16 Best Free Mac Apps

1. Adium

Adium is an amazing communication app that brings together all of your chat accounts onto one platform, including Facebook Chat and Gchat. You can download and add plugins to customize the app, allowing you to change elements such as font style and speech bubble color.

There's also a small, animated Adium icon that lives in your dock. The green duck tells you who has chatted you and holds up a wooden "Away" sign to match your away status.

2. Kindle for Mac

Kindle for Mac syncs your reading progress between your tablet, iPhone and laptop.

You can also customize Kindle for Mac with different colors. But the best part about Kindle for Mac? You don't even need a Kindle to read books. You can simply use the app to turn your devices into a Kindle e-reader.

3. Caffeine

Caffeine is to your Mac what Starbucks is to your mind, but, unlike Starbucks, it doesn't cost $5 to reap the benefits. The free app creates an icon on the right side of your menu bar. If you click the icon, your Mac's screen will stay powered up, preventing the screen saver, screen dimmer or sleep setting.

This app is ideal when watching movies or consuming longreads on your desktop. You won't have to wiggle the mouse to keep your computer powered up anymore -- simply turn on Caffeine and you're good to go.

4. CheatSheet

CheatSheet is extremely useful for program navigation. The app grants you access to an encyclopedia of hot keys for whichever program you're using; however, it pops up whenever you press certain keys, so it's a bit disruptive when using it at first.

5. CloudApp

CloudApp is a neat way to share files with coworkers and friends. After installing the app, simply drag and drop a document to the cloud icon. CloudApp generates a short URL that you can post online, email or chat to someone.

Although you can only see five files links at a time with the CloudApp Mac app, the web app version gives you access to a higher number of files.

6. Dropbox

Dropbox is an exceptional file-storage app. When you save a file to Dropbox, you can access it from any Wi-Fi-enabled device. Starring a file on Dropbox lets you access it offline as well.

The free app comes with 2.5 GB of free storage space, with options to upgrade your account at a flat rate of $100 per year for 100 GB of space. You can also earn 250 MB of storage for free by completing five out of seven Getting Started tasks.

7. Found

Found lets you search all of your content in desktop folders, cloud-based storage like Dropbox, Skypebox, Google Drive and others. You can create hotkeys shortcuts for the Found app in the settings folder. According to the website, Found never sends any of your personal data to a third party; however, it does send anonymous usage data. You can sync the app with multiple Google accounts.

8. OnyX

OnyX is a great maintenance tool for organizing your computer system and keeping it secure. If OnyX detects any problems with your hard drive, it will prompt you to carry out a reparation task. It reminds you to repair the permissions of your system, clear browser settings, cache, passwords, delete applications, user and system caches, etc.

One of the best parts about OnyX is that it includes a glossary of information about the different tasks it performs.

9. SelfControl

If you lack the self control necessary to stay off of Facebook or Twitter all day, this is an app to help you focus.

SelfControl lets you add website URLs to a blacklist and then specify how long you want to be locked out of those sites. It works across browsers, preventing you from pulling up Firefox or Safari in order to beat the system.

10. Skitch

Evernote developed Skitch as a way to visually collaborate on documents. You can easily apply colored annotations to PDF documents, and it's compatible on both your phone and your desktop.

11. Sublime Text

Sublime Text is an exceptional online text editor for coding, markup or prose. While it is free to download and evaluate the software, the download page does say that the license must be purchased for continued use, However, there is no specified time limit for the evaluation.

You can make batch edits, quickly navigate between files and view multiple files at once. You can also customize the app itself with simple JSON files.

12. SuperDuper

SuperDuper is an easy-to-use, reliable data loss prevention app that both non-technical and technical users will enjoy.

With SuperDuper, you can create a backup of your hard drive so that if your Mac crashes, you'll have a second copy of your work stored elsewhere. It's great when moving from one machine to another, or for simply backing up your files. If one of your files becomes corrupted, you can simply reboot it with your SuperDuper copy.

13. The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a quick and easy way to open all compressed file types. This app is extremely easy to customize, and allows you to specify which files for which it should be used and where it should save the files.

This app can handle more file types than the default OS X app, allowing for foreign character support from Zip,Tar-GZip and more.

14. Transmission

Transmission is a notably fast BitTorrent client with an extremely easy-to-use interface and customizable options. The app lets you queue downloads, set timers for when to start or stop them. It's open source and claims that it doesn't track its users or have any kind of third-party ads, so your cybersecurity is safe.

Its most notable feature is that it doesn't use up a lot of memory, so it won't slow down your computer significantly while running.

15. VLC

The VLC player is arguably the best and most versatile media player out there today. It can play virtually any media file, and with a GNU GLP license, you can customize the player to match your needs.

Hot keys give you quick and painless access to VLC's different views and features. VLC also has a slew of effects settings -- audio, video, synchronization and more.

16. Jumpcut

Remember when Microsoft Word had a clipboard that let you copy and paste multiple items? Jumpcut is the free Mac app equivalent.

Jumpcut lets you see everything you've copied that day, and allows you to page through the copied items until you've found the item you'd like to paste.