Top 40 best free Mac utilities

So you’ve just unpacked your new Mac. Now what? How about making it more useful with these free utilities. This list, arranged in alphabetical order, should help you get the most out of your Mac.

1Passwd – finally, a password manager that provides anti-phishing protection and provides convenient usage. This utility goes beyond password management with Web form filling and automatic strong password generation. You’ll have all your confidential information, including passwords, identities and credit cards kept safely in one secure place: the OS X’s Keychain.

Adium – Of course a list of free utilities for the Mac wouldn’t be complete without mention of an instant messaging tool. For Mac users, your best option for a free IM client is perhaps Adium. While iChat isn’t bad, it wouldn’t hurt to have another client in Adium. It connects to platform including AOL, ICQ, .Mac, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and many more.

AllBookmarks ““ This lets you add new items to your Mac OS X menu bar for quick access to all your bookmarks. You can select all your Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks as shown. It also provides accesses to your 1Password/1Click bookmarks allowing you to navigate to a page, fill up a form and submit everything with a single click.

AppDelete ““ This is a simple yet useful utility that lets you choose and delete applications you don’t use anymore. It eliminates the need to weed through your Mac searching for unwanted files.

AppFresh – This utility helps keep all up-to-date all your applications, widgets, preference panes and app plugins. It integrates fully with Mac OS X and provides a central place to control your Mac’s software updates. It also integrates Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate and osx.iusethis.com.

AppMenuBoy ““ This provides a menu in your Applications folder similar to a Dock Menu. It offers a cleaner menu than the one created by dragging your applications folder onto the Dock. Simply put, AppMenuBoy is an application launcher for your Mac.

Caffeine ““ This is a tiny program, which puts an icon on the right side of your Mac’s menu bar. This utility prevents your Mac from going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers automatically.

Data Recovery II – Although we wouldn’t wish an incident where you would need this utility, you never know what can happen. It’s comforting to know that should your system crash, this utility will help recover otherwise lost data. It’s your best option before running a repair utility.

Default Folder X – This utility lets you attach a toolbar to your Open and Save dialog boxes in any OS X-native application. It gives you fast access to various folders. It also offers zoomable previews in Open dialog box, allows you to save spotlight comments and gives you the ability to set finder labels for documents in the Save As dialog box.

Do Something When – Another system preference pane utility, this one allows you to watch for drives mounting and un-mounting, letting you launch or quit applications easily.

Ejector ““ This is a simple Mac utility, which lets you add an eject icon to the Mac OS X menu bar. You can use to eject an iPod, CD, DVD and USB key, or even a .dmg file or internal hard disks.

GeekTool ““ This tool will set up your Mac’s Preference pane and lets you show log files, unix commands, or your own pictures on your desktop with transparent a background. The utility is more commonly used to show console log or system log, df command output or MRTG/RRD/Cacti graphs.

Google Desktop – Google brings its Desktop application to your Mac with this utility featuring a quick search box, Gmail, a Web History search, Google gadgets, smart indexing and much more.

Growl – Want a notification system for the different applications installed on your Mac? Growl helps you do that. It provides new information on whatever application you are using and does not require you open the application sending updates.

iBackUp ““ This is an easy-to-use backup/restore utility for your Mac’s system preferences including the dock, desktop picture, time settings, firewall, bluetooth and system applications such as AddressBook, Mail, iChat, and more.

iGetter ““ This is a full featured and powerful download manager and accelerator, iGetter improves download speeds through segmented downloading. It offers auto resume on broken downloads, queue filtering by various criteria, a site explorer, history list, download scheduling for low traffic periods, auto redidal on a broken connection, and auto hang-up and automatic shutdown when a download is complete.

InstantShot ““ This offers a menubar application to capture screenshots and save them in .jpg, .tiff or .png formats. It provides a pixel-specific selection tool, timer mode and multiple shots.

iWillQuit ““ This simple utility will lets you command your Mac to sleep, shut down, restart or log out after a specific amount of time. It’s best for those who work at night and often times find themselves falling asleep with their computer on.

macFUSE – As a utility for extending Mac’s OS X native file handling capabilities via third-party file systems, macFUSE is a useful utility. It will let you use any third-party file system written atop MacFUSE. MacFUSE also allow you to use MacFUSE SDK to write numerous types of new file systems as regular user-mode programs.

MacJanitor ““ This utility will run your Mac system’s daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts, which are usually performed between 3 and 5 a.m. This utility is best suited for Mac owners who shut off or put their machines to sleep at night. Running the script manually keeps the log files from growing.

