I'm new to AppleOsx and while I can bring many of my favorite OpenSource applications with me to OSX (one of the main reasons I actually migrated from DebianLinux to AppleOsx), there's also a whole new world of applications that I've never used before.
I've put software into two main categories, favorites and everything else. Favorites are software that I actually download and install, if it's shareware/commercial software I actually pay for it. Everything else is mostly software that I want to play with, or have played with but wasn't convincing enough.
See also: AppleKeyboardShortcuts, AppleTipsAndTricks, LinuxSoftware, WindowsSoftware, CrossPlatformSoftware, ApplicationSwitchMatrix
Other People's Lists: Brad Choate, Jonas Luster, Fourth Rock from the Sun, http://www.divnull.com/lward/software.html
And yet more lists: http://nothickmanuals.info/doku.php?id=opensourcemac and http://www.opensourcemac.org/ and http://coolosxapps.net/
Favorite Software
This is the software I always install on my Macs.
- AntiRSI
An OpenSource piece of MicroPauseSoftware. Very simple and seems to work well (similar to the Linux Dr. Write).
- Colloquy
- Very slick IRC client.
- Cyberduck
- I don't use graphical S/FTP clients very often but when one is needed this is a nice, and very Mac, option. Note, I have discovered that while Cyberduck provides a great interface, it transfers files very slowly over fast connections. If speed is of the essence you probably want to find something else.
- delicious2safari
- Imports your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari as a flat list, or organizes them into folders according to their tags.
- DesktopManager
- Multiple desktops for OSX.
- EXIF Renamer
- Nice looking tool which you can hook into Image Capture to automatically rename your photos by EXIF date.
- FetchArt
- Album cover downloader for iTunes.
- Flip4Mac
- Adds the Windows Media codecs to Quicktime. This is the recommended solution from Microsoft now (instead of their deprecated Windows Media Player for OSX).
- GraphicConverter
Seems to be PhotoShop Lite, specializing in bulk ImageManipulation.
- GPGMail
- GNU Privacy Guard (PGP) intergration with Mail.app. I'm not overly impressed with this, it's stupid about where it looks for GnuPG and does dumb things like insert the cipher text when you reply to an encrypted message, but I have yet to find anything better for Mail.app. If only Mozilla integrated with Addressboook ...
http://www.sente.ch/software/GPGMail/English.lproj/GPGMail.html
- iPodRip
- Looks like it will allow you to sync your iPod between multiple computers! About freaking time ...
- iScroll
- Enable two finger scrolling on pre-2005 power books. AWESOME! If your trackpad supports it, this is a much better solution then uControl or Sidetrack.
- iSquint
- Very simple and fast program to convert almost any video format to an iTunes/iPod happy format. It will do H.264 and allows you to mess with most settings you would want to.
- iTerm
- Powerful replacement for the default Terminal.app.
- mlMac
Nice simple GUI for most PeerToPeer networks (Bittorrent, Donkey, Fasttrack, Soulseek, Direct Connect, Gnutella, OpenFT and OpenNap).
- OggDrop
OggVorbis support for iTunes and Quicktime.
- Perian
- Teach Quicktime to play Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6 and these formats when they are inside an AVI (h.264, mpeg4, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3).
- Quicksilver
A free alternative to Launchbar (possibly OpenSource?). So far I like it about the same since I never used most of the fancy stuff Launchbar did. There's also a good quck tutorial.
- Seashore
- Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.
- SideTrack
- Enables the advanced features of the syaptics touch pad shipped on Apple laptops. Enabled horizontal and vertical scrolling, tap for click and other goodies.
- Spanning Sync
- Two way syncing between Google Calendar and iCal.
- SubEthaEdit (was Hydra)
A great editor which does syntax highlighting and uses ZeroConf to allow multiple people to find and collaborate on the same text documents. Interesting for pair programming as well.
- Visual Hub (Commercial)
- Video conversion tool (similar to Handbrake or iSquint). Awesome ...
- VLC Media Player
- Will play almost anything flawlessly on almost any platform. Comes with a nice GUI interface for OSX. Especially nice for DIVX files and obscure formats which I could find no other way to play under OSX (including MPlayer).
Good Software
This is software which I keep on standby because sometimes I need it, but I don't use it all the time
- Adium X (Open Source)
- A multiple protocol instant messaging client, which now utilizes libgaim (the core part of gaim) to connect to multiple protocols, and is also based on a new plugin architecture. Partial address book integration, cool looking tabs, multiple protocols for instant messaging, and a compact contact list are some of the many features.
- Amua (Open Source)
- Amua is a status bar application for Mac OS X that allows you to control Last.fm web-radio streams. It is an alternative to the official Last.fm player. Wonder which song is playing? Just move over the note icon on top right of your screen without switching away from what you're currently doing. A click on the icon displays the Amua menu where you can control your radio stream and send the usual Love/Skip/Ban commands. Alternatively you can detach the song information panel and drag it somewhere on your screen, such that you can always see what is playing.
- Bookit
- With all the browsers available for the Mac OS keeping your bookmarks organized can become a real problem. But with Bookit keeping your browsers' bookmarks synchronized is quick and easy. Bookit compares the bookmarks you have and then lets you synchronize the bookmarks that are not in all of your browsers. Finally, Bookit creates identical bookmark files for each browser.
- Cocoa Dialog
Build simple Cocoa GUI's on the CommandLine (ie. great for BashLanguage scripts).
- Contacts
- Search Addressbook from the command line. Neato.
- EOS Image Manager
- Good looking image sorter with great batching features.
- GeekTool
- Does lots of cool stuff but what I like is putting your logs onto your desktop background.
- iGlasses
- Allows many manipulations to the video you iSight camera provides (flip vertically, enhance image, allow night time mode) and also lets iChat A/V work on older computers.
- JHymn
- Removes the DRM which protects music downloaded from the Apple music store. Useful if you like the idea of owning your music as opposed to renting it at their whim.
- iPhoto to Drupal
An AppleScript to upload pictures from iPhoto to Drupal.
- iPhoto to Gallery
- Adds an option to iPhoto's export feature for uploading to a Gallery photo albumn.
- iSynCal
- Allows proper syncronisation between multiple computers iCal calendars. Wonderful, even more wonderful that he's hoping to support the OSX Addressbook, but hopefully this functionailty will be built into OSX in the nearish future.
- Little Snitch
- Little Snitch is an application supervisor. It watches all running applications and brings up an alert panel when an application tries to establish a network connection. You can either allow the connection, deny it or store a permanent rule for similar future-connections.
- Mplayer OSX
Port of the Linux mplayer for OSX. Will play most audio/video formats and is gloriously OpenSource (does some things better then VLC). Note that the "MPlayerOSX" version which is hosted at Source Forge version is not nearly as good.
- Music Safari
- Lets you save streamed media as MP3/AAC, including scheduling for recording shows at a certain time via iCal
- MySync
Do you have more than one Mac? Would you like to sync any or all of your Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes to all of your Macs? MySync provides the Mac-to-Mac syncing capabilities of .mac, without .mac
- Logorrhea
- iChat log viewer.
- OSX2X
- OSX2X is a small Mac OS X application that lets you control other machines running either an X11 server or a VNC server using your mac's mouse and keyboard. So if you happen to have a mac and either an X Windows machine or a amchine running VNC on your desk you only need to use a single keyboard and mouse! This may sound like a very esoteric thing to need, and you'd be right, but some people have just that need, and thus OSX2X was born.
- Quicktime Plugins
- Plugins for playing AVI and DIVX format movies, or converting them to Quicktimes.
- Parallels Workstation
- VMWare type product which allows you to run Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris etc at the same time as OSX.
- Platypus
- Platypus is a powerful developer tool for creating application wrappers around scripts, i.e. for creating MacOS X applications that execute a bundled script. Scripts can thus be run seamlessly from the graphical window environment, making elegant Mac OS X-native applications from scripts (Perl, Python, Bash etc).
