Converting to a Mac was one of the best computing choices I’ve ever made, the beauty and simplicity of the OS X operating system is astonishing and always a pleasure to work with, making me cringe when I even have to think of turning my PC on to play Eve Online. Freeware on the Mac is a thing of beauty, with large amounts of freeware applications spread throughout the internet enhancing user experience and productivity in more ways than one can count. Today we’re going to list more of our favorite OS X freeware, applications we find crucial to our daily use and crucial in our obsessive need to be on the cutting edge.

Shrook – RSS feed reader
Vienna – RSS feed feader
Both are solid and free RSS readers with features on both sides which give them an edge. Vienna features a nice mini-browser, smart folders and flagged articles. Shrook however wins me over. It’s a bit more lightweight, going for simplicity, which is always admirable for application design. One of Shrooks major features is it’s sync abilities, allowing users to signup to Shrook.com (for a small fee) and then use Shrook over multiple Macs without having to carry your RSS feeds anywhere, open Shrook, log-in and bam, your RSS feeds are there waiting for you.

Deer Park web browser (Optimized Firefox 1.5.0.6 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs)
The official Firefox for Mac drives me insane. I want so badly to use it, but, the performance is so sluggish and unusable that it almost makes me miss IE 5.0. Thankfully there are Mac OS X hackers who’ve had enough and have begun distributing Firefox updates in a Mac-friendly form, under the name Deer Park. Deer Park isn’t a perfect solution but it’s a step in the right direction that’s for sure, taking the usual Firefox updates and puting a little more effort into optimizing them to run more smoothly on G4, G5 and Intel Macs, without the Firefox branding of course as it’s not an official Mozilla product. Switching to Deer Park is easy, you won’t lose any of your bookmarks or other user settings and I haven’t found an extension yet that hasn’t worked with the Park.

Dashalytics – Google Analytics Dashboard widget
A highly recommended Dashboard widget for any obsessive compulsive blog owners who leave a Google Analytics tab open at all time. Dashalytics is a handy little freeware widget which gives you a quick and clean overview of your site’s day, week, monthly and yearly page visits and page views, supporting multiple sites as long as you have them setup with Google’s Analytics service.

Letterbox – Widescreen plugin for Mail.app
Widescreen is the future of computing (and gaming!), you can take that to the bank. As more and more users switch to widescreen resolutions, the need for widescreen support in many applications will be a must. For instance, Mail.app, OS X’s ultra-powerful email application included with every version of Apple’s operating system. It’s not so friendly for a widescreen resolution, especially for those of us with multiple email accounts and thousands upon thousands of emails. But there’s hope in the form of a simple little Mail.app plugin named Letterbox. By rearranging the Mail.app interface into 3 vertical columns, Letterbox instantly transforms Mail into a widescreen users email heaven, allowing the user more vertical space for mailboxes as well as a large preview pane.

QuickName – File utility for renaming large amounts of files
QuickName is a program that I need only a few times a year, but still an important little tool to have. QuickName is as straight-forward as it gets, a small utility that allows you to quickly change the naming conventions of large amounts of files. For instance, you have 275 images in your blog that you were given the suffix .JPG, but you want them to be .jpg. Launch good old QuickName and let her rip, renaming said files in a matter of seconds.

Ventrilo – Group VOIP for OS X
TeamSpeex – TeamSpeak for OS X
VOIP is a godsend for gamers and businesses alike. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are the standards for group-chat functions in the gaming world, with clans from Counter Strike to World of Warcraft to Eve Online using the applications to communicate during group activities in-game (and out). It took awhile, but there are finally stable OS X builds for both applications, bringing Mac gamers (or those of us who use their Mac for Ventrilo while playing on their PC) into the world of group VOIP communication.

Read more: 10 favorite applications for OS X

When I was younger, I always loved heading to my local bookshop every week to look at the newest shareware games that would pour in from bedroom developers around the world. Sadly, those days are over, but, thanks to the magic powers of the internet, I and many others can re-live those days thanks to the DOS Games Archive. The Archive offers hundreds of old DOS-based games, from freeware hobby projects, to the middle-range shareware greats, to the then-mainstream classics in playable demo forms. Every game I remember loving on DOS is up there, including old playable demos from many of the absolute classics from the day, such as SimCity, Doom, Lemmings, Worms, Warcraft 1 and 2 and Ugh!

Read more: The DOS games archive

Windows users who want to be a little more like Mac users will soon have another application to install. Swift is a new web-browser currently in an alpha state (ie. don’t expect solid performance or stability) and is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which also powers many of Mac OS X’s hottest applications, Dashboard, Safari, Shiira, Adium Messenger and BBEdit to name a few. Development is currently well underway on Swift and the codebase is open source, so you developers get on over there and contribute some code to make Windows user’s lives a better place!

