Free Software Central – Free Software Downloads

Want to finally create that website you’ve been thinking about? Don’t worry you don’t actually need to be an expert designer or programmer to build your own. Applications like RapidWeaver make it easy to create and publish websites.

RapidWeaver offers a very clean GUI from which you can easily pick out what elements to create for your website such as a movie album, contact form or styled text. The application comes with 40 different themes, and you can easily find hundreds more created by users from the developer site. Just click on one of the themes from the bottom half of the interface to select it. If you have some coding knowledge you can also work with the xhtml and css to tweak themes to your liking. The application also includes its very own open RapidWeaver Sandwich file format so you can work on your website outside of the program.

Publishing is really simple in RapidWeaver. Once your page is saved, just enter the login details for your FTP or .Mac account and pres publish. Thanks to the preview button at the top left you can also check how your pages will look in a browser before publishing.

Although you can work with the PHP, XHTML and CSS some more advanced users might find it too basic.

However, thanks to a clean interface, lots of themes and easy publishing, RapidWeaver makes it easy for anyone to have their own website online in minutes.

Download RapidWeaver 4.3 in Softonic

Ask anyone who’s used a Mac for a long period of time and they’ll tell you that Cocktail still remains one of the best all round admin tools out there.

Cocktail can do all your essential maintenance tasks from clearing your cache to controlling sleep times. There’s nothing new in Cocktail that you can’t do in Terminal but Cocktail makes it so much easier through its GUI. Many of it’s functions and tweaks will remain a mystery to basic users though – options such as whether to switch on or switch of journaling and the network options are aimed more at power users.

Nevertheless, for those that want more control over how their dock works, their startup sequence and other OS interface related issues, Cocktail gives you immense control. The Interface options are perhaps the most useful allowing you to select a range of different features such as Finder, Safari and Mail and tweak them to your own liking.

Some users will complain that what Cocktail does for a modest fee, other apps do for nothing but as an all round system maintenance tool, especially for power users, it’s one of the best out there.

Download Cocktail 4.5.1 in Softonic

If you haven’t installed Flip4Mac WMV on your Mac yet then how on earth have you survived without it?

Flip4Mac WMV is an essential collection of QuickTime components that allow you to play, import, and export Windows Media video and audio files on your Mac using your favorite QuickTime-based applications. Yes, like it or not, there’s no escaping Windows media content even if you have a Mac and Flip4Mac WMV is your best bet of viewing it.

Flip4Mac WMV plug-ins can be used with most QuickTime based applications, including QuickTime Player, iMovie, Final Cut Pro and more. For instance, this enables you to watch Windows Media using QuickTime player, play Windows Media using Safari Web Browser and import Windows Media for edit or conversion to other QuickTime formats. Unfortunately however, iMovie 08 and iMovie 09 are not currently supported.

Flip4Mac WMV is a virtually essential component for any Mac user who needs to watch Windows Media related content.

Download Flip4Mac WMV 2.3.0.11 Beta in Softonic

If you’re a frequent traveler then keeping track of time zones or changing your clock manually is both inconvenient and a bit risky, especially if you set it wrong, aren’t aware if daylight saving rules apply etc.

If you’re a Firefox user, FoxClocks is an extension for Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird that displays world times in your statusbar or toolbar. You can customise it in any way you like such as by making clocks for specific regions turn green when it’s a sociable time to call people in that region. You can browse time zones by country, region or city but the important thing is to enable automatic updates which will ensure that you’ll always have the right time.

If you don’t like the format of the time in the statusbar, change it: choose from a set of useful standard formats, or create your own – custom formats are easy to create and very flexible. Probably the coolest feature of FoxClocks is the option to use Google Earth to take you to any location in its database (which however doesn’t cover every conceivable country in the World), right-click on it and it will open the location in Google Earth.

FoxClocks is a useful tool for anyone who travels a lot or simply wants to improve their geographical knowledge.

Download FoxClocks 2.5.35 in Softonic

We’ve all come across problems playing media for one reason or another. Thankfully, the open source community came up with a solution in the form of VideoLAN VLC Media Player.

Version 1.0.0 (codenamed ‘Goldeneye’) doesn’t actually look that much different from previous versions of VLC but it does introduce many new features, formats and codecs to the VLC multimedia framework. It also fixes several major bugs that were in earlier versions.

Firstly, don’t be fooled by appearances. VLC Media Player may look basic, but it’s this simplicity and power to play anything that makes VLC Media Player so good. This includes downloading streams from the web. Indeed, I’ve often found that where other media players have failed, VLC Media Player has always allowed me to stream content quickly and reliably. This is because VLC Media Player is so lightweight and doesn’t spend as much time processing images as some players do. If you want to stream your own audio or video, there’s also a useful streaming wizard to help get you going.

If VLC Player doesn’t recognize the file type it will often try playing it anyway and will display the scrambled video in its raw form. As regards control, VLC Media Player offers superb hotkey support allowing you to define a key to do anything from taking video snapshots to skipping tracks. It features subtitle support for all major subtitle formats and even allows you to switch languages in the click of a button.

