After I bought my MacBook last February, I’ve become a serious Mac addict. What Microsoft brainwashing never managed to achieve with slick duo presentations (look Jim it codes itself!) at TechEd, Steve Jobs did. I admit I’ve watched every possible Apple video that can be found in the cloud. From the Mac vs. PC series and iPhone demos to every keynote, speech or interview Apple’s CEO ever gave.
Steve Jobs: mister Charismatic with his brilliant presentations, the guy with the minimalistic Powerpoints I’ve always wished I could make. Apple Inc. portraits itself very succesfully as both innovative and user friendly; throw in a bit of default Windows bashing and you’re set.
Of course I know it’s partly a show and that Apple products also have their flaws. But I just don’t want to hear that anymore. I’m very happy with my ultra stable, user friendly and great looking MacBook Core 2 Duo. The question remains whether the Apple spell lasts. For now, I’m letting my MacBook evolve to my ideal portable application container. One day, something’s gotta give, right?
Below (this one’s for you Harm), my current list of installed free MacOS X applications.
- Atari800MacX - an Atari emulator for MacOS X. Find the Atari ROMs and games images and you may have thousands of classics running on Mac like Frogger, Qix, Pacman, Desmond’s Dungeon, Donkey Kong and Super Zaxxon.
- Azureus - Mac version of the famous bittorrent client, it runs flawlessly.
- Camino - I find myself using this friendly “alternative” browser more and more.
- Chicken of the VNC - a VNC client for MacOS X.
- CoconutBattery - a little gem to monitor your battery charge and health, you can also save its findings to see how your battery holds up over time.
- CocoThumbX - a small drag&drop Cocoa utility to create icons and thumbnails in Mac style.
- CyberDuck - an FTP client. Some say FileZilla for MacOS X is even better, I have to try that out one day. CyberDuck has its occasional little quirks.
- DiskInventoryX - very handy application that scans your disk and presents a graphical treemap (a la SequoiaView on Windows) of all files so you can instantly see where the most diskspace is consumed.
- Firefox - another one of my default browsers.
- Flare - decompiles Flash (SWF) files back to ActionScript (FLR) so you may learn from Flash applications built by others.
- Flash Video Downloader - an application that can seperately download Flash video streams (FLV) that are normally loaded by a Flash player on a web page. For example, the videos on YouTube pages.
- Flip4Mac - plug-in for QuickTime in order to play WMV files.
- GIMP - the open source PhotoShop clone that needs no introduction. It needs the X11 package found on your MacOS X install disk.
- Google Earth - the maps of the world at your finger tips!
- InstantShot! - utility to make a screenshot and write it to file when pressing a user defined key.
- iStat - widget to monitor your system (CPU usage, disk usage, temperatures, fans, network, battery).
- JAlbum - Java applicaton to make nice web albums. If you don’t need that many options use Apple’s standard application iPhoto.
- MegaPOV - ray tracing application, for those of you would like to program and render photorealistic scenes. To get it working under MacOS X, you also need the basic POVRay installation.
- Microsoft Messenger - MSN Messenger clone, but does not support a camera. One day I will try the alternative AdiumX.
- NeoOffice - MacOS X OpenOffice clone, a .dmg file ready to install.
- OnyX - system maintenance application. I didn’t really need it so far but if you do, this is THE tool. For administator tasks like verifying disks, checking all logfiles, cleanup caches, using unix commands, accessing advanced system parameters and much more.
- Safari - Apple’s default browser.
- safeThis - to create encrypted disk volumes.
- SecondLife - the Second Life client for MacOs X.
- SWF & FLV Player - a standalone Flash player that also plays FLV (Flash Video) files directly.
- TextWrangler - a free text editor for MacOS X.
- The Unarchiver - a decompression utility that handles many formats such as StuffIt (.sit), RAR (.rar) and many ZIP variants (gzip/bzip/lha/lhz/7z).
- TsClientX - X11 based Terminal Server client for MacOS X to remotely take over your Windows machines (RDP).
- VLC - a multi-purpose multimedia player that can play DVDs, VCDs or read a stream from the network. It plays DivX/MPEG-4 files (and many other files). Also supports SubRip subtitles (.srt).
- WhatSize - simple tool that allows to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. Files and folders are automatically sorted by size, with the biggest sizes first.
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