Read more: Swift browser for Windows

For the Mac users who are still concious after seeing the new Mac Pro announced yesterday, I bring you the new contender in the OS browser-wars. Shiira, the Japanese browser that can, has finally made their re-designed version 2 release a downloadable beta for public consumption. After a few days usage I’m quite quite pleased. The pagedock is very cool and puts a whole new spin on tabbed browsing (page browsing now?), the performance is pretty much up there with Safari and the feature-set is quite comparable to Safari, with a few nice additions. I have to admit, if it weren’t for the web development plugins, I wouldn’t be using super-mega memory hog Deer Park (or Firefox) on my Macs at all, considering how horribly they perform (yes yes, I’ve used Camino as well). Remember this is still a beta release, so expect some instability and some sub-menus still in Japanese, but, don’t let that put you off.

Read more: Shiira 2.01beta now available for download

ScatterChat is a new multiple IM chat client which is created specifically for non-technical political dissidents and activists, workers requiring a high-degree of privacy and security in their business, or privacy advocates wearing tin hats. ScatterChat is based on GAIM, currently only supporting Windows XP, with OS X and Linux distributions coming shortly. The client offers support for most of the major world-wide chat networks from AIM and ICQ to Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Zephyr and Jabber, offering heavy-encryption methods for authentication, chatting and file-transfers. ScatterChat uses 2048-bit ElGamal and 1024-bit DSA for encryption setup and authentication. For each individual conversation, ScatterChat will generate a new 256-bit AES message key, a 256-bit SHA-1 HMAC key, a 256-bit nonce, and a 256-bit AES file transfer key. The client is also immune to replay attacks, supports PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) and features limited message deniability properties. The creators of ScatterChat are currently looking for help with localization efforts, translating the documentation into Arabic, Chinese and Farsi as well as technical help with ports to various other platforms (openBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu packages, etc). Disclaimer: The use of heavy encryption is not exactly shined upon by many governments, so use of this software is most definitely at your own risk.

[ScatterChat | ScatterChat feature list]

Started in 1971, Project Gutenberg is the largest collection of public domain, digitalized books in the world, with over 18,000 books currently in digital form and over 50 new titles being added weekly. Almost all of the eBooks featured in the Gutenberg library are public domain, meaning you are free to download a copy, store it on any form of media you’d like, write a thesis on the book as well as distributing the book along with it, or even if you’re a writer and want to adapt the book to a stage performance. You are also able to volunteer for Gutenberg’s distributed proof-reading project, assisting the project by proof-reading pages from new texts before they are entered into the library. The amount of digital texts available are overwhelming to say the least, with the current top 10 titles being:

#1 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2 Kamasutra by Vatsyayana
#3 The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci
#4 Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser
#5 How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin
#6 The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
#7 The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
#8 On the Decay of the Art of Lying by Mark Twain
#9 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
#10 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[Project Gutenberg catalog]

Those of you lucky to have one of the newer Intel Macs already know that they ship with the little remote control, allowing you to control Front Row and several other Mac applications. Here comes Remote Buddy, a new interface for using your remote control to manipulate not only a few applications, but almost any application and system-level utilities you can think think of. With the remote you’ll be able to emulate keyboard and mouse movements, eject CDs, terminate applications, control iTunes, Keynote, PowerPoint, VLC and many others, thanks to an open-source API allowing other developers to create different behaviors for other applications.

Video demonstration after the jump..

Read more of ”Remote Buddy – Control your new Mac using just a remote control“

Plasma Pong is a brilliant clone, created by Steve Taylor, a student at George Mason University who is apparently a fan of game design AND physics. Taylor’s take on Pong combines realtime fluid dynamics simulations with the traditional game structure of Pong, which we’re all familiar with. Gameplay is very similar to Pong, however, some new mechanics have been introduced to spice things up a bit. Players are able to inject plasma fluid into the environment, which creates a vacuum originating at your paddle, sending shockwaves into the playing area manipulating the ball. Plasma Pong is a a modernization of Pong, which brings cutting-edge physics simulations onto your desktop for free. Definitely worth a download, especially if online multiplayer ever gets implemented (offline multiplayer is in as of May 2006).

[Plasma Pong]

Nintendo Power was the king of kid’s magazines back in the late 80s. With their amazing claymation covers and their Power Club and all the Nintendo characters featured every issue. I still have my Nintento Power #1 wrapped in an envelope and in a safe place. Since I can never read it, I was excited to find out that Racket Boy went through all the trouble of scanning each page of issue #1 and creating a handy PDF file for all to download (via BitTorrent) and reminisce about the good old days of Nintendo superiority. Any bets on how long this stays up before Nintendo lawyers pounce on poor Racket Boy? (Note: Direct download appears to be down, use torrent link).

[Nintendo Power #1 in PDF format] (Via Joystiq)

Ruby* is considered by some to be the best programming language on Earth. Naturally that’s just one person’s opinion and the question usually ends in some sort of argument with no end in sight. So moving on to tools, the next argument usually involves TextMate being the best text editor for Ruby (on Rails) developers, which I must admit I’m close to agreeing with (I’m still trying to let go of Text Wrangler). Regardless of which editor you use, it’s imperative that you know your way around it, in order to increase productivity and lower turn-around times. Enter stage left, Mike Clark, Rails developer-extroidanaire who’s created a very handy TextMate cheat sheet, in handy, printable PDF format, containing about 50 or so shortcuts for TextMate under OS X.

* – Edited to reflect my lack of knowledge of what a true programming language is ;)

[TextMate cheat sheet | Cheat sheet direct download]