In this post we have gathered 28 free Mac apps for graphic and web designers. Here they are:

Dec 15, 2016  Top 5 Best Free Graphic Design Software for Windows and MAC Thanks for watching If you liked this video leave a thumbs up! And don't forget. Jul 08, 2017  Say what you will though, portable apps are extremely useful, particularly if you don’t want to clutter your lovely OS X with piles of useful but messy-looking little tools. To that end here are five of the best portable apps for Mac. VLC Media Player. More useful skills for Graphic Designers. Microsoft Office Applications While professional graphic design will not be done in Microsoft Word, it never hurts to be skilled in Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and Excel. Depending on where you work, team members may come running to you whenever they have layout problems in their. Jul 04, 2020  The best Mac apps for 2020 By Mark Coppock July 4, 2020 If you’ve heard the phrase, “Once you go Mac, you never go back,” you know it holds true. Top 15 Free Mac Apps for Graphic Designers About the author: This guest article was written by Emma Best from Laptopical - a guide to the latest laptop reviews.

GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, expandable, and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image-manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
Overview and Download:GIMP Homepage.

Scribus

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Overview:Scribus Homepage.
Download:Scribus Download Page.

JAlbum

JAlbum allows you to create nice-looking photo galleries for the Web. You simply select or drag and drop folders containing images or movie files onto JAlbum, and it creates thumbnails and HTML pages to publish your images as a gallery or as a picture slide show. The galleries are based on various templates, and their appearance can be further customized by advanced users. The application’s additional features include support for IPTC/EXIF data, style sheets, lossless image manipulation, pluggable image filters, and a built-in FTP/SFTP client.
Overview:JAlbum Homepage.
Download:JAlbum Download Page.

Paparazzi

Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.It’s written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API and the WebKit framework.
Overview:Paparazzi Homepage.
Download: Paparazzi Download Page.

Google SketchUp

Developed for the conceptual stages of design, SketchUp is powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software. We think of it as “the pencil of digital design”. This award-winning product combines a simple yet robust tool set that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. SketchUp is used by professionals and consumers alike. It contains a unique interface that allows 3D forms to be created, viewed, and modified quickly and easily. The core of its simplicity is that you draw the edges of the desired model in 3D space, just as you would using a pencil and paper. SketchUp infers your design intent and automatically determines the nature of the lines and fill shapes to create 3D geometry.
Overview:Google SketchUp Homepage.
Download:Google SketchUp Download Page.

Linotype Explorer

Linotype Explorer is a great font management application for the Mac. You can use it to both install, manage and “test” fonts.
Overview:Linotype Explorer Homepage.
Download:Linotype Explorer Download Page.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer is the world’s most advanced online image editor. Completely free access to hundreds of fun and powerful features. Includes photo effects, graphics, shapes, seam carving, morphing and collages. Integrates with Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Flickr, and Google.
Overview: FotoFlexer Homepage.

Seashore

Based on Gimp, but doesn’t require X11.
Overview:Seashore Explorer Homepage.

Xee

Fast image viewer and image browser.
Download:XEE Download Page.

Lego Digital Designer

Lego Digital Designer, also known as LDD. With the free Digital Designer software you can build absolutely anything with virtual Lego bricks right on your computer. Then you can buy the real bricks to build your creation online in Lego Factory, or you can print out an inventory of bricks and take it to any Legoland theme park or LEGO Store. The latest version of LDD is 1.5 This version has increased stability and fixes a number of small bugs from version 1.4.
New in Version 2: Improved building experience, quicker brick selection, easier to connect bricks when building, new brick palette tool, more bricks, partly built models for easy start, new backgrounds, new UI, and more.
Overview: Lego Digital Designer Homepage.
Download: Lego Digital Designer Download Page.

