Recently, I've mentioned the virtues of Cyberduck, flickr uploaders (available in wintel flavours too) and the iphoto library manager amongst other free/share/GNUware programs. In a similar I thought that I'd round up some other programs that I use daily (take two after meals), regularly (like on the Queen's birthday or during royal weddings), or occasionally just occasionally. I'm going to try and break it down in basic categories: back-ups; presentation; web design; web and networks; and then 'productivity' software.

One, which I've found useful to have around as someone who backs up to optical disks as well as onto bling-drives is Sebastian Krauß's Locator which archives the contents of removable media, hard drives, etc. Its a simple utility - only seems to search by file-name but does work well. Silverkeeper is LaCie's freeware backup utility, which is good at drive mirroing and basic scheduled backups although itn't an archiving program, so couldn't be used with a RAID setup very easily.

Useful for presentations and, in my case, teaching are Mouseposé, which highlights the cursor like a James Bond introduction; Deskdoodle and Desktastic both allow you to draw over the screen like a black or whiteboard (both of these are shareware).

For webdesign, aside from firefox - which about 30% (!) of you are using, with its truly wonderful web developer toolbar, there's Taco HTML edit which is a nice little text editor with very useful find and replace functions as well as the ability to save code snippets, automatic indenting, syntax checking, and color tag highlighting, etc, etc. I've used it for a few projects now and its great. SubEthaEdit has a good reputation because of the ability to create documents collaboratively, which could be really quite amazing, but I've never had the reason to do it. Good idea 'though. Free Ruler is a screen rule that's free. Good for figuring out unexpected table and CSS mess. ImageMagick is a secret industry standard for working with large groups of images, often for getting them web ready. Its highly programmable, free and available on just about every platform you've ever heard of.

The best RSS reader for the Mac and the most popular RSS reader on any platform is NetNewsWire. Its really changed the way I consume news on the internets. Their Lite version is too good, and free. Another useful mac internet tool is the safari boomark extractor for getting bookmarks from safari and into firefox, for example. If I remember rightly Opera does it automatically and has integration with the Mac address book, and undoubtably the best browser engine available (although the boot-up time does deter me). Adium is the mac alternative to iChat which I use sometimes. Its got lots of geek-pleasing stuff in it although it is not as neat and contained as apple's own messaging client. Thunderbird is a great mail client and a sister project to firefox, and, for windows users, a good way of avoiding viruses that target Outlook. The last of the these utilities that deserves a mention - although I seldom use it - is Deep Vacuum which sucks pages/entire sites/ftp catalogues off the web.

KisMAC and MacStumbler are both network utilities for finding wireless networks. KisMAC includes mapmaking tools for working with GPS if you fancy doing that whole warchalking thing. MacStumbler has GPS support but I don't think does the whole mapping thing. Not that I have GPS anyway, so I'm unable to vouch for them beyond basic wireless networking - but they both work well at that.

Lastly, a few productivity tools worth mentioning: Voodoopad which creates local or remote wikis; OpenOffice is a full office suite that has been spun off from Sun's StarOffice. I use it at work, but haven't really challenged it to anything yet. I wrote edited and fought with PhD through Word and so I know how to use that. OOo is slightly different from Word in some respects and I miss the outline view that Word has, which is not to say I'm a Word apologist (although at time I am). Word is the most bloated piece of software I use regularly. Its one of the only pieces of software that really asks me to quit other programs whilst its running in a desparate to get some kind of speed out of it. Unfortunately, they are not going to be creating a native mac version of OOo. The current version runs through X11 which comes with all macs with the developers tools (and probably deserves a mention too), which although it is fine for people who are used to digital esoterica it isn't a good sign for a mass mac take up, but its an amazing example of what open source software could do. Along similar lines is GIMP the open source alternative to PhotoShop. Its is very very good, it really is. The problem is that PS is just incredible. It isn't until spending your time wrapping your mind around as capricious a piece of software as Word that you realise just how stunning PS really. I tell you what - I'll spend some time with GIMP, in a month of two and I'll really try to see what it can do.

Aside from GIMP I use all of these daily, some only once every few months, but they are all in my applications folder and have survived various prunings that I go through every spring. When I thought that I'd round up some free/shareware, I really only thought that I had a handful of applications. There are over twenty mentioned here, and there quite a few that I haven't mentioned that I don't use that but are very popular. Most of these are free - completely free, with a minority that demand money for full functionality and quite a few that ask politely but don't rub it in your face if you don't fork out for them. I've given money to a few of these, but not enough. They represent years upon years in the lives of people who really didn't have to give away what they loved to do. These people are helping me through my digital existence, and are the strange and human folk supporting our contemporary lives.