#14. Growl Today’s great free application for Mac Os X is Growl.  Essentially, Growl is a notification service that runs quietly in the background and alerts you when specific events happen.  The messages can range from changing songs on iTunes to receiving new mail.  Other programs such as Adium integrate in with Growl to notify you [...]

#15. AppFresh So, now that you have downloaded apps 25-16, you’re going to need a way to keep these applications up to date.  To do this, you can launch the applications and check for updates on each one individually, or use AppFresh.  This application updates widgets, applications, preference panes and Apple updates.  It also integrates in nicely with your [...]

#16. Perian When it comes to watching videos on OS X, I believe that many users have multiple applications to watch them.  VLC is one of the most popular media players for Mac, second only to QuickTime.  Wouldn’t it be great to just enable QuickTime to support all the codecs that VLC supports (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, [...]

#17. Adium One of the best all-in-one messenger clients around.  Adium is a free chat client that has support for Windows Live Messenger (MSN), AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Jabber (XMPP), Google Talk, Bonjour, Apple .Mac, Lotus Sametime, Novell Groupwise, QQ, Gadu-Gadu, Live Journal talk, and MySpace IM. Overall, besides supporting so many different protocols, [...]

#18. Azureus Azureus is a great BitTorrent Client.  That does much more than download your favorite torrents.  In case you don’t know, BitTorrent is a p2p protocol which is widely used in the distrobution of software, movies, music, and pretty much anything else. More information on the BitTorrent Protocol can be found on wikipedia: BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer [...]

#19. Caffeine This is a small application, in both size and functionality, but I have found invaluable.  Using a MacBook Pro one of the things that bothers me is how often and how frequent the monitor dims and the computer goes to sleep.  However, sometimes, while not at the computer I want the computer to fall [...]

#20. VirtualBox VirtualBox is a OpenSource alternative to running Windows on your Mac. This isn’t BootCamp. No, this is similar to Parallels or VMware Fusion, without the price tag! Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT [...]

While watching the usual news channels it seems that 30 minutes can’t go by without the news anchor referring to the presidential election. It’s true with the election approaching upon us quickly it seems like a American can’t get enough coverage of it. What about people’s actual feelings on the matter. That [...]

#21. Handbrake When it comes to backing up your dvd collection so you can watch it on your Apple TV or iPhone, there isn’t a better free program than Handbrake.  The current version for Mac includes a lot of upgrades and is even faster than previous versions. Download now! From the developers site: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, [...]

#22. Last.fm Last.fm is one of those applications that once you use it, you really understand how cool it is.  It’s basically a great music station on your computer.  Gives you the ability to scrobble your tracks, share your music taste, listen to personlised radio streams, and discover new music and people.  By typing in a [...]