14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of days ago, I met an old friend of mine who just got his hands on a brand new Mac and, after about half an hour of showing the ins and outs of the machine, he asked me why the Mac community has so few free applications. If he had known that I would start writing down every piece of free and/or open source software capable of running on a Mac and keep talking about them for a whole hour, I think he wouldn't have asked me that question in a million years.
To be fair, I kind of slowed down about 30 minutes after I started writing the list but still got pretty far to cover two pages. Those were the apps that I could remember at the moment, while still trying to write down other apps in no particular order.
The exact same question seems to haunt a lot of Mac switchers out there and thus, I decided to put up a list of the most important free applications I would install on my own Mac after performing a clean install.
Because I do want to give the list some type of order, I have put the apps in six categories, again, in no particular order: Internet, network, audio/video, graphics, games, editors and miscellaneous. The content in the first five categories is pretty obvious. In the sixth, I have included the programs that wouldn't fit in any of the first categories.
INTERNET
In this class of apps, one would expect to find browsers, p2p clients, chat clients and other programs of this sort. And this is what you'll get.
Firefox - The first in the list and probably one of most important of the whole article is a fast open source browser that has as main features an extreme customizing ability through extensions and blazing fast webpage load times.
Adium - A free instant messaging app which features support for most of the IM services out there.
Colloquy - A free IRC client with a Mac-like interface that will surely satisfy even the exquisite tastes of the hardcore Mac fan boys.
FileZilla - My FTP client of choice when working on Mac mainly because of its highly intuitive double-panned interface. The other FTP client that most Mac users have a sweet spot for is Cyberduck (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Internet-Utilities/Cyberduck.shtml), an open source app that will integrate seamlessly with editors like BBEdit, SubEthaEdit and TextMate and will offer support for FTP, FTP/TLS and SFTP transfers.
Transmission - Although it doesn't nee any presentation for Mac users, I will do the honors for all you switchers and show you a free bittorrent client that you will fall in love with after you first get the chance to use it.
Vienna - From my point of view, THE free feed reader for Mac, Vienna, is a very easy to use application even for the users that first got their hands on a Mac.
NETWORK
Here you will get to know the free apps that will allow you to remote control a Mac, protect your identity on the Internet, scan for wireless networks, scan your network for suspicious packets and broadcast your podcasts.
Chicken of the VNC - Lightweight open source VNC client that will help you remote control other computers.
HenWen - Security package that will allow you to easily setup and configure Snort to be able to scan your network for suspicious traffic.
Juice - Media aggregator that will help you easily download any podcast you want to your Mac and/or portable devices.
KisMAC - Easy to use wireless network scanner that comes with support for 802.11b/g; it is AppleScript-able.
Vidalia - Cross-platform interface for TOR that will help you stay anonymous while browsing the web. Vidalia is compatible with any browser that will allow you to modify its network settings and will also allow you to quickly setup a Tor server on your Mac so that you can contribute to the Tor network.
MULTIMEDIA
As its name says, this category contains the apps that you need to access, store and edit your multimedia files, namely audio and video players, burners, audio and video editors, etc.
VLC - My multimedia player of choice on the Mac platform because of its high versatility and streaming capabilities.
Cog - Not a lot of people know about it but it is a great app nonetheless. Cog comes with support for a lot of audio formats and has a very simple and intuitive interface.
MPlayer OS X - Cross-platform video player that boasts support for any video format you may think of, not to mention the huge number of output drivers, its OSD, and the 12 subtitle formats it recognizes.
Miro - Another cross-platform app that will allow you to easily download and watch TV shows from the Internet.
Audacity - An extraordinary audio editor that will also help you record, play, import and export audio files at your will.
HandBrake - An open source DVD to MPEG4 ripper and converter and the DVD ripping tool of choice for a lot of Mac users.
Burn It Down - Open source application that will allow you to quickly and easily burn the most common types of disks.
GRAPHICS
Here, you get your hands on image editing, vector graphics, desktop publishing, 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, or interactive creation software.
