Forget Keychain on Mac, 1Password is truly the reference in terms of password management.

This application allows you to store and manage multiple identities and passwords, which you might use in all sorts of programs, websites or browsers. The program works with most of the major browsers, for which it includes an extension to quickly access 1Password while you're surfing the net.

Storing any password or secure note is easy and quick and you'll be able to set up your own security policy, like how many minutes of inactivity until your Mac locks. Keychain users will be familiar with this. You will naturally have to set up a solid master password with which you will have control over your whole collection of passwords.

You can synchronize your 1Password Keychain with your .Mac account, your Palm/Treo and even iPhone to access it from anywhere. It won't work with other phones as yet though.

Additionally, 1Password includes a form filler with which you can set up multiple identities and save data for quick entry. These can be edited any time and associated with specific urls.

The application is regularly updated and the developers are said to be very responsive to issues users may have with 1Password.

1Password is a powerful and effective application to manage all your passwords from one place. Highly recommended to protect your identity on the web.

Download 1Password 2.9 in Softonic

The Gimp is the open source reference in image manipulation. This free application will allow you to retouch, author and edit your photos thanks to a wide set of tools.

Let’s quickly go through what you can do with the Gimp. The painting function has the essential clone, airbrush or pencil tools and a powerful gradient and blend tool. You can also create and save your own brushes and patterns for later use. The program lets you manipulate your photos, adding layers, doing Bezier and polygonal selections or setting text. Load and save animations in a frame-as-layer format and batch process all your photos for quick editing. The multi-windowed interface can be moved around to fit your needs and resized according to your desktop space.

What’s more, the Gimp can be expanded with over 100 different plug-ins and extensions available on the Gimp’s website. These apply in majority for layer effects such as render, distort or blur and make a great addition to the ones already present in the program.

While the Gimp is user friendly, the installation process can result a bit hairy. Because the application works under the GTK Runtime Environment, you will have to install this kit to successfully launch the program. The process is fairly lengthy and some error messages tend to pop up, however if you persist, you will be able to install the Gimp properly on your PC

Despite this fairly hazardous installation process, the Gimp is a program we recommend. Whether you’re out of dough or are looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, the Gimp is excellent image manipulation software with all the tools you’d expect. The friendly interface and expandability make this a program of choice.

Download The GIMP 2.2.11 in Softonic

Snapper is an unassuming yet powerful little application to work with your audio files.

The application displays the wave form of any audio file you select and you can play it back to work through the audio, if you're looking for a specific section. Those of you who have worked with audio files before know how much easier having a wave form allows you to study and edit an audio file.

Snapper seems to be particularly useful to check an audio file quickly before opening it up in Pro Tools. However, you can also use the program to send a file by mail and convert it to any format, such as MP3, WAV or AIFF. You can even convert it into separate L and R files for more precise sound editing.

What really makes Snapper attractive though is the fact that it can handle 50 different popular audio formats.

The only gripes we could have with it is that the interface looks a little outdated, especially for an application that can be run on Leopard, and that, at $79, its a fairly expensive application.

Despite the poor interface, Snapper is an excellent tool to preview any audio file in wave format and convert it to another format.

Download Snapper 1.4 in Softonic

Most webmail and desktop email clients allow you to forward mail from other accounts into them. Mail Forward tries to give a bit more liberty to users by letting them forward up to 20 different accounts. The application is simple to use: just enter your SMTP details and forwarding address, then enter info for your different email accounts. You can ask the application to delete forwarded messages and set time intervals for when messages are forwarded.

Obviously, Mail Forward will be extremely useful to those that have multiple mail accounts but use a webmail service that does not support forwarding all other services to it. However, if you use Gmail or a good desktop client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail, you won't really need Mail Forward.

Download Mail Forward 4.1.5 in Softonic

In these days of global economic meltdown, keeping tabs on the stock market is more important than ever before.

Stock Spy does exactly that by monitoring the latest business news with the latest stock market fluctuations which, in theory, should give you an accurate readout of the latest stock trends. In reality of course, not all news affects the stock markets and not all news is even necessarily true so the results can be quite erratic.

Stock Spy monitors several stock market RSS feeds and combines them with the latest stock values. It can suggest possible share purchase targets or when to sell, according to the latest market movements. The application can deliver results to your computer via a ticker, which organizes information through symbols and signs according to whether it's stocks or shares that it's reporting on.

