Specifications

AUSOM & AUSOM News on the Internet22 v AUSOM News April 2009
Geoff Palmer wondered about the Mac Books pictured. Is it a
‘first’ to have such a large number of Apple Products in use in
the club rooms of the Melbourne PC User Group?
Geoff’s photo shows the past and current SIG co-ordinators
of the Digital Video SIG hard at work possibly planning for the
April meeting.
Greg Davies
My Favourite Freebies
Report and summary of March Main Presentation
When the Apple Store Chadstone advised it would be
unable to present the keynote address at the March
meeting, AUSOM’s Stephen Withers, at short notice,
kindly agreed to step into the breach. Stephen is the
Mac OSX Advanced SIG Coordinator.
There are many good free web-based services,
podcasts and software around these days. Some of the
Freeware or Open Source Software applications and
utilities Stephen uses may be relatively obscure but
nevertheless, fulfil a special purpose for his needs.
Camino: a simple and elegant open-source web
browser
Cyberduck: FTP application
ETVComskip: cuts advertisements from TV programs
recorded with EyeTV
Image Well
: simple image editor
JDiskReport
: disk space report
MPEG Streamclip: converts video files into various
formats
Onyx: housekeeping app, which provides an excellent
front end for system maintenance
VLC: cross platform media player
Daily Comics: a widget to display your favourite
comics
Dictionary Cleaner
: clean up incorrect spellings
Weather Australia
: Forecasts can be selected for
any location for, which the Bureau of Meteorology
provides forecasts.
Flip4Mac WMV: lets QuickTime play Windows Media
files
Perian: a QuickTime add-on, it reads all sorts of file
types
Precipitate: makes Google Docs and Picasa searchable
by Spotlight
Menu Meters: system usage monitor
Shades: fine tune your screen brightness
SMARTReporter
: hard drive status reporter
Thank you Stephen for your flexibility in agreeing
to bring forward your scheduled keynote address.
Your insightful comments and introductions to some
fascinating applications and widgets were very much
appreciated.
With 93 people attending, this was one of the largest
audiences for a main presentation for some months.
A CD containing all these and bonus applications and
utilities can be ordered online from the AUSOM Store
on our website. All the applications either Freeware or
Open Source Software. This means that there are no
further fees due to use the software, but donations are
gladly accepted by many authors.
z
A collection of Stephen Wither’s Favourite Freeware Applications for Mac OS X
as presented to AUSOM on March 7, 2009, along with many bonus applications
.
Stephen’s Favourite Freeware
Camino
Open source web browser developed with a focus
on providing the best possible experience for Mac
OS X users. The Camino web browser is powerful,
secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users
while remaining simple and elegant in its design.
Cyberduck
FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon
S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use
interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. The
outline view of the browser allows to browse large
folder structures efficiently and you can quickly
preview files with Quick Look. To edit files, a seamless
integration with several external editors makes it
easy to change content quickly.
Daily Comics
Mac OS X Dashboard widget that remembers and
displays your favorite comics.
Dictionary Cleaner:
Convenient System Preferences Pane utility to
maintain your custom spelling dictionary – One of
the great features of Mac OS X has aways been the
built-in spelling checker. Unfortunately, there's no
easy way to see what words you've added. But with
Dictionary Cleaner, a convenient System Preferences
pane for Mac OS X, now you can.
ETVComskip
Mac OS X port of comskip, along with programs to
have comskip interoperate with EyeTV. These
programs allow users of EyeTV to enjoy commercial-
free recorded television. ETVComskip also integrates
with PyeTV, a Leopard Front Row plugin for
interacting with EyeTV. With this plugin it's possible
to turn commercial skipping on and off directly from
within Front Row.
JDiskReport
Enables you to understand how much space the files
and directories consume on your disk drives, and it
helps you find obsolete files and folders.
MenuMeters
A set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring
tools for Mac OS X that live in the menu bar.
Functions include CPU Meter; Disk Activity Meter;
Memory Meter; and Net Meter
MPEG Streamclip
A powerful high-quality video converter, player,
editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod.
And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine,
and even a stream and YouTube downloader. You
can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie
formats including MPEG files or transport streams;
play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy,
Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them
into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to
QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than
professional quality, so you can easily import them in
Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use
them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD,
VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID,
AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF,
M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3.
OnyX
Multifunction utility that allows you to verify the
Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, run
miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance,
configure some hidden parameters of the Finder,
Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and
some of Apple's own applications, it deletes caches,
removes a certain number of files and folders that
may become cumbersome and more.
Perian
Enables QuickTime application support for additional
media, including AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, & VFW
Precipitate
Lets you search for and launch your cloud data from
within Spotlight or Google Desktop for Mac. It
currently supports the following services: Google
Bookmarks; Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums
Listing Continues…
$10
All the applications on this CD are either Freeware or Open Source
Software. This means that there are no further fees due to use the
software, but donations are gladly accepted by many authours.
AUSOM is charing a small fee to cover duplication & distribution costs
See
http://www.ausom.net.au/discofthemonth
for full details of the applications on this CD