5 Free Mac Applicatons that are totally useful
Following are some of the best free applications for Mac that might come in handy for everyday routine work. You might also be interested in checking out my earlier post on Top 5 Free System Applications for Mac Os X, Best HD Video Players for Mac and Free File Compressors for Mac OS X.
The Unarchiver
The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.
It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.
Carbon Copy Cloner is a free Mac application to clone, synchronize and backup your files. CCC 3 features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup procedure very intuitive.
Key features include
- Complete, bootable backups
- Simple interface for indicating exactly what you want to back up
- Restore using the same process used for backup
- Backups are non-proprietary, so you can browse them or use them with Migration Assistant
- Fast, incremental backups copy only the items that have changed since the last backup
In addition to general backup, CCC can also clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. CCC’s block-level copy offers the absolute best fidelity in the industry.
Stickies is one of my favortite desktop tools ever. It’s one the best ways to remind yourself of stuff that are must be done.
Unlike other applications it lets you arrange all your notes in thumbnail view and create short storyboards/comics or simply store your daily thoughts as searchable text. SketchBox is 100% free for you to use and if you feel like donating, you can do that by visiting their website.
An excellent tool for Mac that keeps all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. It has the ability to help keep software like iTunes and Mac OS X updated at all times. A lot of applications on your Mac don’t include their own update checker and even if they do, they don’t work from a central place.
AppFresh also provides a central place to control the software updates available to your Mac, integrating most popular and most common update checking technologies such as Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate, Adobe Updater, osx.iusethis.com and more.
SilverKeeper is a freeware application from LaCie that automates backups to external storage devices like hard drives, network drives, and other removable storage devices that have IDE, SATA, eSATA, IDE/ATA/ATAPI, SCSI, USB, or FireWire interfaces.
Almost any read/write device that can mount a writeable volume on the Macintosh Desktop can be used with SilverKeeper.