Taoyuan Nights

Free/Shareware Mac Software

• Newsfire
  This program saves me an hour each day. Instead of browsing a dozen websites or more for news, it gathers everything together with one of the most easy to use interfaces I’ve ever seen! One of the few pieces of shareware I’d consider registering…
• Comic Life
  Unbelievably, it’s already installed on your mac if you use a recent version of OS X. It’s a great program for making handmade comic strips or photostories with pictures of your friends. Ker-splat, Pow, etc. =)
• SuperDuper
  Don’t rely on rsync or old backup programs with the recent version of MacOS X. They’re not reliable. SuperDuper will make a perfect copy of a disk – so perfect, that you can disconnect your internal hard disk, connect your external backup drive, and boot from firewire/USB without a whisper of complaint! The registered version has a ’smart mode’ which only copies things which have changed, rather than re-copying the whole disk. You can also set it to only backup your user directory. Great interface – easy to use.
• VLC
  This is how video/music software should be done. Simple interface, lots of protocols/formats/codecs built in automatically into a single program. Just run it, and it will play the craziest DIVX file, ancient AVI file, or mysteriously encoded OGG file you have on your computer. Available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, ….
• Tuboy Juego
  Like youtube? But worried they might delete your favourite videos? Fear not. This program will download youtube videos to your mac, so you can watch them with VLC.
• TextMate
  One of the most highly regarded text editors for the mac. But I still find myself using pico in a terminal…
• Cyberduck
  An excellent file transfer client. Comes with a nice interface, and support for SFTP/SCP as well as plain old FTP. Good for keeping your website up to date. There is also a handy applet that you can keep on your dashboard to move files around quickly.
• Azureus
  Probably the best bittorrent client for the mac. Written in Java but increasingly being given OS-X only features, too.
• Parallels Desktop for Mac
  It’s not freeware, but it’s cheap and it has to be on this list. Check it out. Like VMWare, it’s a virtual machine environment, but it allows incredible integration between MacOS and Windows. Using Intel’s new hypervisor technology, you can run Windows or Linux at around 95% of full speed, without having to reboot MacOS.

Free Games

• Pax Galaxia
  Fantastic RISK-inspired real time strategy game. Available for mac+windows. Shareware but with an excellent freeware trial version. Highly addictive.
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
  Excellent world-war based multiplayer FPS, freely available for Mac, Linux, Windows. Good graphics/sound, fantastic gameplay.
• Allegiance
  Windows-only at present, but it’s a freely available, multiplayer RTS/FPS hybrid 3D space game with great gameplay and graphics. Takes a couple of hours to learn the controls, but it’s one of the best games ever written. One of my favourite games of all time.
• Tower Defense
  Simple, addictive. Shoot sheep and monsters with various weapons. Based on warcraft 3, but much easier to play.
• Desktop Tower Defense
  Remix of Tower Defense, but with different towers, monsters, and gameplay. Same author. Also fun!
• Strange Attractors
  Imagine a game where the only control you can use is the spacebar key. Fun. Nice sound+graphics+gameplay.
• A Parting Shot
  You play the role of a medieval archer in this flash-based game. Quite good fun, for a while anyway.
• Awesome ‘Ninja Jumping Through Gates’ Game
  Try to get the ninja through as many gates as you can. My record is around 280. Flash-based. It took me a week of practice to be able to do 80 gates … then suddenly I could do hundreds.
• Tactics 100 live
  Turn-based strategy game. Build a team consisting of cylons, robin hood, priests and babes and fight on a chess-style landscape. It has a network mode where you can be matched with other players of similar skill automatically. All-in-all, pretty great fun.

Free Software from Google

• 
  
  A handy pack from Google containing both Google Toolbar and Firefox in a single download.
• 
  
  Google pack is another set of free software directly provided by Google which allows faster web search, and also organises your files and gives you a photo album (Picasa) if you want. Picasa is probably the main reason to get this.