Locker is a very simple Dashboard widget that does something Mac OS X should have included by default, it instantly locks your Mac desktop. All you have to do is open your Dashboard and double click the Locker icon and you’ll end up at a login window where you need to enter a login and password to regain desktop access. The uses for this are many, but I am still surprised Apple does not provide a simple way to lock your Mac outside of either a screensaver or fast user logout with Shift-Command-Option-Q. Anyway, check out Locker, it’s no frills and gets the job done.

Developer home
Download now

MAMP: It stands for Mac Apache MySql PHP. It delivers on all four of these fronts and it does it very efficiently. MAMP is nice because you can install it (and delete it) without altering anything “built-in” to your OS X installation. Every file that MAMP needs and uses lives inside of the MAMP folder that you download. This includes all php, mysql and apache configuration files. MAMP ships with a small application that when launched gives you the ability to switch port numbers and control the state of the servers. Also included is a dashboard widget which allows for the same control, from a slightly different angle. For those command-line faint of heart, MAMP ships with phpMyAdmin a very nice front end to MySQL. All of this, out of the box, for free! Other eye-catching features include the ability to switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and the ability to enable cache mechanisms on the fly. Visit the MAMP site for more details.

There are quite a few ways to listen to the radio on your Mac, through iTunes, Safari, various Dashboard widgets, but RadioTuner is probably the best way yet. RadioTuner is a Dashboard widget that allows you to customize the list of radio stations, allowing you to hear what you want to hear rather than whatever is in a predefined list (like iTunes and many other widgets provide). For RadioTuner to work properly, you’ll need Flip4Mac and RealPlayer installed.

The interface is small and easy, simply paste the radio feed URL into the widget and save. The developer also has a growing list of searchable station feeds available, searchable here.

Developer home
Download now