Got your first Mac for Christmas, Now what? Free Software Downloads…

I live my life strewn across two computing platforms. By day I live in the Windows world (happily I might add) and usually at night I am hanging out on one of my Macs. So that leaves me with a unique perspective to share with you. I know what my commonly used and favorite applications and what their counterparts would be for your new Mac. I also know of a few unique to Mac applications that you might just fall in love with. If Santa Claus left a shiny new Apple computer under your tree, read on:

Now your Mac came with iLife, and the applications are really cool. iPhoto is great, Garageband is loads of fun and you will get a lot of mileage out of iMovie but there is more free software than what came from Apple. One quick tip before we get there is that if you DO use iMovie a lot, you will find that many people actually prefer the old version of iMovie, HD 6. You can get the old version for free from Apple to test it out for yourself.

So while we are on the multimedia topic. As good as GarageBand is, it’s not a Swiss Army audio editor. The odds are after you deck out your new computer with ridiculously expensive extras from the Cash Incinerator, I mean Apple Store, you won’t have the money to pick up an expensive audio editor, so check out Audacity. Audacity is a great, simple Audio tool available for Mac, PC and Linux. For all your quick conversion and editing needs, it can’t be beat. Download Audacity here.

Now you probably either already had, or got lucky enough to get a shiny iPod with your Mac. But you don’t want to buy all of your movies on iTunes do you? I mean you already have plenty of DVDs that you might want to rip on there. Download Handbrake and you can rip DVDs to any format you could possibly want.

Now that you are creating all of this cool media on your computer, you might just find you need it somewhere else. There’s one problem, you don’t want to blow $100 a year for Mobile.me. Let’s go somewhere you might never expect…MICROSOFT! Microsoft Live Mesh is a fantastic tool for remote file syncing. You can set the folders you want synced and then have access to those files from the web. It has a great feature set for Mac, PC and Windows Mobile. Learn more and sign up here.

Now iChat is cool, but not everyone is on AOL. Get in touch with all of our Microsoft Messenger buddies with Microsoft Messenger for Mac. What’s that? You have friends on every conceivable service? Download Adium, it supports chatting on every protocol you can imagine. Except IRC…..get your IRC on with Colloquy.

Now that we are in the old school world of IRC, you might also be one of those geeks that needs to FTP stuff from time to time. You just can’t beat Cyberduck for FTP transfer on a Mac.

Now as much as you love iPhoto, you want to share your photos with your friends on Flickr right? Get Flickr’s Uploadr tool and transfer your files to the service quick and painlessly.

Are you using your GPS to Geotag those photos? Run them through GPSPhotoLinker first to get your GPS data into the meta-data before you upload lickety split.

Now this one I don’t really have a metaphor for, but I can tell you that I would DIE if I couldn’t use this application anymore. One thing that Macs just aren’t quite as good at is finding your applications. Sure spotlight is an awesome way to locate your files and stuff, but it’s not the most intuitive way to load Photoshop. You don’t want every application on your Dock. What if you just hit a key, started typing the name till you saw the icon and hit enter. BAM! Enter Quicksilver. This program may take some getting used to for some, but it’s something I just couldn’t live without these days.

One last thing to grab. You will find the Mac world is quite different from Windows when it comes to video formats, and Windows Media video is all OVER the web. Download VLC to get all of your video playing smoothly on your Mac.

Last but not least, Safari? No thanks, download Firefox. While you are at it, if you get disenchanted with Mail.app, Thunderbird is a kick ass mail client by the folks at Mozilla.

Now there are plenty more awesome free applications and lots of them are great. I wanted to list the cool ones that I use daily. Enjoy!

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