MagicCal – This utility offers a menu-based clock and calendar featuring a huge range of configurations for displaying your Mac’s time and date settings. This utility runs well with your Mac’s system menu clock or it can be a good replacement.

MainMenu ““ This nifty utility lets you run tools and scripts to keep your Mac running smoothly. It makes otherwise daunting tasks quick and easy. It builds your Spotlight library to enable faster searching, repairs permissions, cleans caches for improving application performance and completes other advanced functions.

MenuCalendarClock ““ This provides instant access to your iCal calendars from a menu bar icon. It features a monthly calendar view with your iCal schedule, a configurable clock and full task management. Other features include a current date and/or time icon, a system-wide hotkey for opening/closing the calendar drawer, and many more features.

MenuMeters ““ This offers true SystemUIServer plugins – commonly known as menu extras – which can be reordered using command-drag. This open source freeware is released under GNU GPL and offers a set of CPU, Memory, disk and network monitoring tools.

Namely ““ This offers a fast and easy way to open and launch Mac applications. It can be activated using your preferred keyboard shortcut. It also learns your habits and suggests your most used applications automatically.

Nocturne ““ It gives you a flexible way to invert colors on your Mac and lets you switch quickly between day and night versions. It also lets you invert hues.

OnyX – A multifunction utility for Mac OS X , OnyX allows you to verify the startup disk and structure of system files. It lets you run miscellaneous system maintenance tasks, configure hidden parameters in the Mac Finder, Dock and other applications. It also lets you delete caches and removes certain files and folders.

PTHPasteboard – This program watches you while you work and maintains a copy of any items that you copied to your pasteboard. It could possibly be the best and most mature multiple pasteboard program for your OS X.

Quicksilver ““ This lets you reach any program, folder or file on your Mac as few strokes as possible, eliminating the need to search through your files manually. It offers a quick and powerful search function, which quickly lets you launch, email or move files and applications.

RCDefaultApp ““ This lets you set the default applications for file types, various URL schemes, MIME types and Uniform Type Identifiers through a higher preference pane.

rootMachine ““ This offers a complete maintenance application you can use daily to keep your Mac running smoothly. Among the things, the software will run daily, weekly or monthly cron scripts, repair disk permissions, change the screenshot format, let the Spotlight search feature index a folder for you, or clean all those superfluous files from the system and user cache.

Service Scrubber – This utility lets you organize your OS X’s service menu letting you restructure the menu, change service keyboard shortcuts and disable services you don’t really need. It makes the service menu more useful.

Sizzling Keys ““ This gives you full control of iTunes with hot keys you define via an intuitive Preference Pane. You’ll also get a beautiful status window showing what’s playing. In addition, it also has built-in playlist selection.

Skim ““ This full-featured PDF reader and note-taker also helps you annotate and read scientific papers. It lets you highlight important text, navigate with thumbnails, full screen viewing options, an internal links preview, a magnification tool, extensive AppleScript support, and much more.

smcFanControl – If your Mac is giving out too much heat, you might want to run this utility. It lets you set the minimum speed of your Mac’s built-in fans, allowing you to increase the fan speed to make your Mac runs cooler.

StartUpSound.prefPane – Is your Mac becoming too noisy during start up? You might want to try this third-party solution. It lets you adjust the startup sound volume through a new Startup Sound pane in your Mac’s System Preferences. You can either choose to totally mute the volume or chose a softer tone than your Mac’s default setting.

TextWrangler ““ This is a powerful, general purpose text editor and server administrator’s tool.

UltimateTask ““ This is another maintenance utility featuring a simple and easy-to-use interface for cleaning and maintaining tasks on your Mac. It runs all cron scripts, repair disk permissions and delete system/application/user logs.

ViewIt ““ This is a fast and easy-to-use Mac OS X image viewer, which supports JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PSD, RAW, DNG, animated GIF and other image formats. It features a unique and intuitive interface, full-screen mode, slide shows, quick image sorting, digital cameras, EXIF tags, quick image sorting, and printing.

VirtualDesktop – If you’ve wanted to have multiple monitors attached to your Macs but couldn’t afford to get additional monitors, then VirtualDesktop answers your needs. This utility lets you switch between desktops on your monitor as if you had separate monitors. It provides a GUI interface with desktops arranged in a grid. Each desktop is a unique environment where you can accomplish your work.

Have we missed a utility that you think should be on our list? Feel free to add it in the comments.