Although there is the huge amount of free softwares available online but open-source softwares have numerous advantages, apart from their price (i.e. free), they provide you the right to modify and redistribute the software with modifications. The right to modify is important, it enables you to change the software the way you like, also there are plenty of softwares developed but never updated, in this case if you have the right to modify then they can be very handy for needy people as anybody can update it. So looking at their importance, in this article we will feature 50 essential “open-source” applications for your Mac; those which will help in performing your daily life task easily.
1. Firefox
Each and every computer user knows about Firefox which is the most used open source web browser having huge amount of extensions and add-ons, there is no need of detailed description for Firefox.
2. Camino.
Camino is another open-source web browser which ensures to provide the best possible browsing experience for Mac OS.
3. OmniWeb
OmniWeb is an other open source browser for Mac OS providing very powerful interface to enhance your browsing experience in as many ways as possible like built-in web shortcuts and unique drag-and-drop tabbed windows.
4. Thunderbird
Thunderbird glorifies your emailing experience with high level of security and privacy.
5. OpenProj
OpenProj is an open source project management solution which can be used in replacement of Microsoft Project.
6. Adium
Adium is specially developed for people who love instant messaging. It supports all major chatting platform including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Gmail.
7. NeoOffice
NeoOffice is a complete set of office applications mainly including word processing, presentation, drawing and spreadsheet for Mac OS X. It can import, edit and exchange files with other office programs like MS Office.
8. OpenOffice
OpenOffice is an open source office software for Mac OS X offering word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and much more.
9. Disk Inventory X
Disk Inventory X is a disk usage ability which shows the sizes of files and folders in a graphical way.
10 jEdit
jEdit is an open source and extensively used text editor for programmers for Mac OS X, which is written in Java.
11. Celestia
Celestia provides you a great experience of exploring the universe in three dimensions.
12. Stellarium
Stellarium is a free planetarium which shows realistic sky in 3D, exactly same what you see with your eye or any telescope.
13. Jomic
Jomic is an open source application distributed under GPL, which is a strong comic book viewer, stored in PDF, CBZ or CBR. It support various image format like JGP and PNG, it also features two page mode for better reading experience.
14. Stepmania
Stepmania is a rhythm game and dance revolution clone which can be connected to external dance pads.
15. Cocoalicious
Cocoalicious is an excellent open source del.icio.us client for Mac OS X, by using which you can manage your del.icio.us bookmarks from desktop.
16. Plex Media Center
This application reduces the gap between you Home Theater and Mac using a very awesome user interface which links you to your media files. By using Plex you can play diverse audio and video media formats and you can also stream online media.
17. Seashore
Seashore is an open source image editor of Mac OS which features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for text as well as brushes. It also supports multiple layering and alpha channeling.
18. SMARTReporter
SMARTReporter reports about any hard disk failure before it actually happens. It will use Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology to do so; one warning will be enough for you to think about backing up data right then.
19. RSSOwl
RSSOwl is an easy to use and extremely flexible RSS, RDF and Atom news feed reader for Mac OS X.
20. Pixen
Pixen is an advance graphic editor specially designed to facilitate pixel-artists.
21. FreeWRL/FreeX3D
FreeWRL is an open source VRML/X3D browser which fulfils your OS X 3D graphics needs.
22. Scaletron!
Scaletron is an electronic scaling calculator specially designed for graphic and web designers to calculate enlargements and reductions of artwork.
23. ffmpegX
ffmpegX is an open source and powerful Video Transcoder for Mac OS X, which supports huge number of formats for encoding like DVD, SVCD, VOB and more.
24. OpenSong
OpenSong is an open source application developed to manage lyrics, chords, lead sheets, computer projection of your music.
25. iStumbler
You can use iStumbler on your Mac to discover WiFi routers, Bluetooth devices, Airport networks and more.
26. BibDesk
BibDesk is an open source bibliography manager for Mac, which will keep track of your bibliographic information and the associated files or web links.
27. GnuCash
GnuCash is easy to use and free financial accounting software for your personal or small-business use. It includes all major features which any accounting software should have.
