Although Apple products and services are associated with high flying and stylish executives who use iPhone apps and other paid Macintosh and iPhone software to achieve the IT goals there is another way to use Mac OSX applications cheaply, even for free.
I am a long time Linux / Unix user and have my own favourite free and open source tools that I have slowly learned about over the years. Each one of the tools I have selected is free to use in the availability of code and changing of the program sense , it also does not cost any thing to download and is free of charge.
Most authors and websites will not even require registration or membership of a website, however a limited number might. I have found the quality and reliability of free software especially on the Macintosh to be quite high and for my purpose it replaces the use of paid office and productivity software and suits my pocket and lifestyle / beliefs. Below I have listed some of the best and most useful free software I have come accross for the Macintosh in the hope that they might be useful to you as well.
1) Filezilla
An FTP client that is kept updated and improved, an open source standard project to which another aspire. Filezilla is available on a wide variety of platforms including Windows,Macintosh,Linux and others. It is easy to use and supports mean methods of connection including classic FTP protocol and newer more advanced SFTP, SCP , SSH protocol allowing for use with modern secure implementations and classical basic home private internal FTP resources that do not need advanced security.
2) GIMP
My chosen graphics program across many platforms and years is GIMP ! This cheekily titled application stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program, but the short name GIMP has caught on quite globally. It has advanced layer features and is the preferred open source graphics application of the masses. It is conceptually a little different to programs such as Adobe Photo Shop and other paid Macintosh graphical applications, and users may get confused. My advice is to draw on wealth of YouTube videos and other educational material on the internet to get to grips with GIMP and enjoy the advanced graphic capabilities of this great application.
3) VLC Media Player
I like VLC because it doesn't require any of the usual external codecs and host of other add on programs or codec packs to work. Not only is it simple and easy to use it has some advanced features that you might not even be aware of. It supports a really wide variety and depth of audio and video formats from H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac and more. Sources can include files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD,DivX), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols. Not even the built in Macintosh quick time player in this friendly.
4) Virtual Box
Sun Inc's free open source desktop virtualisation tool is my chosen alternative to the paid VMWare Fusion product. Although I miss out of the integration benefits of running XP / Vista in parallel on my desktop with Mac OSX at a cost, I do gain the ability to run Windows full screen with acceptable performance on my Macintosh using free open source software with no additional costs as I already have a Windows license.