- PhotoReviewer
- Allows you to go through a folder of pictures very quickly and decide which to keep and which to get rid of (either by deleting or moving to a seperate folder). Can also find duplicate photos, undisplayable photos and automatically purge them.
- Posterino
- Neat looking software for automating the process of making life posters.
- Rapid Weaver
- A very nice template based web page maker. Allows you to publish blogs, photo albums (integrates with iPhoto!), static pages etc.
- RCDefaultApp
System Preferences pane for configuring default handlers for Mime types, file extensions, URLs etc. To disabled OSX security advisory you need to set the disk, disks and help URL handlers to <disabled>.
- Real Player/Video/One
Not what I'd call quality software but the only thing which does what it does. Despite Real's attempts to hide it there are non-nag non-ad versions of the player available, see the BBC and Real's Enterprise Desktop.
- RSSOwl
- Cross platform RSS/ATOM reader. Looks quite nice.
- SCPlugin
- Finder integration for CVS/Subversion in a similar style to TortoiseCVS. Looks nice but haven't tried it yet.
- Shrook
An interesting RssReader, I replaced NetNewsWire with it (but have since replaced Shrook with BlogLines). It has a couple innovative features that I love, you can register with a free online account at shrook.com and it will keep all your copies of shrook in sync for read item status and feed addtions (great for reading at home and work). It also allows you to sort an arbitrary collection of feeds by time and to sync items to your AppleIpod for reading on the go. I moved on to BlogLines because it was platform independant and development seemed to languish even though there were some significant outstanding bugs (that was over a year ago so may be better now).
- Synergy2
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Note that this does not yet work on OSX, but there are some forks with OSX client support which they hope to integrate soon.
- Tapir
- Tapir is a developer tool for creating global Mac OS X status menu item applications to place in the menu bar. These status menu items can be set to execute a shell command or script and display its output when opened, or alternately, configured to run a given command periodically, displaying output in the menu title.
- TNEF's Enough
Allows extraction of MicrosoftWindows winmail.dat attachments which Outlook generates.
- uControl
- Allows you to remap meta keys on your keyboard. It's not important very often but when you need it boy is it useful (like making a non-Mac keyboard have a command key).
- Unison (Commercial)
- The best (and only decent) news reader of OSX.
- Vienna
- Vienna is a freeware, open source RSS/Atom newsreader for the Mac OS X operating system. It provides features comparable to commercial newsreaders, but both it and the source code are freely available for download.
- WebnoteHappy
WebnoteHappy is a new web site tagging and annotating app for Mac OS X that helps you organize, bookmark, and make notes about the web pages that matter to you. Each web page can be personalized with notes and tags as you bookmark it, creating a "webnote". The fast integrated search makes it easy to find your webnotes again. Organize your webnotes with folders and smart folders.
- Windows Media Player
Want to play MicrosoftWindows media files on OSX you need this (deprecated now in favour of VLC).
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx
- Work Pace
MicroPauseSoftware for helping manage WristPain. Allows you to enforce breaks in your computer usage.
- X2VNC
- The program will open a small (one pixel wide) window on the edge of your screen. Moving the pointer into this window will trigger the program to take over your mouse and send mouse movements and keystrokes though the RFB protocol to a VNC server running on another machine. When the pointer is moved back towards the opposite edge on the other screen, the mouse is then released again.
- xCHM
- Ebook Reader for .chm files.
Software I Don't Use But Is (Or Looks) Useful
I don't use it but I want to remember it because it looks promising or I've heard good things about it.
- Addressbook 2 LDAP
- Migrates the contents of the OSX Addressbook to an LDAP server. Useful if you maintain the family addressbook but want others to be able to use it.
- AppScript
Python bindings for AppleScript.
- CVL
- Concurrent Versions Librarian, it's a front end to CVS.