Stock Spy isn't going to save you from the credit crunch and some of it's features seem a little exaggerated by the developers but in these times you need all the help you can get on the stockmarket.

Download Stock Spy 1.58 in Softonic

Preserving your privacy on the net is no easy task nowadays with so many security risks out there.

Tor is a toolset that's designed for anyone who wants to improve their safety and security on the Internet. It can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. For business users, it means that confidential exchanges of information can be kept from prying eyes and for more general users, it means that ISPs, keyloggers and other types of malware can't track your activities easily.

It works by bouncing traffic around a distributed network of servers which it calls "onion routers" (hence the logo). The Tor interface allows you to easily toggle it on and off based on when you need to go online anonymously - there's no need to restart your Mac when you've done so. You can choose from various proxy tunnels based on a world map which displays exactly where each one is located. To check it's working, you can use the online "Tor detector" to see if you're surfing anonymously or not.

Tor is simple, well organized and a great tool for anyone worried about security or invasions of privacy online.

Download Tor 0.2.0.31 in Softonic

Every productivity geek's dream, Quicksilver has become one of the essential applications on Mac.

For those of you not familiar with Quicksilver, it's an application that lets you reach any program, folder or file in a few keystrokes. You don't have to go searching through your files, you don't have to worry about how your folders are arranged. For many, Quicksilver was a godsend in the pre-Spotlight Mac era. Although it's lost some of its importance with the new powerful search and Finder features in Leopard it still remains very much an excellent Mac application.

The search function is very quick and powerful and once you've found what you're looking for you can apply a number of actions like simply launching it, emailing or moving. What's more Quicksilver adapts to the file it's found, so if it's a document you'll get to modify or send it, and if it's an email you'll get to email or copy it. Quicksilver users also like the fact that the application learns from what you search to bring up what you search for or use most.

Quicksilver wouldn't be what it is without its large library of plugins though. This includes everything from dialing a phone number to interacting with iTunes or image and text manipulation. This means you can really customize the application to work according to your needs.

The only downside is the stability issues that Quicksilver seems to have. The application is noted to crash every once in a while.

Despite this stability issue, Quicksilver remains an incredibly intuitive and powerful multi-application launcher for Mac. Recommended for productivity geeks.

Download Quicksilver 1.0 b54 in Softonic

Limewire, one of the world’s most popular peer-to-peer filesharing applications, has received a lawsuit from the RIAA, who are demanding $115 million in damages, claiming the application promotes the infringement of copyright. Similar applications like Grokster and Kazaa have been forced to go legal and speculation goes as to when Limewire will have to buckle and pay up. The existence of the popular P2P application is not under threat, but if you haven’t given it a try yet, here’s just what makes it a standout program.

In terms of file sharing, Limewire is the cream of the crop, offering the essential peer-to- peer tools in what is probably the friendliest interface of applications in its class. Beginners will appreciate the search bar, which allows you to select the type of file you’re looking for, video, image, audio, or program. Limewire has a “what’s new” button to check out what popular files users have recently exchanged. We also enjoyed the direct connect option. If you know the IP address of one of your friends, type it in the box and Limewire will browse that user’s files. This is a quick way of sharing files with someone else and can come in handy when working on a project and exchanging documents. The only little snag we have with direct connect is that it doesn’t let you enter the username, much simpler than looking for your friend’s IP address.

Downloading with Limewire is very intuitive. After you’ve searched and found the file you are looking for, double-click on it to start the downloading process. The speed of your download depends firstly on the quality of your connection (broadband is a minimum), if you’ve correctly opened your router’s ports and whether you’re downloading a popular file or not. We would like to point out the effort that Limewire takes to make itself accessible to beginners. Not only does a tip pop up every time you launch the application, the help option also leads you to Limewire’s support centre, FAQs and a forum to get in contact with other users.

The lawsuit carried out by the RIAA is all the more surprising because of the measures Limewire takes to keep you in the realms of legality. If you decide to download Limewire from its website, you will first have to agree you will not use it for copyright infringement. When you’re configuring the application, you can set content filters, to avoid downloading files that copyright owners do not want you to share. To avoid embarrassing situations, make sure you tick the “block adult content” box, which will filter out any pornographic files from your searches.

