My 15 Favorite Free Mac Apps.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Blogger and Mac switcher David Alison says he loves free software, especially when it adds real value to his work day, and in the year since David made the switch from Windows to Mac he’s examined hundreds of applications, many of them free or open source, that have made their way into every day use on his Macs.
David posted a list of what he rates as his top ten free (third-party) Mac utilities that he uses nearly daily, and as a free Mac utility aficionado I was interested to note that there is just one (partial) crossover between David’s ten best picks and my favorites, and indeed I only use one of the apps. he listed at all.
David’s faves are:
Firefox
Skitch
Dropbox
iStat menu
Adium
NetNewsWire
TweetDeck
Cyberduck
Google Notifier
MPlayer OSX
The lone common ground for me is Firefox, which I use on an alternating basis with Mac-only Camino which combines the same Mozilla Gecko rendering engine as Firefox combined with a pretty and fully Mac-like Cocoa-based user interface -- depending mostly upon which one has had the most recent update or upgrade.
David’s other nine choices are pretty much terra incognita for me. Different strokes I guess.
So lemme see; what would I choose as my favorite free Mac applications and utilities? Well, I’m a browser junkie, so I could probably just list 10 browsers including a few obscure ones like Cruz, and Sunrise, and Stainless, but that would be lazy, so I started with non-browser applications and surprised myself by coming up with more than 10 of those, so why limit myself to just 10? Here are profiles of 15 (or more, as there are some multiple/alternate choices listed).
ToyViewer
This one’s a truly wonderful little freeware application and a core tool in my production applications suite -- far and away my most-used graphics program. On a typical workday, I probably use ToyViewer a couple of dozen times - mostly for relatively small and short-duration chores like resizing pictures and changing file types, but ToyViewer can do 90+ percent of the image correction stuff I routinely need to do with graphics, and I don’t know what I would do without it. Well, actually I do. After I upgraded to OS 10.4 back in 2005, there was a couple of months lag before ToyViewer’s developer, Mr.Takeshi Ogihara got a Tiger-compatible version of ToyViewer released. I tried several lightweight graphics programs as substitutes, but found nothing as slick, quick, and suited to my needs as ToyViewer is. I’m addicted to this cool little Jack of all trades graphics utility. For more information, visit:
http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ogihara/software/OSX/toyv-eng.html
Spotinside
Spotinside is a lightweight Spotlight enhancer that works the way Spotlight would if I’d been the one configuring its functions. It brings up more useful results than Spotlight, which can be instantly viewed under several different sorting priorities, and doesn’t start searches while you’re still typing - a behavior I detest, and it displays search results in a preview window. The beauty of Spotinside is that it’s speed and simplicity itself to use. The only shortcoming is that it tends to choke and lock up on displaying large file previews, a bug that I hope can be squashed even tually, because otherwise Spotinside is near-perfect.
http://www.oneriver.jp/SpotInside/index.html
Find Any File
A perfect compliment to Spotlight and Spotinside is Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File, which is a little freeware utility that essentially restores the Classic Mac OS’s “Find File” (or Sherlock) function. Unlike Spotlight, Find Any File doesn’t use an indexed database; but rather taps into the file system driver’s own fast search operations, letting you search for file properties like name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content, for which you can, of course, still use Spotlight. or Spotinside. Find Any File’s results turn up stuff that Spotlight doesn’t, such as those inside bundles and packages and inside folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight searches (eg: system files). It’s not as fast as Spotlight, but I find it incredibly useful.
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/
TextWrangler
Originally developed by BareBones Software as a replacement for the old freeware BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler originally was marketed as commercial software for $49, but evidently didn’t sell well so the developer released it as freeware several years ago, and this high-performance plain text editor is one of the most spectacular bargains in Mac free software. TextWrangler offers regular expression–based (“grep”) search and replace, text cleaning and “gremlin-zapping”, multi-file search, sophisticated text transformations, intelligent text coloring, and other features not usually found in word processors like the ability to access multiple open documents in a single interface window.:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml
Smultron
Peter Borg’s Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 intended for use with tasks like web programming, script editing, making a to do lists and so on. Smultron displays all open documents in a list with Quick Look icons to your left similar to iTunes, making switching among multiple documents a pleasure. You can also choose to display open documents as tabs if you prefer. Smultron supports color-coding content and offers a variety of ways to search for words and line numbers. You can also split the interface window in two to display two parts of the same document or to compare two different documents side by side, preview HTML-files directly and save text snippets and insert them simply with a shortcut. Cool.
http://tuppis.com/smultron/
Bean
James Hoover’s Bean is a small word processor/rich text editor that is fully Cocoa -- all document format conversion in Bean is handled by Cocoa. So all of the heavy-lifting in Bean programming-wise is done by OS X’s Cocoa frameworks. Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered and features live word count,
in-depth document statistics, a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale, an Inspector panel with lots of sliders, date-stamped backups, autosaving, a page layout mode, an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue), selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc., a floating windows option (like Stickies has), find panel that allows regular expressions (pattern matching), plus all of Cocoa’s good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)
Bean natively reads and writes .rtfd format (rich text with graphics), .bean format (identical to .rtfd), .txt format (Unicode and legacy), .html format (as source code), .webarchive format (Apple’s web archive format) and also
transparently imports and exports .doc format (MS Word ‘97, minus images, margins, and page size), .docx format (Word 2007, minus images and some formatting), .odt format (OpenDocument, minus images, margins, and page size) and .xml format (MS Word 2003 XML, minus images). It can also export all of the above formats to .html (web page format, minus images), .pdf, .doc compatible (with images intact), and .rtf (with images intact).
