This article is more than 1 year old

Ten Mac freeware apps for your new Apple baby

The latest from the software gift horse stables

Lab Tick

RH Numbers

As I discovered when writing this article, the light sensor in my MacBook Pro is possibly the most frustrating feature ever to have been devised by Apple. It’s a brilliant idea if you are blessed with the god-like ability to control the lighting in every possible workspace, but if, like me, you are not the omnipotent overlord of electromagnetic radiation, then you might find Lab Tick useful.

Lab Tick illumination controller

The ability to disable the light sensor’s influence over the screen brightness is already built into OSX, but the keyboard backlight is a rogue faction on a mission to stage a coup d'etat and overthrow your productivity by delivering subliminal Morse Code messages through its constant dimming and brightening. Lab Tick takes care of this by giving control back to you, the people user, allowing you to manually set the brightness and assign keyboard shortcuts for its control.

Developer Alexander Repty
More info Lab Tick

LibreOffice

RH Numbers

Microsoft Office is the bane of a Mac users existence (PC users too, really) and frankly I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s iWork suite due to its total lack of cross-compatibility with anything. For these reasons alone, you don’t have to be budget conscious to justify using a free alternatives such as LibreOffice.

LibreOffice productivity suite

Not only does LibreOffice offer a rich and full-featured productivity suite covering everything from word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector graphics and database management, but it does so with almost perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office. As such, you can now rid yourself of Microsoft’s shackles and still work collaboratively with the rest of the unenlightened world.

Developer The Document Foundation
More info Libre Office

Next page: MPlayerX

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like