So check it out here.  Sorry Windows users, this game is free on OS X only.

The main features include:

• Double Entry Accounting
• Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund Accounts
• Small-Business Accounting
• Customers, Vendors, and Jobs
• Invoicing
• Import from your previous software
• Reports/Graphs
• FREE and multi-platform

GnuCash is available on all three major operating systems including: Linux, Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7, and Mac OS X.  If you’re in the market for a great financial package and not looking to fork over the big bucks then GnuCash is worth taking a look at (link).

From gnucash.org

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

I did keep the box just in case the screen started acting up, but as of now, no issues to report.

This build requires Snow Leopard to work correctly.  If you need more information click here.

This is simply for doing a brain dump of information into the word processor.  This is not for formatting tables, font or a substitute for a standard wordprocessor.  This is just to help you put twitter, facebook, and digg out of your view while you get some typing done.  You can download this through their website by registering here, or download it directly here.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

Main Features:

1. Free
2. Detailed 3D environments that not only look realistic, but make you feel a little cold playing.
3. Very simple controls, it uses 4 keys (Up, Down, Left, Right).

Downside:

1. Limited features, don’t expect the feature set of a $50 game.
2. First boot, durning what they call their benchmark mode, take a while… a little to long.

This game is a must download for any mac gammer.  It’s free and challenging to play against online competitors.

Download Here.

Regardless, it’s a great browser.  You can download it here: Windows: [link], Mac (beta): [link].

1. Aviary Screen Capture – Very power snap and share feature for screenshots.  Aviary is a online photoshop alternative software, and this extension lets you capture images and process them directly in Aviary.  Very convenient plugin.
2. Gmail Checker – Need a constant eye on your gmail accounts?  gMail Checker for Chrome does just that.
3. AntiADS – Don’t like to view those online advertisements, this plugin is what ad-block is for Firefox.
4. Facebook Notifications – Get your Facebook notifications in your status bar.
5. AniWeather – Weather in your status bar simple and pretty.

1. Installing PHP & MySQL – There are several ways to install these packages on a Mac.  You can build the source code, download installers for each or download a development bundle that already has everything setup.  If you are just using your local machine to develop on then you probably don’t need to update the PHP version on your Mac or install MySQL to the Mac’s bin directory.  There are much easier options.  They aren’t secure enough for production machines, but for your local development they will do just fine.  The easiest one is BitNami stacks.  BitNami provides a wide range of application stacks such as Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal to name a few.  It also provides Infrastructure Stacks.  These are stacks like MAMP, WAMP, LAMP, etc.  Basically, this is a base install for M(ac) A(pache) M(ySQL)P(HP), or Windows Apache MySQL & PHP, etc.
2. Download MAMP ~63MB.  If you are developing plugins or themes for Wordpress or one of their other application stacks then you might just skip this install and download that application stack.
3. Next we need to run the bitnami-mampstack-1.2…installer.app.
4. You will just be prompted for the install location and the root password.  The only requirement is that the password is more than 6 characters.
5. When the installer is done you should now see that your install was a success.  Your web-browser will open to page http://127.0.0.1:8080/  This is your localhost address.

1. Next step is to locate where these files are coming from.  I used the default install which places all files in /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/ .  The page you see on your success page is coming from /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs/.  You can remove all the files from this folder and place your PHP scripts here instead.  If you haven’t used a PHP framework yet, I suggest you try out CodeIgniter.  It’s simple to use and there is a lot of documentation and support online.
2. Install CodeIgniter – Simply download Codeigniter from here. Extract the contents of CodeIgniter_xx to the folder /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs/.  Also, it’s best practice to move the application folder from out within the system folder and to the base or the htdocs/ folder.  (Command double-click the system folder to open in a new finder window.)
3. 
4. Next it’s time to install a free PHP IDE.  Take a pick from my recent article on the top 5 free PHP IDEs on MAC. I chose to use NetBeans due to the great features, free, syntax highlighting, and code completion for libraries such as CodeIgniter.
5. Just a few quick tips.  To access your phpMyAdmin you can goto the link http://127.0.0.1:8080/phpmyadmin/. Here the username is: administrator and the password is the one you used durning the install.
6. Configure CodeIgniter – With NetBeans choose New Project -> PHP Application with Existing Sources -> Sources folder: /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs ->Project Name: Whatever you want. -> Run As: Local Web Site -> Project URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/ -> Index File: index.php .
7. Now everything should be setup.  Just a few tweaks to configure the database and index file.  Open application/config/ and enter in your database credentials.  Next open config and change your base url to http://127.0.0.1:8080/.

