10 Mac Applications for your Christmas List
07 Dec 2006
Here is a list of FREE software that I use everyday, or at least once a week. This year for Christmas I decided to donate some of my gift money to the mac software that I did not have to buy or that was open source. These authors or groups of these applications give their time and energy to make great software for all of us.
Now is a good time to thank them will a small donation. Can you imagine how much of a difference it would make to the developers if just 1% of users gave $5? It would only set you back $50 (or more if you can) for these ten applications.
Here is my list, I am sure you can find more just as worthy.
Mozilla
Firefox & Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html
Firefox goes without saying. And I do like Thunderbird over Mail.app because it does get updates without having to buy a new OS. That might change after Leopard comes out 
I think I might spend more and get a shirt.
http://store.mozilla.org/
NeoOffice
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/donate.php
Kinda sluggish, but does a great job.
Growl
http://growl.info/donate.php
Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X, I use it with Quicksilver (no donation link)
Cyberduck
http://cyberduck.ch/donate/
A perfect FTP client
Adium
http://www.adiumx.com/
Multiple messaging service chat
Handbrake
http://handbrake.m0k.org/?page_id=23
DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter
RSS Menu
http://www.edot-studios.com/
RSS notifier, changed the way I surf
VideoLAN Client (VLC)
http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
Streaming media player
XBMC
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/info_contrib.htm
OK, technically it is not a Mac OS X application, but I use it everyday to watch my MythTV recordings
Remember these are FREE, help keep them that way and donate what you can. These are apps that I use your results may vary.
*gift icon from http://www.benschlitter.com/
Fairly standard list of apps, but a great twist on charitable donations. Like it.
what about GimmeSomeTune? This app saved me thousands of hours. it’s just great.
eternalstorms.at
I would NOT recommend donating to Handbrake. I hang around the forums there and the developer Titer has been AWOL since around April. Development of Handbrake (and Instant Handbrake) has ground to a halt. It’s so bad that some forum members have started their own unoffical Handbrake fork to try and keep it going. Unless Titer pops out of his hole and gives up some answers, I think any donations are not going to be any help for the project. Check out this forum post for more info: http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2031
I’d also highly recommend dontating to Mike Bombich - http://www.bombich.com - he’s made several fantastic utilities for the mac, especially NetRestore and Carbon Copy Cloner.
Journler is also a good app worthy of a donation
mbd, Carbon Copy Cloner was number 11 on my list! I used it once years ago.
Peter, looks like an up and coming app. I’ll have to give it a try. My list is made up of apps that I have been using for over a year and have never donated to. I thought it was about time. I got some Christmas money from a relative and decide it I ought to do something better with it.
I agree that handbrake should not be donated to. Unless someone officially takes over the project, development for the future seems iffy.
Cyberduck is great, adium is excellent, so is VLC and XMBC.
Use all but two of these (RSS menu and XMBC) and like them, but I wouldn’t recommend Firefox to most Mac users. Camino, also from Mozilla, is much more OS X-native. It doesn’t support Firefox extensions, which I realize bothers some people, but it has the same Gecko rendering engine and thus the same compatibility, but in much nicer packaging.
P.S.: One comment about NeoOffice — it is nice and I do use it as my primary word processor, but it does beg for money a bit too often for my taste (several times a month).