Filed under: Software
Ten donationware programs that are worth your money
It's the givingest time of the year, so if you're in the mood to be generous, why not donate to some of the best and most useful Mac software projects. Programs like VLC, Cyberduck, Adium and Handbrake all allow you to donate money to support the continued software development effort. Weblog FairlyUseless lists ten of these applications and suggests you put their developers on your Christmas list: "Now is a good time to thank them with a small donation. Can you imagine how much of a difference it would make to the developers if just 1% of users gave $5? It would only set you back $50 (or more if you can) for these ten applications."
Thanks Brian Wente
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Donald Burr said 4:14PM on 12-14-2006
Great list. Adium is a great multi-platform IM client - the only complaint I have is the ugly duckling icon. VLC is a must have for anyone that downloads/watches videos, as it views many different video formats, and can sometimes deal with slightly wonky video that causes other players like Quicktime to have a panic attack and/or crash. And the latest version supports Windows Media 9 to boot. And XBMC is probably one of the best media centers around. When I recently upgraded to an Xbox 360, rather than selling my old Xbox, I modchipped it, installed a bigger hard drive, and loaded XBMC on it. Not only can I watch any type of media content that's stored on the Xbox's internal hard drive, but it works quite well stremaing files off of my network fileserver as well. (Yes, the Xbox 360 has built-in media player capabilities, but it can only play content streamed from a Windows XP Media Center PC, or a PC or Mac using Media Center emulation software such as Connect360).
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Billy K said 4:53PM on 12-14-2006
iSquint! Totally worth the donation.
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michel said 5:05PM on 12-14-2006
don't touch the Adium icons! it's one of my favorites and a little piece of FUN in the whole os X dock
(and it is quite finely detailled)
only people hating old good warner cartoon can tell adium is ugly.
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Dan said 5:08PM on 12-14-2006
I donated for Journler, and I'm a poor college student. 2.1 is going to be freakin awesome.
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Donald Burr said 5:09PM on 12-14-2006
Doh. Totally forgot about iSquint. Excellent way of quickly and easily transmogrifying almost any video file to an iPod-compatible format. So robust in fact that that's what DL.TV (a IPTV tech show) makes its iPod-compatible downloads.
Also forgot to mention that Handbrake has a new product they are developing called Instant HandBrake. It is basically a one-click (i.e. really easy to use) program that does the entire task of transforming a DVD into a iPod compatible video file. (Yes you can do this with other tools, e.g. iSquint, etc. but you'd need a separate program for DVD ripping as well as transforming the VOB format into something iSquint etc. can read)
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Bill I said 5:48PM on 12-14-2006
I think Vienna is one of the best freeware programs I've ever come across....but I can't seem to find a donate link anywhere!
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php
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stainboy said 5:38PM on 12-14-2006
@Donald: not a fan of the duck myself either. that's why i installed one of the many, many free user-created dock icons for it!
http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=1
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Kerensky said 8:02PM on 12-14-2006
I would NOT recommend donating to Handbrake. I hang around the forums there and the developer Titer has been AWOL since around April. Development of Handbrake (and Instant Handbrake) has ground to a halt. It's so bad that some forum members have started their own unoffical Handbrake fork to try and keep it going. Unless Titer pops out of his hole and gives up some answers, I think any donations are not going to be any help for the project. Check out this forum post for more info: http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2031
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Maddles said 1:51AM on 12-15-2006
Kerensky, I think I know the reason for Titer disappearance. Currently his other project Transmission has ramped up development an I think everyone over there are trying to fix the problems in libtransmission
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Peter said 8:11AM on 12-15-2006
I second the donation worthiness of JOURNLER by Phil Dow!
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