Compatible platforms: v1 is compatible with 10.4; v1.1 is compatible with 10.5 & up. (Take care to grab the right one for your system.)

Version highlighted in this post: 1.1.3

AppTrap is as close to the PC’s wonderful Revo Uninstaller as you’ll find on the Mac. Generally, programs uninstall pretty easily and without much hassle under OS X. But even on the Mac, there are some stubborn programs that refuse to remove all their preferences and settings files when uninstalled. That’s where AppTrap comes in.

After installing AppTrap, the only trace of it you’ll see on a daily basis is its entry in the Mac OS preferences pane. Even if you open it, though, you won’t find much to tweak or adjust because there’s really not a lot to the program.

The power of AppTrap comes whenever you decide to uninstall a program by dragging it to the trash can.  Whenever you do, an AppTrap dialog box will pop up and ask if you’d like to remove all the files associated with the program as well. Saying yes will clean out all traces of the program (except, of course, the files you created and saved).

AppTrap, in my mind, is as close to a “must have” utility as it gets for Mac owners (just like Revo uninstaller is for the PC). It’s lightweight, completely unobtrusive, and works extremely well. What’s not to love?

Compatible platforms: 10.3.9 (Panther with updates to .9 version) & up

Version highlighted in this post: 2.0

OS X has a great built-in utility for extracting and making basic archive files. You’ve probably used it, but may not have ever noticed it since it’s so tightly integrated into the OS. It’s called BOM Archive Helper. But if your needs go beyond the basics of standard zip files and the like, and you find yourself working with file types like RAR that allow spanning across multiple volumes, and 7z (7-zip) files that have great compression ratios, you’ll quickly hit BOM Archive Helper’s limits.

Fortunately, Apple created The Unarchiver and is offering it up absolutely free. Rather than run through the nice, big list of all the file types The Unarchiver handles, I’ll let the screenshot speak for itself.

That’s an incredible list. A list so thorough that I’d rank The Unarchiver’s capabilities right up there with the best PC archival programs (e.g. 7-Zip and PeaZip).

Compatible platforms: 10.3 (Panther) & up

Version highlighted in this post: 1.1.2

Pac Man. For your Mac. For free. Is any more explanation really needed?

Pac the Man X is an award-winning Pac Man clone. It’s an absolute dead-ringer for the original as far as layout and gameplay go, but the graphics have received a nice bit of tinkering to give them a bit of a beveled and gradiated effect.

If you cut your teeth on the beloved, classic 80s game, you’ll be right at home with this awesome implementation.

Even my long-winded self can’t add much more than that!

Compatible platforms: 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard); if you’re running 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you’ll need to grab ClamXav version 2.0, just note that it’s in beta as of this writing; folks who are still running 10.2 and 10.3 aren’t completely left out in the cold, but due to the developer’s (completely understandable) limited resources, the virus scanning engine is slightly out of date.

Version highlighted in this post: 1.1.1

“Wha?!” you say. “Fer realz!” I say. Today, we’re looking at a Mac anti-virus app. And as always, it’s completely free.

News arrived last week that the brand new OS X (10.6 a.k.a. Snow Leopard) will contain a malware blocker. Soon after, though, word dropped that it’ll only cover two pieces of malware and would be pretty limited in terms of which programs it works with. Fortunately, even that is sufficient for most Mac users.

But if you’re interested in something that packs a bit more oomph, ClamXav is here for you. ClamXav is a litter-mate of two other great programs, ClamAV (the UNIX/Linux anti-virus scanner) and ClamWin (the open source Windows AV scanner). Their shared underlying scanning engine is what makes them siblings. The engine is the part of an AV program that tells it what patterns within a file are dangerous and which virus that pattern matches.

My favorite thing about all of the ClamAV-based apps is that they don’t insist on sitting on your machine running all the time. That’s especially useful for Mac users since stumbling across a threat is so rare. It’s much nicer to have those system resources open for regular computing and just running the AV program from time-to-time.

There’s one quick caveat that I always have to mention with the ClamAV apps, though. The first time you fire up the program, before you even run a scan, go into the preferences and under ‘General’ make sure that there’s a check mark next to ‘Quarantine infected files to:’, and verify that there’s a quarantine folder set. If that’s not done, the program will just run the scan and come back and tell you, “Hey, I found something!” But not actually do anything about any of the problem files.

With the tiny number of viruses that affect the Mac, just having ClamXav around to run periodically is plenty and should keep you way ahead of the curve and sleeping well at night.

Platforms available: OS X 10.4.7 & up

Current version as of writing: 1.1.4

If you’ve had issues with VLC or are just a big fan of QuickTime, Perian could be what you need to unlock the true power hiding within QuickTime. It’ll help you open just about any kind of audio or video file you’ll come across right within QuickTime.

QuickTime has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, in its stock configuration, that potential is hindered by a really narrowly defined set of codecs. Codecs are what tell a piece of multimedia software how to deal with (i.e. COde/DECode) the various audio and video formats it encounters. That’s why, for example, when you throw an MKV file at QuickTime, it tells you to take a hike.

But that’s where Perian comes to the rescue! Think of it like a giant plugin that frees QuickTime to play all of the most common video formats, and even most of the truly eclectic ones out there, along with a handful of audio formats, like WMA, that Apple tends to want to marginalize.

Normally I hesitate to just copy and paste things from a program’s site, but it doesn’t get much more efficient for showing what Perian can handle than this handy-dandy bulleted list you’ll find at Perian.org:

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
• Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT

So if you’re in need of unleashing QuickTime on some video files you’ve collected, Perian is hands down the way to go. Of course, if you haven’t already tried VLC Media Player and you’re not averse to trying something new, it’s featured as a “FreeLoader Pick” in the book, and its awesomeness just can’t be overstated!

