10 Great Free Apps for your Mac

10 Great Free Apps for your Mac

Let’s start with some essential applications. These are the apps I can’t live without and use on a daily basis. Most of them are set to start on login, which means that they are always on and ready to rock and roll whenever I call on them.
Depending on what you do with your Mac, you may or may not find this list helpful. Nevertheless, the majority of Mac apps are so easy to install -- there’s no reason not to try them out!

iStat Menus
Category: System utilities, menubar app

OS X intentionally denies you of any unimportant detail. Well, some people actually prefer to know their Mac’s core temperature at all times. Then, there are people who can’t work without knowing the CPU and network activity. Others need to know how much of their memory is free and how much is taken up. For those people, there is iStat Menus.

iStat

iStat Menus is a menubar application and its sole purpose is to allow you to view details regarding the CPU, hard disk, network and temperature. It may be overwhelming for some but for control freaks, there’s nothing better.

Read more about iStat Menus here: [http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/]

Dropbox
Category: File-sharing
Dropbox is a file-sharing, synchronizing and backup solution that is very innovative. It dedicates one folder on your Mac (set as default to ~/Dropbox/) to be synchronized so everything that is dumped into that folder will be uploaded to the Dropbox server and synced across every computer authorized with the same Dropbox account.

The thing I like most about Dropbox is its ease of use. How difficult is it to drop a file into a folder to upload it to the Dropbox server and share?
With its syncing feature, changes to a file are automatically registered without the need to reupload.
That makes it really easy to collaboratively edit a file among several people on
different computers (logged into the same Dropbox account).
Read more about Dropbox here: [https://www.getdropbox.com/] and [http://
www.makeuseof.com/tag/dropbox-review-invites-and-7-questions-with-the-founder/]

The Unarchiver
Category: Archiving tool, Utilities

Sounds like a great movie title, doesn’t it? The Unarchiver adds support for RAR, 7Zip, Stuffit, Gzip, Tar, GNU Tar, ACE, CAB and many more file archive formats that would normally stump Mac’s innate archive utility.

It’s fast, too. Extracting a 700MB sequential RAR archive took less than 20 seconds.
Depending on the type of processor you have, your results may vary.
Read more about The Unarchiver here: [http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html]

Skitch
Category: Image editor

Skitch is an awesome image editor and screenshot-capture tool as well as a image sharing service, all bundled together in a compact application. In fact, images from this very ebook was put together by Skitch.

It’s great for taking quick snapshots of your screen, adding annotations, drawing arrows and sharing them with your friends and colleagues. You can save your images in different file formats e.g. PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, PNG, BMP, TIF easily by pulling the “drag me” tab at the bottom of the window.
If you have a built-in iSight, it can also take your picture and allow you to edit it before saving or sending to a friend.
Read more about Skitch here: [http://skitch.com] and

Shadow
Category: Clipboard manager, Utilities

By far the best clipboard manager I’ve used to date. It supports multiple clipboards which includes a system clipboard that registers everything that is copied (even images, links and styled text) and an unlimited number of customized clipboards that you are able to share over a network!

Shadow is invoked using a hotkey. You can then browse through everything that was copied to your clipboard, double-click to make it the active object and paste it.

By default, it stores up to 200 recently copied items so your list may get a little cluttered. To cure that, Shadow has a search function.
Read more about Shadow here: [http://www.theescapers.com/shadow/index.html]

Perian
Category: Quicktime plugin

Quicktime is great but its Achilles heel is the inability to play anything other than Quicktime Movie files -- which is, needless to say, a quintessential feature.

Perian adds support for almost every video and audio format (except for Windows Media Video), bringing Quicktime back to life. For WMV support, there’s Flip4Mac [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx]
Read more about Perian here: [http://perian.org]

Daphnism
Category: File-sharing

I actually have a personal attachment to Daphnism because I helped to develop (or rather just
beta-test) this fantastic application. If you are a frequent DivShare user suffering from the
death trap that is the flash uploader, this is your panacea.

Daphnism is a desktop client for DivShare’s online file-sharing service. It will allow you to add
as many DivShare accounts as you want, upload, download, share file links, edit and delete
files from your account -- from the convenience of your Mac.
Daphnism is still in beta but the developer and I are constantly working together to fix bugs
and add new features.

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