Audio & Video
Whether you simply want to cut, split or otherwise edit an audio file or feel ready to start recording your next album, Audacity allows you to do both. It’s very simple to use but you’ll be amazed at what you can get out of it.
Flip4Mac WMV Player is a Windows Media component, that will enable you to play Windows audio or video files (.wma & .wmv) directly in Quicktime or embedded in web pages. Its basic version is totally free and will meet most users’ needs. Like Perian, it’s a must-have!
Want to rip DVDs to your Mac the free and easy way? Then Handbrake might well be just what you need! It also allows you to convert the most common multimedia formats to MP4 or MKV. Subtitles? Yes! Chapter selection? Yes! And more…
Miro is a free HD video player that can play almost any video file and offers over 6,000 free internet TV shows and video podcasts, that you can download and watch offline. “..the future of television” says Josh Quittner –Time Magazine.
Just want to convert videos to MP4 or OGG and (possibly) copy them to your mobile, iPod or iPad? If you’re not scared by simplicity, just give Miro Video Converter a shot and I’m pretty positive you’ll love it. It really is as simple as 1-2-3 and works a treat!
Based on the MPlayer and FFmpeg projects, MPlayer OSX Extended is a powerful, fast and very clean free audio-video player for Mac. Another very good choice to play back HD H264 and MKV files, among others. Supports a wide range of formats.
Say your audio or video file won’t open in QuickTime and, for some reason, you don’t want to play it with any other app, the first thing you wanna try is to install Perian! It’s “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”, they say –and rightly so!
As of today, VLC has been downloaded more than 400 million times (45 million for Mac only). Can you imagine that? How can that be? Well…it’s just the most versatile media player you can dream of. It can read virtually any multimedia file. Must-have!
Backup & Restore
Carbon Copy Cloner is an easy-to-use & effective backup utility for Mac OS X. It allows you to create a bootable clone of your system on an external device, in case your hard drive or sytem fails, but also to make regular scheduled backups. And yes, it’s free!
Although it’s only free in its demo version, SuperDuper! HAS TO be featured here! It makes creating a bootable backup of your system really easy. Subsequent backups? Restore? Ditto. The demo version doesn’t expire but allows only FULL backups. Paid version is well worth its $27.95!
CD-DVD Burning & Imaging
Looking for easy-to-use but powerful CD & DVD burning software for Mac? Then don’t look much farther than that (SimplyBurns included), unless you really want to pay for it. Burn allows you to easily burn data, music and video in various formats.
You will have a hard time finding a simpler application than SimplyBurns to create or copy CDs/DVDs on a Mac. Very light, clean interface, 5 basic functionalities –audio, data, duplication, image burning, DVD ripping…More than enough for many users!
Development : Text-HTML Editors & Other Tools
Fraise is a fork of the famous Smultron, which development had been discontinued on, but it’s Mac OS 10.6 compatible and still free… Like Smultron, it supports C, C++, C#, PHP, LISP, Java, Python, Ruby, HTML, XML and CSS, among others.
Mac OS X Terminal can be somewhat frustrating, notably –but not only for demanding Unix / Linux users. Enters iTerm2: split panes, Exposé tabs, autocomplete,”back in time”, mouseless copy, amazing search/replace functionalities, real full-screen, etc. Amazing!
Based on Nvu, whose development has been discontinued, here’s a very capable WYSIWYG web page editor with powerful CSS features (powered by Mozilla).You don’t need to know anything about coding to create attractive web pages!
Smultron is an excellent text editor for Mac. Its developer had decided to stop its development, but a 10.6-compatible Smultron can now be found…on the App Store for $4.99. The last stable version for 10.5 is still available for free.
TextWrangler, the free BBEdit’s “little brother”, is a very capable text editor for Mac, It’s powerful, easy to use, integrates nicely with Mac OS X (full AppleScript support & much more) and incorporates advanced development tools.
E-mail & Chat
An excellent “multi-protocol” instant messaging client for Mac, that allows you to connect to virtually all existing IM platforms: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpace, Facebook Chat, GroupWise, Tencent, Gadu-Gadu…Lovely little duck!
A free open source MSN Messenger clone for Mac, only better than the “original”. Neat interface, tabbed chat windows, webcam support, full-speed file transfer, group and conferencing support, and the list goes on! A good choice if you only use MSN.
Why on Earth should a good IRC client be sad looking? Colloquy is a good-looking AND advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client for Mac, which integrates smoothly with OS X. Powered by the Irssi Engine & the SILK Toolkit, it’s also plugin-friendly!
If Mail.app doesn’t fit your needs or you’re working on multiple platforms and want to use one email application, Thunderbird is a serious alternative: tabs, advanced search capabilities, loads of add-ons for just about anything you can think of.
