Useful, fun freeware for your Mac

Oct 18, 2008 12:20 GMT  ·  By

Stop what you're doing and enter our latest edition of Mac freeware picks, because this week's apps are sure to make friends with your hard drive (long term too).

Start Menu access your applications Windows style

This is probably going to hurt the eyes (and feelings) of some faithful Mac fans, but here goes. Start Menu for Mac OS X, developed by BlazingTools Software, is a free application for Mac OS X which provides a simplified Windows Start Menu for the Dock.

It does what you'd imagine – it displays all your applications and directories Windows style. Have a look at the two screenshots below.

The good thing is that, if you don't like the Windows logo, you can replace the program icon with any other .icns file, just open the program's package and replace the vista.icns file with your own. Surely this is the first thing you'll do once you get it in your Dock.

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Start Menu functionality from the Windows world

So, do you like it? Ok, then just copy the Start Menu application into any folder on your Mac (your user's folder is recommended so you can access all your apps and other important stuff) and then drag and drop it into any place of the Dock, preferably one of the sides. As soon as you're done with these steps, just click on the icon and you'll be able to browse the list of all installed Applications and run what you need with a single mouse click. You can click the icon with the right mouse button or with the Ctrl key to show the more compact list of Applications without icons.   If you would like to have Start Menu running on your Mac startup, click it with a right mouse button and check "Open at login". You can scroll the program list with a mouse wheel, or type the first characters of the program you need, to find its menu item. To change the button title in the Dock – just rename the program. Start Menu will then have to be restarted for the changes to take effect.

The program will work in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (recommended) and Mac OS X 10.4. Known bugs and issues include a problem in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger – if you use Dock magnification, the icon won't zoom back after you click it.

Download Start Menu using the link below, have a go at it, and share your impressions with us later.

Download Start Menu for Mac OS X (Free)

Robombs – 3D, third-person shooting, online multiplayer bomberman

Basically you don't need any more information about Robombs, having read the line above, but just in case you need further confirmation that this is what you and your friends have been waiting for, read on and have a look at the screens.

Robombs takes the basic concept of Bomberman and transfers it into the 3rd dimension. Although you play from a third-person perspective, the feeling is that of an online first-person shooter. The goal of the game is similar to FPSs, as you must blow your opponents to shreds, collect as many bonuses as possible and stay alive.

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The game mostly focuses on multiplayer, but it also offers a basic single player mode so you can practice when your “ignorant” friends are out doing stupid things like dating girls and stuff. Robombs comes with 9 levels (more to come in the future, says the developer), while all levels are roughly based on other games. Mazes from Pac-Man, Arkanoid and even one based on a Call of Duty 4 level are there for you to choose from.

Robombs has been designed for LAN play. “It may work over the internet too,” according to Egon Olsen, “but it hasn’t been optimized for this mode,” the developer says. The game is written in Java, and runs on Mac OS X (PPC and Intel both), Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Yes, everyone can jump in, blast everyone on the map. What are you waiting for?

Download Robombs 0.99 for Mac OS X (Free)

LabStatus useful tool for monitoring a set of hosts

Developer Christian Pape has come up with a simple and useful monitoring app for network admins, which lets you know not only how many hosts are up, but also which kind of operating system is running.

You can define your set of hosts with the hostname, ip-address and mac-address. For each of these hosts all indicators you define will be executed and you can configure actions as well. One example is “wake on lan.”

For example, you have a lab setup with 20 hosts, and each host can either boot Windows or boot Linux for administrative tasks.

Adding hosts: Before LabStatus can do anything you must define host entries. For each host the indicators and actions will be generated in the main window. To add a host, Open the preferences panel, Hit the add button (+), Enter a hostname, and enter an IP-address and MAC-address.

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Adding hosts example

Credits: Christian Pape

You can define indicators for your hosts. An indicator consists of a name and a command to be executed on a host. The return value of the command will be used to change the color of the indicator. While a result of 0 means success (green indicator), one greater than 0 indicates a failure (red indicator). To add an indicator: Open the preferences panel, Hit the add button (+), and enter a name and a command to execute.

As noted above, you can define actions that will be executed if you hit the corresponding action button next to a host. To add an action, open the preferences panel, hit the add button (+) and enter a name and a command to execute. According to the developer, you can use %ipaddress%, %macaddress% or %hostname% to define your commands.

A download link for LabStatus is available below. The app is a Universal Binary but requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run.

Download LabStatus (Free)

Thanks for dropping by. We hope you enjoy using this week's software picks, giving you a reason to come back next week for more freeware additions.