Scroll down and make your pick. Three new Mac apps are available for you to download and use for as long as you like. All three programs are Universal Binaries and require Tiger or higher.


Architect – quickly design your own Leopard theme

The folks at Slightly Pretentious Software claim to have rolled out the premiere app for designing themes for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Architect is an easy to use and straight forward Mac application that will allow you to quickly design your own Leopard theme, from your own theme images.

Architect is currently in beta / pre-production, and is not guaranteed to be stable, or even necessarily safe to use, according to the makers. Through their testing, Slightly Pretentious Software have determined that it will “MOST LIKELY” perform without any hiccups. Nevertheless, you should be aware that the developers are in no way responsible for any damage to your computer as a result of using this software. Softpedia also advises to take caution, should you take the security and integrity of your Mac very seriously.

All that being said, Slightly Pretentious Software will gladly resolve any issue you may find with the software, noting “there are still bugs, and there will still be bugs until enough people have used the app.”

Reverse engineering the Architect theme file format is strictly prohibited except for personal use on your own computer, as is sharing knowledge or code gained from the reverse engineering of the Architect file format. Some issues have been reported with Live Preview - a new feature. Also, some elements in the browser may not properly map to their image files.

All this being said, you can download and use Architect for free until the current build expires at 12am GMT on September 23, 2008. After that, you may be granted more free usage, should Slightly Pretentious Software issue a new beta build of Architect. If not, the makers may ask you to register your copy, at which point Architect should be at its final release.

Architect requires Mac OS X 10.5.3 or newer. Click here to download the software now.


Filemailer – for those who use email to send files

Filemailer is a new Mac utility designed to let you send files via email very fast and without impacting your hard drive. Most email clients save a new copy of the same e-mail on your hard drive every time you send it. Not Filemailer. It also eliminates the need to enter any text manually and it sends files without archiving sent items.

Using the program is as easy as dragging a file over the name of the person who should receive it. Filemailer deals with the compression of the file, enters the name of compressed file in the subject, inserts text information in the body of the message and sends the file. Basically, all you have to do is hit the Send button. The recipient isn't required to use Filemailer to receive files – they can do so using their preferred e-mail client.

For a personal use of the application, one account to send files is enough in most of the cases. Filemailer Pro can offer this feature, but it costs to use. Filemailer is given to all those who use email to send files, particularly for those who do so for work. The software comes in most handy where heavy file-sharing occurs between colleagues. Also, Filemailer is particularly recommended to those who need to send files to someone but do not have time to entertain a circumstance conversation via email.

So, if you need a to send files via email using a special program that does not archive sent files and doesn't require the sender to write text manually, Filemailer is for you. Altomac's free utility can be acquired here.


Consistent Keyboards – easily switch between PC and Apple keyboards

Consistent Keyboards is a daemon for Mac OS X that swaps the locations of the Option and Command keys, but only on PC-style keyboards. The free Mac app makes the Windows key acts as the Command key and the Alt key like the Option key, when you connect a PC-style keyboard to a Mac. Consistent Keyboards is open source, covered by a BSD-style license.

Basically, by installing Consistent Keyboards on your Mac, the keys' positions are reversed compared to an Apple keyboard. You can swap them in System Preferences, but the swap affects all keyboards. Therefore, if you use an external keyboard with your MacBook (which sports its very own, built-in keyboard), you have to turn the swapping on or off each time you switch from one keyboard to the other. “AppleScript UI scripting can make this chore somewhat less painful,” according to developer Vebjorn Ljosa, “but it is still cumbersome and slow.”

A known issue with Consistent Keyboards is that the program can't swap Command and Option while the focus is on a secure text field – e.g., the password prompts in most applications. Since this is a Mac OS X security feature, the developer decided to leave things as they were.

Vebjorn Ljosa is a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He deals with databases, data mining, and bioinformatics and aims to find new database and data mining techniques that can make large-scale mining of diverse biomedical image data-sets possible.

Consistent Keyboards is available here for free.