85 Useful Free Mac Apps for Designers

With many applications emerging one after another, it's not really difficult to find free apps out of the net. Perhaps, those free applications are suitable for us compared to commercial ones.

Knowing there are quite a number of designers out there using a Mac, we compiled free Mac applications for designers. In this compilation, you can find useful Mac applications that can be downloaded and used for free.

Modeling & Animation

  • Google SketchUp is a fast and simple 3D modeling program. You can use it to model simple 3D objects. Textures and colors are also available for use.
  • DAZ Studio is a free feature rich 3D modeling and animation tool. It enables anyone to create stunning digital imagery. This is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and animation.
  • Quartz Composer helps you creating a groundbreaking screen savers, user-interface widgets, data-driven visual effects, and animations. It's shipped with Leopard.
  • Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite that features 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation, and playback.
  • Sweet Home 3D is the application for interior design. It can model the placement of furniture, draw the walls, texture the surface, and many more features. Moreover, generated house plan is viewed in 3D model.
  • Microspot 3D Toolbox is a free application that enables you to open, edit, print, and navigate Quickdraw 3D, 3D Studio Max, and Google SketchUp files.
  • Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.
  • Keynote Goodies gives you more available Keynote backgrounds, themes, and objects for you to create even more mind-blowing Keynote Presentation.
  • NodeBox is an application used to create 2D visuals using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie.
  • ShapeOnYou is a little application that can display and animate different vectorial 3D shapes. It is designed to easily drag-drop the results in other applications where you would like to use 3D shapes.
  • Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.
  • GiftedMotion is an easy to use GIF animator.
  • Lego Digital Designer lets you build with LEGO bricks on your computer, virtually.

Vector Drawing

  • DrawBerry provides us the possibility of vector drawing empowered with layers, powerful drawing tools, inspectors, and workspaces.
  • Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that uses the W3C standard SVG file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features such as markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.
  • DrawIt Lite is a vector editing application with support for bitmap-like image filters. The Lite version offers several basic things such as Vector Tool, Non-destructive Effects, and Bitmap to Vector Conversion.
  • Pencil is an animation and drawing application. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon). It supports both bitmap and vector graphics.

Web Development

  • Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch, or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface. You can also manage multiple CSS projects and import your existing style sheets.
  • Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize snippets in one convenient location.
  • FontDoc is a very simple program which shows you all of the fonts on system using any text and size of your choice.
  • Aptana is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more.
  • Nvu is a high-performance web editor built around Gecko. This makes web designing easier for web developers, especially beginners.
  • Paparazzi is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.
  • Plainview is a full-screen web browser, which is best for presentations that require interactivity, you can do Flash, HTML presentations and do cool things with video.
  • iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It's the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development.
  • Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks.
  • Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client.
  • FileZilla is the free FTP solution for Mac. It includes both a client and server side.
  • OneButton FTP is a free graphical FTP client for Mac OS X with a strong emphasis on simplicity, drag-drop usability, and file queuing.
  • JAlbum allows you to create nice-looking photo galleries for the Web. You simply select or drag and drop folders containing images or movie files onto JAlbum. JAlbum will then create thumbnails and HTML pages to publish your images as a gallery or picture slide show.
  • Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser. It is the second most popular browser, right after Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Multimedia

  • Front End Digital Media Workshop harnesses the power of QuickTime to bring you powerful batch based conversion of sound, video, and image files.
  • HyperEngineAV is a multimedia authoring application for capturing, editing, organizing, processing, and exporting video, audio, and text to create quality movies and shows.
  • Flaex is a Flash Movie extractor for Mac OS X. From any flash files, it extracts images, sounds, videos, etc.
  • FLV Crunch is an application that converts one video file format into another.
  • Subs Factory is a free but powerful utility designed to make the creation, modification and resynchronization of subtitles easy.

Other Tools

  • The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for BOMArchiveHelper.app, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. It handles many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper.
  • Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
  • Comipro+ is a cartoon production application.
  • Slammer overlays your display with grids, which can be use as a measurement tool.
  • Shape Collage is a free automatic photo collage maker that lets you create picture collages in a variety of shapes within less than a minute.
  • PosteRazor cuts a raster image into pieces which can afterwards be printed out and assembled to become a poster. The result is saved as a multipage PDF document.
  • Top Draw is an image generation program based on the JavaScript programming language that can create surprisingly complex and interesting images.
  • ImageOptim has a set of tools for optimisation of PNG and JPEG images. It's suitable for publishing images on the web.
  • DropJPG makes it easy to convert images from most formats to JPEG. For converting to JPEG, only simple drag-drop is needed to be performed.
  • Iconic is a free application used to create ton of icon thumbnails that can handle multiple processes at once.
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