28. SimplyBurns
SimplyBurns is an open source and simple CD / DVD burner for Mac OS X.
29. Juice
Juice is developed for a person who wants to listen online audio programs but cannot, due to, whatever may the reason be. Juice allows you to capture and listen to missed podcasts anytime in future.
30.HandBrake
HandBrake is a multi platform and multi threaded video transcoder specially designed of Mac OS X providing excellent output quality.
31. Inkscape
Inkscape is an awesome replacement of Adobe Illustrator which is a vector graphic editor. Features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones and other important features.
32. Cyberduck
Want to browse FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs and Amazon S3? Try Cyberduck which is a splendid open source tool for browsing.
33. Gallery
Gallery is a web-based photo album organizer, helping you to blend photo management smoothly into your own online projects. It is very easy to install and use, it includes resizing, rotating, automatic thumbnails and more.
34. Komodoedit
Komodo Edit is an open source language editor that will help you in writing codes easily. It is a multi-language editor supporting Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, Ruby and JavaScript. It writes codes faster because of its auto-complete feature, it also provides support for adding third-party libraries.
35. JUnit
JUnit is an extremely useful framework for writing and running automated Java testing.
36. Jext
Jext is an awesome open source code editor written in JAVA. Apart from JAVA, it can edit many other types of source codes for example, source code of XHTML, JSP, PHP, Python Ruby etc.
37. Scintilla
Editing and debugging source codes are basic and fundamental need of any developer, “Scintilla” can help them in doing so. It is a free source code editing application which includes important features like error indicators, syntax styling, code completion and call tips.
38. FullSync
FullSync is n extremely expandable and customizable file synchronization and backup tool, especially made for developers but its basic functionality is very simple which can be used by everyone.
39. Angry IP Scanner
Scanning IP is very crucial for network administrators and other enterprises like banks and government agencies. For this purpose Angry IP Scanner is best choice as it is open-source and cross-platform network scanner specially deigned to scan IP addresses and ports in a very simple and fast way.
40. MUTE
Mute is a peer-to-peer file sharing network that enables us to search and download easily with privacy. It is a fast and native application with no java or python.
41. Apcupsd UPS control software
Apcupsd is software for monitoring power management and controlling most of the APC UPSes. During an event of power failure, this program will inform the user about power failure; hence giving a warning to save important data before system gets shutdown.
42. TV-Browser
TV-Browser is a digital and java-based TV guide which collects daily TV programs from internet and arranges them in a form of a TV guide. It supports a huge amount of skins and plugins, making customization comfortable. Its only purpose is no make TV guides; you cannot watch TV using TV-Browser.
43. MacLibre
MacLibre provides an excellent collection of free software for Mac OS X from categories of Internet, multimedia, Office and other utilities.
44. Moodle
Moodle is an education course management system which can be used by educators to make informative online learning websites.
45. Synergy
Synergy enables you to share a single mouse or keyboard between multiple computers having different operating systems, without any special hardware.
46. Blender
Blender is very handy 3D content creation suite, having all major features required in this kind of software including very sleek interface, awesome animation, UV unwrapping, real-time 3D game creation, Imaging and composing, shading, rendering and modeling.
47. Skim
Skim is a powerful PDF reader and note-taker for OS X, which can be used as an alternative of Adobe Acrobat Reader.
48. AppleJack
AppleJack is an effective troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X which runs in single user mode and it is very user-friendly and easy to use. With this you can troubleshoot your computer even without GUI.
49. PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a Linux New Media Award winning and powerful object-relational database system.
50. MAMP
MAMP is an easy to use program which is used to start and stop the servers. It is a powerful completion of Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X, it is very easy to remove as it do not modify any part of normal Mac OS X.
51. NetBeans
NetBeans is a free and open source program which provides, software developers, an integrated development environment. You will get every needed tool to create website, applications, professional desktop, it also supports C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby.
52. WineHQ
Windows OS has much bigger library of applications than Mac OS, so if you want to run any Windows applications on your Mac OS X then WineHQ can help you in doing so with ease and flexibility.
In the end we would like to hear your recommendations and suggestions about open-source applications. 🙂
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