posted on Mac Beginners

If that is your train of thought, then i maty be able to help. The best thing i have found about Mac OSX is the freeware available for it - freeware that is of such great quality and diversity, you can get a piece of software for almost anything you can imagine you need for the mac and then some you would never think of. Ok lets start with the all important nitty gritty of replacements for microsoft office, as i don’t imagine you’ll be going out to purchase that straight away - or at all, try OpenOffice or NeoOffice for full ooffice suite replacement but if you are like me and just needed Word every now and again try AbiWord for your document needs, as it can open and save to .doc file extension. Another thing i feel i need to tell you is about system productivity and maintenance applications, first off you may hear of have heard about Quicksilver or Butler or maybe not - check them out they will make your use of OSX much quicker, easier and refreshing - my personal pick is butler, but why not try them both out and compare as there are a few others out there similar to these two. Secondly, maintenance - keep your mac upto scratch and in perfect running order, this is not the ordeal you had to go through to try to keep windows running smoothly, check out and install MainMenu - a simple one click autoomated maintenance application that sits in your menu bar. Other notable apps you will need are the likes of Adium for all your IM communication needs on AIM, MSN and Yahoo, with plenty more things to discover in freeware software i won’t spoil the experience for you of discovering cool OSX software, gadgets and tools i suggest you keep an eye on sites like Cool OSX Apps, FreeMacWare.com, Super OSX Menubar Items, iusethis and then you also have Versiontracker

As an example of what is available in freeware and which apps are most usefull that your mac cannot do without, my list is as follows - that is the list of freeware that is actually on my machine and which i use constantly.

IM Chat - Adium X, CD Media - LiquidCD, Email - Thunderbird, System-wide Productivity - Butler, Maintenance - MainMenu, Time and Date - JetClock, FTP - CyberDuck, Photo Gallery and Flickr - JetPhotoStudio, Screen Capture - SnapNDrag, Font Management - Linotype Font Explorer X, Disc Image Mounting - FlashMount

And i do have a few notable others on my machine, it is of great interest to me to see what is out there and test out anything that i may find usefull.