Platforms: Mac OS X 10.3.9 and up

Current version as of writing: 2.3

Apple’s approach to media burning is actually interesting because so much is either built into OS X or integrated into specific apps (e.g. iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, etc.). For a lot of users, that covers all their needs and eliminates the necessity for a standalone burning app. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a one-stop shop. Or if you’re a Mac convert coming from PC-land, maybe you just got used to using an all-encompassing app that takes care of everything.

On the features front, Burn does all the standard stuff you’d expect. It’ll burn data and music discs and can copy CDs and DVDs (as long as the DVD isn’t copy protected). Making data and music discs is just a nice, easy process of dragging and dropping.

But let’s get to some of the geekier features that make Burn really stand out. First up, let’s talk about CD-text. Maybe it’s just my own strange little fetish, but I seem to find myself using CD-text as a barometer for burning software quality fairly often. Maybe that’s because a lot of burning apps either don’t do CD-text or they do it so badly that they may as well not have bothered. Burn not only does it, but it does it in an intelligent way. In the preferences panel, under ‘Audio’ there’s a check box that turns on CD-text writing, and Burn (usually) gets the text burned in a way that’s actually convenient for seeing on your CD player’s display, which is where many others fall down.

If you don’t need CD-text at all because you just use CDs filled with mp3s, Burn’s got something for you, too. If, for example, all your tunes are ripped in 320kbps, but you want to maximize how many will fit on your disc (at the expense of a little fidelity), there’s a setting under the ‘Audio’ section that will tell Burn to cut the bitrate down and then burn the songs to the disc. Pretty slick.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t go over a bunch of detail about video codecs (there’ll probably be a feature entry about that enormous topic in the not-too-distant future), but one of the very coolest features of Burn is its ability to convert video before burning it to your media. Some of the biggies available are VCD and DivX.

Finally, a feature that Burn includes but very few other burning apps include is a DVD authoring. Burn bundles a small utility called MenuEdit, and with it you can add some slick (albeit simple) menus to your DVD projects. It’ll let you throw in background images, icons, and has a few other fun little menu tweaks available to play with.

I could go on and on, but I’ll call it good here and let you play with Burn and discover any other tweaky features that happen to be important for the projects you work on.

Platforms: Mac OS X (10.3 for most features, 10.4 or higher for full functionality)

Current version as of writing: 0.1.9

Having a BSD-based OS gives Apple some cool advantages. One of them is the ability to run a lot of native Unix and Linux apps. The only downside is that there can be a fair number of hoops to jump through in order to make that happen. A good example is GIMP. It’s a near Photoshop-level, professional image editor that has native Linux and Windows versions, but to get it to run on OS X, you’ll need to get X11 installed so that you can run X Windows-based programs. (X Windows is a Unix/Linux-based OS thing.) Some helpful Mac fans have stepped in to make getting GIMP up and running as easy as possible by providing a streamlined intaller, but some people are just naturally gonna be turned off by it all.

(As a side note, if you’re running Leopard, aka 10.5, you should actually be able to install and run GIMP directly because X11 is automatically a part of Leopard. The only downside is that it still doesn’t have that slick, naturally elegant look of native OS X apps.)

That leads us to Seashore, a native OS X (Cocoa-based to be precise) image editing app that’s built from GIMP code. If you’re also a PC user, Seashore is roughly akin to Paint.Net with respect to power, features and flexibility. For Mac-only users, you’ll find Seashore to be a big step up in flexibility and power from iPhoto. It doesn’t have professional users in mind like Photoshop or GIMP, but is plenty powerful for most chores. It’s a layer-based tool, which, in my mind, instantly puts it into the more power-user oriented category. But let me temper that comment by saying that it’s not hard to use. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

Actually, if you’re new to layer-based image editors, Seashore is a great way to cut your teeth. Photoshop and GIMP are undoubtedly awesome, but for newbies they can be brutal. Because they’re so vast, weeding through the almost countless features and functions can make doing the simplest edits frustratingly time consuming. Seashore doesn’t make you feel like you’re spending hours spinning your wheels doing something that would’ve taken you two minutes in a program like MS Paint.

OK, so it’s easy to use, fast, native to OS X, and powerful enough for most tasks, what’s not to love? Well, there are a few weaknesses worth knowing about before investing your time (small investment though it may be) in learning the program. First, if you need advanced or flashy text editing, Seashore may not be able to keep up with you. Its text capabilities limit it to only some basic effects, and your control over them is a bit narrow. On the same lines, vector graphics functions are, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. While a full version of GIMP may not have the most robust vector graphics capabilities, they are there. Seashore, unfortunately, doesn’t (as of now) have much going on vector-wise. The good news: If you have no idea what vector graphics are and only plan on doing photo editing, you probably won’t notice that shortcoming at all!

If you’re an old hand at layer-based image editors (especially GIMP), Seashore is going to be a snap to pick up. But if this is your first dance, it’ll actually save you a lot of time in the long run to watch or read some tutorials. I’m a fan of video tutorials since you not only see things in action, but there also tends to be lots of helpful side comments by the videos’ makers that give you handy ideas for how to use what you’re learning in other scenarios. YouTube user Andy Roberts has put up two Seashore tutorials that can help you get up to speed.  Tutorial #1 Tutorial #2 Andy also has a blog where you can watch these tutorials and see his other videos.

If you grab Seashore or have previous experience, please drop by the comments section and let us know what you think of it.