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Bowtie Customisable (themeable) iTunes controller and Last.fm scrobbler. Useful. |
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ScrobblePod Last.fm scrobbler that handles songs played in iTunes and on your iOS devices. |
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Max Max is an easy to use audio converter that supports over 20 audio formats. |
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Spotify Instantly listen to over 15 million tracks online and sync them to your iPod. |
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Breakaway Pull out your headphones, and iTunes pauses. Plug it back in, and it starts again. |
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X Lossless Decoder Decode/convert various lossless audio file formats including FLAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, etc. |
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Audacity Open sources, cross-platform audio editor. Must have for amateur musicians. |
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Songbird Alternative music player and library manager. |
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Vox A lightweight alternative music player for OS X. |
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Google Chrome A lightweight, fast browser. Great alternative to Safari. |
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Firefox For Firefox fans who can’t live without it. |
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Opera Tthe only popular browser for Mac that’s available on the Mac App Store. |
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Hotspot Shield Utility to secure your browsing sessions and prevent identity theft or bypass restrictions. |
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Purity Clear browsing cache, logs and temporary files. Also removes unwanted temporary system files. |
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CCleaner Finally the Mac version of the essential CCleaner for Windows. Still in beta. |
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Delivery Status Delivery tracker that alerts you when your package clears custom or is on the delivery truck! |
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TimeScroller Find out the time in other cities compared to yours. Very useful when checking time difference. |
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CurrencyConverter One of the best currency converter widgets for Mac OS X. Updated frequently. |
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iStat Pro Highly configurable system monitor widget. Reports CPU, memory, disk, network usages; temperature; uptime, etc. |
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The Weather Channel Widget All the weather information you need right on your Dashboard. Check it out. |
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Countdown Dashboard widget Set the date and time for any event and it will show you how much time you have left. |
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Symbol Caddy Can’t seem to find the Euro currency symbol? Symbol Caddy provides access to all special characters. |
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Mozilla Thunderbird If Mail isn’t good enough, try Thunderbird. |
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Postbox 2 Another alternative desktop email client. $29.95 |
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Postbox Express Free, lighter version of Postbox. No longer in active development. |
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Gmail Notifier Menubar app that alerts you when you have new Gmail message or upcoming GCal events. |
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Notify Even though it’s no longer in development, Notify is an elegant menubar mail notification app. |
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SketchBook Express Free, professional-grade drawing application for Mac. |
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Pixelmator Great Photoshop alternative. Extremely capable and easy to use. $29.99 |
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Skitch Skitch helps you to create screenshots and add annotations, then share it with friends. |
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Paparazzi! A useful tool to take screenshots of webpages. |
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Hugin Free panorama photo stitcher, assembles a mosaic of photos into a series of overlapping pictures. |
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Poladroid Create awesome Polaroid-esque pictures from your digital photos. |
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HDRtist Create HDR images easily and simply from multiple images with different exposures. |
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Inkscape Open source vector graphics editor similar to Illustrator. Uses the SVG file format. |
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Fresh Feed Fresh and light menubar feed reader. Download |
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Mixtab A vibrant, graphical RSS reader. Like Pulse but on your desktop. |
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NetNewsWire Lite Light RSS and Atom feed reader. Comaptible with Instapaper, Twitter, MarsEdit, etc. |
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Transmission The ultimate torrent downloader for Mac. |
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Prey Open source anti-theft solution. Tracks your stolen laptop’s position, photographs the thief, and much more. |
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Cyberduck Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Google Storage and Amazon S3 browser for Mac. |
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iAlertU Uses the MacBook’s Sudden Motion Sensor to trigger an alarm when your MacBook is touched or moved. |
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teleport Seamlessly control multiple Macs with a single keyboard and mouse. |
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f.lux Cross-platform app that automatically tweaks the colour of your screen to suit the time of day. |
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DiskWave Free utility to determine which files and folders consume the most disk space. |
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Mactracker Get detailed specifications of every Mac ever made. |
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Transmit Superb FTP client that also supports SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3 file transfers. |
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ClamXav A free virus scanner based on the ClamAV open source antivirus engine. |
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TextExpander The best solution for text substitution. Syncs with Dropbox if you have multiple copies. |
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Evernote Jot your ideas, memories and thoughts and bring them with you. |
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Wunderlist The desktop client for the one and only Wunderlist. |
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Anxiety Another great, super lightweight to-do list manager. Syncs with iCal and Mail. |
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Bean Free, easy to use word processor. Reads MS Word and OpenOffice documents. |
