20 Mac apps you can't live without

The selection of great free or inexpensive Mac programs on offer has never been better. You can now get amazing software designed by small or independent developers to cover practically anything you could ever want to do on your Mac.

Since the mass adoption of OS X, Apple has made it easier than ever for people to build their own applications, and as a result there's a flourishing community making everything from games and novelties through to office applications, web design software, video compression and iPod tools and much more.

Thanks to the developer tools provided by Apple, OS X shareware programs, unlike Windows versions, tend to be slick, well designed, stable and a pleasure to use so there's really never been a better time to be a Mac user on a budget.For every big, expensive program like Office or Photoshop, there's almost always a smaller alternative with a great feature set that costs a fraction of the price, or even costs nothing at all.

Read on to discover MacFormat magazine's 20 great Apple gems!

1. OpenOffice.org
Microsoft Office for the Mac is ironically regarded as being better than the Windows version, but it still costs more money than most can afford to pay. OpenOffice.org 3 is a remarkably accomplished program. The result of many years of open source development, it includes advanced word processing, spreadsheet, multimedia presentation, graphical planning and database applications. In short, everything that you get with Office, only for free. It is compatible with leading document format standards so exchanging files with people who are using Office won't be a problem.

2. VisualHub
iPods and iPhones both support video playback, but first you have to get your movies into the correct format. A cheaper and faster alternative to QuickTime Pro is VisualHub at $23 from www.techspansion. com. Not only will it crunch a movie to the right format much quicker than you expect, it will let you convert pretty much any video format into any other video format, complete with size and crop options. There are also handy presets for converting for specific devices. Even for video professionals, it's a very handy tool to have.

3. VLC media player
There are lots of video codecs in use across the web, and since many originate from the world of Windows, QuickTime isn't always able to play them back properly, even with something like Perian installed. VLC Media Player is a free video player that has support for just about any video you're ever likely to come across. It's usually able to open and play back videos that no other application that's currently around can do. In addition, it has advanced network features for playing streams and will get you out of a fix when you're struggling to open movie files.

4. Cyberduck
Transferring files to and from web servers over FTP can be a little hit and miss using Finder. A great free solution is Cyberduck, which is a powerful but easy-to-use program that supports all leading file transfer standards and protocols and makes transferring files as easy as dragging and dropping. With support for Spotlight, Keychains and iDisk, it integrates perfectly with OS X and is the perfect companion for iWeb if you're using your own domain. You can even bookmark and store settings to manage multiple FTP accounts easily.