Save Your Money. Get Free Software For Your Mac

For as long as I can remember there has been free software for Mac users. Whether it’s a Microsoft Office wannabe or a simple Dashboard Widget, free software is everywhere.

If you’re a Mac user on a budget you can find big savings on good quality Mac utilities and applications. How long will free software be available for Mac users? Is the trend toward more or less commercial software?

I was browsing through MacUpdate today, looking for Friday Freebie™ bargains and noticed one thing right away. There is not as much free software for Macs as there used to be.

No, I didn’t do a scientific analysis, charting free software over the past five years. With the right monetary donation I’d be happy to include your name on my research.

This is more of a gut feel which may be skewed somewhat because software titles for the Mac have grown substantially in recent years. There may be more free software available, though it may be a smaller percentage of all software available.

I’m in charge of the pantry in our household so I tend to pay attention to anything that helps me organize my shopping.

Pantry does that. Think of it as inventory for your food. It’s free.

Every Mac user knows about QuickTime movies, and most Mac or PC users know of Windows Media Video, Flash video, and perhaps a few others. Amazingly, there are still twenty eleven other video playback utilities around, including DivX. It’s free.

We’re in the middle of Sports Season Heaven again, which will last from basketball to baseball to football to hockey and until this time next year. A free score keeping Widget is all you need, right? Try Sports Fan, sports fans.

Answer me this. Why is there no home run in soccer? They’re running, right?

I Love Photos. No, seriously. I do. Especially the thousands of photos I keep in iPhoto. Bored with iPhoto? Try I Love Photos. It tags photos via facial recognition. For free. Just like iPhoto.

Utilities that actually do something useful are more difficult to find these days, so try VoodooPad Lite. Lite seems to be the key buzzword when we’re describing free software, right?

VoodooPad Lite is the poor man’s version of VoodooPad which is a pad-like, notebook-like, place to keep notes, images, lists, etc. The free one is there to help you to decided to buy the one that isn’t free.

Speaking of notes, you might like to not spend money on Memoblock, a simple utility to store notes which you can transfer as RTF files. It’s Friday. It’s free.

Enough of the simple utilities. What about something with some meat on the ribs? Try Genious, the free version of Genious Pro (see the trend?).

This nifty utility is a must have for any man or woman who wonders why their children behave the way they do. Not, it has nothing to do with genealogy, but genes. As in DNA, protein sequence analysis, bioinformatics, and other complicated stuff. But it’s free.

If you like to think and want to see what thinking is like when it’s on a schedule and a list and you haven’t come to hate Java, then try Thinking Rock, a GTD app. Free again.

Got an uncontrollable hankering, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge? Dive into the innards of your Mac with Bwana, the “man” page reader for your Mac. See, OS X has all kinds of little manuals hidden away inside the Unix innards of your Mac.

Bwana brings ‘em out, displays them in English, and disappears when done. If only my mother-in-law were so thoughtful. Bwana is free.

Got a favorite free Mac utility you cannot live without? Share in the Comments section below.