Color Oracle is a free app that makes simulating color blindness easy, allowing for a real time look at how those with different types of color impairments will view images on screen. The utility “takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness” and according to it’s developers, uses the best available algorithm for simulating color recognition impairments.

Color Oracle is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and a valuable addition to any designers toolkit.

• Get Color Oracle free from colororacle.org

Considering that color blindness effects as high as 8% of the male population, if you’re a print, web, or app designer, you’ll want to know what your creations will look like to those who are affected.

Thanks for the tip Henrik

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing is remaining focused, which is increasingly difficult in the digital world of mass distractions. Using distraction free writing software can really help eliminate the interruptions that exist elsewhere on your computer, and the open source FocusWriter fits this bill nicely.

FocusWriter is a full-screen distraction free writing space that has a lot of great features including autosaving, spell checking, live statistics on character and word count, and goal tracking. The entire interface is customizable and the rest remains hidden away unless you mouse over portions of the screen to access things like document tabs, saving, find and replace, goals, and the scrollbar.

FocusWriter is a free download, open source, and cross-platform compatible. There are Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows versions available to download at the developers site.

We have covered WriteRoom in the past which is another solution, but since version 1.0 the developer started charging for it.

One of the features of Windows 7 that gets pretty good reviews is the window preview, you access these by hovering over items in the Windows task/start bar and a little preview of the minimized window is shown as a pop-up. With a little utility called HyperDock, you can get this same functionality on your Mac Dock.

HyperDock includes window previews (see screenshot above if you’re not sure what this would look like), some advanced window management features, and you can even control iTunes and iCal through the preview windows. I tried it out and it works as advertised.

If you want this sort of thing on your Mac, check out HyperDock, it’s free for now while it’s in beta but is expected to cost money when the final version is released.

How’d you like to get notifications from your Android phone onto your desktop? This cool little utility will notify you of incoming SMS’s, phone calls, and battery notifications, right on your desktop. The app installs on your Android and also on your desktop PC and communicates through Bluetooth, it’s fully multi-platform compatible so it will work in Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

You can grab the Android Desktop Notifier tool at Google code.

I came across this cool utility on LifeHacker a bit ago and figured it was worth reposting here. We generally cover the iPhone but I realize that many people have Androids too, if I couldn’t have an iPhone I probably would as well. If you’ve never messed around with it, you can run Android in a virtual machine and check it out, it doesn’t have the Apple polish but it’s not a bad mobile OS at all.

Now I just wish they had a similar notifier tool for iOS…

RedHand is a pretty powerful Mac security app with a creepy icon that locks your computer using a myriad of protection options and scripting support, but I think the two best features by far are these: Bluetooth detection locking & unlocking, and the ability to take iSight pictures on failed login attempts.

Take an iSight picture with logins and failed login attempts

Once your computer is locked with RedHand, it will document all intrusion and login attempts with time and date, the attempted password that was entered, and best of all… an iSight picture! You can actually use any external camera attached to the Mac, but the iSight makes the most sense since it’s directly in front of the face of most Macs. This ability is configurable through the preference pane and even scriptable.

Lock & unlock your Mac based on the presence of a Bluetooth device

Yes, this means you can use an iPhone as a keycard of sorts to lock and unlock your Mac. No password required. If RedHand detects the specified Bluetooth device, the Mac unlocks itself. If the Bluetooth device is no longer detected, the Mac locks. How awesome is this?? Why isn’t this feature built into Mac OS X and iOS?

Failed login penalties, disable the keyboard, scripting support, and more
Further options let you adjust a penalty time for failed login attempts, disable input for time periods, or just turn off the screen completely. There’s even AppleScript, Bash, Perl, and other scripting language support so that you can write custom scripts to respond to intrusion attempts. Failed login? Use a script that saves the date and time with a picture and emails it to you remotely. With scripting support, the possibilities are endless. Check out the screenshot below of the preference pane options.

Download for free, $5 if you like it
RedHand is awesome, perhaps even more awesome is the developers attitude toward customers; they give you full access to the app to try it out and there are no serial numbers, they trust that if you like the app you’ll pay the $5 to buy it.

You can download the app for free and try it out, but if you like the app you should pay the $5, it’s a small price for some great Mac security software.

For a lot less security and reporting, you can always just lock your Mac with a screen saver, but where’s the fun in that?

PixelStick is a great utility for designers who want to quickly measure distances and angles on their screen. Just launch the app and start dragging the endpoints to adjust measurements and get the pixel dimensions.

