One of the best parts of owning a Mac is the cool free apps that you get to download! Just like the iPhone, there’s an app for your every need, and they exceed expectations most of the time. I will go over free basic apps as well, for those with a new setup. A lot of the apps that will be showcased are open source, which basically means that you can view it’s source code and contribute to the project.

1. Skype

Skype lets you make voice calls, as well as video conferencing online to anyone else with this free app installed. You can also make conference calls effortlessly, as well as participate in text chats and file transfers. With Skype To Go, you can make calls from your mobile phone and from your computer, you can dial international landlines and to cell phones with prepaid minutes.

2. Anxiety

This great little app is a to-do list manager. It’s easy to use, out of the way, and can be integrated with iCal and Mail. Melting into your desktop – and out of your way, you can effortlessly add new tasks and task sheets, to keep areas of your life separate with multiple lists.

3. Cyberduck

Cyberduck is a “FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs and Amazon S3″ browser for your mac. With an easy to use interface, super cool features and seamless integration with external text editors, this app is not one to miss!

4. GIMP

GIMP is an image editor (raster), which quite possibly to many is a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. It has tons of cool features, and is a great free alternative to other software.

5. Monolingual

Monolingual is a utility that removes unwanted languages from OS X, and in doing to can recover disk space you never knew you had. By removing those unwanted languages, you can seriously save sever hundred mbs of space.

6. Firefox

Firefox is a leading open source web browser, with a tons of skins and expansions. This modern browser has features like Tabs, CSS3/HTML5 support, Private Browsing, an Awesome Bar, easy bookmarking and a built in Feed Reader.

7. TextWrangler

TextWrangler is a powerful text editor that makes editing files a breeze with remote FTP support, Keychain support, syntax coloring, auto indenting, built-in text transformations and so much more.

8. VLC

VLC is an application that lets you view any type of video file without hassle. Features like handling subtitles, DVDs, CDs, web streams, VLC is a powerful media player. If you are a Mac Developer, the people behind VLC are looking for more developers for the Mac OS X port of VLC.

9. Growl

Growl is a notification system for Mac that lets supported applications send you notices in an unobtrusive way. With customizable skins, and add-ons for even more growl-goodness, you control all aspects of the notifications that get sent your way.

10. Transmission

Transmission is an open source, non-commerical BitTorrent client that is easy to use and comes with tons of cool features, like; having a small footprint, seamless integration, uses Growl Notifications and is quite powerful.

11. ClamXAV

Macs are not prone to getting infected with viruses, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t transmit them to a machine that can be. ClamXAV is a free virus scanner that checks for files that can infect other operating systems as well.

12. Google Notifier

Google Notifier is an application that lets you check your email and calendar events without even visiting a browser. Much like Growl, but for Gmail and Google Calendar.

13. Adium

Adium is a small, yet powerful Instant Messaging client that lets you connect to multiple networks, such as AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, and Facebook Chat – just to name a few. It also has customizable ‘Xtras’, file transfers, and an events system.

14. Thunderbird

Thunderbird is another one of Mozilla’s creations; a messaging application that enhances your email experience. Features tabs, search, archives and add-on support. Its open source and totally secure and not to mention, easy to use.

15. Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a fully featured yet functional web browser. With themes and extensions, you can totally transform it to make it your own. Being amazingly fast, plus with a built in Google Search, Chrome is the way to go.

16. Quinn

Quinn is a Tetris mock for Mac! Have fun playing this addicting game on your local network, or with the globe against the highscore database.

17. Inkscape

Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor, similar to Illustrator and Corel Draw that supports many advanced features. Not only is Inkscape open source, but there is a great community behind it that creates articles, tutorials and maintains a gallery for users.

18. AppCleaner

AppCleaner makes it easier to uninstall unwanted apps by removing all small, yet unnecessary files that an application dumps on your system – once you decided it’s time to remove the app. And all it takes is moving the app’s icon to the trash!

19. Seashore

Seashore is a small lightweight graphics editor for Mac OS X; it features gradients, anti-aliasing, textures, layers and alpha channel editing. Seashore is based off of GIMP, yet remains different in many ways.

20. Caffeine

Caffeine is a small, out of the way application that gives you the option of preventing your Mac from going to sleep. Residing in the menu bar – caffeine is always there when you need it.

21. Paparazzi

Paparazzi is a small utility that allows you to generate full-page screenshots of a certain webpage. This app can prove to be very useful for web designers in need of large screenshots.

22. Burn

Burn offers amazingly simple yet powerful disk burning for your Mac. Features include automatic converting, interactive menu creation, custom icons and file permissions.

23. OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a free productivity suite that gives you abilities like word processing, creating spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more!

24. Miro

Miro is an open-source, non profit video player that downloads torrents and podcasts, and plays videos. Designed with HD in mind, Miro is a better way to watch your videos.

