There’s never been a better time to be productive on a Mac and on a budget at the same time.
Macs are less expensive than comparable Dell PCs running Windows. Great Mac applications and utilities are free.
Assume you’re not made of money but quality of your digital life is important to you. What do you buy?
Of course, you’ll buy a Mac. Why? The total cost of ownership is less than a comparably priced PC with Windows.
That’s a start. If money is an object then you’re also careful about what Mac applications and utilities you use.
Quality. Service. Price. It used to be that you could only pick any two of the three. I get all three on my Mac.
Go down the list of what’s on your Mac already that’s free. Firefox? Sure, it’s on my Mac and I use it and I love the extensions.
Firefox’s bag of tricks doesn’t cost a nickel. Neither does the email companion Thunderbird. Full featured, good quality, low price.
Those are basics, but there are others. Replacing the expensive Microsoft Office is easy with NeoOffice. Drag and drop and cheap, as in beer.
Collecting free utilities and applications for my Mac is such fun that I do a Top 10 Free Software For Mac OS X list.
Just recently I’ve added a few other tools to my Mac.
The kind that don’t cost a dime. They cost exactly 10-cents less.
For example, to make Safari more competitive with Firefox, I added David Watanabe’s Inquisitor. Now your Safari Google searches can be done before you’ve started the search.
Mac the Ripper is a great way to copy your movie DVDs to your Mac. Netflix users probably love Mac the Ripper.
I’ve added MAMP as a permanent utility, rather a set of utilities, to my Mac. What a great way to learn about web tools. The cost? Zilch. So is the BitRock MAMPstack, but it’s a bit more geeky.
For the monetarily graphically challenged, ImageWell remains free but has a new version out. Ditto with ImageTricks.
I’ll take some heat for this, but I’m still not in love with QuickSilver as a great alternative to DragThing. It’s too much of a paradigm shift for me. It is cool and it does work.
How do you beat the price tag on PTHpasteboard? It’s a multi-level clipboard with a single level price. Free.
I’ve got a new baby that requires my time so I make better use of time with Alarm Clock. A little rock and roll is a good diversion from mommyhood.
One of our all time favorite Mac utilities, SuperDuper! is not free, unless all you’re doing is cloning your Mac to another hard drive. If that’s what you need, SD is also free.
Most of these are utilities I’ve added recently to my Mac. What have you added to yours? Make it a quality Mac utility, make it free, and share it with other Mac360 readers.