There’s very little to fault with VLC Media Player. It’s a superb lightweight media player that will successfully play the most stubborn files where other players fail.

Download VLC Media Player 1.0.2 in Softonic

Long gone are the days when you’d have to save up for weeks to make a long distance or international phone call. Thanks to Voice over IP technology and the widespread availability of broadband it’s now possible to talk free of charge to anyone in the world.

Skype has made the technology accessible to all through it’s simple and fun-to-use chat-style interface. The program is gaining in popularity, meaning the community of users you can chat to for free is expanding. This update certainly contains some decent additions to the previous version, most notably its webcam facilities. This means you can now watch your buddies as you chat to them and let them see you if you want.

You can use the program to chat with other Skype users anywhere in the world for free either via telephone or the built-in chat feature. However, some overly optimistic users may be disappointed to learn that you still need to pay for credits to make calls to landlines and mobiles with Skype, through the SkypeOut function. Luckily, this is a very painless process, and Skype has recently added a plethora of different ways to pay.

The program is perhaps even easier to use than ever, with streamlined new tools such as the ability to add a contact from the main Skype window and contact grouping for arranging your friends, family and colleagues into categories. You can even import contacts from Outlook, and find out if any of these use Skype. The changes to the interface and its icons may confuse existing users for a while, but once you get used to it, the new GUI is arguably more intuitive than ever.

As we’ve come to expect there’s plenty you can do other than just having a two-way conversation with a friend, including inviting other users into a conference, setting up chatrooms, exchanging files, and viewing the history of your contacts. You can even set up customized voicemail to record messages while you’re away from base.

As more people clamber aboard the Skype bandwagon, the network will become a much more convenient way for people to chat with each other. The client now provides the perfect platform on which to join the communication revolution. Let the Skyping commence…

Download Skype 2.8.0.722 in Softonic

Things is an innovative task management program for Mac, which GTD (Getting Things Done) adepts will be comfortable working with.

Things lets you easily create tasks and organize these by project. You can set them for a given date or delay less important ones by placing them in the ‘Someday’ category. Things syncs perfectly with iCal so that any newly created task of project appears in the Mac calendar.

To keep your tasks organized, Things lets you add tags. The more you add the easier it will be to find and identify a task. You’ll also notice tags appear at the top of the interface.

If multiple people are working on a same project, Things lets them collaborate and remembers contributions from each person.

I’ve found Things enjoyable to work with, although I would have liked it to interact with more applications like Address Book.

Things is a smart and friendly task management application for Mac.

Download Things 1.2.3 in Softonic

Joost it’s free on-demand video. With Joost you can watch more of 20,000 TV Shows. Joost feature popular channels as Reuters, Comedy Central, Showtime, National Geographic and MTV, among many others. More than 480 channels on your computer for free. Joost offers high quality video and audio. Created by Kazaa and Skype inventors, Joost [...]

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have even entertained the prospect of using an electronic reader to read an e-book. It just seemed so soulless and there’s nothing like a good book in your hand.

Nowadays however, the technology and economies of scale have advanced so much that I’m coming round to seeing the benefits of e-books. Rather than carry around lots of books like I usually do, one device can hold my whole collection and rather than waiting for Amazon to send me a book, I can download them instantly for half the cost of the print version.

However, what has been missing has been a tool like Calibre to manage my e-books. Calibre is like iTunes for e-books and it’s absolutely free. It’s so well presented and designed that anyone can use it and flicking through your books iTunes album cover style is a real bonus. It gives life to what are otherwise just soulless data files on your Mac. You can send and retrieve e-books from your reading device and metatags to your books to make them easier to find in your reader. Some users have been turned off by the general interface but I really liked it – it’s self explanatory, makes everything simple and I had no problems with stability.

Calibre is a great free app for anyone that likes to read e-books but has yet to find a way of cataloging them conveniently on their Mac.

Download Calibre 0.6.12 in Softonic

Captain FTP might sound like some kind of swashbuckling, seafaring FTP client but ignore the name – it’s actually a really good client.

Captain FTP is an intelligent client because it uses what the developer’s call “Sync Browsing”. This means that if the local and remote directory structure match, users can browse folders locally and the remote folder will automatically follow the local folder. Captain FTP supports all major protocols such as SSL and SFTP and it even has presets for those that upload to Amazon S3 and WebDav uploads.

The interface of Captain FTP couldn’t be simpler. It features simple navigation with Quick Connect, supports drag and drop, supports virtual folders, Growl alerts and built-in internal viewers for movies, pictures, sound and PDFs. Captain FTP also supports scheduled transfers, accelerated transfers, resuming, auto-reconnect, synchronization, Applescripts and much more than it should do for a such a simple client.

The only downside is that the largest file it will transfer is 2GB although that will surely be enough for most people’s FTP needs.

Captain FTP is an excellent FTP client that will satisfy just about every conceivable FTP need within a compact but powerful package.

Download Captain FTP 6.1019 in Softonic

Coming from the developer of the excellent Acquisition search tool, we’re bound to expect a top notch program. The Xtorrent client does not disappoint.

