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85 Useful Free Mac Apps for Designers

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With many applications emerging one after another, it's not really difficult to find free apps out of the net. Perhaps, those free applications are suitable for us compared to commercial ones.

Knowing there are quite a number of designers out there using a Mac, we compiled free Mac applications for designers. In this compilation, you can find useful Mac applications that can be downloaded and used for free.

Update. Some screenshots are added for readers' convenience.

Mind Mapping

Applications that can be used to sketch out your creativity…

SketchBox

SketchBox is a Sticky Notes Manager for Mac. With SketchBox, you can enter text, make drawings, and set reminders for each sticky notes.

CocoPad

CocoPad is a simple pad in which you can draw whatever you like with a mouse or tablet pen: sketches, notes, messages, etc.

MindNode

MindNode is elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for helping us to visually collect, classify and structure ideas.

FreeMind

FreeMind is a free mind-mapping software written in Java.

Productivity Tools

Applications that you can use to cut down your time consumption in doing project.

Dateline

Dateline is a small, simple application that displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. Dateline provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day.

Anxiety

Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail.

iClockr

iClockr is a small application that tracks your work time.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a simple, fast, and powerful applications launcher. Quicksilver will make your designing process faster.

aLunch

aLunch is a very lightweight application that acts as a handy launcher that runs from within the menu bar.

NameChanger

NameChanger is a little application that does batch file renaming.

Todos

Todos shows you all of your applications in a complete dock.

Think

Think is an excellent application for making you focus on the task at hand. With its illumination panel, Think only reveals a single application to improve our concentration.

Backboard

Backboard is a Mac application used to collect notes and tasks.

Image Viewer

Applications that can be used to view your images easier than manual browse…

Sequential

Sequential is an image viewer for Mac OS X that was designed for opening a folder of images and displaying them in order. Sequential also suits well for viewing comics and manga.

CocoaSlideShow

CocoaSlideShow is a simple and fast image viewer. It supports Apple Remote, fullscreen mode, GPS mapping and user metadata addition.

iMedia Browser

iMedia Browser brings Apple media browser to any applications of your Mac. It enables photo browsing with drag-drop ability.

Xsee

Xsee is a native Mac OS X image browser and viewer with a beautiful Aqua interface. Xsee supports integrated slide show, customizable toolbar, full mouse or keyboard navigation, and much more.

Xee

Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is used for fast image viewing and management, with a sleek interface.

Pix'S Tribe

Pix'S Tribe is a fast digital photo finder. It brings the possibility to get, select, and import your digital pictures into iPhoto from a file shared volume.

JustLooking

JustLooking is an image viewing program for Mac OS X that substitutes the use of Preview by supporting files and directories browsing.

Phoenix Slides

Phoenix Slides is a fast full-screen slideshow program/image browser for browsing through folders or disks full of images. It also does lossless JPEG transformations and can display EXIF data.

Color Tools

Tools that are useful in assisting you blending the color…

ColourMod

ColourMod is a dashboard widget that helps you getting a color value. It also enables color value conversion from RGB, CMYK, HSV, or Hex Value.

Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler helps you in exploring, creating, and sharing color theme to inspire any project that involves choosing color themes. Kuler also enables you to generate color themes from an image.

Colorate

Colorate is a utility for generating harmonized color palettes and color schemes. It fully automatizes the palette generation from a particular color swatch dragged from other application or obtained from an image.

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

ColorNamePicker

ColorNamePicker is a plug-in for the colorpicker. ColorNamePicker can be used to select a color based on RGB values, a Hex value or a Color Name. It will analyze the selected color and return the name of the closest matching color.

Pixel Tracker

Pixel Tracker is a handy little application that magnifies parts of your screen making it easier to capture specific colors.

Image Editor

These applications are useful for editing existing images. Some of the applications can even add special effects to your images…

Seashore

Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X with Cocoa framework that enables the use of gradients, textures, text anti-aliasing, brush strokes, and other essential and basic image editing needs.

GIMP

GIMP is another open source image manipulator. Using GIMP, you can easily perform photo enhancement and digital retouching.

GIMPshop

GIMPshop is a modified version of GIMP that makes the user interface more like that of Adobe Photoshop.

Xe-IMG Image Editor

Xe-IMG Image Editor is an Adobe AIR application for image editing.

Paintbrush

Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X. It enables users to perform a quick creation of simple images. When you need to quickly crop a photo, add some text, or perform some doodlings, Paintbrush is suitable for that purpose.

Pixen

Pixen is a graphics editor for the Mac. It's designed for people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games. Pixen also allows you to generate animations just as easily as creating images.

Thumbscrew

Thumbscrew allows you to drag and drop images to create rotated thumbnails with borders and drop shadows with customizable angle of rotation, thumbnail bounding box, and border size.

Image Shackle

Image Shackle is a simple widget that lets you quickly scale images to the desired size.

