As I switched 1993 completely to Apple and MacOS X I never regret this step. Back to the years before that date I had to reinstall my Windows PC a minimum of twice a year, have dozens of apps installed and sometimes 3 different software pieces for one task, only because software “A” had feature “X”, “B” had “Y” …
Never mind! From 1993 up to now things improved, MacOS X gets better and better, the pre-installed software is fabulous and I’ve no anti-virus software installed – it’s still not necessary. But the best of all I haven’t experienced any problem expect some minor apps crashes which I had several times a day with my Windows junk PC – now once a month.
But don’t get it wrong, I’m not some kind of Mac geek (ok, maybe I’m) but I found a tool that enables me to do the jobs I want to do in a way I like. And my Mac was a real life saver during my MBA courses through the cool Keynote app, Pages for the most of my papers … only to mention some examples.
Over the past years I discovered some great software gems, that I’ll share today with you. The best they are all for free, which means open-source. Here we go (in alphabetical order):
- CurrencyConverter: This is a simple currency converter widget that installs in your MacOS Dashboard. The currency values are updated via Internet regularly as well as the app itself checks for updates. You can expand the list of displayed currencies very easily and converter one value in all other and vice versa. You can find it here.
- Cyberduck: This is THE FTP app for the MAC and it’s completely free. It has some great features and is absolutely free from the Swiss (but you can donate via PayPal, what I’d suggest to do for this great peace of software). With Cyberduck you can browse, up- and download files with FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 and much more. It is a must have and can be found here.
- Freemind: If you know MindMapping as a tool for creativity and sorting your ideas, make notes etc. Freemind would be a great tip. Instead of other more feature and graphic rich MindMap software it is free and does the necessary task in an unagitated way. Some of my MBA class notes are done with Freemind. This software is freeware and can be found here.
- Firewall and Bluetooth Switch: This two additional MacOS widgets that are very helpful to turn the build-in firewall and bluetooth of any Mac on and off. Find it here and here.
- GetTube: If you love YouTube and want some videos offline, e.g. for viewing later or to use in a presentation, then GetTube is the right software piece for you. It integrates itself into Safari and Firefox and grabs the video URL of the choosen YouTube video and safes it as MP4 or MP3 to the harddisk. Download it from here.
- iStat Pro: This MacOS dashboard widget gives you a comprehensive overview of your MacOS ressources usage, like CPU, memory, disk, batter, network, processes … performance. A must have for all performance and statistics freaks. Download it for free from here.
- Skim: Today you have in any business and foremost in academics to handle tons of PDF Files. The MacOS build-in PDF-Viewer is good but it miss some essential manipulation tools you can “only” get with Adobe Acrobat Reader (Professional). But this is pay-ware, so Skim is a good freeware substitute. With Skim you can view PDFs and anotate your scientific papers. Additionaly it integrates with BibDesk. Download it from SourceForge.
- TrueCrypt: Security and encryption is essential to most businesses, like consulting, athorney, industry … to protect trade secrets or customer data. TrueCrypt is an open-source multi-platform disk encryption tool. I used for some years the data safe feature of MacOS. But it slows down the MacOS performance and costs additional disk space. TrueCrypt is muli-platform and so you can use it on Windows, Linux and MacOS. As it is available as a portable app you can use it straight away from an USB-stick and have access to you encrypted data everywhere, a secured computer assumed. Find it here.
- TweetDeck: As I’m a fan of Twitter as an information gathering and marketing tool it would be very stressful and time-consuming to use without some helpful tools. One of this helpful tools is TweetDeck, an Adobe Air application for free and multi-platform, too (depend on the availability of Adobe Air for your platform). With TweetDeck you can group followers, define search strings and monitor your replies, direct messages and so on. It save me many houers a day, when I use it a Twitter client. Download it here (and thanks to @guykawasaki for this tip
). - VLC: Some of the internet videos and of my MBA course material was in other than Quicktime format. VLC is a great player for the rest of the video formats, like WMV, DivX … and it is free, again. So download it here. Besides Flip4Mac, which integrates in Quicktime, VLC is the swiss army knife of video watching.
Do you know any good open-source and/ or freeware app for Mac that can be of good use in any business and academic environment? Don’t hesitate to write me a note!
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