While there’s always been plenty of great free software available for the Mac, when Apple switched to Unix for Mac OS X the floodgates really opened. Below are some of my favorite pieces of freeware for the Mac. You can find all of these, and a whole lot more, at .
. What can I say about Quicksilver? it’s a revolutionary piece of software. Being an old Unix guy, my computing life is very keyboard-centric. With Quicksilver, tasks that usually require reaching for the mouse can be reduced to just a couple keystrokes. It feels like such a natural extension to the operating system. It’s also got lots of great plugins, for things like my Camino bookmarks, great handling of iTunes (including controlling it, which is awesome), and support for Gmail and Growl. Go, get it, spend some time in its dialogs, and wonder how you ever got along without it.
. While Firefox gets all the attention, lately my browser of choice has been Camino. What makes it better than Firefox? Well, for starters, Camino supports the Mac OS X Services. That means I can simply select something in a web page and send it right to a Google search, or directly into DEVONThink, or to QuickSilver, with just a keystroke or two, or a pop of the Services menu. Many Mac users don’t even pay attention to the Services menu, but, once you get used to it in other Cocoa apps, you’ll miss it terribly if you surf with Firefox. Secondly, and harder to describe, it’s just more Mac-like. It feels like a natural Mac app. Firefox has that feel of a port, just not quite integrated into the look, feel, and flow of the operating system. Unfortunately, you’ll have to give up your Firefox extensions, which I’ll be the first to admit is very tough. On the plus side, Camino uses the same underlying browser engine as Firefox, so it’s hip to the latest web standards. I never thought I’d use anything but Firefox, but, Camino’s now the browser for me.
. I’ve always (well, since I gave up Windows, anyway) used virtual desktops on my computers, starting with WindowMaker in the old days. There are a few virtual desktop managers for the Mac, the best of which is Desktop Manager. But Spirited Away does things a bit differently. Instead of you moving windows around to desktops to clear clutter, Spirited Away will automatically hide apps that haven’t had the focus for a certain amount of time. So, using only one desktop remains uncluttered, because apps you haven’t visited in a while will get hidden. It’s also easy to exclude apps from getting ‘spirited away’ via the menuicon, for those times when you really do need two application windows up at the same time. Now when I spend time on Windows and Linux, I miss this functionality. Give it a try, it’s great.
. Adium is, quite simply, all that iChat wishes it could be. It’s a fantastic multi-protocol instant messaging client. Incredibly simple to set up your Google Talk account, and it works with other Jabber servers (like Mac OS X Server’s iChat Server), ICQ, MSN, AOL… all of them. let you customize it with sounds, macros, and themes. Just a wonderful product.
. It’s difficult to say something about Growl that will get readers excited about it, but Growl is very exciting. If I were a betting man, I’d say the next innovation in the Sherlock and Konfabulator line of Apple’s embrace-and-extinguish utilities would be Growl. Growl is a mechanism that allows other applications to present notifications to the user. This happens through a well-published API, so that there are lots of applications that support it, including a little command-line app that you can add to your own background shell scripts. There are several styles of notifications, mostly popups, but also you can set Growl to mail you. Now, the Growl framework supports network notifications, so sysadmins (like yours truly) can see Growl notifications for hosts around the LAN.