This Bittorrent client offers a powerful search tool, reminiscent of Acquisition, and a great way of organizing your different downloads. These will be separated by type (image, video, audio) and can be stored in different groups. Once a file is downloaded you can have Xtorrent automatically store it somewhere, such as place audio files in iTunes.

Torrents can be managed individually and Xtorrent offers both a progress bar and bottom information window to keep you updated on all the stats relating to the torrent.

I enjoyed the torrentcast feature, which is ideal to download new episodes of a file being released regularly.

If there’s one thing that’s missing from Xtorrent, it’s the ability to create your own trackers, a feature now available in most torrent clients. I also felt the interface could get a little crowded with many downloads running.

Overall though, Xtorrent is a clever torrent client with a great search tool and a cool torrentcast feature.

Download Xtorrent 2.2 (v82) in Softonic

Do you feel like brightening up your desktop? Changing the icons is an easy way of giving it a new look.

This icon set, Must Have Icons is a pretty comprehensive collection of 50 icons, each in four different sizes. They can be used in Windows or OSX, and instructions available from the developer’s site. There are XP and Vista only instructions included.

The icons are all high quality, and have a clean, modern style to them. They are not radically different, and are more utilitarian than stylish, but attractive none the less. We would have liked to see more unique folder icons, as the included folder icon is pretty dry.

For a free collection, Must Have Icons is impressive. It features pretty much every icon you might want for your desktop environment.

Download Must Have Icons in Softonic

Although Postbox has clearly been inspired by Thunderbird, it features many useful tools that make organizing and tracking your e-mails a real pleasure.

Postbox is designed as an alternative e-mail client that quietly works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email. That means every single bit of text, contact, address, link, picture, document and attachment. The great thing is Postbox is a lot simpler than Thunderbird and getting your webmail – such as Gmail or Yahoo e-mail onto your desktop – is extremely quick and painless. It can even retrieve your Facebook messages for you using a simple setup wizard.

When you install Postbox, you’re taken through a very simple setup wizard to retrieve your mail. My Gmail account info was retrieved within seconds and suddenly I had a fully searchable and backed up copy of my e-mail on my hard drive. There are various features of Postbox that make it worth a look. One of them is just the general ease of use and another is the images view which allows you to scroll through every single image in your inbox. You can also view messages by conversation, create to-do items and organize mail into folders. It does not however extract labels from Gmail which is a downside because it means reorganising your entire collection once again.

If Postbox looks and feels a lot like Thunderbird, then it’s no surprise because some of the same development team worked on both projects. However, if Thunderbird has failed to grab you, you should definitely give Postbox a try.

Download Postbox 1.0.0 in Softonic

DivX is the worldwide codec standard behind many of those compressed videos that are legally or otherwise downloaded from the net.

Of course, there are now hundreds of players out there that play DivX but whichever you use, your files need to be encoded in DivX to work properly. The only way to do this is to run them through a converter such as DivX 7 which converts your files to the latest version of the DivX standard. DivX 7 for Mac provides everything you need to enjoy high-quality digital videos including high definition H.264 (.mkv) videos with AAC audio.

The DivX for Mac download includes the DivX Player plus trial versions of the DivX Pro Codec (6-month trial) and DivX Converter (15-day trial). The DivX player is one of the sleekest out there featuring translucent windows, clean play controls and on-demand scrub bar. It will also play Quicktime and other popular formats. The converter is extremely simply to use as it merely requires you to drag and drop files into it’s tiny interface. Conversions can be rather slow though depending on the size of the file you want to convert.

DivX 7 takes DivX to new levels of quality although since so many other players now playback DivX, the price to upgrade may put off many. If you want the real deal with the converter as well though, DivX 7 promises the best and most accurate DivX conversions and playback

Download DivX 7.1 in Softonic

OmniFocus, the Getting Things Done productivity tool, is finally out of Beta and officially 1.0.

With the help of productivity whiz Ethan Schoonover, aka Merlin Man, OmniFocus is an unassuming yet highly effective piece of software. It gives you limitless possibilities to organize and manage your notes. First plan your projects and actions, then set them in contexts, whether by date or by topic. Features can be added, removed and shifted around as you like. The Perspectives feature is great to save all your custom settings a click.

The folks at Omnigroup have really worked on interaction, and integrated OmniFocus to Mac apps like Mail, Spotlight and iCal. The program is also built so that notes taken anywhere, whether in an email, a document or another note taking app, can be effortlessly integrated in OmniFocus. Another handy little feature is SmartMatch. With this method you can quickly access or edit notes or parts of notes in a few keystrokes. Saves you a considerable amount of time.

While OmniFocus is a highly flexible application and even though you can use it whatever your style of project management, it still is very GTD centric. If you don’t particularly like that method then you might not adjust to it. Another point: at $79.95 it’s a pretty expensive piece of software, but considering the level of innovation put into it we think it’s worth it.

OmniFocus is the perfect organizer for GTD afficionados.

Download OmniFocus 1.7.3 in Softonic