Over at the Montreal Mac User Group, I get to do a presentation every month and somehow I’ve become the “software” guy among presenters and I gotta say I love me some good software. The OS is important, and certainly I’m glad I’m on Leopard and not on Vista, but the Mac shareware scene is incredibly good and I thought I’d do 2 posts outlining some of the best software I’ve found. First one is about freewares, next one will be about paid shareware.

ImageWell

If you have to often resize or convert images, ImageWell is a small freeware that will make your life much simpler. A great piece of software, it does exactly what it needs to do, it does it well and doesn’t get in the way. It also starts quickly and doesn’t take a lot of resources. There’s a paid update to it, but the base freeware does everything.

WriteRoom

Do you often have to write long text? If so, you might have my problem where I get distracted by a lot of things on my Mac. New emails come in all the time, RSS feeds are updated, iChat invitations, etc. There’s a lot going on at all time and this is where WriteRoom comes in. This is an extremely simple text editor that has a full screen mode that blocks out everything else. The new version is a paid shareware, but the old 1.0.4 is free. Given the nature of the application, I find that this version does what I need it to do.

Audacity

This one is pretty well known but I thought I’d include it here anyway. Audacity is cross platform audio editor that does a lot of what the bigger (and more expensive) softwares do. It works great on Mac and once you learn how it works, you can use it again on Windows or Linux if you ever need it. There’s a ton a plugins and filters, the audio editor works great and it supports a bunch of file formats.

Paparazzi!

This gem is one of my favorite shareware on Mac but it’ll be especially good if you design or work on websites for a living. Paparazzi! is a small freeware that takes a ’screenshot’ of a website as seen by Safari and saves it in a PNG image. You get the whole page, not just a screenful of it so it’s extremely useful. There’s also a little bookmarklet to make it even more useful. Make sure to drag this link to your link bar if you use the software, it’ll make your life even easier.

Caffeine

Caffeine is a small utility that is especially useful for those of us on laptops. What it does is that it adds a menulet (a little icon to the right of the menu bar) and when you click on it, your Mac will never go to sleep. Your screen won’t dim, it will just keep going until you run out of battery. I use it all the time because I hate it when the screen dims or worse still, goes blank. Small. Useful. Free. That’s good for me.

TextWrangler

This one’s a puzzle to me. First, if you’re a developer, you’ll like TextWrangler. It’s a free text editor from the makers of BBEdit. BBEdit is a great piece of software, but it’s expensive and for some reason I never got around to buying it. One thing that didn’t help was TextWrangler, a free software that does pretty much everything I need. I’ve since switched to TextMate, but there’s no question TextWrangler is quality software.

NeoOffice

OpenOffice is a well known, cross-platform MS Office replacement that works well. NeoOffice is based on Open Office but is done for Mac users. It looks like a Mac application and acts (mostly) like one. With Microsoft Office 2008 getting very mixed reviews, this can be a great alternative if you’re on a budget.