Macs are expensive. Let’s just go ahead and admit that right away. Yes, they’re the best computers on the market, and each new Mac includes useful software like Mail, Safari, TextEdit, and the iLife suite for no extra charge. But many consider certain high-priced software packages—specifically, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, although the list doesn’t end there—to be so standard that they’re practically required purchases. Indeed, when people ask us about switching from a PC to the Mac, one of the first questions usually is, “I’ll have to rebuy Office, won’t I?”

 

Not necessarily.

 

Tons of free apps are available for the Mac, thanks to Mac OS X’s Unix underpinnings. Many were written to fill a specific niche (Cuppa, for example, times your morning cup of tea so you know when it’s steeped just how you like it), but you can also find robust, feature-filled apps that, while they don’t always have the polish of their big-budget brethren, you might like well enough to make the switch for good.

 

Free Photo Editing: Bring out the GIMP

 

At $649, Photoshop CS3 (5 out of 5 stars, Jul/07, p54) is a pricey app, but it’s such a powerful, popular photo editor that many who are buying a Mac mentally add the price to whatever they’ve budgeted for the computer—because everyone needs Photoshop, right? Well, yes and no. It is a superhandy app to have (iPhoto does some basic edits, but to composite images or add layers you need something more powerful), but of course it’s not the only game in town.

 

Photoshop Elements 6 costs only $90 for a stripped-down feature set, and it requires just half the hard drive space (1GB compared to Photoshop’s 2GB). Photoshop is the industry standard and will be for the foreseeable future, so pros are probably stuck with it, but anyone looking to save a few bucks and still have a solid image editor should consider some open-source alternatives that won’t cost a dime.

 

GIMP takes some getting used to, but handy features like the Undo History pane and pop-up labels for all the buttons will help smooth the transition. The wiki at wiki.gimp.org is incredibly helpful as well.

 

GIMP. The GNU Image Manipulation Program can do many of the same things Photoshop can, without the big price tag. Or any price tag, for that matter.

 

GIMP for the Mac requires you have X11.app installed first, found on your Mac OS X Install Disc. (See “What the Heck is X11, Anyway?” below.) To install X11, pop the install disc into your optical drive, look for the package labeled Optional Installs, and double-click it. You’ll see an installer window. Click Continue through the Introduction, License, and Destination screens to the Installation Type screen. There, expand the Applications subsection and check the box next to X11. Click Update, and X11 will be installed.

 

What the Heck is X11, Anyway?

 

X11 is short for the X Window System, version 11, the standard graphics display system in the Unix world. Think of it as a client-server relationship, where X11 is the central server that draws the windows on your screen, and apps like GIMP or GIMPshop are the clients that tell X11 what to draw. Mac OS X is Unix-based, but it uses its own graphics display system, called Quartz. Since many open-source apps are written for Unix, installing X11 can allow you to explore many free software options.

 

Now it’s time to download the GIMP. You can grab the source code from the GIMP home page at www.gimp.org/macintosh. But if you go that route, you must compile the source code into GIMP.app yourself, with the help of the Terminal. (If you’d like to try that, we found helpful instructions on the Wilber Loves Apple forum, at www.wilber-loves-apple.org/topic.php?id=8.) But there’s an easier way—at Wilber Loves Apple (www.wilber-loves-apple.org), you can download the already-compiled app nicely packaged as a regular disk image (DMG). Then you just double-click it to mount the disk image, and drag the GIMP.app icon to your Applications folder.

 

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When you launch GIMP, you’ll also see the icon for X11 in your Dock. You can ignore it, but X11 must be running while you’re using GIMP. You’ll notice that the menus for GIMP aren’t in the menubar (which shows the menus for X11—again, just ignore them), but rather at the tops of the floating GIMP windows themselves. To quit the app, choose File > Quit from the main GIMP window, which looks more like a palette.

 

GIMP’s main advantage, of course, is that it’s free. But if you’re a Photoshop veteran, the Mac version may seem unintuitive at first. Open-source aficionados who use GIMP on other platforms, like Windows or Linux, tend to regard the Mac version as the ugliest of the bunch. But it does have support for layers, and it can read and write many popular image formats, including bitmap, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, and PSD (Photoshop Document). It can open PDFs and many cameras’ RAW image files, but not write to them. The native GIMP format is called XCF.

 

Wilbur Loves Apple is a great resource for learning GIMP, along with Wilber’s Wiki at wiki.gimp.org (Wilber/Wilbur is the GIMP mascot, who appears on the Dock icon), which has links to plug-ins, scripts, directions for compiling the app yourself, a glossary, tutorials, documentation, and lots more. Overall, we found GIMP to be powerful, but somewhat intimidating, and with a slightly steeper learning curve than two other open-source image editors that are built on the same tech: GIMPshop and Seashore.

