85 Useful Free Mac Apps for Designers

Mind Mapping

• SketchBox is a Sticky Notes Manager for Mac. With SketchBox, you can enter text, make drawings, and set reminders for each sticky notes.
• CocoPad is a simple pad in which you can draw whatever you like with a mouse or tablet pen: sketches, notes, messages, etc.
• MindNode is elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for helping us to visually collect, classify and structure ideas.
• FreeMind is a free mind-mapping software written in Java.

Productivity Tools

• Dateline is a small, simple application that displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. Dateline provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day.
• Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail.
• iClockr is a small application that tracks your work time.
• Quicksilver is a simple, fast, and powerful applications launcher. Quicksilver will make your designing process faster.
• aLunch is a very lightweight application that acts as a handy launcher that runs from within the menu bar.
• NameChanger is a little application that does batch file renaming.
• Todos shows you all of your applications in a complete dock.
• Think is an excellent application for making you focus on the task at hand. With its illumination panel, Think only reveals a single application to improve our concentration.
• Backboard is a Mac application used to collect notes and tasks.

Image Viewer

• Sequential is an image viewer for Mac OS X that was designed for opening a folder of images and displaying them in order. Sequential also suits well for viewing comics and manga.
• CocoaSlideShow is a simple and fast image viewer. It supports Apple Remote, fullscreen mode, GPS mapping and user metadata addition.
• iMedia Browser brings Apple media browser to any applications of your Mac. It enables photo browsing with drag-drop ability.
• Xsee is a native Mac OS X image browser and viewer with a beautiful Aqua interface. Xsee supports integrated slide show, customizable toolbar, full mouse or keyboard navigation, and much more.
• Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is used for fast image viewing and management, with a sleek interface.
• Pix'S Tribe is a fast digital photo finder. It brings the possibility to get, select, and import your digital pictures into iPhoto from a file shared volume.
• JustLooking is an image viewing program for Mac OS X that substitutes the use of Preview by supporting files and directories browsing.
• Phoenix Slides is a fast full-screen slideshow program/image browser for browsing through folders or disks full of images. It also does lossless JPEG transformations and can display EXIF data.

Color Tools

• ColourMod is a dashboard widget that helps you getting a color value. It also enables color value conversion from RGB, CMYK, HSV, or Hex Value.
• Adobe Kuler helps you in exploring, creating, and sharing color theme to inspire any project that involves choosing color themes. Kuler also enables you to generate color themes from an image.
• Colorate is a utility for generating harmonized color palettes and color schemes. It fully automatizes the palette generation from a particular color swatch dragged from other application or obtained from an image.
• Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.
• ColorNamePicker is a plug-in for the colorpicker. ColorNamePicker can be used to select a color based on RGB values, a Hex value or a Color Name. It will analyze the selected color and return the name of the closest matching color.
• Pixel Tracker is a handy little application that magnifies parts of your screen making it easier to capture specific colors.

Image Editor

• Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X with Cocoa framework that enables the use of gradients, textures, text anti-aliasing, brush strokes, and other essential and basic image editing needs.
• GIMP is another open source image manipulator. Using GIMP, you can easily perform photo enhancement and digital retouching.
• GIMPshop is a modified version of GIMP that makes the user interface more like that of Adobe Photoshop.
• Naked Light is an easy-to-use image editor with non-destructive image editing, node-based compositing, live filters, high-end tools, and infinite resolution.
• Xe-IMG Image Editor is an Adobe AIR application for image editing.
• Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X. It enables users to perform a quick creation of simple images. When you need to quickly crop a photo, add some text, or perform some doodlings, Paintbrush is suitable for that purpose.
• Pixen is a graphics editor for the Mac. It's designed for people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games. Pixen also allows you to generate animations just as easily as creating images.
• Thumbscrew allows you to drag and drop images to create rotated thumbnails with borders and drop shadows with customizable angle of rotation, thumbnail bounding box, and border size.
• Image Shackle is a simple widget that lets you quickly scale images to the desired size.
• LiveQuartz is a simple and powerful free 64-bit photo editor based on non-destructive layers and filters.
• Image Tricks is a freeware application for editing photos and images using Mac OS X Core Image filters. It transforms your photos and apply advanced visual effects. It also contains image generator for creating unique backgrounds and abstract images for business cards, web design, print materials and more.
• HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1-bit black & white by implementing the "Atkinson" dithering filter.