That’s it you can now visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and you should see your wonderful new site.  I hope this helps clear up some questions about getting started with Mac Apache MySQL PHP.  If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below. TRHFUVMUP9CQ

5.  Fluid – Fluid provides a native style application for your favorite web applications.  Fluid is a free application that creates a site specific web-browers for a given url.  This doesn’t sound all that great, but the concept works pretty well.  I usually find my Safari window filled with tabs and unable to actually locate what I’m looking for.  Even with Expose, it’s still hard to find my gmail tab.  Fluid also provides dock notifications for new mail when applied to a supported webmail site, like Google’s Gmail.  Overall Fluid is a really light weight application that works really well if you are stuck to using a web based mail client.

Benefits to using Fluid over Apple Mail:

• Very small footprint.  Files are not stored locally.
• When using Gmail as your main client it’s easier to access Google’s features such as tagging messages and applying filters.
• Supports 1Password and other third party scripts.

4.  Mailplane – Think of Mailplane as a perfected Fluid application for Google’s Gmail.  It provides drag and drop file attachment, sending screenshots, supports Offline Gmail, optimizes photos, multiple gmail accounts, and Growl support.  This is a really nice application but at $25 it’s a little steep for me to see how it’s worth it with so many free alternatives.  It does offer a very good experience for using Gmail with multiple accounts.

Benefits to using Mailplane over Apple Mail:

• Image optimization
• Offline Gmail mode with Google Gears

3.  Thunderbird 2 – Thunderbird is a multi-platform desktop email client that is based on the same framework as the Mozilla web browser.  Thunderbird is a fully functional replacement to any email client.  It’s main features are message tagging, great search ability, saved searches, notifications of new mail, third party add-ons, anti-phishing tools and other privacy features.

Benefits to using Thunderbird over Apple Mail:

• Large user community
• Updated often
• Tagging emails

2.   Opera Email Client – In case you haven’t looked at Opera lately, the multi-function web browser, perhaps you should take another look.  Opera 10 is a fast browser to launch and has always adhered to web standards.  Opera now integrates your email with your web browser.  One of the benefits of using Opera mail is if you have multiple accounts they show all new messages in a single inbox called Received.  It’s a pet peeve of mine to have to click on individual accounts to check new messages, like the iPhone’s interface.

Benefits to using Opera over Apple Mail:

• Integrated experience
• Labels
• HTML WYSIWYG Email Editor
• Built-in Emoticons

1.  Postbox –  Postbox is a great email client that is really for the pack rat in you.  It keeps track of everyone you’ve sent emails to and received emails from.  There is an amazing search that lets you search attachments, files, images, and pretty much any field.  They also have a excellent export feature that you can backup to save your email.  With threaded messages and tagged topics along with To-Do items Postbox is the most complete replacement for Apple’s Mail.  The only caveat is the $39.95 price tag.  I used Postbox for 6 months durning the beta, and loved it.  However, when it came out at $40 I couldn’t compel myself to buy it.

Benefits to using Postbox over Apple Mail:

• Amazing search functionality
• Direct access to file attachments
• Smartly threaded conversations
• Summary inspector pane
• Tabbed interface

Those are my top five picks for Apple Mail replacement.  If you have any others please comment below. If you just can’t give up Apple Mail, tell us why.