LiveQuartz

LiveQuartz is a simple and powerful free 64-bit photo editor based on non-destructive layers and filters.

Image Tricks

Image Tricks is a freeware application for editing photos and images using Mac OS X Core Image filters. It transforms your photos and apply advanced visual effects. It also contains image generator for creating unique backgrounds and abstract images for business cards, web design, print materials and more.

HyperDither

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1-bit black & white by implementing the "Atkinson" dithering filter.

Modeling & Animation

Applications that can be used to assist in creating stunning models or mind-blowing animations…

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp is a fast and simple 3D modeling program. You can use it to model simple 3D objects. Textures and colors are also available for use.

DAZ Studio

DAZ Studio is a free feature rich 3D modeling and animation tool. It enables anyone to create stunning digital imagery. This is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and animation.

Quartz Composer

Quartz Composer helps you creating a groundbreaking screen savers, user-interface widgets, data-driven visual effects, and animations. It's shipped with Leopard.

Blender

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite that features 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation, and playback.

Sweet Home 3D

Sweet Home 3D is the application for interior design. It can model the placement of furniture, draw the walls, texture the surface, and many more features. Moreover, generated house plan is viewed in 3D model.

Microspot 3D Toolbox

Microspot 3D Toolbox is a free application that enables you to open, edit, print, and navigate Quickdraw 3D, 3D Studio Max, and Google SketchUp files.

Scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.

Keynote Goodies

Keynote Goodies gives you more available Keynote backgrounds, themes, and objects for you to create even more mind-blowing Keynote Presentation.

NodeBox

NodeBox is an application used to create 2D visuals using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie.

ShapeOnYou

ShapeOnYou is a little application that can display and animate different vectorial 3D shapes. It is designed to easily drag-drop the results in other applications where you would like to use 3D shapes.

Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.

GiftedMotion

GiftedMotion is an easy to use GIF animator.

Lego Digital Designer

Lego Digital Designer lets you build with LEGO bricks on your computer, virtually.

Vector Drawing

Using these applications, you can draw vector-based illustration…

DrawBerry

DrawBerry provides us the possibility of vector drawing empowered with layers, powerful drawing tools, inspectors, and workspaces.

Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that uses the W3C standard SVG file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features such as markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.

DrawIt Lite

DrawIt Lite is a vector editing application with support for bitmap-like image filters. The Lite version offers several basic things such as Vector Tool, Non-destructive Effects, and Bitmap to Vector Conversion.

Pencil

Pencil is an animation and drawing application. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon). It supports both bitmap and vector graphics.

Web Development

These are some free basic tools that can be used for small scale web development.

Simple CSS

Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch, or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface. You can also manage multiple CSS projects and import your existing style sheets.

Snippely

Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize snippets in one convenient location.

FontDoc

FontDoc is a very simple program which shows you all of the fonts on system using any text and size of your choice.

Aptana

Aptana is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more.

Nvu

Nvu is a high-performance web editor built around Gecko. This makes web designing easier for web developers, especially beginners.

Paparazzi

Paparazzi is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.

Plainview

Plainview is a full-screen web browser, which is best for presentations that require interactivity, you can do Flash, HTML presentations and do cool things with video.

iPhoney

iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It's the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development.

Cyberduck

Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks.

Transmission

Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client.

FileZilla

FileZilla is the free FTP solution for Mac. It includes both a client and server side.

OneButton FTP

OneButton FTP is a free graphical FTP client for Mac OS X with a strong emphasis on simplicity, drag-drop usability, and file queuing.

JAlbum

JAlbum allows you to create nice-looking photo galleries for the Web. You simply select or drag and drop folders containing images or movie files onto JAlbum. JAlbum will then create thumbnails and HTML pages to publish your images as a gallery or picture slide show.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser. It is the second most popular browser, right after Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Multimedia

You can use these free applications for handling with multimedia…

Front End Digital Media Workshop

Front End Digital Media Workshop harnesses the power of QuickTime to bring you powerful batch based conversion of sound, video, and image files.

HyperEngineAV

HyperEngineAV is a multimedia authoring application for capturing, editing, organizing, processing, and exporting video, audio, and text to create quality movies and shows.

Flaex

Flaex is a Flash Movie extractor for Mac OS X. From any flash files, it extracts images, sounds, videos, etc.

FLV Crunch

FLV Crunch is an application that converts one video file format into another.

Subs Factory

Subs Factory is a free but powerful utility designed to make the creation, modification and resynchronization of subtitles easy.

Other Tools

Other designers tools that are supporting the designing process.

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for BOMArchiveHelper.app, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. It handles many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper.

Scribus

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Comipro+

Camipro+ is a cartoon production application.

Slammer

Slammer overlays your display with grids, which can be use as a measurement tool.

Shape Collage

Shape Collage is a free automatic photo collage maker that lets you create picture collages in a variety of shapes within less than a minute.