25. AppFresh

Now that you’ve downloaded all of these cool apps, AppFresh helps you keep track of updates for all of your applications! osx.iusethis.com functionality as well.

Anything missed? Feel free to share via comments. Which one is your favorite free mac app?

There are many reasons why working on Linux has advantages, but for web developers, it should be a no-brainer, but just in case you really need reasons here are just a few of the main ones.
The main feature Linux boasts that makes it better suited for web development over any other Operating System is the fact your local apache server has the same setup as your live hosting. Even without this, the benefits of using Linux over Windows or Mac OS are massive. I’ll go through the main advantages with you in this article.

Spending less time worrying about problems

As Web Developers spend a lot of time on the Internet, whether its checking emails, working on twitter or downloading the latest patches for software you use. It’s nice to know your pc, and all the important work on it is save. When using Windows and even a Mac to an extent you can install Antivirus, anti-spyware and anti adware on your computer to have any chance of making sure its safe from the threats that come with using the internet these days. And even then, that is a lot of trust to be putting in the hands of a 3rd party company.

A real life, proper server to test on

When working on a site, many web developers work on a local development server before transferring it over to their live site. This enables them to test everything before it goes live. Any computer with a browser can view locally stored html files, although if you work with php in any form, you’ll need a server with php supported (guess what you can do that locally on the Linux box as well!).

Both Windows and Mac can be setup to run as a local server, although these have totally different setups from over 70% of all online servers, which run on Linux Machines.

When running Linux on your PC you can have a fully functioning web server on your computer with the exact same setup as your live site.
How to install Lamp on Ubuntu

Save Money

You don’t need to spend big bucks to have the latest and best Linux running on your computer. Licencing is non-existent as Linux is Open Source.You’ll be able to easily find a linux distro that will run on nearly any PC made within the last 10 years, possibly more if you really want to.

Instead of spending money on the applications you use, you can get something suitable for free, which can be installed in minutes without any hassle once you get past the relatively easy learning curve. And as Linux is open source it means that anyone who is interested can help out with the code, just like what happens with WordPress!

It’s Yours: Web Developers love Open Source Software

It’s a fact that a majority of our community love Open Source software. Most of US believe that software should not be under proprietary license. So why use a software which is not open source. Linux is open source and you are free to do anything with the code. Change it, rip it, sell it whatever you want to do with it. Just keep it open source. :)

5 great free Linux Web Development Applications

Gedit

Comes as default with most Linux distributions, is a great simple no frills text editor which its quite popular for coding. Has syntax and tab support.
jEdit

Another text editor, though more advanced. This truly is a programmers text editors.
KompoZer

Kompozer is a great free wysiwyg web editor. Another similar software is Amaya which is a great free Web editor started by the WC3.

Aptana

Offers a full web development environment producing html, css and JavaScript.

Despite what some people believe browsing on the web using Linux is the exact same (apart from being allot safer). You can use all the big browsers apart from Safari, and I’ll also point out that all the addons work as they should no matter what Operating system you are running.

Lamp (Linux, Apache, MySql & PHP )

One I’ve already mentioned: The package LAMP, an anagram of Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP provides a fully working server which is the same package 90% of all websites run on. Great for offline development too!

Note: I haven’t linked to the above few programmes a I recommend you download them with your system installer.

For a great sized list showing some brilliant Linux Applications head over to Top 100 OpenSource Applications

Designing on Linux

Designing on Linux is also a lot better than what people seem to think. By default many distributions include the programme Gimp, which although not exactly as detailed as Photoshop, it defiantly does pack a punch.

Other programmes that are great for designing are:

Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

OpenOffice Draw
From the OpenOffice package offers the ability to draw anything from a quick simple design to detailed complex designs

It’s also possible if you don’t want to use any of the great Linux alternatives  to get Photoshop working on Linux using Wine.

Photoshop CS2 on Linux with Wine

And if there is a Windows programme that you can find for Linux then you can more than likely get it installed on Linux using Wine (Free) or Crossover (from €37.00 ) though crossover is more aimed at playing Windows games on Linux.

As an alternative if you do have a reasonably fast PC with sufficient ram you could use a virtual machine  (VIRTUAL BOX) and have a couple of flavours of Windows on it (licensing is the issue here, but you are just testing) and then check if IE7 and 8 (and IE6 for about 20% of the web users) can access your site. More importantly you can then see how badly these will mangle your code and what fixes you have to make.

Linux is suitable for everyone

A common misconception is that you need to be a big tech person or geek to use Linux, although this is true with some distributions such as Arch Linux, with the dawn of new distro’s like Ubuntu, you can have a fully working Computer with a few clicks and 15 – 20 mins of your time.

You can even use Wubi: the Ubuntu installer to install Ubuntu with a single click from Windows.

Helpful Readings:

• Offical Ubuntu Installation Guide
• Dual Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
• Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide: What to do and try after installing Lucid Lynx!
• Installing Apps in Ubuntu