ctrl.altered.mind

Dashalytics is a free Dashboard widget for the Mac that offers quick access to your Google Analytics account statistics. With their revamped interface, Google Analytics is probably the best free solution available today to monitor your website visitor statistics. While my site isn’t exactly one to attract high traffic, it does add a sense of responsibility when you get quantified results - this Dashboard widget just makes keeping a tab on things a bit easier, if you’re using a Mac. For Yahoo! Widgets users on Windows, there’s Vivalytics.

Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X (10.3 and later). I stumbled upon this application while looking for something to profile the directory structure on my external drive (which is currently running ridiculously low on space). Disk Inventory X has a universal binary beta version, and is absolutely free (released under the GPL). Advanced Windows users might find this application quite similar to WinDirStat, and naturally so because this program was inspired by it.

This utility shows the sizes of files and folders as a ‘treemap‘.

Joost is an exciting new platform that has the potential to revolutionize the way TV shows and other video content is distributed over networks. If a few more popular and informative TV networks join the system, I may never have to subscribe to cable television ever again.

If you haven’t the first clue about Joost, it’s a P2PTV-based program (by the founders of Skype and Kazaa) that lets you watch near-TV resolution video content over the internet, converting a computer into an instant on-demand TV set (without a set top box and its tight storage constraints).

Oh, and the program is still in beta testing, under the title ‘Joost for Friends’. As a beta tester, I do have a few invites, so if you’d like one, feel free to leave your name and email address in the comments. Don’t worry, I won’t send you spam. You’re not that important. Just kidding!

Open Source Mac is a simple list of free, open-source software for Mac OS X. It is not a comprehensive list, but a good point for OS X newbies to start looking for a popular and easy-to-use open source program.

FreeSmug.org, on the other hand, is a comprehensive resource. Alternatively, IUseThis.com adds a social aspect to program listings by letting you see how popular (or not) a program is.

For Windows, check out Open Source Windows. Don’t forget to get the PC Decrapifier if you just got yourself a branded computer that’s been treated more like a billboard than a personal computing device.

Dasher is a free universal binary app for OS X Tiger that lets you run Dashboard as a screensaver. It adds a preference pane that pulls up your widgets after a certain amount of system idle time. If you’d rather have your screensaver display something useful, instead of some really slick OpenGL mathemagical beauties like these.
Dasher by Splasm Software

If you have been a long time Windows user like me, you mostly probably would have atleast a few music files on your machine in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. I’d guess it would be more so if you used the Windows Media Player to keep your music collection organized. While it is a format that offers an advantage by using up lesser disk space over the MP3 format by using a proprietary algorithm, its disadvantage is exactly that - the proprietary algorithm makes it unusable on other operating systems due to licensing issues.

iTunes for Windows, which I have been using all along, automatically converts WMA songs to Apple Lossless (AAC) or mp3 formats when added to the library - although, this does not work with iTunes on the Mac. Its the licensing issue again. Unfortunately, there is no indication that this action is not allowed on the Mac. iTunes just stays put and does nothing when you try dragging a WMA file onto the library. The (easy) answer is to use third-party software that does this conversion for you. A better answer would be to altogether switch to an open source format (OGG Vorbis), however this is not an option for me since I use far too many devices that do not support this.

FreeMacWare introduced me to Switch - a sound file conversion application for the Mac that converts most known audio file formats to mp3 (or wav). While Switch is free and provides basic conversion options that would satisfy most users, NCH Swift Sound does offer the advanced Switch Plus application (for $19.40 - a 50% discount until Sep 15) with many more features.

A feature that stands out amidst the standard list of supported encoding rates and optimized CPU usage, is the ability of the application to process up to 32,000 files in a single batch process.

Switch is also available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

More Screenshots