The best way of checking the quality of the audio or video you’re downloading is via Limewire’s mini player. It’s fairly basic and to par with the players you find in similar filesharing applications, but we appreciated the way it was integrated in the program.

If there’s one thing that we’re still expecting from the Limewire team, it’s that it finally decides to jump on the BitTorrent bandwagon. Torrents are the way forward when it comes to peer to peer file sharing because of the speed, the security and freshness of downloads. Large files like movies or complete seasons of TV series are much easier to download via BitTorrent. We were also annoyed by the “buy the PRO version” window that popped up every time we started Limewire.

For its wealth of possibilities and huge base of users, (more than 4 million simultaneously on the Gnutella network) we encourage you to give Limewire a test drive. Because of the controversial nature of the application, you should always make sure that you aren’t using Limewire for illegal activities like copyright infringement. However don’t be scared off by the legality issue. Limewire, like most P2P applications is one of the most exciting possibilities that the internet gives us. It would be a shame not to give it a try. You should also check out Frostwire, the not-for-profit project of the Limewire development team.

Download LimeWire 4.18.8 in Softonic

I must admit I'm not very fond of audio editing tools. Mixing music has never been my cup of tea, so when it comes to testing an audio editor, chances are I end up more confused than satisfied. However, this isn't the case with Audacity. To begin with, this editor is free source and supports MP3, two features which usually don't meet in this kind of application. Secondly, it's easy to master, even for newcomers. And finally, there's a wide range of filters and special effects you can apply to your music so that you easily achieve the desired effect.

Audacity doesn't stand out for its interface. At first sight one wonders if this program is really going to be that easy to use. In fact, the interface sometimes makes it really hard to work with your tracks, especially when you zoom in on them for a more comfortable editing session. Besides this, I found myself constantly right-clicking on the working area and the tracks too, waiting for some handy context menu to appear but nothing came out.

After these few first minutes struggling with the interface, it's time to begin having fun. You can open as many tracks as you want by just dragging and dropping audio files onto the program's interface. Use your mouse to select the fragment you're interested in and begin working with it. You can perform the basic editing actions (cut, copy, paste) or apply effects to it. The zoom tool helps a lot when selecting small areas, as well as the chronometers found at the bottom of the program's window. Obviously, you can use the integrated player to check how your work sounds before saving the project.

Audacity features quite a large selection of filters and effects. Each one has its own setting options to adjust it to your liking. But what I loved is the possibility to preview how the filter will look on the audio track. This preview function allows novice users to test each filter before actually using it and also configure it with great accuracy.

On the downside, Audacity doesn't have much more to offer. After a few days playing with the program, you soon grow tired of selecting audio fragments and adding effects, and you feel like you need something else. In other words, the simplicity of the program makes it easy to learn, but at the same it makes it too basic and requires a lot of creativity on the user's side to obtain ear-catching results. Anyhow, Audacity is still a perfect choice to take your first steps in the music mixing world and then perhaps move on to another more professional tool.

Download Audacity 1.3.5 d in Softonic

Shovebox is for saving all those great ideas, images or links you stumble upon in your daily Mac use. Snuggly tucked in your menu bar the application can organize and prioritize your items by way of labels and flags. We also encourage you to add rules to filter the different elements you come across. Quick jot can be summoned to write down any thoughts going through your head.

Shovebox's location in the menu bar makes it very discreet yet can be annoying when you're dragging an element from the other side of the screen. We welcomed the inclusion of hotkeys but wished they were not just limited to 4 actions and could be set for just about anything you can do in Shovebox.

Download ShoveBox 1.5.1 in Softonic

Debtinator lets you properly handle your debts in one single place. The application lets you follow multiple accounts and enter your expenses and income. Adding new entries is simple and fast and I like the fact that you could set up transfer rules, which keeps you from worrying about moving amounts from one account to another.

The best way to preview your finances is probably by way of graphs and charts. It's usually much clearer than just looking at numbers. Debtinator comes with lots of different report plans for all your needs. I did notice there weren't so many graphs though.

Debtinator is pretty straightforward and simple enough for anyone to enter their finances. The app is built so that you can immediately have a clear view of what situation you are in, even with little financial knowledge.

If you're looking for a simple way to handle your debts, you can turn to Debtinator.

