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Freeware Gems Revisited
More utilities that are absolutely free!
The response from my last article on freeware gems was astronomical. Therefore, bringing several
other freeware utilities to the forefront seemed appropriate,
hence this article.
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 ACE! (Advanced Character Editor): Ever wanted to gain the advantage in your favorite game? Maybe
a couple million extra credits or some badly needed health points
could be of some use. While it undoubtedly can be used as a tool
for cheating, which would destroy any potential bragging rights
you could've gained, ACE! can be used for viewing and printing
details of a game and, of course, for making some minor tweaks
to them. While it can already edit over 30 different games by
itself, what differentiates ACE! from other utilities of its kind
is its modular expandibility. Contributors can write editor plugins
for brand new or obscure games to further expand ACE’s usefulness.
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 ADB Unplugged: You’re working along on your Mac when suddenly you snag the mouse
cable with your hand, pulling it straight out of the keyboard!
Sure you can plug it back in, but now the mouse tracking is unbearably
slow, forcing you to restart the computer to get the mouse back
to normal. While USB users can chuckle silently to themselves
over this dilemna, users of older Macs with ADB peripherals know
this scenario all too well. That’s where ADB Unplugged from Frozen
Heads Software can lend a hand by resetting the ADB bus and getting
you back on track, all without a restart.
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 Address Pad: While there certainly is no shortage of applications that can
juggle postal and electronic addresses, phone numbers, and URLs,
Address Pad by Gabriele de Simone can provide you with the bare
essentials, all without the kitchen sink feature list, complicated
interface, or even a price tag! In fact, this no-nonsense PIM
provides a clean, OS 9-savvy interface, complete with drag-and-drop
entry, clickable Internet links, and themes support.
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 Enveloper: Following the same philosophy as Address Pad, Enveloper, a component
of the Donation Manager also offered separately, sticks strictly
to address entry and printing of Size 10 business envelopes. It
does, however, remember the previously entered return address
when launched in the future.
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 File Freak: Gone are the days of a bootable floppy disk with a couple hundred
kilobytes of space remaining for a handful of files! With today’s
hard drives filled with hundreds of programs spawning thousands
of files, finding a digital needle in a gigabyte-magnitude haystack
has become increasingly more difficult. John Scalo’s File Freak
comes to the rescue by offering a search method similar to the
way you highlight a file in a long window listing. Just select
the type of file you are looking for by its type (folder, picture,
MP3 encoding, Word document, etc.) and then start typing the first
few letters. A list is produced and is peared down as you continue
to type and refine the search. Best of all, after the initial
indexing of your hard drive for these specific file types, File
Freak will fetch a buried file in a flash.
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 Fontastic!: Ah, fonts: typefaces for every mood, occasion, or whim. Over
time, you find that a substantial collection of them has accumulated
in your Fonts folder, cleverly placed by application installers
and hand-picked from font archives. Knowing what each one looks
like and, more importantly, knowing whether one is worth keeping
are points that Mac users should think about when attempting to
tame their fonts. Fontastic! makes this job a little easier. With
this handy, little program you can view how each of your fonts
displays a particular sentence and optionally print the list as
a typeface reference. Handier, however, is its ability to remove
fonts without requiring you to quit every application but the
Finder!
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 FTupperware: This small wonder from StimpSoft monitors a hot folder on your
system and synchronizes it with an FTP server of your choice,
but it offers a couple of slick features that you wouldn’t expect
to find in a freeware utility, namely:
- email notification
- event logging to track successful uploads and failed attempts
- the ability to archive uploaded files for a certain number of
uploads before deleting from the source drive
- a master password for preserving settings
- sounds to inform you of certain events while FTupperware is running
in the background
- the ability to route uploaded files to specific directories based
on their file names.
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 Gauge Pro: Keeping track of your Mac’s technical specifications can be a
daunting task. When upgrading your system, especially hardware
components, it’s good to know what processor you have and what
its megahertz rating is, what megahertz rating your bus runs at,
how much cache memory you have installed, and what type of memory
your system uses. This utility from Newer Technology will tell
you all this and will even give you brief descriptions of the
various specifications and what they mean.
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 MPlay Multimedia Player: Mac users, like the rest of the computing world, have succumbed
to the age of digital music collections. Everywhere you turn,
music players crank out tunes from MPEG Layer III (MP3) files
and QDesign Music files as well as QuickTime, RealAudio, ShoutCast,
and IceCast streams. There are a handful of these players that
are freeware, and MPlay Multimedia Player is one of them. Besides
the playlist and skin features that are popular additions to programs
of this type, MPlay offers track mixing or the ability to fade
one song into another radio-station style, and separate volume,
balance, bass, and treble settings for each song which are a real
boon for listeners due to the varying sound levels of encoded
files. MPlay isn’t limited to just sound, either. Motion video
and still graphics can also be viewed. Because it uses QuickTime
for playback, MPlay has access to all QuickTime-supported media
formats including: MPEG music (Layers I, II, and III with QT 4
and variable bitrate with QT 4.1), MPEG-1 video, QuickTime and
AVI movies, VideoCDs, and QDesign Music files. The wealth of features
that this program provides is astounding, and best of all, it’s
freeware!
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 StevePerfect: SimpleText is an improvement over its older sibling TeachText,
but there is still much to be desired before it can qualify as
a trim and efficient mini-word processor. There are enhancement
kits for SimpleText that will fill in some of these extra features,
but they come only as shareware. StevePerfect by Steven Massey
comes much closer to the mark and is absolutely free! It gives
you control over a text string’s color as well as its font, size,
and style, a feature that can come in handy for extra emphasis
on headers, URLs, or important content. Like TeachText and SimpleText,
it can also open PICT documents but is capable of viewing any
graphics, audio, and video format that QuickTime supports!
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 VSE Update Finder: Keeping your Mac’s software current can be a full-time job. System
software patches, application bug fixes, along with beta versions
and minor updates to your favorite software are released on a
regular basis. Stay on top of it with VSE Update Finder, a utility
that searches various well known software archives. Every application
present on your hard drive is listed along with its version number.
You simply select an application you wish to check for an update
on, select a software archive site from the popup menu, and click
“Find Update.” While this utility will not appeal to users that
already visit software archive sites on a regular basis, VSE Update
Finder can be a real boon to newbies and to those who simply don’t
want to scour the Internet for updates themselves.
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Despite the hoards of shareware and commercial programs out there
all holding out their digital hands for money, it’s comforting
to know that at least a few developers have desired to bless the
Macintosh community with some good quality freeware. For them,
satisfaction is their only payment, and I for one am greatful
for their generosity.
Jeremy Hoesly
ResExcellence Software Tester
July 7, 2000
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