This is an awesome tool, and it’s free to download.

You can grab PixelStick for free from the developer, Pixelated Software.

If you’re looking for a solution to triple boot Mac OS X with Linux and Windows without using Boot Camp, you can do this using a third party boot menu called rEFIt, which shows a menu like the above screenshot on each system boot.

If you’re already familiar with multi-OS setups, partitioning, and the like, you probably won’t need a walkthrough since the setup is pretty straightforward to those who have experience in dual/triple boot environments.

If you’re new to the topic though and would like some more assistance in setting up a triple boot OS environment, LifeHacker has a write-up although it’s sort of just stating the obvious: install rEFIt, partition drives, install OS’s, and of course the rEFIt documentation is another great resource.

If you have an older MacBook or MacBook Pro and you envy your friends with newer models and their fancy inertial scrolling, envy no more. InertialScroll is a simple freeware utility that allows you to enable inertia scrolling on older Mac laptops, the only requirement is that they have multitouch trackpads (this covers at least 2009 and some 2008 models).

The app is very simple to use, you just enable the feature through the app in your menubar, and you can disable it the same way. You can check out InertialScroll here.

(For those that do have newer MacBook models and don’t like the feature, you can disable inertia scrolling rather easily too.)

Evom is a great free app that converts video and lets you easily download any flash movies from the web. The interface is dead simple, just drag a URL or file into the app and the video will download or convert for you.

Downloading YouTube songs with Evom

Now here’s what I think is the best part about the app: you can easily download any YouTube video and just save the audio track as an mp3, letting you play it in iTunes. This is great when you find a video with a song that you love but you can’t track it down otherwise, which is often the case with more obscure music.

Here’s how to download and convert a YouTube video to a song:

• Drag the YouTube video URL into Evom
• Select ‘iTunes’ and click on ‘Save as audio only (mp3)’
• Click on “Convert”

Evom will then download the video from YouTube, and then extract and convert the audio to MP3 format and automatically import it into iTunes.

Yes, you can download YouTube videos to your Mac with just Safari, but Evom is nice because it will also convert the video file for you to a format that is compatible with iTunes and thus your iPhone, iPad, or whatever.

Evom is actually much more than just a way to download YouTube videos and songs, it will convert and save most video formats you throw at it. It’s a great app, simple to use, and free.

You can download Evom here, highly recommended!

DaisyDisk is a beautiful application that gives you an excellent breakdown of disk space usage on your Mac’s hard drives. Using DaisyDisk is about as easy as it gets, you select the drive you want to scan, let it run, and wait a minute or two until a great looking interactive graphic is presented to you. The larger the blocks, the larger the contents combined file size. Hovering over the blocks lets you see live information on what exactly they are, and you can then right-click on the graphic to show the contents in the Finder.

With DaisyDisk I was able to identify 4.3GB of Podcasts that I haven’t listened to in about two years… that’s 4.3 precious gigabytes of my MacBook’s hard drive! Anytime I’ve cleaned up disk space on my Mac before I generally just leave the iTunes directory alone because I don’t want to delete any music, but what’s the point in keeping ancient podcasts about topics that are no longer even relevant? This is something I totally overlooked with just manual folder size inspections, but it stood out like a sore thumb in DaisyDisk. Honestly I’m a bit confused as to why Apple doesn’t integrate something like this directly into their own Disk Utility, it’s that useful, plus the interface and snappiness feels right at home in Mac OS X.

I am pleased to say that DaisyDisk has a nice comfortable home in my /Applications/Utilities/ folder and I’ll be using it again very soon for some much needed Spring Cleaning.

You can download a free demo of DaisyDisk, otherwise the retail version is $19.95 and available at DaisyDiskApp.com

Update: Check out the comments below for some similar but free suggestions from our users.

Gitbox is a pretty nice GUI to the Git version control system. All the features you’d expect are there: quickly see branches, history, working directory status, then easily commit, pull, merge, and push files with minimal effort. I first used Gitbox as a Preview version a while ago and enjoyed it, you’ll need both Xcode and Git installed to be able to run the app yourself.

Here’s what the Gitbox developer lists as the features:

Check Out Everything. You may check out a local branch, tag and even a remote branch with a single dropdown button. From now on you don’t have to remember the obscure branch-tracking command or edit .git/config. Select the remote branch, type a local name for it and you’re done.