 

If you like Photoshop, GIMPshop’s tools and menus will seem a little more familiar, although under the hood it’s all GIMP.

 

GIMPshop. If you’re comfortable working with Photoshop’s menus but still want to go open-source, GIMPshop might be your happy medium. This app is still GIMP under the hood, but it comes wrapped in a more familiar package, with the menus rebuilt to resemble Photoshop’s and the terms changed to match what Adobe uses. It’s just as powerful as GIMP.app and only about half as ugly. GIMPshop also requires X11, but you can download a disk image of the app from www.gimpshop.com/download.shtml.

 

As is the case with GIMP, the X11 menus appear in your menubar while the GIMPshop menus appear on the palette-like application windows themselves. And like GIMP, it supports modules and plug-ins, lets you build your own brushes, and supports a number of image formats. Both apps are snappy and won’t bog down your system—GIMP requires less than 100MB of space on your drive, and GIMPshop is twice as big but still svelte at under 200MB. Photoshop CS3, by comparison, requires 2GB.

 

Fewer online resources are available for GIMPshop help than for GIMP, but you can ask questions at the forum (www.gimpshop
.com/forum/). Its resemblance to Photoshop makes it easier to learn in the first place, and since the menus are so close, once you’re familiar with the interface, you’ll be dusting off your Photoshop skills in a zero-cost, open-source image-editing playground.

 

X11 Quick Tips

 

A couple of quirks to watch for when using X11 apps: You generally have to select a window before you can click on any buttons or tools inside it. And you need to substitute the Ctrl key for the Command key in any keyboard shortcuts.

 

GIMP and GIMPshop give you helpful tips every time you launch the app. Once you’re a GIMP ninja, you can disable the pop-up tips, of course.

 

Seashore. If you don’t need all the power of Photoshop, or you don’t want to install X11, try Seashore. If GIMPshop is the closest thing to open-source Photoshop, Seashore is like GIMPshop Elements. In fact, it’s even built on GIMP’s technology, although it uses Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework, so it doesn’t need X11 to run. You can download a beta from seashore.sourceforge.net. Since the app is still in development, it’s a good idea to keep another copy of whatever image you’re working on, in case your file winds up corrupted somehow.

 

Seashore includes four layered XCF image files, and the 53-page documentation uses them as examples for its helpful tutorials.

 

Seashore supports layers, alpha channel editing, gradients, and textures, and it uses the same native file format, XCF, as GIMP. You also get Save As and Export support for JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF. But it also aims for simplicity—this is meant for basic photo-editing tasks, not a replacement for Photoshop. Even this early in its development, Seashore is a Universal binary.

 

Online help is a bit sparse, but the Sourceforge page does have small forum, and the 53-page PDF Seashore Guide is extremely thorough and clearly answered any questions we had. Seashore is an intuitive app, and since it’s built on Cocoa, it really looks at home on the Mac.

 

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Office Suites That Won’t Cost A Whole Paycheck

 

Microsoft Office is kinda like the phone company—everyone uses it, but no one seems to like it. Apple’s iWork ($79, www.apple.com) is a more elegant and user-friendly option, and you can export your work into Microsoft Office formats. But if $79 is still more than you want to spend, once again it’s open-source software to the rescue.

 

OpenOffice runs over X11, although an Aqua version is being developed. The suite’s robust help offerings resemble Microsoft Office’s, and most of the tricks you use in Office will also work here.

 

OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org is an open-source office suite for Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. A full office suite, it includes Writer, Impress (presentations), Calc (spreadsheets), Math (function writer), Draw, and Base (database). Of these, Writer and Calc are the closest to their Microsoft Office counterparts, while Impress’s ugly interface and bare-bones template offerings make the “you get what you pay for” adage spring to mind—and make Keynote, part of iWork ’08, seem like a welcome expense.

 

OpenOffice also runs on X11, with all the menus contained in the single-window interface instead of in your menubar (no palettes anywhere, either). Writer’s menus closely resemble Word’s, and the same keyboard shortcuts are here too, although you have to substitute Control for Command (Ctrl-S to save, for example)—recent Windows switchers will feel right at home. The interface resembles a Windows version, but it’s easy to get used to once you realize all the familiar functionality is here, including macros, footnotes, autocorrect, spell check, export as PDF, and more. You can customize all the menus, toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts too. Calc works just like Excel, and the function wizard can help you build over 200 functions. Even the help menus look like the ones in Microsoft Office.

