Alfred can help you access applications, websites and other aspects of your Mac in the touch of a button. For instance, by configuring a few keyboard strokes, you can make Alfred provide instant access to web searches, bookmarks, your iTunes library and even the copying and pasting of files. You don't even have to configure keystrokes though - Alfred will learn which apps you use often and prioritise them when you search.

Alfred also comes with a high number of customisation options so you can control exactly how Alfred interacts with your Mac and how it looks. If you've ever used Quicksilver, you'll be impressed by both the customisation possible with Alfred and the incredible speed and effectiveness it makes to your working day. There's very little to fault.

Alfred is an excellent launch tool that is guaranteed to improve your productivity if used correctly.

Download Alfred 2.0.3 in Softonic

The interface is very slick and iPhoto features tons of tools to help you manage your library. In fact, the real strength of the program resides in the organizing options such as organizing by events, create a gallery, print out calendars and books etc. In particular, the unified search function allows you to quickly find any photo based on all sorts of criteria like date, name or keywords and now, even faces.

One of my favorite features of iPhoto are the photo montages which allow you to select a style of presentation with accompanying music. These look great and are a nice way to view your photos and reminisce on the past. However, I dislike the way iPhoto has to build a library file of your photos. If you've already got several GB of photos on your system, you don't want another huge iPhoto file taking up space on your hard drive.

Of course, iPhoto is also very well integrated into other Apple apps such as iDVD so your iPhoto images can easily be used in videos that you're editing. Displaying photos in full screen mode isn't as simple as it should be however - it involved way too many clicks and its hard to get rid of the toolbar.

Overall, iPhoto is an extremely elegant photo application which makes viewing photos a pleasure.

Download iPhoto 9.4.3 in Softonic

Songbird is an open-source music player and organizer with which you can manage, play and discover music.

It's free, cross-platform and highly customizable thanks to a wide variety of plug-ins and can be improved and extended by the contribution of its user community. The first thing you'll notice about Songbird is its resemblance to the iTunes interface, which means that if you've ever used iTunes you won't have any problem in learning how to use Songbird.

Songbird automatically imports your music files from a selected folder, monitors that folder for future music additions, organizes your music in a handy, easily browsable catalog, is compatible with iTunes and Last.fm libraries, can be controlled from any other app thanks to global hotkeys and also supports Last.fm scrobbling. It also includes album art and a simple equalizer.

Songbird is such a complete tool that's hard to find negative sides to it. Plus there's an army of developers constantly working on improvements and new features. The only thing that's missing is support for podcasts. It should also be noted that with each new release of Songbird, your plugins may be broken by the new release.

Songbird is a complete, full-featured music player and organizer with support for plug-ins and an extensive user community.

Download Songbird 2.2.0 in Softonic

Firefox Beta 19 adds a built-in PDF viewer so you don't have to rely on a plug-in. The other big update is that Firefox will offer to reset the URL bar for the default search provider if a third-party program changed it.

Smaller improvements include faster startup performance so the browser should open quicker. Developers also gained new features with the debugger supporting pausing on exceptions, the remote web console being able to connect to Firefox on Android or the Firefox OS, and a browser debugger add-on.

Firefox Beta 19 didn't add many major features, but continues the steady development of the browser.

For the stable version Firefox, click here.

Download Firefox Beta 19.0 in Softonic

Quicksilver is a handy app and folder launcher has quickly 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 finds, 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 b71 in Softonic

The popular article aggregator finally comes to the Mac. If you use Pocket on iOS or Android, you'll definitely want to download Pocket for Mac so you can read your saved content at home. The beauty of Pocket is its simplicity. Browsing the web and see an article that you don't have time to read at the moment? Save it to Pocket for reading later.

Pocket for Mac is a good recreation of the mobile apps but takes advantage of the screen real estate of a laptop or desktop. Articles will show up in a column on the left. Click on an article and it will expand on the right side. You can either view the article as you would on the web, or you can choose to read it in "article view" where ads, and other parts of the webpage are stripped out, leaving only text and photos.

Not everyone can be connected to the internet at all times so it's great to see that Pocket for Mac automatically downloads all of your articles for offline viewing. This means you can have all of your articles like a newspaper, ready to read, even if you're not connected to the internet. Pocket for Mac can decide whether the article or web view is the best and will cache that for you.