Up To Date. Gitbox updates working directory status each time you focus the window. When in background, it periodically fetches data from the selected remote branch and displays unmerged commits in the history. The status of the working directory, local and remote branches are always up to date.

Rich History. History shows all commits on both local and remote branches. Non-pushed commits are green. Non-pulled commits are grey. You can also select another local branch in a “Remote branch” menu to merge it into the current one.

Clean Design. There are no palettes or additional windows cluttering the screen. Your repository fits nicely inside a single window with a few buttons. Use the Main Menu for infrequent operations such as adding a new repository URL or stashing away changes.

Super Fast. We all love the command line for the speed. But it is not very smart. Say, you move a file from one folder to another: in the Terminal you would have to “git rm” the old path (the file is gone, so no tab-completion) and “git add” the new path. And it becomes a real pain when you happen to rename multiple files. But in Gitbox you just click the checkbox. Status is updated instantly, you don’t have to type “git status” ever again.

If you’re looking for a Git GUi client for Mac OS X, check out Gitbox.

If you’re looking for a simple stopwatch menubar timer for Mac OS X, look no further than Thyme. No, not the herb, Thyme is a very simple app that sits in your menubar and allows you to quickly start and stop a timer.

Wondering how long it takes you to perform a certain task? No problem, use Thyme and figure it out. You can quickly activate and deactivate Thyme by hitting Control+T, otherwise just access it from the menubar.

Surprisingly useful! If you’re not keen on installing third party apps, you can always create a rudimentary stopwatch from the command line too.

I came across an excellent alternative to the command line ‘ping’ and ‘traceroute’ tools recently. It’s a utility called mtr, which combines the statistics and prints their functionality into a single network diagnostic tool, reporting details on the network connection between your host machine and whatever the destination host is, determining the address of each network hop (like traceroute), and sending ICMP ECHO requests along the way (like ping) to determine the response quality of each network link.

To install and use mtr you will either need DarwinPorts or to be a familiar with the command line and compiling from source on your Mac, both of which requires the installation of Xcode.

You can download the source of MTR at the developers home or the more user friendly installation through DarwinPorts.

I found mtr while reading old posts on OneThingWell, and the screenshot is borrowed from them as well.

I was recently looking around for a Mac OS X GUI to IPFW and came across WaterRoof. If you’re looking for a nice powerful GUI frontend for Mac OS X’s built in firewall IPFW, look no further, WaterRoof is free and simple to use. Using WaterRoof you an easily add, build, and modify ipfw rules quickly and easily.

Here is the full feature list of WaterRoof from the developer:

* uses Mac OS X built-in IPFW firewall. No kernel modules, no extensions, no pain. WaterRoof is free and open-source
* the most advanced Mac OS X free graphic frontend for ipfw now features a new, clean interface. WaterRoof lets you create, modify, delete, move ipfw ipv4 and
* ipv6 rules very quickly.
* build ipfw rules easily with the new simplified interface and the IPFW Rules Translator. Building ipfw rules now is easier than ever
* Backup and deploy firewall rules with WaterRoof Injectors
* Quick dns reverse and whois queries with copy/paste
* manage network bandwidth with dummynet pipes and queues
* check live dynamic rules created by stateful firewall rules
* watch and parse firewall logs, create raw and graphic statistics
* look at active network connections, block them or limit their bandwidth on-the-fly
* list all applications that make network connections
* manage Network Address Translation (NAT) daemon: create a dual-homed firewall/nat/router with port redirection and forwarding; deploy NAT settings using
* WaterRoof Injectors
* import rules from NoobProof Injectors
* keep your favourite firewall rules active at system boot; import/export rulesets
* explore and test ipfw with configuration wizard and ready rule sets
* compatible with Mac OS X Server 10.5 .
* requires Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6

Download WaterRoof now
Developer home

If you’re looking to deploy the iPhone in an enterprise utility, don’t miss out on Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility, which makes enterprise iPhone management a snap. Apple describes the tool as follows:

iPhone Configuration Utility lets you easily create, maintain, encrypt, and install configuration profiles, track and install provisioning profiles and authorized applications, and capture device information including console logs.

Configuration profiles are XML files that contain device security policies, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, APN settings, Exchange account settings, mail settings, and certificates that permit iPhone and iPod touch to work with your enterprise systems.

You can download the utility for either Mac OS or Windows:

iPhone Configuration Utility for Mac OS X

iPhone Configuration Utility for Windows