Tom’s Budget Software Picks

Snood, a remarkably funny and addictive puzzle game, was recently released in a beta version that runs under OS X 10.4 or later.

The object of the game is to clear the screen of Snood characters by shooting them with your Snood-O-Matic cannon. But instead of shooting, balls, bombs, bullets, or other mundane ammunition, you shoot Snoods with Snoods. Matching three or more Snoods of the same color and type causes them to fall off the screen.

It sounds easy enough, but the puzzles can get very intricate, particularly at the more difficult levels of play. There are multiple games to choose from; my personal favorite is the Evil level, because that’s just what Snoods are: evil little characters trying to take over the screen.

iSeek places a search field in the Apple menu bar that you can use to search the Internet at any time, from any application. The basic idea behind iSeek is very compelling, and its implementation is a good one, with an easy-to-use interface.

iSeek comes pre-populated with a wide selection of web sites you can use for a search. In addition to the obvious, namely Google, there are also movie databases, stock quotes, and more. You can also add your own favorite search services.

If the idea of being able to search the Internet, at any time, from any application, sounds appealing, then iSeek is for you.

iClipboard from Chronos L.C. is a clipboard manager that stores everything you copy to the standard Mac clipboard. While there are a number of third-party clipboard managers that provide the same type of unlimited clipping storage, iClipboard goes a step further by providing powerful ways to access, organize, edit, and use the clippings.

iClipboard expands on the standard clipboard that Apple provides and turns it into a way to store, organize, and use an unlimited number of clippings. A clippings can be just about any type of content, from plain text to rich multimedia content. Accessing the items is easy because of how iClipboard lets you organize and even name the clippings.

TypeIt4Me has long been a favorite of Mac users. It’s been around for 20 years, in one incarnation or another. TypeIt4Me is a utility that monitors your typing, looks for keyword phrases (called abbreviations in TypeIt4Me) you have defined, and replaces those keywords with the text you have assigned to that keyword.

If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like the AutoText feature in Microsoft Word, or many other word processors, you’re on the right track. The difference is that TypeIt4Me is a system-wide application that will work with almost any open application. You can use TypeIt4Me in your email application, word processor, web editor, or just about any application that works with text.

Mariner Software’s MacJournal 5 may be the best journal, diary, and blogging front end for the Mac. That's saying quite a lot, considering that any word processor should be able to fulfill the same needs. But while word processors can do those things, they don't do them nearly as well as a dedicated application like MacJournal.

MacJournal is a writer's journal. It lets you record ideas or create full stories in multiple journals and entries. You can use MacJournal to chronicle your life, develop stories or ideas, or serve as a front end for your favorite blogging service.

SuperDuper 2.5 is one of the easiest backup tools to use for creating a bootable clone of your startup drive. It offers step-by-step guidance, and verifies what will happen before it starts a backup.

SuperDuper also makes a great companion application to Apple’s Time Machine. Together they form a robust backup strategy that can protect your data, and offer quick recovery when you need it.

Ricochet Infinity provides hours of arcade-style entertainment with over 200 levels of play. Even after you complete the game, Ricochet Infinity offers replay value, by changing skill levels, creating your own levels, or downloading new levels from other Ricochet Infinity players.

Ricochet’s main problem is its addictiveness; as my wife says, “It’s evil.” Evil or not, Ricochet Infinity is a fun and lighthearted game that will take you back to the heady early days of arcade-style games. Play full screen for the best arcade effect.

DVDRemaster is a must-have video tool because it can re-encode and compress video to fit a target device. DVDRemaster makes it easy to transfer your favorite movies to portable devices, just the thing for those long business trips or vacations.

DVDRemaster turns the complicated process of re-encoding, transcoding, and compressing video into a relatively simple task, with an easy-to-use interface that even novices will find easy to understand and use.

DVDRemaster also simplifies the process of backing up your favorite DVDs.

The latest Macintosh version of Photoshop Elements, Adobe's consumer photo editing application, is universal binary, which means it can run as a native application on both newer Intel Macs and older PowerPC Macs.

It's been a long wait for a universal binary version of Photoshop Elements, but it looks like Adobe used the time wisely, incorporating many features from Photoshop CS3 and creating a surprisingly powerful image editor, while maintaining its focus on home users. Don’t let its focus on home users mislead you, though; Photoshop Elements 6 contains more than enough image editing prowess to serve occasional business needs as well.

OpenOffice.org, an office productivity suite, has been available for the Mac for many years, but until recently it used its own windowing system rather than a native Mac interface. Fortunately, the latest version of OpenOffice.org (3.0.1) has a native OS X Aqua interface that has made using this office suite a more pleasant experience.

OpenOffice.org includes five core applications: Writer, for creating text documents; Calc, for spreadsheets; Impress, for presentations; Draw, for creating graphics; and Base, a database application. Together these five applications cover the most common tasks for daily business use. OpenOffice.org is Open Source software and is available for free.