Mac Users Sound Off: High Hopes On The Low End.

We all like a good bargain, right? We’re Mac users. Generally, we pay more, expect more, and buy more. It’s a breath of fresh air when a great application for Mac OS X shows up as cheap. Or free.

The Mac OS X developer community is rocking along with a great list of applications. At the high end, there’s Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, and Apple.

On the free side there’s, well, there’s Apple with the iLife suite (not really “free” since you have to buy a Mac or OS X to get the applications) and a bunch of well crafted niche utility applications that make life easier.

Tera was kind enough to tell us what was on her Mac and Mac users were kind enough to share some of their favorite free and not-quite-free Mac applications.

She also took time to unload her list of high end applications. Both high end and low end garnered plenty of response from the Mac community. While few Mac users could (or did) complain about iTunes, the view of iPhoto was different.

“macaddict” wrote about his view of iPhoto and one of Tera’s favorites on the high end, iViewMedia.

"I stopped using iPhoto after my first few hundred pictures, because it is such a closed applciation. You are forced to use iPhoto to effectively get at your images, and the captions & keywords you might invest hours into creating are trapped in iPhoto’s proprietary database. I switched to iView Media Pro.”

Turns out it was a MUCH better managing program, but specific to the two problems I mentioned it (1) Managed your images files in place, meaning they are easily accessible via the FInder, organized however you wish.”

Of course, it’s the low end applications that keep taunting us. First, they’re free or inexpensive. Second, the fill niches not touched by the larger, more expensive, so-called “professional” applications.

For example, Mac user “cseanburns” gave us his favorite list of Mac applications (low end):

QuickSilver for launching apps, opening docs, pics, tunes, searching.  I love this app. 

MenuCalendarClock: it syncs with iCal, without having to open iCal, provides a little calender in the top right corner of my menu bar, plus shows the date.  It’s a perfect calender app. 

Fugu: I’m not a huge FTP/SFTP user, but I do dip on occasion (mostly when connecting to a friend’s computer via ssh or SFTP) and Fugu is free and easy to use and very solid and does both. 

Desktop Manager: being also a linux fan, I’ve grown used to having the ability of multiple desktops.  Desktop Manager, while not as advanced as Linux (mostly, no multiple desktop images), does this for me on my Mac. 

Books is a wonderful app for managing the collection of books I have.  There are other good library apps out there, but this one is free and easy to use and very adequate. 

Taco HTML Edit: this is great for me, since I’m just learning HTML.  It’s free and offers a built in real time preview of the HTML you’re writing. 

You get the idea, right? Share and share alike. Wait! There’s more.

Mac user “cnh” gave us a whole list of FREE or donationware applications.

Free or Donationware:

Now that’s sharing. Finally, Tera got racked hard by Mac user “jcap” who objected to the lack of links on some of the applications in her “What’s On Tera’s Mac” series.

“Tera, how about giving us links to this stuff on your lists. I can only wonder why you wouldn’t bother to include the link to find out more or download.”

Good point. I know some of our writers send in articles via email without links to applications. Sorry. It happens. We’ll work a little harder on that point. In the future (meaning; not today, of course). In the meantime, my favorite starting point for finding Mac applications is MacUpdate. Click Here to see the latest.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.