50 Must Have Open Source Application for Mac
Taimur Asghar
Although there is the huge amount of free softwares available online but open-source softwares have numerous advantages, apart from their price (i.e. free), they provide you the right to modify and redistribute the software with modifications. The right to modify is important, it enables you to change the software the way you like, also there are plenty of softwares developed but never updated, in this case if you have the right to modify then they can be very handy for needy people as anybody can update it. So looking at their importance, in this article we will feature 50 essential “open-source” applications for your Mac; those which will help in performing your daily life task easily.
1. Firefox
Each and every computer user knows about Firefox which is the most used open source web browser having huge amount of extensions and add-ons, there is no need of detailed description for Firefox.
2. Camino.
Camino is another open-source web browser which ensures to provide the best possible browsing experience for Mac OS.
3. OmniWeb
OmniWeb is an other open source browser for Mac OS providing very powerful interface to enhance your browsing experience in as many ways as possible like built-in web shortcuts and unique drag-and-drop tabbed windows.
4. Thunderbird
Thunderbird glorifies your emailing experience with high level of security and privacy.
5. OpenProj
OpenProj is an open source project management solution which can be used in replacement of Microsoft Project.
6. Adium
Adium is specially developed for people who love instant messaging. It supports all major chatting platform including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Gmail.
7. NeoOffice
NeoOffice is a complete set of office applications mainly including word processing, presentation, drawing and spreadsheet for Mac OS X. It can import, edit and exchange files with other office programs like MS Office.
8. OpenOffice
OpenOffice is an open source office software for Mac OS X offering word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and much more.
9. Disk Inventory X
Disk Inventory X is a disk usage ability which shows the sizes of files and folders in a graphical way.
10 jEdit
jEdit is an open source and extensively used text editor for programmers for Mac OS X, which is written in Java.
11. Celestia
Celestia provides you a great experience of exploring the universe in three dimensions.
12. Stellarium
Stellarium is a free planetarium which shows realistic sky in 3D, exactly same what you see with your eye or any telescope.
13. Jomic
Jomic is an open source application distributed under GPL, which is a strong comic book viewer, stored in PDF, CBZ or CBR. It support various image format like JGP and PNG, it also features two page mode for better reading experience.
14. Stepmania
Stepmania is a rhythm game and dance revolution clone which can be connected to external dance pads.
15. Cocoalicious
Cocoalicious is an excellent open source del.icio.us client for Mac OS X, by using which you can manage your del.icio.us bookmarks from desktop.
16. Plex Media Center
This application reduces the gap between you Home Theater and Mac using a very awesome user interface which links you to your media files. By using Plex you can play diverse audio and video media formats and you can also stream online media.
17. Seashore
Seashore is an open source image editor of Mac OS which features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for text as well as brushes. It also supports multiple layering and alpha channeling.
18. SMARTReporter
SMARTReporter reports about any hard disk failure before it actually happens. It will use Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology to do so; one warning will be enough for you to think about backing up data right then.
19. RSSOwl
RSSOwl is an easy to use and extremely flexible RSS, RDF and Atom news feed reader for Mac OS X.
20. Pixen
Pixen is an advance graphic editor specially designed to facilitate pixel-artists.
21. FreeWRL/FreeX3D
FreeWRL is an open source VRML/X3D browser which fulfils your OS X 3D graphics needs.
22. Scaletron!
Scaletron is an electronic scaling calculator specially designed for graphic and web designers to calculate enlargements and reductions of artwork.
23. ffmpegX
ffmpegX is an open source and powerful Video Transcoder for Mac OS X, which supports huge number of formats for encoding like DVD, SVCD, VOB and more.
24. OpenSong
OpenSong is an open source application developed to manage lyrics, chords, lead sheets, computer projection of your music.
25. iStumbler
You can use iStumbler on your Mac to discover WiFi routers, Bluetooth devices, Airport networks and more.
26. BibDesk
BibDesk is an open source bibliography manager for Mac, which will keep track of your bibliographic information and the associated files or web links.
27. GnuCash
GnuCash is easy to use and free financial accounting software for your personal or small-business use. It includes all major features which any accounting software should have.
28. SimplyBurns
SimplyBurns is an open source and simple CD / DVD burner for Mac OS X.
29. Juice
Juice is developed for a person who wants to listen online audio programs but cannot, due to, whatever may the reason be. Juice allows you to capture and listen to missed podcasts anytime in future.
30.HandBrake
HandBrake is a multi platform and multi threaded video transcoder specially designed of Mac OS X providing excellent output quality.
