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Yesterday marked the first public release of Olearia - a free and open source DAISY digital talking book player for Mac OS X. Olearia is still in beta release, but is fully compatible with VoiceOver and plays DAISY 2.02 and DAISY/NISO 2005 audio or text+audio talking books. Future versions will also play text-only DAISY books and many other features are planned.

Mail Act-On is a plugin for Apple’s Mail program which gives you the ability to assign a keystroke to almost any action that can be done with a mail message. It’s simple to configure and simple to use and free - couldn’t get any better than that!

Do you have problems with getting distracted by the other windows on your screen, but you don’t want to hide them completely from view? Isolater and Menu Eclipse might be just what you need.

Mindmaps are diagrams used to represent ideas - they use pictures, colours, position on the page and text together. MindNode is a free mindmapping application which is simple to use but does the job extremely well. It is fully keyboard accessible and the developer is interested to receive information about any access problems.

OS X’s system-wide dictionary and spell checking service is very helpful, especially when you need to add custom words to the dictionary. But how can you delete or edit those custom words if you add them by mistake?

Doing math can be a big problem for students who can’t write or work with rulers and protractors and compasses. It’s hard to type math problems in a regular word processor, and it’s impossible to work out “protractor and ruler” type problems. Here are some programs which can help students do this type of maths on a computer

iNavigate is a new head-mouse which uses an iSight camera and is implemented entirely in software in a similar manner to Windows’ “CameraMouse” program.

SoundAsleep is a freeware app which will mute and unmute the system sound at times you specify.

AudialHub can convert audio files (and even the audio inside video files!) in as little as three steps.

There’s a new version of the Growl notification system available. What is Growl anyway, and why might you want to use it?