lindsvedotnet

There are a lot of people (read: Windows users ) around which have the assumption that there is a lack of software on the Mac OS X platform. That is plain wrong, and in addition to a lot of great shareware/commercial software, there are a lot of free software available.

FreeMacWare.com is a handy site which regularly presents a selection of great free software for Mac OS X, and which I quite often have learned about new and very cool software from. This site is definitely recommended for all Mac OS X users, and for those which are curious about the selection of free software for the Mac. So far, they have reviewed 337 great and absolutely free applications!

I present here a selection of five of these applications, all of them apps I miss when I’m using a computer without them:

1. Growl (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)

   Growl is a great notification system for Mac OS X. The visualization of the notifications are highly customizable and can be set up to not be that intrusive when they pop up. Some examples of notifications which I use: finished download from Safari, new song playing in iTunes and message received in iChat.

2. Quicksilver (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)

   Quicksilver is an application launcher on steroids. In addition to be used as a launcher, it can be used with certain actions. This makes it possible to as an example find a file on my harddrive and send it to a contact in my Address book without opening any of those applications. I haven’t used it much for the latter though, but it is indispendisble as a quick and hassle-free way to launch applications

3. Chax (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)

   Chax is a plugin for iChat which provides several additional features to iChat which other popular IM application has. I’m also the maintainer of the Norwegian localization of this app, so I have to recommend it

4. Transmission (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)

   Transmission is a very light weight bittorrent client, and the best one I have come across for Mac OS X.

5. NetNewsWire Lite (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)

   NetNewsWire Lite is a great free RSS reader which makes it very easy to keep track of whats going on on all the sites which I subscribe to. Currently I’m subscribing to about 60 feeds, spanning from news sites to personal blogs

I should also mention that they currently have a contest up to promote the collection of free applications on the Mac OS X platform, and if you’re a Mac user - Head over to them and check out the contest announcement!