Web Browsing

Mozilla Firefox

The premier free, open-source browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's best browser. 
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Google Chrome

The premier free browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's fastest browser. 
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Opera Browser

The beautifull free browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's stable browser. 
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Video Player, Torrents, Podcasting

Miro

Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than quicktime). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others. 
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IM - Instant Messaging

Adium

Connect to multiple IM accounts simultaneously in a single app, including: AOL IM, MSN, and Jabber. Beautiful, themable interface.
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Video Converter, iPhone Converter

Miro Video Converter

Convert any type of video to mp4 or theora. Convert any video for use with iPhone, iPod, Android, etc. Very clean, easy to use interface.
Download Page | Mac App Store (free)

Telephone

Telephone

A great "SIP" client. Call regular phones from your Mac. 100% free and open source. 
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Financial Transactions

Bitcoin

A "peer-to-peer" digital currency so you can buy things without paying transaction fees.
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Application Launching

Quicksilver

Quicksilver lets you start applications (and do just about everything) with a few quick taps of your fingers. Warning: start using Quicksilver and you won't be able to imagine using a Mac without it. 
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Email

Mozilla Thunderbird

Powerful spam filtering, solid interface, and all the features you need. 
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Utilities

The Unarchiver

Uncompress RAR, 7zip, tar, and bz2 files on your Mac. Many new Mac users will be puzzled the first time they download a RAR file. Do them a favor and download UnRarX for them! 
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DVD Ripping

Handbrake

DVD ripper and MPEG-4 / H.264 encoding. Very simple to use. 
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RSS

Vienna

Very nice, native RSS client.
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RSSOwl

Solid cross-platform RSS client.
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Peer-to-Peer Filesharing

Cabos

A simple, easy to use filesharing program. Gnutella network. 
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SolarSeek

Soulseek filesharing for Mac, in a simple, solid client. 
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Transmission

Very nice torrent downloader. 
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Running Windows Software on Macs

Q Emulator

Run Windows programs on your Intel Mac at near native speed. Works on G4 / G5 Macs too, but much slower. 
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Podcasting

Juice

Solid podcasting client. 
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Video Playback

VLC

Plays more video files than most players: Quicktime, AVI, DIVX, OGG, and more. Pretty good interface. 
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MPlayer

The interface and buttons are not as nice or as Mac-like in feel, but it may play even more video files than VLC. 
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Perian

A plugin that allows quicktime to play additional video formats. (Included in Democracy Player.) 
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iPod Ripping

iPodDisk

Copy music off your iPod in the finder, like a regular disk drive. 
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CD / DVD Burning

Burn

CD and DVD Burner. Burn any video to a disc that plays in your DVD player! 
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Privacy

Vidalia

This TOR frontend keeps you anonymous on the web using military-grade techniques. For use with Firefox see: TorButton. 
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Word Processing / Office Suites

Bean

Very fast and easy to use word processor. Live word count, autosaving, more. 
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LibreOffice

Big, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. Compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Friends don't let friends pay for Microsoft Office. 
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AbiWord

A word processor. Leaner and quicker than OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft Word documents and OpenDocument Format. 
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Wifi Scanning

KisMac

The best wireless scanner for Mac. Find wireless access when you're on the go.
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Sound Recording

Audacity

Simple sound recording tool. 
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Graphics, Photo, Publishing

Seashore

Based on Gimp, but doesn't require X11. 
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Formulate Pro

An easy way to fill-out (or sign) PDFs that Preview can't edit. 
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Xee

Fast image viewer and image browser. 
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Gimp.app

Photo editing application that rivals Photoshop in features (requires X11).
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Inkscape

Vector graphics application (requires X11). 
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Scribus

Desktop publishing. Complicated install, but a nice app. 
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FTP / SFTP

Cyberduck

Very good all-around ftp program. 
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OneButton FTP

Simple, fast FTP, with a focus on "advanced queuing". 
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Fugu

Not as polished as Cyberduck (and only for SFTP) but has a side by side interface showing your files and the remote files. 
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HTML / Text Editing

Blue Griffon

Visual tool for making websites (WYSIWYG html editor), comparable to Dreamweaver. 
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IRC

Colloquy

Great IRC client. 
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KVIrc

A cross-platform IRC client that's free and open source. 
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Web Development

WaveMaker

A visual development tool for building great-looking web and cloud applications. 
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