osx

Some will say they don’t like Macs but the ones who have tried just even once are hooked and can’t seem to live without a Mac running OSX. Mac lovers enjoy the cool and intuitive user interface, awesome design and a stable system but on the other hand most don’t see what is at the core of the Mac’s operating system. OSX is built based on a sturdy open source core of BSD UNIX.

There are lots of opensource apps downloadable from the web for free that you can use on OSX, heck, you can download an open source core of Mac OSX here and try rebuilding one if you have the time and geekiness to tinker with it.

Other than that here are some of the free and useful Mac OSX applications lying around:

  • For graphic designers there are the GIMP and the Seashore. Yes, Photoshop is the popular editing software but shelling out $1,000 is another thing. Gimp does almost all what Photoshop can do, and have lots of very useful installable plugins to suit your editing needs. Seashore on the other hand has a stripped down functionalities compared to GIMP but still have the common routines.
  • Playing video on the built-in Quicktime has some limits since the not every codec comes with it. Purchasing QuickTime Pro can give you the features but still you have to shell out some bucks, so here comes VLC. VLC player is a quick and light application that can play almost any video format. It’s light, it’s quick and easy to use for you to enjoy your favorite movies.
  • Needing the functionalities of the much popular Microsoft Office? Grab the OpenOffice instead, started by Sun, this open source project maintained by OpenOffice.org. You can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations even a database.
  • Safari is essentially one powerful browser under OSX but sometimes we need another one or two running side by side on the same machine. Firefox running on the Mac has the same look and feel with that Firefox running on a PC besides installing and using Firefox is a breeze.