I recently clean re-installed OS X on my creaky old first generation TiBook and have since been on a mini mission to restock the applications folder using open source alternatives to the professional apps on my other Mac. The main benefit to this is that open source apps are so often considerably less resource hungry than their pro counterparts, meaning that the laptop that seemed to be beyond it’s life span is actually still perfectly usable.
Today I discovered Seashore, an open source, Cocoa, OS X image editor based around the GIMP’s technology and using the same native file format (nice for open portability). Despite its early version number it seems like a really nice stable image editor. Give it a go.
Oh, and while I’m here, here’s four other incredibly useful, awesome, freeware apps to try which all fall in to the category “Light years ahead of anything on Windows”. And they’re free.
Paparazzi! - screengrab an entire webpage as rendered in Safari in one shot. ImageWell - so useful it hurts. QuickSilver - I can’t even begin to describe how useful/awesome this is. VitaminSEE - superfast image viewer.