Wednesday, 14 January 2009

My list of must-have apps for Mac

Maybe this could be of interest for somebody around this blog. So there we go:

Beyond the obvious apps, those that everybody knows from Microsoft, Adobe, etc, there are a few which might be under the radar of the majority. The point of this post is to list apps that I have found to be very useful. Wherever possible I will list free apps.

Office suite: iWork 09. Trial available for free. Much better than the MS counterpart if you don't need a powerhorse, but beware: if you need to interchange documents with people working on Windows, it might be more convenient to use the MS suite. OpenOffice for Mac OS X is less mac-friendly than iWork, but really brilliant and powerful. And besides it's for free!

Scientific graphing: DeltaGraph Pro. Old software, but still without peers in 2009. Excellent.

Ftp stuff: Cyberduck, free software and very nice. You feel the Apple-focused design all the way, by someone which has nothing to do with Apple. Transmit is a paid app which also does a great job.

Video format conversion: MPEG Streamclip

Audio format conversion: XLD and xACT

Unprotecting DVDs: MacTheRipper

Torrent: Transmission

Compressing/decompressing files: Gumby 50c

Video playback of pretty much any format: VLC player and MPlayer

Mac OS X maintenance: Onyx

I hope this will be useful for some of you. If you can't find some of those by googling, the best site to look for Mac apps is www.macupdate.com.

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