- Ecto
- A good, and potentially great, blogging client (it is the sucessor to Kung-Log).
- GroupCal
Neat little commercial plugin which allows iCal to talk to a MicrosoftExchange server.
- iPhoto Diet
- Apple's iPhoto automatically backs up original copies of your photos whenever you make changes, such as rotating an image, adjusting brightness, or cropping. This makes it possible to revert back to the original if you are unhappy with your changes. The originals, along with the modified photos, are kept in the iPhoto library and over time add greatly to the library's size. There may be times when you do not want to keep some or all of the originals. iPhoto Diet is an application that scans through an iPhoto library folder and moves any undesired originals to the Trash. iPhoto Diet can be run manually or set to run automatically at desired times.
- iPhoto Library Manager
Allows you to keep your data in multiple different iPhoto libraries, including seeing what albums are in each library, copying pictures (*with* MetaData) and other neat stuff.
- iPod It
- Transfer your PIM data to your iPod so it's available whenever you need it; iPod It supports transferring information from Entourage, Stickies, Mail, Address Book and iCal. You can even download weather forecasts and news headlines directly to your iPod.
- iSpeek It
- Listen to your documents on your iPod. Take any document or web page and convert it into an MP3/AAC track in iTunes using your Mac's built-in text-to-speech capabilities. From there it's a quick sync to your iPod and away you go!
- Keyword Assistant
- Keyword Assistant is a plugin for iPhoto to make keyword management easier. The main feature, pictured at right, is an auto-completing text field for assigning keywords. This is much faster than using the built-in keyword panel.
- Mac::Glue
Perl hooks into Apple's Open Scripting Application (AppleScript) framework.
- Monolingual
- Removes all the localization data for languages you don't use. Can free up over a gig of data if you are low on space.
- myPhoto
A PhpLanguage front end to the iPhoto library. Manage your photo's with iPhoto and because myPhoto directly queries the iPhoto database the web interface is automatically updated. Appears that it will work with an rsync'd iPhoto library to a Linux box as well though I haven't confirmed this.
http://agent0068.dyndns.org/~mike/projects/myPhoto/index.php
- OSX Utils
A series of CommandLine tools for accessing OSX MetaData (eg. resource forks, creator types etc)
- NeoOffice/J
Java port of OpenOffice with OSX in mind.
- Romeo
Controlling your laptop with a BlueTooth enabled phone.
- Salling Clicker
Controlling your laptop with a BlueTooth enabled phone.
- SSH Keychain
- Manages your SSH key phrases using Keychain.
- SSH Tunnel Manager
- GUI for configuring SSH tunnels.
- Talking Panda
- (commercial) Talking Panda sets a new standard for language translation software. Designed for the iPod, it’s stocked with over three hundred essential words and phrases of the language you want to speak, organized for instant access.
- TinkerTool
TinkerTool is an application that gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X. This allows to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system.
Codecs
- DivX
- Ogg Drop
- Used for converting files to OGG but also includes a plugin which allows any Quicktime enabled application to playback OGG files.
- Xiph Quicktime Components
- A collection of plugins for Quicktime (Apple and Windows) which allow Quicktime to play other formats. As best I can tell from the online documentation, at this time the only plugin is for Ogg.
Collections of Unix Software
- Darwin Ports
- A collection of software in a format similar to the FreeBSD ports collection. Seems pretty nice but requires use of CVS etc so probably not for the Unix newbies.
- entropy.ch
- A collection of useful Unix tools and services ported to OSX. They are designed to work with the default software installed with OSX and require a minimum of fussing to get to work.
- Fink
Your favorite DebianLinux package tools for OSX (see AptHelp) along with a healthy collection of FreeSoftware ported to OSX. Currently I'm not a big fan as it's documentation seems scattered and unobvious (try installing MySql and then look for documentation on how daemonic works, blech).
- Server Logistics
A collection of "bleeding edge" ports to OSX, specifically Apache2, MySql, PostgreSql, MapServer, Tomcat, PHP and some others.