My new favorite OS X application has landed and it’s beautiful! A French project, with English and French versions, Poladroid lets you take normal digital photos and turn them into virtual Polaroids via an elegant drag and drop and intuitive “developing” feature (shake them to develop faster!). You can also export the finished photos for print or sharing on the Poladroid Flickr group. You might not be able to find the film as easily anymore, but at least you can relive the good ole days with a little bit of grainy Polaroid visuals on your desktop.

Read more: Lego Digital Designer

Download it at Phun.at

Armchair astronomers and space freaks listen up! The amazing developers behind Stellarium have accomplished quite some amazing things. Used by many real planetariums for their projection showings, Stellarium is an amazing feat of open source software development, giving the user a realistic, 3D sky on a desktop environment, allowing users to enter coordinates, browse the night sky or even beam it onto your ceiling before going to sleep. The educational usage and possibilities of this is amazing and I for one am considering purchasing an HDTV projector simply to see Uranus on my ceiling at night!

Download: Stellarium – Open source planetarium for your computer

I’m currently setting up my new smart phone so that I can carry around as much of my online data as possible in my pocket. First and foremost, I’m prioritizing the hundreds of RSS feeds in my online reader and putting the most important onto my device, purposely avoiding the default RSS reader shipping on my Symbian phone. So far, I’ve been able to find two interesting mobile apps for storing, reading and organizing your RSS feeds, both of which are sharp-looking, free and easy as pie to operate. Though I haven’t decided on a clear winner yet, I’m still always on the lookout, so if you have any other suggestions, by all means, let me know!

Hit the jump to take a look at my two favorites so far, Mobispine and Widsets..

Mobispine
A relative newcomer from Northern Europe, Mobispine is a fantastically designed mobile RSS feed reader, which allows users to add multiple RSS feeds to their collection and lower their mobile bandwidth costs considerably at the same time. Taking a few pages from the Apple school of design, your favorite feeds are presented visually including a simple number displaying the amount of new stories available to you. Supporting a large range of JAVA (MIDP 2.0) compatible phones (most modern LG, Nokia and Sony handsets), Mobispine is coming on strong, let’s just hope they can keep up the quality, and clean up their user forum which at the time of this post was full of spam.

Widsets
Widgets, we all know them, many love them, many hate them. I personally love my Dashboard widgets, so, it only makes sense I’d be drawn to mobile widgets. Widsets is a clever little service that allows you to add your favorite RSS feeds to your mobile device wrapped in a slim and attractive user interface. The Widsets library is HUGE, with Wids already existing for many of my favorite blogs. They also offer you a quick and easy tool for creating your own Widsets widget which you can offer to your friends, family or visitors of your blog.

The desktops are alive with the sound of widgets and now more than ever thanks to Wigipedia, a wiki community collecting everything there is to know about desktop and web widgets for Windows, OS X and Linux computers. Wigipedia is attempting to catalog the development of all widgets and gadgets, across all platforms, allowing developers to upload their creations in order to collaborate with other developers and offer their small apps directly to end users. There’s also a comprehensive section with tutorials and code samples so you can learn to create your own desktop widget!

Widget more: Widgipedia.com

So your favorite band came through town, you missed the show and now your friends are all telling you how killer it was? Have no fear, a pair of grad students have gotten fed up and have developed a delightfully simple tool for keeping track of both your MP3 library AND your favorite band’s tour dates so you won’t miss the next killer do. The tool is iConcertCal and it’s a free iTunes plugin that monitors your music library and based upon your most playlist, generates a personalized calender of upcoming shows in your city. THe interface mimics iCal and is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Download: iConcertCal

So Twitter is our new fun obsession and what better way to enjoy a newfound hobby is there than to find all the free and open source software you can for it!? NONE! Twitterrific is a light and fun little application that lets you easily publish “tweets” to your Twitter account or read tweets from your Twitter contacts, all while stylishly occupying a small spot of real estate on your Mac’s desktop. Let your friends know what level your World of Warcraft character is or how badly you want the iPhone you’re reading about without having to leave your desktop!

Download: Twitterrific | Twitter

For many, using open source software is about equivalent to breathing, but for most, we need certain commercial software in order work, easy communicate with family or even to sometimes surf the internet. But that’s quickly changing. As the quality levels of many open source projects begin to soar and more and more developers are opening their software up, the need for certain commercial software is rapidly diminishing. Still lost? Well, let osalt.com help you find your way. Collecting links, descriptions and explanations to some of the best open source apps this side of the www, osalt guides you through the process of open sourcing your Windows XP, Mac OS X or Linux machine with ease, offering you open source alternatives to some of the largest commercial software in existence.

Read more: Open Source Alternative

Working in web development I’m constantly finding myself taking screenshots, which I am then manipulating manually, cutting and pasting here and there and back again, in an attempt to get the perfect shot. I knew of screenshot tools on the PC, maybe even used one or two here and there, but, for some reason they just never stuck. Now that I’m fully using OS X for everything I do, I’ve noticed the need for taking screenshots rapidly, with as little downtime as possible, and I think I’ve finally found the perfect piece of software for me. InstantShot! is a freeware piece of software (free as in beer, or bier) which creates a menu icon under OS X, assigning an easy to use UI for OS X’s screenshot functionality, allowing you to capture whole screen, partial screen and timed captures. All this for the low-price of nothing, but donations are highly encouraged.

Read more: InstantShot!