31. Inkscape
Inkscape is an awesome replacement of Adobe Illustrator which is a vector graphic editor. Features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones and other important features.
32. Cyberduck
Want to browse FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs and Amazon S3? Try Cyberduck which is a splendid open source tool for browsing.
33. Gallery
Gallery is a web-based photo album organizer, helping you to blend photo management smoothly into your own online projects. It is very easy to install and use, it includes resizing, rotating, automatic thumbnails and more.
34. Komodoedit
Komodo Edit is an open source language editor that will help you in writing codes easily. It is a multi-language editor supporting Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, Ruby and JavaScript. It writes codes faster because of its auto-complete feature, it also provides support for adding third-party libraries.
35. JUnit
JUnit is an extremely useful framework for writing and running automated Java testing.
36. Jext
Jext is an awesome open source code editor written in JAVA. Apart from JAVA, it can edit many other types of source codes for example, source code of XHTML, JSP, PHP, Python Ruby etc.
37. Scintilla
Editing and debugging source codes are basic and fundamental need of any developer, “Scintilla” can help them in doing so. It is a free source code editing application which includes important features like error indicators, syntax styling, code completion and call tips.
38. FullSync
FullSync is n extremely expandable and customizable file synchronization and backup tool, especially made for developers but its basic functionality is very simple which can be used by everyone.
39. Angry IP Scanner
Scanning IP is very crucial for network administrators and other enterprises like banks and government agencies. For this purpose Angry IP Scanner is best choice as it is open-source and cross-platform network scanner specially deigned to scan IP addresses and ports in a very simple and fast way.
40. MUTE
Mute is a peer-to-peer file sharing network that enables us to search and download easily with privacy. It is a fast and native application with no java or python.
41. Apcupsd UPS control software
Apcupsd is software for monitoring power management and controlling most of the APC UPSes. During an event of power failure, this program will inform the user about power failure; hence giving a warning to save important data before system gets shutdown.
42. TV-Browser
TV-Browser is a digital and java-based TV guide which collects daily TV programs from internet and arranges them in a form of a TV guide. It supports a huge amount of skins and plugins, making customization comfortable. Its only purpose is no make TV guides; you cannot watch TV using TV-Browser.
43. MacLibre
MacLibre provides an excellent collection of free software for Mac OS X from categories of Internet, multimedia, Office and other utilities.
44. Moodle
Moodle is an education course management system which can be used by educators to make informative online learning websites.
45. Synergy
Synergy enables you to share a single mouse or keyboard between multiple computers having different operating systems, without any special hardware.
46. Blender
Blender is very handy 3D content creation suite, having all major features required in this kind of software including very sleek interface, awesome animation, UV unwrapping, real-time 3D game creation, Imaging and composing, shading, rendering and modeling.
47. Skim
Skim is a powerful PDF reader and note-taker for OS X, which can be used as an alternative of Adobe Acrobat Reader.
48. AppleJack
AppleJack is an effective troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X which runs in single user mode and it is very user-friendly and easy to use. With this you can troubleshoot your computer even without GUI.
49. PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a Linux New Media Award winning and powerful object-relational database system.
50. MAMP
MAMP is an easy to use program which is used to start and stop the servers. It is a powerful completion of Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X, it is very easy to remove as it do not modify any part of normal Mac OS X.
51. NetBeans
NetBeans is a free and open source program which provides, software developers, an integrated development environment. You will get every needed tool to create website, applications, professional desktop, it also supports C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby.
52. WineHQ
Windows OS has much bigger library of applications than Mac OS, so if you want to run any Windows applications on your Mac OS X then WineHQ can help you in doing so with ease and flexibility.
In the end we would like to hear your recommendations and suggestions about open-source applications. :)
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RAjesh
Posted 95 days ago 29Mac apps is the best
faraz ahmad
Posted 153 days ago 28Very good article i am downloading these software for new 2011 macbook pro
Venkatesh
Posted 255 days ago 27It’s very good article. I just found the article for more mac apps in http://www.mebaze.com.
anonymous
Posted 261 days ago 26omniweb? opensource? stopped reading at #3. kthxbai.
joez
Posted 462 days ago 25Seashore is incredibly limited and NOT suitible as a replacement for GIMP or Photoshop. Not even close.
angus cooney
Posted 491 days ago 24I would have had GIMP on there, its a free version and as power full as photoshop.
hard to get started but when you spend time with online videos it saves you 700 dollars for photoshop.
angus cooney
Octavio A. Méndez Sánchez
Posted 533 days ago 23you forgot include Blender 3D on the list:
http://www.blender.org
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
probodj
Posted 550 days ago 21Wait, this list in not accurate! It’s not 50 Must Have Open Source App — it’s 52! :)
May I add freemind (freemind.sourceforge.net), a simple mind map manager. If you need more bell and whistles, try Xmind (www.xmind.net).
