Chronicles of a Techoholic A blog chronicling the life of a student and aspiring programmer

Some cool freeware and open source apps for OS X

This was originally meant to be a YouTube video, but when I had finished recording it and imported it into iMove for editing, I realised I didn't record the sound. I then made it again on another occasion. I made the same mistake. I made it a third time, again with the same mistake (my microphone works, I just keep forgetting to set it to record sound as well. It's not the default, but I set it to record no sound for some other movies and the setting just stuck). Anyway, I'm not going to make it a fourth time, I will just give you the material.

Burn - an application to burn data, audio or video onto optical media, or you can copy disk images.

Caffeine - App Store - a menu application to prevent your Mac from going to sleep or initiating a screensaver while you do a task that the Mac doesn't consider as user-activity, e.g. watching a movie.

Mactracker - App Store - an application that lists all models of Apple computers/devices from 1984 to the present day.

Paparazzi! - a useful tool to capture webpages

Transmission - an open source, cross-platform, yet platform-native (in terms of looks) torrent client which consumes less resources than some CLI torrent clients.

Perian - a QuickTime component and prefPane which allows QuickTime to play many more formats, while also extending QuickLook (so I guess it's also a QLGenerator).

Bean - a free, light word processor which has just the right features and doesn't overload on features, yet doesn't skimp either.

There are loads of websites which list more apps like this. If you're a switcher and you're left with a budget of 0 for downloading apps for your new platform, this list can be so helpful. I consider these to be unmatched in their beauty and functionality too, so there are no paid apps which offer the same functionality with a better experience. These are apps you will keep, not free alternatives to tide you over while you save up for superior apps.

I hope you enjoy this list of free and open source software for OS X!