Looking to beef up your Mac with a few great—and free—apps that cover a whole lot of your productivity and computing needs? Our annual Lifehacker Pack for Mac rounds up the best free downloads for OS X.


Productivity

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Quicksilver: Quicksilver is an application launcher and then some, capable of browsing your file system, firing off quick emails, flipping through your iTunes library, and much, much more. It can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so rather than go into too much detail here, check out our beginner guide, settings tweaks, and video demonstrations. [Download]



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Bean: You're on a Mac, and chances are pretty good you're not eager to shell out cash for Microsoft Office to open and edit the occasional Word document. Bean is an extremely fast, lightweight document editor (and written in Cocoa) that handles Word documents like a gem. It's not a replacement for Word, but if you don't need everything that word offers (and you don't want a bloated replacement like OpenOffice.org), Bean's a great option. [Download]




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Notational Velocity: This brilliant little note-taking application creates, searches, tags, and syncs plain text notes between desktops, the web, and even your iPhone (syncing takes place either through Dropbox [see below] or the excellent web-based Simplenote). If you're an obsessive plain text note-taker or to-do list creator, you won't regret giving it a test run. [Download]




TextWrangler: If you do heavier text editing than Notational Velocity offers—like, say, coding—free text editor TextWrangler is a great tool for the job. A good share of Mac fans pony up for premium apps like TextMate , but if you don't feel like shelling out $50 to get your coding on, TextWrangler's a great option. [Download]




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Firefox/Chrome: These two are fighting for default browser status on many a Mac, and frankly, they're neck and neck in our hearts at this point. Google just dropped the beta tag from Chrome for Mac and released their first stable build; meanwhile, Firefox still has a few features we'd sorely miss if we switched over to Chrome. For now, we'd happily recommend either. [Download: Firefox/Chrome]



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Adium: Adium is hands-down the best multi-protocol instant messaging client we've used on any platform. It's completely customizable, works with almost any chat network you'd want, and still outdoes iChat on most fronts. (Though if you're a big user of iChat's admittedly great screen sharing and video chat tools, it's unfortunately not up to snuff on those points.) [Download]



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Cyberduck: This excellent open source client can connect to and upload/download files via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, and even Google Docs. Cyberduck's impressive feature list is a little too long to dive into, but if you thought you needed to pay money for a solid FTP client on your Mac, take a look at Cyberduck first. [Download]




Fluid: If you turn to web applications more than you do desktop apps, this free, open source tool creates standalone "apps" for any web site you throw at it. With the right set of user scripts and tweaks, your Fluid-made site-specific-browsers (or SSBs) can display Growl notifications, Dock badges, and make your web apps feel more like they're running on your desktop. [Download]



Utilities

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The Unarchiver: Your Mac's built-in Archiver Utility isn't bad, but if you regularly traffic in archive file types like the popular RAR format, it can't handle all your needs. The Unarchiver unpacks traditional ZIP archives along with RAR, TAR, 7Z, Stuffit, and most obscure archive types you could get your hands on. [Download]




uTorrent/Transmission: It used to be that when it came time to download something on your Mac via BitTorrent, you only really had one solid choice: the open source Transmission . But as of just a few days ago, uTorrent—the most popular BitTorrent client for Windows—upgraded to a 1.0 release. uTorrent for Mac still isn't up to snuff when compared to the Windows version, but we still think it's a solid alternative to Transmission—though some would argue that Transmission is more "Mac-like". [Download: uTorrent/Transmission]



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Burn: OS X's built-in Disk Utility is actually quite good at burning ISOs and other disk images to optical media like CDs and DVDs, but the aptly-named, open-source Burn is a great supplement for less esoteric burning duties. Burn handles data, audio, video, and disc copying in a very user-friendly interface. [Download]




Growl: Growl is a universal system notification tool that displays attractive system notifications and integrates with nearly every really popular Mac application (including the majority of the apps on this list). As handy and popular as this universal notification application is, it's still hard to believe it hasn't been built into OS X already . [Download]




Dropbox: This handy utility adds a Dropbox folder to your user directory and instantaneously syncs any file you add to, edit, or delete from that folder to Dropbox's cloud servers and to any other computer you've installed Dropbox on. If you regularly move around between a couple of computers or you just wouldn't mind a way to access and back up a few of your most important files, Dropbox is a must. [Download]




Mozy: We regularly preach the importance of backup, and the newest release of Mozy is a double-threat of both on-site and off-site backup with impressive ease of use. You get the local backup and 2GB of online backup for free, or for $5 a month, you get unlimited online backups. We don't normally urge people to pry open their pocketbooks, but with Mozy's unlimited backup, we strongly believe it's worth it. [Download]



Media

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VLC: Throw any video or audio file you can find at VLC and it'll play it, no matter how obscure the format. While not necessarily as friendly on the eyes as QuickTime, VLC is a workhorse of a media player that we've turned to in many a dark hour when it looked like a file might not play. [Download]



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iTunes: iTunes may be one of the most controversial apps on this list. Some love it, some hate it, but the fact remains that if you're firmly planted in Apple hardware and software, iTunes is the glue that keeps all of your media together. And if you're an iPhone/iPod/iPad owner, it's still a must. [Download]




Seashore: Photoshop may be the gold standard for image editing, but if all you need to do is some basic photo editing and you don't want to fire up an industrial workhorse to get it done, Seashore is a handy tool to have on hand. [Download]



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Picasa: If you're unhappy with iLife's default photo management software, iPhoto—and many Mac users on the Lifehacker staff are—Google's Picasa offers a strong alternative. It handles many of the same features iPhoto does, plus it integrates like a charm with your Google account and Picasa Web Albums online. [Download]




Handbrake: Got a DVD you'd like to rip to your hard drive in a high-quality, portable-device-friendly format? Turn to the extremely popular, always handy Handbrake. [Download]



We've done a fair amount of tweaking from last year's Lifehacker Pack for Mac, so check out our previous Mac Pack if you're still hungry for a few other options. Let's hear about your must-have apps (whether we listed them or not) in the comments.