Gimp - My free image editor of choice when working on my Mac and most probably for many other Mac heads.
Scribus - Open source desktop publishing tool that brings professional page layout to your Mac.
Inkscape - Open source SVG based drawing software that has similar capabilities with Illustrator, FreeHand and CorelDraw.
Blender - Last but not least, Blender is the Swiss Army Knife of any modeler or animator. Blender comes with 3D modeling, animation, interactive creation, rendering, post-production, and playback support.
GAMES
First person shooters, race games, or any other kind, this is the category where you'll find them all. Although the list could have been a lot longer, I decided to only write down my personal favorites.
Nexuiz - Another personal favorite, Nexuiz is a cross-platform 3D FPS that brings the death-match style multiplayer games to the basics and sporting fast paced action.
OpenArena - Open source Quake III clone that will allow you to play online and with bots.
SuperTuxKart - 3D kart racing game, that focuses on fun and not on realistic racing physics.
X-Moto - A free 2D motocross game that will require you to control a bike inside a world that sports real physics.
Armagetron Advanced - Ride your motorcycle inside a 3D environment while trying to crash your enemies into a wall.
EDITORS
From WriteRoom to OpenOffice, from the simplest to the most complex, this category features the tools that will help you write down the reports on your work at the end of the day.
OpenOffice - The infamous open source alternative to Microsoft's Office and is also available on the Mac platform.
NeoOffice - A suite of office applications that features word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs, all ready to be used for free whenever you need them.
Smultron - My favorite free text editor for Mac, an editor that comes with easy selection of open documents, line numbers, support for syntax coloring for many different languages, support for text encoding, code snippets, status bar, HTML preview, multi-document find and replace with regular expressions, possibility to show invisible characters, authenticated saves, toolbar, command-line utility, Mac synchronization of preferences and many others. Another free text editor often accessed by Mac users is TextWrangler (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Developer-Tools/TextWrangler.shtml), an app that will help you edit your plain text files easily and for free.
Bean - A lightweight word processor that features a very simple interface. This makes it the text editor of choice for many Mac heads and most probably the one that will get adopted by a lot of Windows users that are fed up with the cluttered interface sported by Microsoft's Word.
JDarkRoom - A text editor with a black clean interface, without shortcuts or menu bars that will allow you to focus strictly on your writing.
Nvu - Open source WYSIWYG editor for HTML code licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Nvu is so easy to use that even beginners can create a web page or manage a website.
MISCELLANEOUS
In this category, you will find the applications that did not fit in any of the previous ones.
The Unarchiver - A free and very capable replacement for the integrated OS X archive unpacker tool, the BOMArchiveHelper.app. The Unarchiver comes with support for 7-Zip, LhA, Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, StuffIt and a lot more or less obscure formats that one can think of.
Deeper - An easy to use and free application that will make it very easy for you to toggle on or off the deepest hidden OS X preferences.
Quicksilver - Probably the undefeated star of the free Mac software world, QuickSilver is based on the Wei Wu Wei - Act Without Doing theory, which sums up everything that the app stands for: after getting used to it, you will eventually get so good at accessing it that you will not understand how you can use a Mac without having Quicksilver installed on your system. No one can describe exactly what the capabilities of QuickSilver are but you can be sure of one thing: it is a great app launcher.
Growl - Yet another application that most Mac users don't imagine living without, Growl provides you with a global notification system for OS X that can be very easily integrated with almost any app that runs on your Mac.
Disk Inventory X - A disk utility that will help you get a quick glimpse at the size of each file and folder on your Mac by using treemaps.
Buddi - Easy to use application that will help even the most inexperienced users to manage their budget and finances.
Senuti - The only app you will ever need to transfer your songs to and from your iPod.
Google Earth and Celestia, the last two apps of the list get these two spots because of their huge education potential. The former will help you learn almost everything you will ever want to about geography, the latter about astronomy and all related subjects.
These are the free applications I consider to be the ones that each Mac user should install on his system to be sure he has the best software he can get without having to empty his wallet. If you have suggestions, please share them with us and the rest of the readers by inserting a comment.