 

OpenOffice’s native file format is called Open Document, with extensions like .odt for Open Document Text, .ods for Open Document Spreadsheet, .odp for Open Document Presentation, and so on. OpenOffice can read and write Microsoft Office formats like DOC, XLS, and PPT, but doesn’t support Apple’s iWork formats (which are named after the iWork apps: Pages uses PAGES, Numbers has NUMBERS, and Keynote uses KEY). OpenOffice writer can read and write the XML format used by Microsoft 2007 for Windows, but we couldn’t check compatibility with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which wasn’t available at press time. (Since OpenOffice is a cross-platform app, and Microsoft intends XLS to be the new cross-platform standard, it should work.)

 

This Guitar Hero review was created in Microsoft Word, but NeoOffice opened it without a hitch and recognized all the character and paragraph styles from our Word template.

 

You can download a DMG of OpenOffice, which comes in Intel and PowerPC flavors for Tiger and Leopard, and also for Panther (Mac OS 10.3) and Jaguar (Mac OS 10.2). Besides the extensive built-in help, a handy wiki is available at wiki.services.openoffice.org. The next major update, version 2.4, is planned for March 2008, including improvements to Base, the database app, more chart options in Chart, better Find/Replace in Writer, and more. An Aqua version is also being developed, which won’t require X11 to run. You can download a very early version of OpenOffice.org Aqua now, but the site warns that the builds are for testing purposes only and could crash at any time.

 

NeoOffice. NeoOffice is another open-source office suite, similar to OpenOffice.org, but you don’t need X11—it uses Cocoa and Java to run as a native Macintosh app. The result is that NeoOffice looks more like a Mac app (but not as much like Microsoft Office) than OpenOffice.org. The NeoOffice suite includes Writer, Calc, Impress (presentations), Draw, and Base (database). You can download a disk image of NeoOffice 2.2.2 (based on OpenOffice 2.2.1) from www.neooffice.org. Make sure you also grab the latest patch.

 

Other than not needing X11, NeoOffice works very similarly to OpenOffice. The database wizard in NeoOffice’s Base app is easier to use, and can get you up and running in no time even if you have no experience. You won’t find as many buttons on the toolbars throughout the suite, and the menus don’t exactly match Microsoft Office’s, but the functions are all here, and you can customize the menus, shortcuts, and toolbars to your liking. The help menus are almost identical to OpenOffice’s, and you can also peruse the thorough wiki at neowiki.neooffice.org. NeoOffice handles the same file formats as OpenOffice, and has that app’s export-to-PDF ability as well.

 

NeoOffice’s Calc spreadsheet app can save in a variety of formats, and export directly to PDF.

 

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More options. If all you need is a cross-platform, open-source word processor, AbiWord (free, www.abisource.com) also reads and writes Microsoft’s DOC format, as well as OpenOffice Writer’s SXW, Open Document ODT, HTML, TXT, RTF, and others. And don’t overlook TextEdit, which came with your Mac. It looks simple—and it is—but packs some decent formatting options and can save documents as RTF, TXT, HTML, DOC, or XML files. It opens files created in any of the other mentioned apps (Word, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and AbiWord) with the formatting and styles intact.

 

Find More Apps Online—And Don’t Forget Online Apps

 

Buzzword’s gorgeous design makes writing a pleasure.

 

If you like Photoshop and Microsoft Office just fine, thank you, there’s still a world of freeware for your Mac. Even if you’re not trying to replace a big-budget app, you can still expand your Mac’s capabilities—and your skills—without spending any money. (That said, if you wind up relying on a free app in a major way, many developers appreciate a donation.) Find more at opensourcemac.org, macupdate.com, and versiontracker.com.

 

Adobe InDesign is the current standard in desktop publishing, but Scribus (free, www.scribus.net) is a solid alternative, although it can’t read or write InDesign or Quark formats (it does support XML, PDF, Open Document, RTF, and HTML). An Aqua app, it doesn’t need X11, but you do need to have Ghostscript 8.5.4 or later installed first to assist with translating formats, and the Scribus install itself is a little complicated (see www.scribus.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index for a walkthrough).

 

Inkscape (free, www.inkscape.org) is a drawing app that requires X11, but the single-window interface is easy to use, although its looks leave something to be desired. If you’d rather have a native Mac app and don’t mind a reduced feature set, Teal (free, www.versiontracker.com) is an entry-level drawing/editing app, but at version pp8 for “public preview 8,” it’s really more like a work in progress (it currently supports PNG and JPEG).

 

And if you tend to be always online, consider trying some online apps. Your work is accessible from any online computer, and many apps offer handy collaboration features. Just make sure to export a copy of your work to your local machine periodically, especially if you’re going to be offline for an extended time—since the drawback of online apps is that you have to be online to use them. We like Google Docs and Spreadsheets (docs.google.com), the ThinkFree office suite (www.thinkfree.com), Mint for personal finance (www.mint.com), and the elegant word processor Buzzword (www.buzzword.com).