File Sharing
Perhaps the best bittorrent client for Mac. It’s fast, easy to use and consumes very few memory. It has been built exclusively for Mac OS X and it shows! It supports encryption, peer exchange, magnet links, etc. Icing on the cake: remote control!
Looking for a very easy way to download your favorite shows automatically in your Mac? Don’t look further! With TVShows, no need to download your torrents “manually” or to look for working RSS feeds. It works backstage for you! Just needs a torrent client. Discreet, effective!
uTorrent is a super-light bitTorrent client, well known by Windows users, but also available for Mac. Although we prefer Transmission, we can’t deny its qualities & think it’s fair to provide an alternative to Transmission, if only for newcomers to Mac.
File Transfer
While its funny icon might be slightly misleading, this FTP-SFTP-WebDAV client is far from being a toy. It’s packed with functionalities, integrates perfectly with Mac OS X and supports Amazon S3 and Cloud Files. Well worth a try!
FileZilla is one of the most widely used FTP-SFTP clients on Linux and Windows®. Its interface is totally different from CyberDuck’s which has been designed exclusively for Mac OS X. Classical 4-pane-view, fast, reliable and feature-rich. Your choice!
Graphics & Publishing
If you’re looking for a lightweight and elegant image editor, built for Mac OS X, Gimp might not be the right choice for you -if only because it requires X11. But if you’re looking for a very powerful graphic creation and editing tool, Gimp is really amazing!
ImageOptim is a VERY handy image compression software for Mac. It allows you to reduce the “weight” of your .jpg, .png or .gif images in a blink, either individually or by batches, so that take up less space on your disk & load faster if you put them online. Must have!
Inkscape is a very powerful vector graphics editor, often compared to Adobe Illustrator®, Corel Draw® or Freehand®. Not bad! It uses W3C’s SVG file format that most vector graphics editors can import/export. Requires X11 to be installed.
If you have loads of images to resize, you’re going to LOVE this piece of software! OSX Image Resizer will allow you do do it the very fast & easy way. Supported input file formats include .jpg, .png, .gif, .tiff & .tga. Output? you can choose either .jpg or .png-24. Great app!
Paintbrush is an improved clone of Paint® designed for Mac, that replaces the defunct Apple’s MacPaint. It lets you create simple images / drawings very easily and allows basic editing. It will certainly make children happy but grown-ups might like it too. I do.
Scribus is an award-winning Page Layout application, often compared to very expensive professional DTP software. It requires that Ghostcript be installed for print preview and PDF/PS/EPS import. And please…stop googling for “publisher for Mac”!
Although it’s based around Gimp’s technology, Seashore has been built specifically for Mac OS X. It doesn’t aim to be as powerful as Gimp, but to serve the “basic editing needs”. It features brushes, textures, gradients, layers. Good-looking, light and fast!
Music
Very good free DJ software with MIDI controller support, superior mixing engine, vinyl control, skinable layout, etc. If you are a seasoned DJ, you’ll probably miss functionalities, but for the rest of us, Mixxx delivers more than enough to get yourself going!
MuseScore is an excellent free music notation program that provides a serious alternative to commercial software! You can use either your mouse/keyboard or a MIDI keyboard to enter your notes. Your creativity is the limit. Very clear tutorials, very nice job all around!
Networking & System
Chicken is a VNC client for Mac based on the famous Chicken of the VNC, which hasn’t been updated since 2006… It keeps the best of it and adds some useful features. Big thanks to the developers for keeping this free VNC client up-to-date and improving it!
iStumbler is a free wireless discovery tool for Mac, that makes it easy to find AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices, Bonjour services and Location information. Unlike KisMac, it works in “active mode”, i.e. it must get a response from the networks it sends requests to.
KisMac is a very powerful wireless network discovery utility for Mac. If you were looking for “NetStumbler for Mac”…you couldn’t find a better replacement: KisMac rules! But be warned that it’s meant to be used as a security tool and don’t expect any leniency if you misuse it…
Vine Server (aka OSXvnc) is a free, open-source, robust & full-featured VNC Server for Mac. You can use it together with the above-mentioned Chicken or any other VNC client. It is provided by TestPlant, for use with Vine Viewer & Eggplant for cross-platform testing,
VirtualBox allows you to run Windows or other operating systems “inside” Mac OS X, as you would run any applications. It’s FREE, very easy to install / use and has become a VERY serious alternative to commercial software like VMware Fusion or Parallels. Try it before you buy!
Office & PDF
Here’s another neat little app! Bean is a very fast and easy-to-use word processor. It’s fully Cocoa (built for Mac) and full of useful features like a live word count, date-stamped backups, a very handy Inspector panel, etc. And it looks…gor-geous!
