As a followup to my last post about Mac freeware applications that Apple’s new operating system (Leopard) has mauled I decided to list some freeware applications that Leopard has left untouched and that I rely on daily. Some of these might not be necessary for everyone out there, but they certainly are for me.
Leave me a comment if you can think of a freeware application that you still need despite Leopard’s new features.
VLC: Quicktime is a powerful video player but is somewhat limited in its file compatibility. For files that Quicktime doesn’t support I rely on the great Video LAN Player or VLC. VLC is a cross platform player capable of playing nearly every file format. If you’d prefer to stick with Quicktime you can add the Perian add-on, a.k.a. the swiss army knife of quicktime components.
AppCleaner is the freeware version of the very popular shareware application AppZapper. While removing unwanted applications is super easy in OS X, these applications often leave behind stray files. AppCleaner tracks down these files and presents you with the option of deleting them.
Cyberduck remains my favorite freeware FTP client. It supports both FTP and SFTP protocols, stores frequent locations as bookmarks and integrates with growl for notifications. One look at the changelog and it is clear that is an application under robust development.
Whatsize is a great little utility that measures the size in bytes of a given folder and all its subfolders. This tool is essential when trying to recover disk space or track down a bloated folder or log file. Nothing in Leopard allows such easy visualization of disk usage. Update - a reader correctly noted that Whatsize appears to no longer be ‘freeware’ but instead exists somewhere between donationware and shareware. Those wanting to stick with true freeware should try Disk Inventory X.
svnX: While subversion comes already installed on Leopard the user is limited to command line without a GUI. Well, svnX comes to rescue as a full featured GUI for Subversion, allowing users to browse working copies, spot changes, and operate on them, search logs, and of course browse revisions!
Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple’s iChat more enjoyable. Some of Chax’s nicer featuress include a unified contact list shows all contacts from all accounts in one window, support for growl notifications of new messages and user status changes, and automatically resizing the contact list to fit the number of visible contacts.
Gimp: I dream about Apple someday releasing a competitor to Adobe’s Photoshop. Until then there is Gimp, a capable alternative to Photoshop. I’m hoping someone will develop a Cocoa version, then I wouldn’t have to run X11. In fact, there seems to be just such a project underway here although I can’t tell how far along it is.
TextWrangler: Leopard’s version of TextEdit.app is slightly improved over Tiger’s but doesn’t even come close to cutting it for code wranglers. TextWrangler is baby brother of Bare Bone’s Software’s BBedit, the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh.
Texshop: For anyone that uses LaTeX to typeset documents, Texshop is a must-have. Texshop provides a full featured editor as well as useful macros, templates and even some LaTeX related AppleScripts. Not familiar with LaTex, you can find out more here.
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January 24, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] party developers. Perhaps I could have made this more clear. Be sure to checkout my followup post, A list ...