Productivity

There are several great and free alternatives available to Apple's iWork productivity suite and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac which both cost over £65.

For users seeking a full-featured office suite, OpenOffice may very well be the right choice. OpenOffice is a suite of applications, backed by Sun Microsystems, that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet app, a slide presentation app, a database app and a drawing app. The latest release, OpenOffice 3.1, includes several welcome improvements to the popular free suite, including significantly better anti-aliasing for vector graphics making for better looking charts and graphs and new user-defined property fields for documents. OpenOffice supports a wide variety of document, presentation and spreadsheet formats, including the .odf open document format and Microsoft's .doc, .ppt, and .xls formats. However, since Oracles takeover of Sun, the future of OpenOffice, is perhaps uncertain. (Download - License: LGPLv3)

While OpenOffice may be the corporate backed "king of the hill", NeoOffice, a project run by a small team of developers, is funded entirely by donations. NeoOffice 3.0, is a well-liked Mac OS X only suite based on version 3.0.1 of OpenOffice. The suite is one of the most stable office suites for Mac OS X and shows significant speed improvements compared to OpenOffice. NeoOffice features support for Apple's iLife Media Browser, gestures support for recent MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and native floating tool windows. (Download - License: GPLv3)

AbiWord is an easy to use word processing application that keeps things simple. It's not updated as regularly as OpenOffice and NeoOffice, but it does support everything that a user might expect in a document layout editor. It's a good choice for users wanting a basic document editor without all of the extra features included in a full office suite. (Download - License: GPLv2)

Image Editing

Most individuals can't afford or don't need all of the features included in an imaging application like Adobe Photoshop. Luckily for them, there are a few open source alternatives available for the Mac.

GIMP.app is a binary distribution of GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP is a popular and full featured professional image manipulation application that can easily handle everything from small jobs to full-blown image authoring and photo retouching. Like other more advanced applications, many users won't need or use all of the features, but they are there should they be needed. Unlike previous versions of GIMP for Mac, the latest version of GIMP.app doesn't require the X11 windowing protocol. GIMP has always been an open source favorite and for good reason too. (Download - License: GPLv2)

Seashore is another alternative image editor that's based on GIMP and written using Mac OS X's Cocoa API. Like GIMP, it also features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing and supports multiple layers. The main focus of Seashore is to meet the basic image editing needs of most computer users by dropping support for some features. It lacks some of GIMPs more advanced editing features and isn't updated nearly as often, but it reduces the feature set down to those that most users commonly rely on, making it easier for beginners to learn and use. (Download - License: GPLv2)