Photo from Ricky Romero (Creative Commons License)

Yes, we are happy MacBook users! Me and my wife too: “Why didn’t you already buy this Mac some years ago?” She loves the dock with its program icons, the amazing fast boot time, and the intuitive handling of day-to-day tasks (e.g. including a foto into an e-mail).

The only thing which I’m not satisfied at all is the missing import function from Outlook to Mail. This is a basic feature that I would have expected to be implemented by Apple. Why do I have to buy a 3rd party tool to import properly emails and contacts?

Which are the other pieces of software that are very useful, not part of the Mac software package, and free of charge?

• Cyberduck – the right choice for an FTP client
• Fruux – a good solution to synch your address books, calendars, and favourites between Mac users (even on the same MacBook)
• Gimp – for the more advanced editing of your fotos and graphics
• OpenOffice – good enough for 80% of the tasks I use the MS office package for in the office
• MPEG StreamClip – a converter for MPEG video files
• RadioLover – the right tool to record and split MP3 songs from radio streams (limited to 30 minutes per session for the free version)
• Skype – no need to introduce this one…
• Smultron – an open source text editor (e.g. to edit HTML code on your website)
• XMind- use it for mindmapping
• Zattoo – watch TV via an easy-to-use peer-to-peer system (mostly German channels)