PosteRazor

PosteRazor cuts a raster image into pieces which can afterwards be printed out and assembled to become a poster. The result is saved as a multipage PDF document.

Top Draw

Top Draw is an image generation program based on the JavaScript programming language that can create surprisingly complex and interesting images.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim has a set of tools for optimisation of PNG and JPEG images. It's suitable for publishing images on the web.

DropJPG

DropJPG makes it easy to convert images from most formats to JPEG. For converting to JPEG, only simple drag-drop is needed to be performed.

Iconic

Iconic is a free application used to create ton of icon thumbnails that can handle multiple processes at once.

Categories: Applications, Popular
Tags: Application, Designer, Free

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Nice! A lot of these tools are integrated into CS4, but some of them look interesting. Of course, for those who are just starting out, these apps could very well bring them to Internet fame! Thanks for the suggestions!

I found out one cool feature to preview a Picture or documents (like .pdf) of Mac Os X! 

Click on a file on the desktop, than press space, and you get a quick preview...! Quite cool!

Paparazzi has saved my life. It makes screenshots super simple, especially super-long pages. 

Don't forget the free alternative to BBEdit called TextWrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/ 

Interesting list, with few fascinating apps I've not heard of before. Thanks.

 An unusual compilation. Thanks.

There was ButtonBuilder of  realmacsoftware, but unfornately it's not available anymore.
I would to put it on the list.
Why do they delete this excellent freeware?

Everyday I love your site more!

Hi kaspth, thanks for your love! ^^

Awesome!

Only if you guys had put this list up before I bought all of the Adobe Software. 

Yeah thanks, I downloaded name changer and datelines!

I have been using Taco HTML edit as a text editor/development environment for a little over a year - l Love it!

Yeah! Only 1 Screenshot: I will donwload them all to see the userinterface... >____<

I'd recommend Art Text too from BeLight Software. Neat and slick app for heading, quick logos, button and other stuff for web or publishing.

For animations, try the free program Stykz, which allows you to make simple stick figure animations. For professionals, it can be useful for storyboarding or planning, etc, or you can just use it to impress people.

Thanks for Shape Collage - what fun! It's exactly what I've wanted to do with my o/s holiday shots but didn't have time to fiddle around. Great way to make novel wrapping paper too. I'm always on the Apple Store site checking out the downloads for freebies but this list will keep me busy for a while.  

Thank u so much.
It gives me a lot

Don't miss out another cool photo editing software:

PhotoMagic for Mac , which can help us to Resize Image on Snow Leopard as a wallpaper for iPhone, iPod, PSP.

Hey, you should mention Flash Decompiler , which it must-have tool for Flash Designers and Animation-makers

In the screenshot's I see a lot of very nice wallpapers, maybe nice to make a thread with a collage of those wallpapers. I would really like to use a couple of them !!

Great compilation of programs i cant wait to try some of them out!!!

good article, you should've mentioned MAMP for web designers though, its a great little app

The app Slammer is not free. On the site it says was $25 now $20 :( Shame because it looked pretty cool.

Wow, great lists, thanks for sharing, im new in mac environtment, this list very helpfull

R-Name maybe an application worth adding - It also is a Batch File/Folder renamer with added options of replacing letters or words, at the beginning, end or set number of digits, Converting to upper or lowercase or capatalize 1st word in title.
Also can numberically title folders and ... more!

It has the added benefit of giving an outcome in an opposite mirrored prior to change with the option of unticking items or displaying which items will not be changed.

It does more besides.

An absolutely excellent app I use more often than many paid for apps I use regularly.

Great list BTW.

1 more app I find useful, IPMenu, more or less self explanitory, though it does have the ability to (essentially) ping your IP thus keeping connection (handy for people who don't use the net often and tend to get dropped lines when they are on line - my Dad thinks its great, he just has to "Update IP Adress' every 6 months :) (well twice a week) and he is connected for as long as he wishes, nothing more required (of which he has no desire to learn :))
For other uses. Setting or resetting your dropped WiFi/Ethernet LAN numbers (or for FTP etc) this is a fast way to read the assigned Internal and External IP Numbers. There are better that display MAC addresses + etc but not free. As the name suggests sits in the Menu.

To Re Cap

R-Name
&
IPAddress

I could list more but they are used daily.

Oh btw 
Split & Concat
&
UnRAR X 2.2 I saw weren't mentioned.

Essential for anyone who deals with compressed segmented files along with the above mentioned Unarchiver (and the wonderously slow but needed :/ BetterZip) are a much better alternative to the extremely over priced Stuffit (any price is over priced for that.)

You bring new dimension to my mac, thanks. I like this site everyday much.

Thank you very much for the very very great collection!!
I as a Mac user always looking for nice helpful software.

Many thanks for this collection! There are some apps I don't knew but helps a lot. Thanks again!