Charles Moore recently commented on Alexis Kayhill's top 10 freeware apps on OS X. Of his, I found PTHPasteboard interesting enough to check out:

How often have you copied something only to find that you need it a few minutes later but you've already copied another item over it on the Mac Clipboard? PTHPasteboard watches you while you work and keeps a copy of any items that you have copied to your Clipboard (you can specify how many entries are cached) and also saves the clipboard through restarts. I keep it configured as a default startup item.

Honestly, that happens to me all the freakin' time. This is worth a look.

So here are the two lists, now with my idiotic commentary. First, Kayhill's.

* NeoOffice:
* Flip4Mac: (Windows Media Player alternative)
* TextWrangler (serious text editor)
* Firefox & Thunderbird
* CyberDuck (FTP and SFTP client)
* Adium: (multi-service chat client)
* ImageTricks (sue with OS X Tiger's Core Image filters)
* MAMP (server software)
* iBackup (free backup software)
* Vienna (RSS and Atom reader)

And a few more Moore adds, though he doesn't exactly say what to remove.

* ToyViewer Image Viewer/Editor
* PTHPasteboard Multiple Clipboard Utility
* SpotInside Spotlight Search Enhancer
* OnyX System Maintenance and Cleaning Utility
* TigerLaunch Application Launcher
* Seashore Cocoa Open Source Graphics Program for OS X

The bottom line seems to be you can't pick a top 10 without a bit more requirements stated beforehand. That is, I tend to program a bit on the Mac, so MacVIm, Netbeans, and Eclipse are all very high on my list.

I can't say much for SeaShore (a neat idea not yet ready for prime time) or Cyberduck (bad enough I re-registered Transmit). Adium's okay, Thunderbird's okay, Firefox is okay, but v3 RC 1 does awfully on my iBook. Very buggy. None of these are good enough to get rid of their commercial counterparts, including those that come with OS X, on a permanent basis. Firefox comes closest, especially b/c of its ability to navigate pages by typing. Still, occasionally in my experience it's buggy and I go back to using Safari for a week or two before trying another build.

Instead of going through all I can think of, here's the freeware that currently lives on my Dock.

* Eclipse
* iTerm
* TextWrangler
* Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator)
* AbiWord (a decent, smallish Word replacement that translates Word and WordPerfect fairly well)
* vMac (68k MacOS emu)
* MacVIm

Add to that WhatSize, which was free at one point, and which I use for spring cleaning the hard drive. You might as well add GraphicConverter, which, as I've said recently, isn't smart enough to force you to register and, in fact, encourages you to treat it as free software. I'll spare you the gushing recommendations for each.

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