Salintheus

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying quite a few different Mac OSX applications to try and make life a bit easier.
Some are pretty bad, some are mediocre and I think a couple are actually decent.
These shall be short summations with a point score.

Onyx: This little system maintenance tool for OSX is free and allows you to customise some really basic things within OSX, some UNIX ones and some hidden features. E.g. you can change what format the screenshots you take are saved to. It actually allows you to do an awful lot. A couple of bad things about it are the general loading of it can get painful (especially if you do a S.M.A.R.T scan!) and that the cleaner doesn’t do anything to Firefox or other browsers apart from Safari. Laid out really well. 7.5 / 10

AppFresh: I didn’t use this program for very long mainly because it caused a severe slowdown on my computer. Although when that stopped, I liked the results it came up with. It found out that there was an X11 update about 4 days before the Apple software update decided to point that out to me. If it didn’t slowdown my computer, it would be a much nicer program. Laid out really well though. 6 / 10

SnapNDrag: An alternative to the built in screenshot command and Grab application. Really nice but causes some pretty intense slowdowns when doing a full screen cap. Also, the lack of autosave is a bit annoying but it has some redeeming features like JPEG quality and the option to resize (but you have to pay for that). 5 / 10

Vienna: I love this program. RSS Feed reader with a built in browser. Laid out perfectly. Blogging option. Skin customisation. 9 / 10

1001: I’m relatively new to Flickr (less than a week) and I have been using the official Flickr Uploadr to upload my pictures. I thought it was a bit bland and so got a different one. 1001 looks promising but its rather hard to get it to do what you want it to. The upload side of it is good but the other part of it that make it special, made it rather bad and clunky. The option to see a specific Flickr feed or a group feed sounds like a good idea, it just doesn’t seem to work. 4 / 10

Journler: This looked really promising. Its a blog client/note taker. Its laid out really well with a couple of exceptions. I didn’t like this one purely because of a personal reason. It just didn’t look ‘right’ to me. It has a ton of features that make it nice but I just couldn’t use it very well. It would be nice if it had more of an iTunes integration, e.g. ability to insert current play track. Seems to have a very intense Livejournal integration though. 6 / 10

Qumana: Oh god, I saw this program on a list of top 5 blog clients. It looked okay but the reviewer said the source view was pitiful. I didn’t think it could be that bad. It was. Integration with WordPress was rather good. Just the actual writing in both source and layout mode is horrible. Source mode doesn’t stay aligned and so if you keep going back and forth between those two modes, you spend ages cleaning up code. 5/ 10

QTM: I didn’t really try this one for long but it seems to be a barebones blog client. Fairly easy to set up a connection with a blog. Laid out fairly well. Its a very boring program to use. Wiht a better GUI (its open-source), this could be a rather top notch program. I can’t wait to see how it becomes past its current version of 0.5.5. 6.5 / 10

Xjournal: For those who use Livejournal like I do (my personal blog) and who use Mac OSX, this is one program you should get. It does everything you could want it to. In fact, its pretty much the Livejournal editor with some cool automation (like getting the current iTunes track), a couple of features that exist on LJ but a slightly harder to find and the ability to save everything as an offline draft. One little problem with it though is that you can’t enter your current location. 9.5 / 10

GIMP: An open-source image editing program coded in X11. Think Photoshop at around CS1 and then add some slower speeds to it and a slightly confusing interface. Thats GIMP for Mac OSX. Still, its free and does Photoshop’s job really well. A tad clunky and the keyboard shortcuts need to be learnt (not the same as every other Mac program.) 7 / 10