http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
Quicksilver 1.0b31 Launcher, Search Utility, Shelf, And Much More
Quicksilver is one of those utilities that grows on you to the point where you really don’t want to be without it. Quicksilver’s primary function is that it allows you to find what you need on your hard drive quickly and easily, while keeping your hands on the keyboard. For example, if you want to launch an application buried somewhere in a folder, simply activate Quicksilver with a keystroke, type a few letters of the application’s name, then hit Return or Enter to launch it. When you don’t need Quicksilver, it keeps out of your way, preserving screen real estate, yet you can summon it instantly with a key stroke. If you have programming skills, you can also extend and customize Quicksilver to do other things you want it to. I’ve used TigerLaunch as my OS X app. launcher since the early ‘00s, but it doesn’t work on my Intel MacBook, so I’ve switched to QuickSilver, and I like it better than TigerLaunch now that I’m used to it.
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
MyPopBarrier 2.2.4 Email Server Checker
It’s often desirable, especially if you’re on a dialup Internet connection, to be able to check the contents of your email on the remote POP 3 server before downloading it to your hard drive with an email client. Just one large graphics attachment can slow down your day drastically if you’re not on broadband. MyPopBarrier is a good freeware utility that performs this task and also has configurable spam-blocking rules
http://elaum.free.fr/index.php?page=English/Dashquit#download
Eudora Classic 6.2.4/ Eudora 8/ Thunderbird
Eudora Classic is definitely a lame duck, development having ceased in 2006, but it’s still my main email application on my Power PC Macs by virtue of the fact that I haven’t found anything else I like remotely as well. Eudora 5.x and later was marketed in commercial software, ad-supported, and semi-crippled freeware modes, but since Qualcomm terminated development the erstwhile ad-supported mode has become de-facto freeware as well. However, Eudora 6.2.4 refuses to work properly on my new unibody MacBook, so I’ve been casting about looking for a tolerable substitute, and have so far provisionally settled on Mozilla’s Thunderbird as the best of a mediocre lot (and no, I don’t like Apple Mail better). I’m still reserving judgment on the Open Source Eudora 8 project that is developing a Eudora-esque (sort of) front end grafted on to Mozilla.org.s Thunderbird email engine. I’m pretty underwhelmed so far, but then I’m not much of a Thunderbird fan. However Thunderbird is a serviceable free email client that deserves honorable, albeit not enthusiastic mention here.
http://www.eudora.com/mac
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Seashore Cocoa Bitmap Graphics Program
I pondered including the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is an awesomely powerful professional-grade Open Source image editing program on this list, but it seems more than a bit like overkill, so I’m going with Seashore instead. Seashore is an Open Source bitmap graphics program in Cocoa for OS X by Mark Pazolli with a nice selection of basic painting tools and layers support, there are no automated photo image clean-up and optimization/enhancement tools, and arguably is what the wonderful old MacPaint program that shipped with the original Macs back in the ‘80s might be like updated for the OS X era. Seashore features gradients, textures, clone and smudge tools, and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing, and is based around http://www.gimp.org/ the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format.
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
OK; that’s eleven (or a dozen depending upon how you count) cool freeware apps. that aren’t browsers, so now it’s on to the browsers, a field so rich it’s hard to choose, but the following are my persistent top choices.
Opera
My all-round favorite among the several several browsers I use regularly, I love its speed and its deep, useful feature set with tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, the ability to restore the last session you had open before quitting the program, full screen mode, mouse gestures support, quick, efficient and handy zoom function that can magnify pages up to 1000% shrink them down to 20% from a menu on the main window, easy toggling image display on and off, the superb download manager (with pause and resume that works reliably), extensive customizability, and for those so inclined there’s a built-in email client and newsreader. And Opera is getting even better. The public preview of OPera 10 Turbo released this week speeds up page loads on low bandwidth connections dramatically.
http://www.opera.com/
Camino/Firefox
While I generally prefer Opera, were I limited to just one browser, for the best compatibility I would probably pick one of the Mozilla Gecko variants, and as noted above Camino and Firefox are my current favorites. Firefox 3 for Mac has a much-improved and more attractive user interface compared with earlier FF versions, with a more native Mac OSX look, smaller buttons, more compact tabs, and new forward/back buttons, and all Cocoa Camino looks even better.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
http://caminobrowser.org/download/releases/1.6/
iCab 4.1.1 (Plus Cruz and Shiira)
Another browser I usually have up and running is iCab, a German indie browser that just keeps quietly getting better and better, adding to its already amazingly deep complement of useful and powerful features, the latest version (4) being based on Apple’s Webkit engine. iCab is a niche player in the browser world, with less than one percent of the market, but it deserves a wider clientele on merit. It also requires an asterisk on this list of free software because while iCab does offer it for free-use, it’s nagware and the registration invitation sheet popping up will drive you nuts if you don’t register ($25.00). So for a pure freeware Webkit-based browser to round this out, feel free to substitute Cruz or Shiira, whose respective marquee features are multiple browser panes in the same window and thumbnail bookmarks respectively.
http://www.icab.de/
http://cruzapp.com/
http://shiira.jp/en.php
Further reading: Top 15 Free Mac Apps for Graphic Designers
http://www.marcofolio.net/features/top_15_free_mac_apps_for_graphic_designers.html
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