The interface of Pocket is minimalistic but still retains all the functions of its mobile apps such as sharing, adjusting text size, and tagging. There's a search field at the bottom left so you can quickly search your articles and tags. It's a shame that Pocket for Mac doesn't have a grid view like their website does, which provides a more visual experience with large header images.

Pocket for Mac is a must-have for those who already use Pocket in the browser or mobile devices.

Download Pocket 1.1.0 in Softonic

If you've had your email account for awhile and haven't been keeping it organized, it's easy to lose track of photos sent to you from friends and family. You probably have a bunch of pictures saved there that you won't even remember receiving. Good thing Lost Photos exists to help you unearth them all.

Running Lost Photos is easy. Just launch the program, enter the email address you want to search (plus a password), and the app will start searching for you. Lost Photos automatically stores discovered photos in a folder and let you share them via Facebook or, perhaps ironically, even through email.

There are also some nice customization options that Lost Photos offers to help you define your search criteria. Some of these include ignoring images below a certain file size, omitting different file types from your search, and searching from a set date on forward.

Unfortunately, Lost Photos doesn't work on all email accounts, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) most notably.

Lost Photos is a great organizational tool that helps you search for photos sent to your via email.

Download Lost Photos 1.1 in Softonic

Similar to its Twitter counterpart, Echofon for Mac, FaceTab lets you view all the important information on your Facebook account from the comfort of your desktop. Different integrated links exist for your Newsfeed, Events, and Places, as well as main linked tabs for Home, Profile, Friends, and Messages. In addition, you can search via FaceTab just like you can on Facebook's regular site, and you can sort through your notifications and various requests too.

FaceTab also comes with a refresh button so you can see the latest news in your feed whenever you like. There are also convenient forward and back arrows and a settings menu that lets you determine how frequently you want to be notified of new information, if at all.

On top of the great options for getting content from Facebook, you can also interact quite easily through FaceTab. Comment on other peoples' statuses, share news stories, or even update your own status easily and quickly. You can also view peoples' photos directly through the app. In fact, the only thing that FaceTab doesn't do is actually upload pictures. For that, you'll have to log onto Facebook via the web. If this feature was added in future versions of the app, it would undoubtedly make this one of the best Facebook desktop apps on the market, if not the best.

FaceTab really makes it easy to keep up with all the things happening on Facebook, all from the comfort of your Mac's desktop.

Download FaceTab 4.4 in Softonic

Adobe AIR has spawned a huge number of social networking apps and Twhirl is another example aimed at the Twitter community.

Twhirl actually supports not only Twitter but also Friendfeed, identi.ca and seesmic. It can connect to multiple accounts at the same time in much the same way as Adium can as an IM client. Notifications on new messages are delivered to your desktop, you can cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku, post images to TwitPic and search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan.

To get started, you'll obviously need to download Adobe AIR first. Setting up your various accounts is easy as your taken through the process via a wizard. The problem is that once you're up and running, you may notice that some of the fonts aren't rendered very well in Mac OS. The reason is that while Twhirl uses system fonts installed on your computer to display tweets, the Flash-based rendering of system fonts on OSX can ruin them although the developers say that the Verdana font at 12pt works best.

Twhirl is a useful micro blogging desktop app for those that are members of Twitter, Pownce, identi.ca and seesmic.

Download Twhirl 0.9.7 in Softonic

Once registered with SoundCloud, you can upload up to two hours of music in AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP3 or AAC formats. You can share your music publicly or privately, and even make your track downloadable. The social part of SoundCloud is similar to Twitter - you follow members and others follow you. There are also groups, so you can find people with similar tastes to you.

This desktop client allows you to make your recordings easily and both upload and share them from your Mac. You can browse and search and sound and create your own playlists. The only problem you may have is connecting to SoundCloud occasionally - if it times out, there is no error log to explain what's wrong and the application may just crash as a result.

If you're a big SoundCloud user, then this Mac desktop client is a must.

Download SoundCloud 1.2.0 in Softonic

If you've ever wanted to have copies of all the photos people tag of you on Facebook, you can download them one by one from the web site, or use an app like Photograbber. This is a standalone app, meaning you don't have to install it, which is good news. Getting photos is easy - first click login, which opens your browser, then once you are logged in you receive a code, which you have to paste into Photograbber.

Next you can choose anyone from your friends list, or yourself, and then Photograbber will search for and download every picture tagged of that person and put it in the folder of your choice. You can also choose to download complete albums you feature in, albums uploaded by that user, and the comment and tagging information as well. Photograbber has the same permissions as you, so it can only download images you can view yourself! Photos are left in separate folders, names after the photo album they were taken from.

Once finished the app will close. Photograbber is a simple Facebook photo downloader, but it works well. It could be improved if you could select multiple users to download, and being able to download all images to a single folder might be preferable for some people.

Photograbber is a quick and painless way of downloading tagged photos of you or your friends on Facebook.

Download Photograbber r83 in Softonic

Splunk is a web based tool for IT administrators that need to search and navigate IT data from applications, servers and network devices in real-time.

The tool allows you to log, configure systems, run scripts, search code, and much more. The developer claims that if your machine can generate it then "Splunk can eat it". Splunk is a handy monitoring tool that can alert you to changes in scripts, configurations, capture files and even connect to network ports. You can be sent notifications by RSS, email and SNMP.

While the indexing, searching and reporting aspects of Splunk are impressive, the presentation is also excellent. It feels like a Google-style analytical tool, offering clear and easy to read reports, and a fairly easy setup procedure. However, anyone trying to use this on a small network with little IT administration knowledge will find it tricky. It's definitely aimed at the advanced group of network administrators out there.

Splunk is a fully comprehensive monitoring, alert and reporting app that will appeal to experienced administrators working on large networks.

Download Splunk 4.2.2 in Softonic

Here we have a good name for a good program. Wallet can store all your important information in a clear and well structured interface.

Those of you that already use Apple's Keychain Access will find some similarities in Wallet's interface. Items you create can be saved in one of the existing groups like serial numbers, web services or credit cards and you can also create your own.

Wallet includes a handy password generator for when you have trouble finding a good one to use. Just type in where you want numbers or letters, if you want it to be pronounceable or not and let it do it's job. Wallet also works with Apple's Password Assistant to let you create a very solid one.

The application comes with a Dashboard widget which can let you search for any item stored in Wallet.

As expected, Wallet comes with an autofill feature, great for handling forms on the web. I was a bit surprised that this feature only works with Safari, OmniWeb and IE. Surely other browser like Firefox or Opera should have been included.

Despite this slight limitation, Wallet is a great app to store any sort of sensitive data and create strong passwords.

Download Wallet 3.2.2 in Softonic

Zimbra Desktop was one of the first applications to embrace Web 2.0 and show us what it could offer. It's been a little left behind by todays generation of 2.0 apps but is still an interesting option.

Zimbra Desktop is an AJAX-based collaboration tool that aims to ensure that you can work on and offline. For example, using Zimbra, you can write emails, add new appointments and edit documents offline and when and when you reconnect, changes will be automatically synced to the Zimbra Server.

Firstly, installation of Zimbra Desktop is lengthy, requiring you to sign up for a Zimbra account so make sure you have a bit of time spare before starting on this. You have to configure all of your server and mail details in your Zimbra account before you can start working. Zimbra Desktop syncs Yahoo! Mail and Gmail accounts and it can read email from any POP or IMAP email account, including AOL, Hotmail or business email. The developer touts Zimbra as a possible replacement for Outlook for Windows users, although I'm not sure if Apple Mail users would really consider switching. Syncing with Zimbra Desktop is fairly fast although even this could be a made a little quicker.

Zimbra Desktop elements in Zimbra Desktop such as inbox, contacts, calendar or documents appear in a new tab in your default browser. You can search items very quickly using the search field at the top of the interface although again, this can be a little slow. It has to be said that the overall interface isn't exactly slick and could do with being given a much nicer OS X look or Cocoa revamp.

If you regularly work offline, then Zimbra Desktop could be worth a try for you. However, it is blighted by a rather lengthy installation process and slowness in certain departments.

Download Zimbra Desktop 2.0.1 in Softonic

Maintaining your privacy when using P2P networks is becoming an increasingly hot issue amongst the internet community with authorities increasingly keen to clamp down on P2P file sharing.

Services like BitTorrent and Gnutella share data with anyone that asks for it which allows a third-party to systematically monitor user behavior. OneSwarm has been designed to provide users with maximum control over how their files are shared. If you choose, you can make all your activities public or you can choose to share it with just those friends and colleagues you trust.

When you open One Swarm, it opens a new tab in your browser from where you operate One Swarm because although it uses an installer, this is purely a web app. Note that it doesn't search for torrents within it's interface like eMule does. Rather, from it, you can search the net for torrents and then load those torrent files into One Swarm for downloading. This is quite confusing for those new to P2P file searching but the advantage is that when you start downloading, you have a high degree of control over how it's shared and who can see what you're sharing.

Alternatively, OneSwarm is useful just for sharing files with friends. It would be useful though if the developers had provided more in the way of a guide to getting started. Because it's so different from most BitTorrent clients, it can be quite confusing at first.

OneSwarm is the BitTorrent client for those that know what they're doing with P2P file sharing, want maximum security and don't mind working from a web interface.

Download OneSwarm 0.6.7 in Softonic

Although some bloggers are hailing it as a 'new' release by Google, Google Quick Search Box was released as part of the Google Codes project earlier this year but it's now been given an official release by Google with it's own web page.

And you can see why Google think the tool is fitting of a major release. Google Quick Search Box is a basically a Spotlight-style app that can search for just about anything both on and offline. In this way, it's very similar to Google Desktop, except it's far more discreet and lightweight and there's no annoying indexing to wait for.

Rather, Google Quick Search Box floats on your desktop ready for action whenever you need it. Previously, it only performed basic searches on your hard and online but this official release makes it an altogether more powerful proposition.

Google Quick Search Box can performs more through hard drive and online searches and it can even launch applications. As you'd expect from a Google product, searches are incredibly detailed and quick and results are displayed clearly. Search for 'Firefox', for example, and it immediately brings-up the Firefox icon ready for launching. In this way, Google Quick Search Box acts not only as a search tool, but as a launcher as well.

You can even customize Google Quick Search Box to search only those online sites that you choose such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Gmail and Google Docs. To search both your Gmail and Google Docs account, you need to enter your Gmail account credentials in the 'Accounts' section in Preferences. However, when I tried to search my accounts using Google Quick Search Box, the search seemed to hang for a while and no results were found. Whether this was a technical glitch or a bug I'm not sure, but it was a little disappointing.

There is also an impressive number of preferences in Google Quick Search Box for a small application. You can customize whether to show the Dock icon, configure a hotkey to reveal it, select which sites are searched and as already mentioned, add a Google account.

Google Quick Search Box has come a long way since it's initial release. Whether it's good enough to replace Spotlight I'm still not convinced but it's certainly in the right ball park.

Download Google Quick Search Box 2.0.0.1447 in Softonic

With Last. fm, music fans have found a place to congregate and share musical tastes. The Last. fm player places the “social music revolution” onto your desktop, giving you access to thousands of tracks from all musical genres.

Search results appear as a tag cloud, with the biggest elements being the most popular. With thousands of songs available on Last. fm, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll listen to the same thing twice.

The player is streaming and you’ll have to be connected to the internet and have a Last. fm account for it to work.

fm player interface is sleek and accessible. We like the shiny control icons and the “now playing” window. This is where you’ll find all artist information like album cover, a small description of the artist, related tags and artists and top listeners.

The menu bar on the left includes your recently played tracks, recently loved and recently banned, although to listen to these you’ll need to upgrade your Last.

fm account (€2. 50/month). The last 10 stations you’ve listened to are automatically saved in your history file.

fm and becomes pretty addictive. By listening to tracks you create a profile of yourself, the music you listen to and the artists you like. Last.

fm then connects you to other users that have similar tastes, whom it calls neighbours. In the Last. fm player, you can connect to neighbours' stations and listen to their tunes.

The lists of the friends you made on Last. fm will also appear in your player. If you have the Audioscrobbler plug-in installed, Last. fm can also track all the songs you play in your favourite desktop music app (like iTunes) and connect you with even more neighbours.

In line with modern evolutions in online music, this web music application mixes streaming and social tools to give you an exciting music player.

Download Last.fm player 1.5.4 in Softonic

Now that Google Docs has become such an essential tool, it's useful to have some way to search for documents within it from your desktop.

Precipitate allows you to exactly this by enabling you to search for Google Docs within Finder or Google Desktop. All of your Google Docs will be returned as results in the same way as any other document saved on your machine.

Not only that but it also searches Google Bookmarks and Picasa Web Albums too.

Precipitate works by creating files on your machine that are imported by Spotlight. It then periodically checks with the Google server to verify if any changes have been made.

The only downside is that changes may take up to an hour to be visible in local searches. One extra bonus, though, is that a small search box in the Precipitate interface allows you to search your System Preferences window for all kinds of preferences available on your system.