osx

At just 1.8meg and completely free iAlert is a very useful addition to OSX. Once installed it is configured via the Preferences Pane and provides good looking and useful notifications for events on your Mac and on the Internet. It can be configured to alert you of Mail, iTunes, iChat and Calendar events plus periodically check for changes to your favourite websites. Its very tidy and so far has not missed a beat.

BareBones has made TextRangler free on OSX. This is good news if you use OSX and require a flexible yet powerful text editor. In the past I used JEdit but the native OSX TextRangler results in faster loading times and an improved user experience.

TextRangler can be downloaded from www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/