Download Debtinator 2.6.1 in Softonic

Following the release of new versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the infamous 'browser wars' are flaring up again. Despite both Firefox 1.5 and the Beta of IE7 making significant strides, it would be be foolish to think this was a two-horse race. While gaining a good reputation with geeks and power users, Opera has long been a bit-part player among the big boys of the browser world. However, if this preview release is anything to go by, the Norwegian-built browser could finally be ready to punch with the heavyweights.

Opera has been pioneering new ways of browsing the web for some time. It has had tabbed browsing since the days before tabbed browsing was cool and developed the innovative 'mouse gestures' control system, where you navigate through the web just by holding the mouse button and flicking your wrist. The developers even dabbled with a multi-pane interface for viewing several pages within one interface.

The good news is that Opera has lost none of its appetite for innovation, and version 9 is packed with new goodies that will have the programmers at Mozilla and Microsoft choking on their doughnuts. For starters the app runs much quicker than the previous release, making it arguably the quickest browser around (except perhaps for Safari) at rendering pages. Incredibly, despite this boost in performance, the program appears to use less memory than version 8.5, making it far less draining on system resources than Firefox and IE.

In terms of features Opera is the gift that keeps on giving. New to the program comes OSX Tiger-style 'widgets', allowing you to check news, convert currency, view the weather and so on through a series of draggable pop-ups which anchor themselves in front of the browser. Although there aren’t many widgets to choose from at present, this is sure to change once the tech-minded Opera fans start developing more.

Another great addition to Opera 9 is BitTorrent support, allowing you to download torrents directly within the browser – a feature that amazingly no one had thought of before. This system works very smoothly, which makes us wonder why RSS feed reading support in Opera is still so poor.

Among the other new treats within the program is a nifty new search feature which lets you add any search engine to the search bar in the main toolbar. This means you can instantly access searches within your favorite online destinations (Softonic, for instance).

Tabbed browsing remains, although some users may be annoyed to discover that Opera has added close tab buttons to the tabs themselves rather than as a separate button. Having said this, the new web page preview thumbnails that appear when you rollover a tab are a real masterstroke. Mouse gestures are still there too, along with the addition of Total Recall-style voice commands – another example of how cutting-edge this browser is.

Opera's developers have been keen to ramp up security features too, and although they aren't highly original, the new content blocking and pop-up blocking functions serve their purpose effectively. What's more, it's refreshing to see a browser that embraces the latest web standards so freely, with the latest release boasting support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 tags.

The browser is remarkably stable and is far better behaved than Internet Explorer 7. Combined with its speed, innovative features and standards support, Opera is undoubtedly web software's best-kept secret, and the final release may prove to be even better than Firefox. Don't say anything though, or everyone will want it.

Download Opera 9.6 in Softonic

Books is much more than a simple library manager for Mac OS X. It is your new virtual book cataloger, able to store in detail all the essential information about your books (author, title, review, publisher, commentary, illustration, etc.). Entering data is very easy, very much like filling a loan card in the library, with the noticeable difference that it is for your own personal use and that you have much more options, like keeping notes on your favorites or recommending works to your friends.

With Books, you will no longer have to review all the bookcases in the library to find what your looking for. Books lists all the novels in your private collection. Books supports text without format and XML, which allows you to import and/or to export data of your library to HTML or XML formats.

Download Books 3.2.2 in Softonic

If you've never heard of the Adobe Kuler community then prepare to immerse yourself in its wide and technicolored world via Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum.

Adobe Kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. The color themes in Kuler are contributed by users, many of them professional designers or in the creative business so you're dealing with top notch results. So where does Mondrianum come in?

Well it's a plug-in that enables Mac applications to get the most out of the Kuler community. Once installed, it acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker which is available on any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. These include all the big apps such as Apple’s own iWork and iLife suites, Google Sketchup, Adobe Photoshop and other widely used applications such as Coda and CSSEdit.

Mondrianum is a great plug-in for designers and creative professionals looking to access a whole world of unusual and creative colors.

Download Mondrianum 1.0b7 in Softonic

Radioshift is a unique tool to browse and listen to any radio station in the world straight from your desktop. The interface, a mix between iTunes and a news reader, makes it easy to browse and subscribe to new radio stations. You can find shows by using the search window or simply browsing through the categories. Shows are divided into three main sections: spoken, music and sports but you can also search for stations geographically, thanks to a map included in the interface.

