Best free Mac software (Mac freeware)

Firefox
Currently the leading open source web browser, Firefox has thousands of plugins to help customize your web browsing experience. (And I use it every day.)

Safari
Safari is included free with Mac OS X. Safari 4 includes a number of improvements that make it a good browser (but I prefer Firefox and Chrome).

Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a web browser that runs web pages and applications as fast as Google can make it go. The Chrome people seem to want to make the world's fastest web browser. (June, 2010: Chrome is now my favorite Mac browser, though many other people still prefer Firefox.)

Camino
Camino is an open source web browser developed with "a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users". Historically, Camino was developed as a native Mac OS X web browser when there weren't any other good alternatives. It is still a very good browser -- possibly better than Safari -- but I prefer Firefox.

Opera
I personally don't use Opera, so I'll take this statement from their website: "Opera’s newest Web browser introduces a new technology platform, Opera Unite, allowing you to stream music or share files, photos and more, right from the browser".

SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey -- which is discussed in the next section -- also includes a web browser. If you're an original Netscape Navigator user, the SeaMonkey browser will put a smile on your face. I use the SeaMonkey HTML editor, but I don't use their browser.

SeaMonkey
From their website: "SeaMonkey provides a web browser, advanced e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat, and HTML editing made simple -- all in one application." As mentioned before, if you ever used the original Netscape suite of products, SeaMonkey will look very familiar.

I use the SeaMonkey Mac HTML editor (their 'Composer') for creating WYSIWYG HTML documents -- such as this document -- as described in this "Best free Mac HTML editor" article.

Amaya
Amaya is a free Mac HTML editor that was originally developed to showcase web technologies. Amaya really isn't intended as a commercial product, so these days Amaya's UI looks old, and the software runs slow, but it does create very clean HTML code.

OpenOffice
OpenOffice is a free and open office productivity suite from Sun Microsystems. It is probably the most popular free "office" suite in the world, and OpenOffice 3 provides a much better experience on Mac OS X.

NeoOffice
NeoOffice adds "improvements" to the OpenOffice project for the Mac OS X platform. (There is a little angst between the OpenOffice people and the NeoOffice people, but for a long time NeoOffice provided a better Mac experience. With the release of OpenOffice 3, I don't know if NeoOffice is much better than OpenOffice any more.)

Mac Mail
Mac OS X comes with a free email application named Mail, which can usually be found in the dock and Applications folder when you first buy a Mac. You can configure Mail to work with your email servers.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird 3 is the latest version of Mozilla Messaging's free and open source email application. Like Mail, Thunderbird is an email client that you configure to work with your remote email servers/accounts.

HandBrake
HandBrake is "an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows".

I've used HandBrake for the last two months, and it's great for ripping DVDs. I've written more about this in my iPhone/iPad DVD movies article and in my When ripping a DVD movie to a digital video file makes sense article. In short, two thumbs up.

Burn
From the Burn website: "Simple but advanced burning for Mac OS X."

Like HandBrake, I haven't used Burn, but again, I see it referenced on many Mac websites. When I burn a CD or DVD, I do it the old-school way, as described in this article on "How to burn a DVD on Mac OS X".

GIMP
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

GIMP has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is a really good free image-editing program for Mac OS X. It doesn't currently provide a "native" Mac look and feel, but it's a very powerful image-editing application, and I use it every week. It's a great free alternative to an application like Photoshop.

Blender
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU GPL.

I haven't used Blender yet, but it certainly looks like it can create really terrific 3D images.

NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is "an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac. The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs."

Whenever I do use an RSS reader I use NetNewsWire, but for better or worse I don't use any software applications like this these days. I usually find what I want on the internet via iGoogle and similar services.

Filezilla
FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

While Filezilla may not look like a native Mac OS X application, I use it all the time for FTP file transfers, and it's a very decent FTP client. Take a look at it before you go out and buy a Mac FTP client application.

Cyberduck
Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac.

I haven't used Cyberduck yet, but I will give it a trial run soon. (Again it's one of the names I've heard about for several years, but I haven't used it myself.)

Adium
Adium is "a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more". I don't use any IM clients myself, but I've seen Adium referred to for several years now.

Yahoo IM
I briefly tried a beta version of Yahoo's IM client for Mac OS X about a year ago, and it seemed fine for text messages. We had some problems with the video and audio quality, but the text messaging was just fine.

Colloquy
From their website: Colloquy is an IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to conform to Mac OS X interface conventions.

GarageBand
GarageBand comes free with Mac OS X, and you can use it to create podcasts. I've used it several times, as shown in these GarageBand podcast tutorials, and I thought it was fairly easy to use.

Juice
Juice is a cross-platform podcast receiver. If you want to listen to podcasts, this program is for you. Juice is the premier podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere.

Audacity
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more.

FreeMind
FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java.

GnuCash
GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL.

Buddi
Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background.

Eclipse
Eclispse is an open source IDE, originally intended for Java, but now with support for many different programming languages and frameworks.

NetBeans
NetBeans is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java language, as well as C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby.

MAMP
The abbreviation "MAMP" stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X.

MacPorts
The MacPorts project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

Fink
The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution.