Like everyone I have a list of favorite applications that I just can not live without. The wonderful thing about Macintosh is how many of the them are not only free, but they’re actually good software and do their job really well.

First off, I use FTP extensively. My favorite program is and continues to be Cyberduck ftp. The program has never crashed on me, is very user friendly, works great under Leopard with no problems. It uses Bonjur, to find servers, can upload to iDisk supports SSH, secure connections, and does everything else you could want in an FTP program.

Leopard comes with a pretty good terminal. It’s fairly good, gets the job done, and is a big improvement over Terminal.app in Tiger. But for those of us who live in terminal administering machines iTerm is the way to go.

When it comes to office products, everyone knows about Redmond’s offerings. But Open Office has been ported over to the Mac for a long time. Just be sure to get the latest Leopard Version. The biggest issues are compatibilities between the two that are usually easily solved. But if you’re just doing basic documents and spread sheets, NeoOffice is well worth the download.

Even the best kept Macintosh ends up having issues. Full Caches, etc. Onyx is currently in Beta for Leopard, but again I’ve not had a single issue with it. In fact it fixed a Leopard machine that was feeling unstable after it was upgraded from Tiger and saved a full reinstall.

Every hardcore Mac Designer relies on Fonts. Font Book is one of the least stable applications in OSX, especially when you hit more then a hundred fonts or so which is easy to do when you’ve installed anything from Adobe. Linotype Fontexplorer does a good job managing fonts and activating the ones you need when you need them.

The only program on this list that isn’t free is Vuescan. It does an awesome job scanning images and documents from a whole bunch of scanners. And of course a Leopard version is available. Vuescan has been one of my must have applications for years.

This is by far an incomplete list, being merely the apps I use on a regular basis. Got one you use? Please post it.

No related posts.