I’ve seen hundreds of these lists over the last few years, but I was cleaning up my bookmarks today and going through all stuff I bookmarked and tried out over the years. This is a list of Mac utlities that I use all the time and are free. Definitely not a list of all great apps out there, but just a list of what I use regularly.

Adium: The best IM client on Mac. The only downside is that it doesn’t support video, but it supports nearly every IM platform out there.

DropBox : Not really an app in the traditional sense (and available on Win & Linux), but 2 gigs of free storage that is sync’d to the cloud, provides revisioning, sharing between peers, and has proven to irreplaceable for me as I work from both a laptop and desktop, or from an office (contracting) or at home.

Linotype FontExplorer X: Manage your fonts. They’ve kinda hidden away the free version, but its the bottom link on the download page.

MAMP: 1-click solution for running Apache, MySQL & PHP locally for testing.

QuickSilver: More than an app launcher. Not be actively developed anymore. Some have recommended Launchbar (not free though). If QS stops working once Snow Leopard comes out, I may have to pay for Launchbar.

AppFresh: checks all the installed apps, preference panes, plugins, etc on your Mac and checks to see if there are newer versions out there. It will even download and install those updates.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Great utilty for cloning, syncing, and backing up your drives. I just used it recently for cloning my 250 gig startup drive onto a newer 1.5TB drive.

Chmox:Â CHM viewer.

CleanArchiver: On the surface, just another archive utility, but it strips out the .DS_Store and custom icons from your archive file. I use this a lot when sending files to clients who I know are on PC. Opening a Mac .zip file on PC can be confusing when looking at all the extra files.

Name Mangler: Awesome utility for doing batch renaming of files. Has tons of options, and can use RegEx.

The Unarchiver: Far more capable decompression tool that Apples built-in tool and has handled zips in the past that just refuse to decompress under Apples utility . Handles nearly every file format out there.

Xee:Â Â Fast image viewer and browser.

TimeMachineEditor:Â Change the default 1 hour backup interval for Time Machine.

Visibility: App for viewing and hiding invisible files in OSX. Handy when working on files like .htaccess or .profile while using GUI apps.

Mail Unread Menu: I use a lot of rules and folders in Mail. The Mail icon in the dock only shows the unread emails in your Inbox. Mail Unread Menu provides a customizable menu bar icon that can show any collection of folders in your Mail app.

Perian: Gives Quicktime the ability to play nearly ever video format out there.

iStat Menus: Great menu bar item for monitoring all aspects of your system from cpu usage, memory, bandwidth, hard drive usage, and much more.

QuickLook: Not enough people know about or use QuickLook. Its built into the Mac OS 10.5 and is awesome. If you don’t know what it is, find out about it here. Now the reason I mention QuickLook is because it is extensible and people have written a lot of great plugins for it. Two sites that I find great plugins at are: QuickLook Plugins web site & QLplugins web site.