Wolverhampton City Learning Centre (CLC)

Apple computers are appearing in more of our schools. Small suites in Secondary Media Studies or Art Departments are not uncommon. A primary school may even have a couple of MacBooks or a Mac mini for podcasting or editing video.

For most, the reason these computers have managed to break the long-standing dominance of Windows is .. iLife. The iLife suite, Apple’s integrated collection of media tools - iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, iDVD, iTunes - is a fantastic collection of tools for all forms of media manipulation. The intuitive ease-of-use of these tools, and the way they link together so seamlessly, makes them an easy sell for Apple. For many schools, educators, or departments, iLife is THE reason to buy a Mac. (Oh, that and the fact they look quite cool too).

However, the Mac OS X operating system is a fully mature and compelling alternative to Windows. What about other software, beyond iLife? Well, the biggest software applications are available for Mac OS X too, of course. Microsoft Office and Adobe products (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and so on) are available. Add in Apple products such as Aperture (photo editing and management) or Final Cut Express / Pro (video editing), and most bases are covered. Lower cost applications include:

• Pixelmator - image editing (http://www.pixelmator.com)
• I Can Animate - stop-frame animation (http://www.kudlian.net/products/icananimate)
• Call Recorder - record Skype conversations (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder)

What about free applications? Well, there are some wonderful freeware tools out there for Mac OS X. What I want to do here is highlight a few of these. If you have more applications you’d like to add, please submit a comment and let me know.

Neo Office (http://www.neooffice.org)

Neo Office is a Mac OS X version of the hugely popular OpenOffice suite, the free, full featured alternative to Microsoft Office. (The latest version of OpenOffice itself (version 3) is now fully Mac native, but doesn’t yet have an authentic Mac OS X feel to the interface. For the moment, therefore, I prefer NeoOffice)

Fluid (http://fluidapp.com)

Fluid is a really clever idea. It allows you to create a standalone application from your favourite Web 2.0 site, complete with its own icon in the Dock or on the desktop. For example, you might create a standalone Google Docs application, or an application for your VLE or webmail. Once the application is open, the usual trimmings of a browser window have disappeared: there is no address bar or bookmarks list. Instead you’re left with the website behaving as if it were an application. In Windows, this idea is now part of Google’s new Chrome browser too.

A Flickr application, created using Fluid

Skitch (http://skitch.com)

Skitch is a tool for capturing screenshots. Add simple annotations and drop-shadows, resize the results (by simply dragging the corner of the document window) and quickly drag-and-drop to re-export the image ready for inserting into a document or uploading into a website or blog post. It’s wonderfully simple and intuitive to use. All of the screenshots in this post were captured using Skitch.

(At the time of writing, Skitch is beta software - at some point in the future, plasq may decide to charge for it).

RapidoWrite (www.app4mac.com/rapidowrite.html)

RapidoWrite is a tool for quickly “expanding” designated codewords/text snippets into a block of text. For example, with RapidoWrite enabled, I can designate that typing “loremipsum” generates five paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum filler text. (As someone who regularly demonstrates ideas for laying out webpages, the ability to “call up” realistic holding text so easily is invaluable). One other idea is to designate a term - say “creativecommons” - to add a standard credit message to an iMovie text box. Of maybe your students have a common structure for report-writing; simply assign a code snippet that rapidly adds this into a word processed document.

Marco Polo (http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo)

One for portable Macs, Marco Polo allows you to change a variety of system settings based on your physical location:

• Change the desktop background based on the wireless network (I use this to switch from a family photo at home to a corporate background at the CLC).
• Change the default printer for different locations
• Change network settings. I regularly move between several different wireless networks. Marco Polo switches the proxy server settings automatically as I move between them
• Automatically mount network drives at a given location

SoundSource (http://rogueamoeba.com/freebies)

A really simple little application that runs in your menu bar, Sound Source provides easy access to the Sound Preference settings. This is particularly useful in podcasting / film-editing work; you can quickly change the input/output device and the volume levels for each.

FlipSide (http://projectappletree.org/applications/Flipside/Flipside.html)

If you have BootCamp installed on a Mac (so that it can run Windows too) you know that to move from one operating system to another requires a reboot with the alt key held down on the keyboard. FlipSide removes the need for this. Click on it, select the Windows drive, and FlipSide will automatically reboot you to Windows.

DockSpaces (http://web.mac.com/patrickjamelo/dock.html)

The Mac OS X Dock holds all of you major applications in a single location for easy access. However, students may be drawn to click on software other than that intended … “ooh, I wonder what that program is” .. (I Can Animate’s gnome icon seems to be particularly effective at drawing distracted clicks)

DockSpaces allows you to have multiple, labelled docks. So, for example you might have a “Podcasting” Dock full of audio apps (GarageBand, iTunes, Audacity), or a “Stop-frame animation” Dock - iCan Animate, iStopMotion, iMovie HD.

For teachers with laptop Macs, DockSpaces is useful for labelling different Docks for different circumstances; I have three Docks - “Home”, “Office” and “Teaching”

ffmpegX (http://www.ffmpegX.com)

FfmpegX is a video conversion tool. It is very useful for converting Windows-based file-types (e.g. WMV files) into a format that iMovie will accept. (Ffmpegx is actually shareware - if you use it lots, you should donate. However, it is fully functional without donation).

JumpCut (http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net)

JumpCut is a multiple clipboard manager. When you copy an item into the clipboard, Jumpcut intercepts it and stores it. Thus you can copy multiple items without each overwriting the last. This is very useful for collecting information from the web, or for copying and pasting multiple bits of code.

Software with Windows versions

Lots of other popular pieces of Windows freeware have Mac versions too:

• Google SketchUp - 3D modelling (http://sketchup.google.com)
• Google Earth (http://earth.google.com)
• The Jing Project - record screen activity (http://www.jingproject.com)
• Firefox - the popular browser (http://www.getfirefox.com)
• VLC Media player - an absolutely essential tool on both Mac and Windows. Plays pretty much any video file format (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
• Smart Board Notebook software, for your interactive whiteboard (http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Support/SBS/NBSv10Mac.htm)
• Updated: Phun - a “2D Physics sandbox” - see blog article here