You can stuff lots of virtual holiday stockings with the Mac OS X shareware products that are rolling out. New and updated products include ShredIt, Web Dumper, MakeItGrow, Web Confidential and Seagull Video Player.
ShredIt, the electronic document shredder from Mireth Technology was recently updated for the “traditional” Mac operating system, getting a “Safe Place” feature that lets you protect important documents from accidental shredding. Now Mireth Technology has released ShredIt X for Mac OS X.
Like ShredIt for OS 9, ShredIt X includes the Safe Place feature. For example, you can move your child’s homework into a Safe Place folder so that it can’t accidentally shredded. What’s more, ShredIt has been rewritten from the ground up for OS X to take advantage of Mac OS X’s native Cocoa development environment.
ShredIt X costs US$19.95 and can be ordered from Mireth’s Web site, where a demo can also be downloaded. Bulk discounts are available.
Meanwhile, the folks at Maxprog have introduced a new product, Web Dumper, an Internet tool that lets users download Web sites for offline browsing. It’s available for Mac OS X and for the traditional Mac operating system.
With Web Dumper you can download entire Web sites off the Internet and save them on your hard drive for later offline browsing, according to MacTech magazine (http://www.mactech.com). Downloaded Web sites are saved on your hard drive with their directory structure intact. Web Dumper automatically downloads HTML documents along with their embedded pictures, sounds, movies and so on while it screens them to look for any enclosed links to other documents.
What’s more, Web Dumper lets you select the kinds of files you want to be dumped. You can choose from over 60 available standard types, the folder depth level, how links must be processed, and if it must re-link your HTML documents for offline browsing.
Also, shareware author Alco Blom has brought Web Confidential 3.0 to Mac OS X. The $20 Web Confidential is a password manager that organizes passwords and protects them. It sports encryption using BlowFish, automatic entry of www forms, automatic HTTP authentication integration and the ability to access your passwords in your browser and from the Dock. Web Confidential also offers synchronization with a Palm OS handheld.
Then there’s MakeItGrow, a garden layout package. MakeItGrow has been updated to version 2.5. The software will allow you to plan a garden using 96 of the most common types of vegetables, herbs and fruits, plus 67 common flowers.
With MakeItGrow you can plan and visualize your garden at the correct scale, including the spacing required for each plant, according to developer John Spicer. As you plan your garden, you can label your plants and create garden boundaries, draw circles and squares, with assorted fill patterns and colors. The app is US$39.95. More info can be found at the product Web site.
Finally, Trinfinity Software has an update to Seagull Video Player, a video player that lets you create a playlist of your video files and play them full screen. This update contains a number of new features, including the choice of viewing videos at 50 percent, 100 percent or 200 percent of their original size or the maximum size that will fit on the screen. You can also choose to have the video window centered on screen at all times. Plus, Seagull Video Player’s Playlist window now accepts dragging and dropping of files and folders. A new preferences dialog lets you have the playlist window shown every time the application launches. Or you can now choose not to display the splash screen and can change the background color of the screen in full screen mode.
Seagull Video Player 1.2 is a free update to all registered users. New users can download and evaluate Seagull Video Player 1.2 for 30 days. Registration is $19.95 for a single-user license.