Lionel
Posted 552 days ago 19Pixen 3.1b2 won’t launch :-( And no new post on the website since 2006, it seems.
Stefan Wolfrum
Posted 552 days ago 18I’d like to suggest my own application “Twunes”, a free tool for tweeting what you’re listening to in iTunes. With a lot of features. ;-)
Available here: http://twunes.wops.de or from apple.com/downloads in the iTunes section.
;-)
Will
Posted 552 days ago 17I think you forgot Jumper 2.0 collaborative search
http://www.jumpernetworks.com
Jake
Posted 552 days ago 16Nice list, but none of these apps ante up to their professional counterparts. There is a reason why *those* apps aren’t free. Still, if you’re not too demanding, or for the occasional use, these open source apps suffice.
Vickie
Posted 552 days ago 15The list started out pretty well, but the further down the list, the more techy they seemed to get. Too much of the list seemed made up of web page programming/coding stuff. Too many of a specific type of programming, like several html coding/debugging apps, animation apps, music composing-related. Overall not many directly useful programs for everyday users. And all those unpronouncable names!
I can’t believe there’s not one task manager in this list. That’s one of the most lacking areas in open source.
I do use FFMPEG ALL the time and love it! MPEG Streamclip is another one that is fantastic for converting file formats.
Vickie
ConnyLo
Posted 552 days ago 14Instead of FileZilla you can use fancy Cyberduck!
For RSS-feed fans there is Vienna for you.
Sachin
Posted 552 days ago 12awesome..most of them are new to me….thanks
bcotier
Posted 552 days ago 10It would have been nice to include GIMP too. Great alternative to photoshop. I recommend it to clients. It works on all platforms
Sudhir
Posted 552 days ago 13Seashore is based on GIMP and is the better option. GIMP requires X11 and is therefore not a good option for Mac OS X. Seashore on the other hand uses Cocoa.
Hanibaal
Posted 553 days ago 8Good to know these exist on Mac… I am about to buy my 1st Mac (mainly to develop IPhone App)… but certainly such tools can come handy.
obligatoire
Posted 553 days ago 7I think you forgot FileZilla . .
Emma Kane
Posted 553 days ago 6What is awesome is that Guy Kawasaki tweeted about your very excellent page. A few apps I didn’t know – well done!!
Oscar Gonzalez
Posted 553 days ago 5Very nice collection. I knew about a few of these and others are very cool. Good for all types of work.
Velma Sem
Posted 63 days ago 30yes, Very nice collection. I like
gass
Posted 553 days ago 4why no mac-screenshots for cross-plattform apps? I see many windows & linux/unix screenshots.
so this is a list of 50 Opensource-Applications with only a few Mac-Only apps.
Taimur Asghar
Posted 549 days ago 22Actually i will take care of this next time, I didn’t knew you people see image to decide the platform of an application.
Thanks
David
Posted 553 days ago 2Here’s another great one: MuseScore. I use it but am not affiliated with the development. It’s pretty powerful music composition and notation software with some decent default instruments and nice export features. It’s not open source, but it’s free under GNU GPL license.
http://musescore.org
Richard Howell
Posted 553 days ago 1Interesting list, what is more interesting however is the fact that Windows Apps are included in your list when the title says it is the 50 must have for mac?
Taimur Asghar
Posted 553 days ago 3It would be awesome if you point out which one so that we can fix that :)
Joe Sewell
Posted 553 days ago 9Well, in terms of what pictures show Windows apps rather than Mac apps, we have:
• TV-Browser
• Apcuspd (although that appears to be a Linux GUI)
• Angry IP Scanner (Windows-like frame)
• FullSync
• Scintilla
• Jext (maybe)
• Gallery
• Stellarium (maybe)
• jEdit
• OpenProj
By the way, in case you didn’t know it, NeoOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org, which stopped supporting PowerMacs as of version 2. (Actually, I’m not sure now if they support Mac OS X at all nowadays.)
Carl Grint
Posted 552 days ago 11NeoOffice is a Mac only version of OpenOffice, so yes it does support OS X as that is it’s only platform.
ryosaeba
Posted 551 days ago 20i’m still using neooffice 3.1.1 on my macbook.