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WriteRoom Distraction-free, full screen writing environment. |
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TextWrangler Much better text editor than TextEdit. Supports syntax colouring and advance search functions. |
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Stuf The ultimate clipboard manager. Supports clipboard sharing over network. $24.99 |
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LibreOffice Alternative, free office suite. |
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Quicksilver Resurrected, Quicksiler is the best Mac launcher and time saver you’ll ever need. |
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Dropbox Sync and share files with other Dropbox users or mobile devices. |
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SugarSync Dropbox alternative that allows you to sync any folder. Provides a free 5 GB account upon subscription. |
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Do Something When System preference pane that allows the user to watch for certain events and invoke an automated response. |
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Notational Velocity Store notes, thoughts and data securely. Syncs with Dropbox and Simplenote. Open source. |
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Think Block out distractions with you’re trying to concentrate. |
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Desktop Curtain Classic Temporarily hide the clutter on your desktop. |
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Alfred Saves you time searching your desktop and the web. Launch your apps with shortcuts. |
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CloudApp Drop images, links, music, videos and files from your desktop to share them. |
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Keynote Create incredible presentations and slideshows with dazzling effects. |
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Parallels Desktop Easy to use virtualisation app. Allows you to run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously. $79.99 |
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VMware Fusion Another great virtualisation application. $79.99 |
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Virtualbox Open source, cross platform virtualisation software. Not as easy to use as Parallels or VMware but is free. |
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WineBottler Run Windows apps on OS X without installing Windows. |
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Microsoft Office for Mac Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel included in the Home & Student suite. $149.99 |
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Wineskin Make wrappers to run Windows software on Mac OS X. |
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Adium Customisable, themeable, multiprotocol instant messenger. |
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Facebox Pro Check Facebook updates and chate with friends directly from the menubar. |
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Twitter Follow your friends’ tweets and send out your blurts from the desktop. |
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Skype Essential application, especially useful for long-distance teleconferencing. |
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The Unarchiver Unarchiver works with just about any type of compressed file. |
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MenuMeters A complete set of CPU, memory, disk and network monitoring tools. |
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MacFUSE Enable third party file systems like NTFS. |
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Growl Better notifications for just about any system event. |
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Little Snitch Control and administer connectivity privileges for each of your applications. $29.95 |
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Caffeine Temporarily prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep or initiating the screensaver. |
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AppCleaner Completely removes all preference and system files when uninstalling apps. |
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OnyX Enables you to configure and tweak hidden parameters of OS X. |
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1Password Great password manager that automatically stores and retrieves online passwords. $39.99 |
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Burn A free and better solution to Mac OS X’s innate DVD recording feature. |
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Carbon Copy Cloner Easily create and backup bootable images of your hard drive in case it crashes. |
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Afloat Window management application that allows you to pin windows to the top. |
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Keyboard Cleaner Handy application that temporarily disables your keyboard and mouse, allowing you to wipe it clean. |
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BetterTouchTool Adds configurable gestures to your Magic Mouse and Magic TrackPad. |
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Secrets A database of hidden settings for Mac OS X. More user friendly than OnyX. |
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Lab Tick Control the brightness of your MacBook Pro’s backlit keyboard. |
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Hazel Create folder rules to automatically organise files and run tasks. $21.95 |
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Monolingual Removes unnecessary languages from your applications, saving disk space. |
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Drop Copy The easiest way to send files across your internet network. |
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Perian System preference pane application that enables QuickTime to play other video formats. |
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VLC Media Player The best cross-platform multimedia player. Ever. |
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MPlayerX Strong contender for VLC Player. Plays almost any media format, sleek user interface. |
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Handbrake The best open source, multiplatform, multitreaded video transcoder. |
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MetaX Meta-data tagger for MP4 files that automatically searches IMDB and tagChimp for movie credits. |
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Boxee Boxee is an alternative media center and allows you to watch TV shows and Netflix movies. |
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Subler Easy to use demuxer to quickly convert video files to MPEG4 format for playback on AppleTV. |
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Flip4Mac WMV Play Windows Media files (WMA and WMV) in QuickTime. |
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Fairmount Decrypt DVD content on-the-fly for archival. |
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Evom For those looking for a simple, one-click video converting solution. |
Disclaimer: All applications listed were thoroughly reviewed. MakeUseOf is not responsible for any damage and/or data loss
that might result from use of any of the above mentioned applications.