You may find it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. You don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for some terrific software. There are literally thousands of software programs that are either free or sold at bargain basement prices. The creators of these applications are generally people who see a need for specific programs with the skills to create them. And by building these useful tools they hope to make a couple of dollars and perhaps get recognition for their efforts.

There are a couple OT things to bear in mind when working with an unknown program, and this could easily apply to traditional vendors as well. Some of the programs won’t run well on every Mac. Heck, some won’t run well on any Mac. They also could conflict with other programs and even with the operating system. It this is the case, you could be looking at crashes and possible corruption OT other programs.

Another thing to think about before using an untested program is wrestling with your conscience. It you regularly use one of these programs you’re bound by honor to make the requested minimum payment. In some cases that could take the form of a postcard from your location (known as postcardware), send an e-mail thanks, or even donate to a charity. You’ll feel better if you get good Karma points by honoring the request. The large companies are also most interested in having only purchased copies on your machine, but the little guys are generally just regular folks trying to make some extra spending money.

(To download, just click on the link with the name of the software.)

Here, in no special order, are my favorites:

This nifty capture extension extends the built-in capabilities of your Mac.

It not only captures selected areas, but will automatically capture windows and pull down menus. Instead of just capturing the entire screen, when you activate selected key commands a crosshair appears. You next position and drag the crosshair over a selected image on the screen. You can now save this as a pict or a resedit file.

Although since System 7.6.1 and beyond you can grab a selected section by pressing Command > shift > 4, with this utility you can also capture pull down menus.The ability to capture the pull downs is a must-have for teachers, trainers and even Macintouch writers.

This extension allows you to see the characters of any font you happen to be using in your word processor, or any program for that matter. A small "p" in a box resides in the top right hand corner of your screen. To activate it just click on the image and select the character you want to use.

This freeware program is used to create those nifty animations we see all the time on web sites.

Think of this program as a versatile graphic editor, catagorizer, converter and presentation engine and you're only thinking of a fraction of the things this powerful tool can do.

This free program allows you to distort any image in a kind of visual effect akin to the psychedelic effects in the movie 2001. You can change colors, create moving images, even use your computer's microphone to have the art respond to sounds.

Zoom Lens ( To Zoom Into Screen Images)

With this freeware program you can look up close at anything on you Mac's screen. You have the option of viewing from six different resolutions.

SimpleText Color Menu (Adds More Functions to Simple Text)

This program is freeware. It adds extra functionality to the SimpleText program, making it a much more versatile word processor.

3D Morphing Power Cube (Exclusive MacUser Download)

This is one of the coolest screen savers ever. It takes six images and places them in a 3d cube that floats around your desktop. You can change the images and even add live video or QuickTime movies to the mix. It also floats a single picture , a leaf, and other cool objects in front of your screen. I use this at the start of my presentations with different images and titles on the cube.

This nifty free utility puts a countdown clock on the desktop that can be set to count down or time an event. I’ve used it with students and others doing a timed presentation. By displaying the clock in the largest of the two view sizes, presenters can check how much time they have left. Thanks to friend David Thornburg for showing me this fine program.

URLs (For those who want to print out this page.)