My Mac Freeware and Open Source Favorites

You don't have to spend a lot of money to build a useful Mac software library. I've grouped freeware and Open Source software into three categories. I call the first category Favorites. These are applications and utilities that I find I use frequently for one reason or another. The second category gets the label Interesting. These are applications that I either infrequently (but are handy when needed) or sounds interesting but hasn't been tested on my Mac yet. The third category is Iffy. These are apps that should be in one of the other two categories but has something about it that irritates me. I'll list Favorites here.

FAVORITES

Amazon MP3 Downloader - This isn't as, hmm, pretty as iTunes. But, it delivers DRM-free 256-bit MP3 songs from Amazon reasonably nicely and tosses the music into iTunes automatically. The Amazon MP3 songs and albums are usually a bit less expensive than songs from the iTunes store. However, the Amazon MP3 store doesn't seem to have a selection as large as iTunes store.

Audacity - This Open Source editor is reasonably easy to learn and use. If Garageband does not quite do what you want as a sound editor, check out Audacity.

Camino - When Firefox drives me batty, I switch to the other Mozilla browser project aimed specifically for the Mac. Camino looks more like a Mac app and doesn't seem as buggy as Firefox (which you notice is not on my Favorites list).

Evernote - Take and view notes on the web, in a Mac client, in a Windows client, or on a smartphone. Awesome. The beta preview is free. I don't know if it will remain that way. But, we can hope it does while still allowing Evernote to produce a revenue stream somehow.

Flip4Mac Free Edition - You sometimes really need to view Microsoft Windows Media media. Microsoft provides a free version of Flip4Mac to let you do just that on your Mac.

iSquint - I didn't think I would ever use this video converter... until the day I found I really really needed to convert a bunch of video files to play on my iPod touch. Then, I discovered the MPEG2 video files I converted from old analog video tape home movies wouldn't play on my Mac and it saved the day again.

Komodo Edit - I write all long-ish Mac Center blog entries (like this one) using Komodo Edit these days.

Seashore - This Open Source bitmap editor is just a little buggy on Intel Macs (it was stable on my old G4 Mac mini). But, when it works, it does the job. It is a great fast graphics editor for resizing screen shots or photos for blogs and other web-work.

TextWrangler - You just can't have too many good text editors. And, this definitely is a good one.

TrueCrypt - If you want to secure data on your Mac, this Open Source tool is definitely worth evaluating. A big plus is that it also works under Linux and Microsoft Windows. This means that you can take your TrueCrypt encrypted files to any platform and work with them.

xPad - xPad is a great notetaking program that keeps everything organized simply and effectively.

I don't claim this list is definitive or exhaustive. If you have freeware or Open Source Mac software that you recommend to others, post a comment here or drop me an email.