Date: June 19th, 2007

Presenter: Brian Hoppe

Topic: Favorite FREE Mac Applications and Utilities

Meeting Summary:

You can find commercial software through all the usual outlets, ranging in price from the sublime(ly affordable) to the ridiculous(ly overpriced) -- but do you really need to spend all that money to do what you need done? Maybe not, if you don't care about using programs with a recognizable name and printed manuals in a fancy store package. There's a lot of really good software out there that doesn't carry a big price -- or even any price sometimes, if you know where to look. OMUG member Brian Hoppe did, and he shared that knowledge with us and gave us a look at some of his favorites. I hope you didn't miss this interesting and VERY useful presentation...

Brian had a very interesting presentation for us, using a PowerPoint slide-show with links to sites with free or reasonably-priced programs available for the Mac. Categories of programs included Productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets and office suites), Financial Software, Video, Graphics and Audio software, Web Browsers and more. As he worked his way through the presentation, he showed us the places on the Web where these programs can be found, and actively demonstrated some of them. I found it a very interesting presentation indeed, and plan to use the PDF version of his slide-show (available through the link below) to get and use several of the programs he discussed. I suggest that you may want to as well....

Links to presentation files, etc.:

Other references and links:

MacUpdate (another site like VersionTracker....)

SourceForge (A central hub or archive of Open Source software....)