LetsMoveToTheMoon

God, Technology, and Things That Make Us Want to Move to the Moon

5 Free, Semi-Obscure Mac Applications

May 27, 2010

I really enjoy discovering a good, free, and not-that-popular application. Really, who doesn’t like finding a shiny new application that does something just a little bit better than the one you’ve been using? Well, here’s a list of five of my favorite semi-obscure Mac apps. Feel free to add yours to the comments!

1. Skim

Skim is a PDF viewer, much like Apple’s built-in Preview or Adobe’s Acrobat, but with a much more robust set of features. I’ve found that Skim is particularly useful for annotating documents. It provides a bunch of methods to mark up a document, and its notes sidebar allows for easy navigation between annotations. Besides those annotation abilities, Skim has a ton of minor features that make it a great application for reading short or long documents. And in case you were wondering, it is in fact pretty fast, so you don’t have to worry about that in wondering if you can replace Preview with it.

2. Smultron

If I hadn’t purchased Espresso (which you should really do), I would do all of my coding in Smultron. It’s a wonderfully simple text editor that allows for all sorts of coding and has lots of features packaged neatly in a concise package. It really does a great job. Unfortunately, the developer, Peter Borg, has decided to discontinue his work on the project, but hopefully it will continue to be updated by others.

3. OmmWriter

I’m certainly pushing the boundaries of “semi-obscure” with some of these, but that’s alright. OmmWriter has indeed been getting a good deal of coverage in recent months, but I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not too popular to include on this list. OmmWriter oozes simplicity; it’s a text editor of a different sort than Smultron—it’s all about writing, writing, writing and nothing else. By providing elegant backgrounds, full-screen distraction prevention, and soothing music, OmmWriter is begging you to write. If you find yourself at all struggling to get work done, go OmmWriter. You’ll have to do a little post-work in Word or Pages to format your document, but it’ll still save you time in the end.

4. MacSword

It’s sorta a cop-out for me to write about MacSword (official site) again, but I think it’s a great application…and it was recently updated significantly to look and feel much more like more expensive Bible software. Its new look is pretty darn good, and although it’s still a far cry from the big guys, its price is a bit less (if you’re a fan of understatements, you would have liked that one).

5. FreeMind

FreeMind, although written in Java and therefore cross-platform, is a great mind-mapping application for Mac. It’s got way too many features, but you definitely won’t be able to argue that it’s not able to do something. Its availability as a cross-platform application is definitely an advantage, and I can personally attest to its usefulness in working on projects.

Honorable Mentions: Fluid (site-specific browser creating application, mentioned before on LMTTM; official site) and Jalbum (web photo gallery production)

Give these applications a shot, and be sure to list your favorite little-known applications in the comments!