Radioshift offers a good deal of extra features like the lists of favorite and popular shows. Once you subscribe to a song (by clicking the + button) it'll be added in the list on the left side of the interface. You can also edit show information, although in a limited way. In terms of usability, Radioshift includes an intro movie and a help manual to get first time users going.

Radioshift is the application of choice for any radio or podcast addict.

Download Radioshift 1.1 in Softonic

With DiskCatalogMaker you'll be able to catalog and organize your disks any way you want it. It has the following features:

• Simple, light-weight and fast
• Finder like intuitive look and feel
• Super fast search algorithm
• Compressing catalog data for disk space
• Long Unicode file name support
• StuffIt / CompactPro / LHA archive formats support
• DiskCatalogMaker for Mac OS X is a Mach-O application (Mac OS X native format)

Download DiskCatalogMaker 5.5.1 in Softonic

iVPN allows you to have a Virtual Private Network (VPN) server interface even if you're not actually running Mas OS X Server.

The application allows you to choose both the PPTP and L2TP protocols. You'll then have to enter your username, password, IP address range and check router, subnet mask and server details. Details entered in iVPN can be stored in your keychain if you so wish.

Setting up a VPN is fairly easy and is both secure and stable. It's very often chosen by businesses for connecting to a server without putting at risk company data and information.

You can easily set up a VPN connection via Network Preferences in your Mac, however some people might prefer the simpler interface offered by iVPN. You'll have control on all the VPN settings instead of having it appear among the other connections created on your Mac.

iVPN brings a Virtual Private Network server interface to your Mac.

Download iVPN 3.0 in Softonic

AppZapper was built to help you undelete applications and all their associated files. You'll find many similar applications on Mac, the reason being that Apple doesn't really provide an advanced deleting tool.

AppZapper is very intuitive to use: just drag and drop the application you want to remove onto its interface and let AppZapper find associated files. It will list these for you and let you decide which ones to remove or keep. If you just want to browse your applications and find which ones to delete, just press the Genie button at the bottom of the interface.

Luckily, AppZapper isn't limited to applicaitons. It will also list all plugins and widgets and let you delete them in a click.

The latest version of AppZapper also includes an undelete feature, just in case you've mistakenly removed a program and want to recover it.

Although the application works fine, it's a little worried that AppZapper hasn't been updated in such a while. There's bound to be more features to add to it and hopefully the developers will come up with something new soon.

AppZapper provides an intuitive way of deleted any application and all associated files.

Download AppZapper 1.8.0 in Softonic

When editing, converting and even managing images on a Mac, the obvious choice can tend to be to use iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom. GraphicConverter X is not as much in the limelight even though it proves to be a more than worthy alternative.

GraphicConverter X comes with two browsing views, which let you dig in deep in folders and find your pictures. The application can also convert pictures into any of the popular image formats out there. The interface itself is well structured and streamlines your workflow.

Although you may not find as many editing tools as in Aperture or Ligtroom, GraphicConverter X comes with a very wide list of filters and effects that you can place onto your pictures. These are all accessible from the menu bar.

GraphicConverter X probably lacks more advanced web and sharing features as you can only really send pictures by mail and create a rather basic HTML catalog. Considering that sharing pictures online is more and more common I would have liked to see more choices in this sense.

Thanks to a great interface, powerful and accessible features, GraphicConverter X is a solid photo application for managing, converting and editing your pictures.

Download GraphicConverter X 6.1.5 in Softonic

You've got that shiny new iPod and you've got it packed with your favorite music. But you may want to transfer songs back from your iPod to your Mac. Obviously if you just work with iTunes you will not be able to do so. Senuti provides an easy solution for you.

Fitted with a simple interface, Senuti lists all the songs and playlists in your connected iPod. You can search through them and sort your songs. Senuti can automatically add songs to your iTunes library or you can decide which folder they go into. If you are worried about duplicates, you'll be glad to know Senuti display a little blue dot next to every song you already have in your library. Senuti can transfer your playlists and save your metadata.

The application has been in beta for a while now, which unfortunately still means you'll get the odd bug here and there. Apart from this though, the transfer process is seamless.

Senuti offers a great way of transfering songs and playlists from your iPod to your Mac.

Download Senuti 0.50.2 in Softonic