Free Software for the Mac

Monday, September 24th, 2007 | Free Stuff, Reviews, Software

MacLibre icon.png We all like free stuff. I know I do. When it comes to free software, the Windows world is known to have plenty available. But what about the Mac side of the world? Are there any free applications for the Mac? And the answer is yes. There are free applications for the Mac. Now, when I say “free,” I mean legally free. I’m not talking about any of the pirated stuff.

Now that we established the fact that there is free software for the Mac, the next step is to find it. There are several ways of doing that. You can search Google, visit Apple.com and browse around in the OS X section, or you can visit other freeware directory sites. But there is one other way. And this way is MacLibre.

I’ve found this to be the easiest way to find, download and install free Mac software. MacLibre is a small program that aggregates freeware applications for Mac and allows you to download and install these applications from one simple user interface.

MacLibre organizes these applications into five categories.

Create - image editing and authoring and audio editing programs
Internet - web browsers, instant messengers, email and RSS
Multimedia - video and audio players and rippers
Office - productivity software such as word processors and spreadsheets
Utilities - desktop management, anti-virus scanning and terminal enhancing applications

Some of the titles that you will find in MacLibre are:

Audacity - software for recording and editing sounds
Gimp - application similar to Photoshop for editing and authoring images
Adium - an instant message client that supports protocols such as MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, AIM and others
Cyberduck - FTP and SFTP client
Firefox - open source web browser
Thuderbird - open source email application
Vienna - a free application for reading RSS feeds
MPlayer - a media player that plays a variety of DivX and other codecs
NeoOffice - an open source office application that includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, vector drawing and database applications
ClamXav - an antivirus scanner
VirtualDesktop - a desktop manager for Mac

These and other applications are available for download and installation through MacLibre. To begin enjoying these free programs all you need to do is install MacLibre.

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