Apr 27 2009
Tracking Tiger
I’d like to start off by saying that Tiger has a lot of exciting new features, and represents a significant milestone in the development of OS X. With no disrespect to the year and a half Apple’s programmers have put in, we’re going to do our best to match some of the Tiger’s best features – for free, or close.
One huge bonus in each of this week’s picks is the excellent community support that make these applications so powerful. Quicksilver, like Spotlight helps you find things on your Mac faster. Through an extensive plugin library, Quicksilver finds select files and folders on your system, and provides you quick access to their contents.
You have to try Quicksilver to fully appreciate its convenience. The website hosts a bunch of plugins which give you commands and search data from your favorite applications. The next Tiger-only version will feature many new features, but the latest beta will be preserved for Panther users.
Tiger will ship with a new enhanced version of iChat. This new version will support video conferencing. Adium does not support this. The new iChat is now Jabber-based, and Adium is probably the best Jabber client for OS X.
Again, part of what makes this such a great application is the community supporting it. Adium is much more than a multi-protocol chat client. On Adium’s site users share sound sets, window themes and scripts. The forum is full of users too. Did I mention a strong community?
Now, this is not quite Automator, but this custom contextual menu system could save you all kinds of time on repetitive tasks. In fact with the plethora of commands available from the website, you can create contextual menu items to do everything from Force Eject to Track a UPS Package. This great utility should save you at least as much time as you will waste playing with it (and trust me, that’s a lot of time).
Okay, this one is neither a surprise, nor is it free. However, I’m willing to make an exception here if you’ll indulge me. Konfabulator is a konfabulous way to both make your desktop more useful and attractive and is hauntingly similar to Tiger’s Dashboard. There are more user-contributed widgets than you can shake a stick at, and the community support is great. If all you want from Tiger is lick-able widgets, save yourself some money and go with Konfabulator.
There you are. It’s not quite Tiger, but you can’t argue with the price.
Downloads provided by MacUpdate
