Excellent Geeky Mac Freeware
- July 16, 2004
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I’ve recently found two excellent freeware apps for my Mac. Both of them are tied to the CLI, but add GUI front-ends.
The first one I found several days ago is called GeekTool. It’s a Preference Pane that allows you to display Unix commands output, system logs, Web images, etc. on your desktop. For example, I have three commands running on my computer. One shows the most CPU-hungry of my apps in my menu bar. Two others show current weather. They get their info from Weather Underground every 10 minutes.
What’s so cool about GeekTool is that you can have it display just about anything you want. It’s easy to set up and create new commands. If you’re familiar with the Unix underpinnings of OS X, then the sky is the limit. If you’re not familiar with it, then you can go to their support forums and see what others have done.
The second great utility I found is called OnMyCommand. It’s a contextual menu item, but what sets it apart is that it lets you create your own contextual menu items based on Unix commands.
This little gem is amazing! Within 5 minutes of installing it, I had several different options for compression/decompression of files, archiving of folders, burning/creating ISO images, mailing files, etc. And OnMyCommand lets you easily create and organize your own commands so you don’t clutter up your contextual menu. You can also download and customize a huge number of commands others have come up with.
And what’s so great about these utilities is that they’re both free! So check them out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.