LibreOffice is a very good, full-featured office suite, based on the well-known OpenOffice.org, with a Mac version. It is developped by The Document Foundation, which now gets huge support, to the point that one can wonder what will become of OpenOffice.org…Apache?
Based on OpenOffice.org code, NeoOffice is a top-notch office suite developped exclusively for Mac OS X. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, math & db programs and can read virtually any file created with other office suites. Well worth a small donation!
Skim is not only a light PDF reader, it also allows you to edit your PDFs: you can highlight text and add notes in a variety of styles, then skim through them quickly. If you have an “old” version of Preview, you’ll like it even more (Tiger users here?)
Productivity
An advanced mind-mapping software, whose development has fortunately resumed & turned it into a high quality productivity and creativity tool. One-click “fold/unfold” & “follow link” make it fast & easy to operate. Try FreeMind & XMind before you buy commercial software!
Another neat mind-mapping software available for Mac & other platforms –which is important for collaborative work! Offers advanced sharing options via XMind.net and many import/export features. Totally open-source & now free in its basic version.
Science
Celestia is a wonderful free real-time space simulator that lets you experience our universe in 3D. Let’s travel throughout the Solar System and elsewhere in space, at any speed, at any moment of time and in any direction you choose!
EureKalc is an environment for numeric and symbolic calculation, dedicated to solving problems in the field of Physics, Mathematics, Engineering…It’s been developed by Nico Hirtt, a Physics Teacher. It’s designed to simplify problem solving.
Utilities
Your Mac won’t start even in “Safe mode” and you don’t have your install DVD or other bootable device at hand? If you have been wise enough to install AppleJack, it may be your savior! It runs in “Single User” mode ONLY & performs maintenance / troubleshooting tasks.
Disk Inventory X is a utility for Mac that shows you in a graphical way where you disk space goes and how you can get some back. Seems obvious? Videos, music, etc.? You’re right but is everything where it should be? Isn’t there a disk image or virtual disk you don’t use anymore?
Just like Disk Inventory X, GrandPerspective gives you a nice, colourful graphical outlook of your Mac’s hard disk usage and makes it easy to reclaim the unnecessarily used space. Which one should you choose? Mainly a matter of taste, really. Try them both, they’re free!
Growl is a very useful and configurable notification system for Mac OS X. It enables supported applications to display alerts or simple information messages, without you having to switch from the application you’re in. With Growl, you are really in control.
MEO is a simple yet powerful encryption software for Mac (& Windows). It enables you to encrypt all kinds of files that include sensitive content. You can also encrypt mail attachements & send them via your mail client or MEO’s. Uses 3-DES 256 bits (recommended) or Blowfish.
Your hard drive is getting fuller than an egg and you’re wondering what else you could delete? Here’s an app that allows you to reclaim several hundreds of MB, by deleting the languages & architectures you don’t need. Careful not to delete English!
Its name sounds like a -very bad B-movie title but this little program will allow you to unpack about any archive type you can think of: Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and more, including old and rare formats. Another must-have.
You work on a a large screen and/or multiple monitors? You’re getting tired to run back and forth on the back of your mouse? Wraparound will make your job a lot easier & perhaps prevent an RSI: it allows the pointer to “wrap” around the screens or bounce from an edge to another.
Web browsers & RSS Readers
Built from the ground up for Mac OS X, Camino is a very clean, fast and safe browser, built on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. Very nicely done! Good news for the happy Panther user: a 10.3-compatible version can still be downloaded.
Chromium is the open-source browser on which Google Chrome is based. Put it another way, Chrome owes it everything but Chromium is experimental -it is updated almost every hour! For developers or first-hand information seekers.
The most famous open-source web browser. Its impressive add-ons library makes it very customizable. There are by the thousands: appearance, web development, bookmarks sync, social networking…Not really lightweight but stable and safe.
Gruml is an excellent and free RSS Reader, that puts Google Reader on your Mac. It looks very much like Vienna but the big difference is that it syncs with your Google Reader account. It’s also very social-media-friendly: you can send an article to almost 20 social networks.
You own an iBook, PowerBook or any other PowerPC running Tiger? Not only don’t you want to trash it, but you think it deserves a modern browser allowing you to read & use “today’s web pages”? Well, rejoice! Apple & Mozilla let you down, TenFourFox developers didn’t! Thanks, Guys!
A very good free and open-source RSS/Atom reader for Mac OS X, with a solid built-in browser. Very clean interface, easy to use, yet packed with functionalities. It even allows you to share the stuff you like on social networks like Facebook and Twitter!