Colorate

Colorate is a utility for creation of harmonized color palettes and color schemes, aimed from hobbyist to professional designers.Colorate fully automatizes the palette generation from a particular color swatch, selected from the standard Color Panel, dragged from other application or obtained from an image through the integrated Image Analyze feature.Once the palette has been generated, it is possible to add the new palette to the Library. Colorate can save and open as many Libraries as needed. Colorate also lets save the selected palettes as standard “.clr” system palette files. This feature allows use any of the generated palettes from hundreds of application that uses the Mac OS X standard Color Panel for color selection.
Overview: Colorate Homepage.
Download: Colorate Designer Download Page.

Front End Digital Media WorkShop

Front End Digital Media Workshop harnesses the power of QuickTime to bring you powerful batch based conversion of sound, video, and image files. Resize, resample, join, split, trim, basic edits, selective conversions via marked I/O points are some of the tools. All in an environment that provides powerful play back features including variable speed, slow motion, full screen playback and video to image frame capture. Batch lists can be saved and also used as play lists. Some of the dozens of supported formats include: MP4, MOV, AIFF, 3GP, 3GP2, WAV, AU, AVI (basic codecs), JPEG, PICT, PNG, PSD, BMP, and TIFF. QuickTime video filters and effects are also available.
Overview:Front End Digital Media WorkShop Homepage.
Download:Front End Digital Media WorkShop Download Page.

Autodesk Maya

Maya Personal Learning Edition (PLE) is a special version of Autodesk Maya software, which provides free access to Maya for non-commercial use. It gives 3D graphics and animation students, industry professionals, and those interested in breaking into the world of computer graphics an opportunity to explore most aspects of the Autodesk Maya Complete software in a non-commercial capacity.
Overview: Autodesk Maya Homepage.
Download: Autodesk Maya Download Page.

Graphisoft ArchiCAD

Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD 11 delivers new and enriched capabilities designed to help architects develop their concepts, compete for business more effectively and boost business efficiency. The enhancements reinforce ArchiCAD as an extraordinarily powerful design tool for architectural practices – large and small – worldwide.
Overview:Graphisoft ArchiCAD Homepage.
Download: Graphisoft ArchiCAD Download Page.

Simple CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to specify the styles of fonts and other page elements on your sites. It makes it easier for you to update styles too, because when done right, you only need to make a single change to update the styles on multiple pages and elements. Another bonus is that your visitor’s browser needs to load less data per page, helping you reduce your data transfer usage while serving the same information. That means you’ll be able to accommodate more site visitors without having to spend more on data transfer. Your pages will also load faster. To help you work with CSS, we’ve created a tool called Simple CSS, which runs on Macs, Windows and Linux. Simple CSS allows you to create cascading style sheets from scratch, and/or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface.
Overview:Simple CSS Homepage.
Download:Simple CSS Download Page.

Blender

Blender is the open-source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. It is available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Version 2.44 offers numerous bug fixes. Version 2.46 includes cloth and fur simulation, physics caching and baking, shading, glossy reflection and refraction, raytraced soft shadows, improved rendering features, and more.
Overview:Blender Homepage.
Download:Blender Download Page.

HyperEngine-AV

HyperEngine-AV is a true multimedia editor that lets you combine seamlessly video, photos, sounds and text to create slide shows, family movies, business presentations, or your own feature films quickly and easily, with full DV quality.Media clips can be dragged and dropped, imported or captured in real time from a FireWire DV camera, then freely arranged in the workspace to make movies. Real-time, editable transitions are automatically created when video clips are dragged on top of each other and over a dozen video effects are available and can be applied to any video clip.Audio clips can be edited, arranged, stacked, and processed to generate stunning soundtracks. There is no track limit because . . . there are no tracks! With HyperEngine-AV there is simply no learning curve, you learn as you go, and you can get all the fun of creating any multimedia pieces without the hassle of dealing with tedious and counter-intuitive software interface.
Overview and Download:HyperEngine-AV Homepage.

However, keep in mind that the standard text message limit of 160 characters still applies even when using Messages. You may or may not have to type in a confirmation code, depending on your setup.Once everything is set up, you can send text messages by clicking the pencil icon located above the contact list, entering your desired recipients, and composing the message as you would normally. Android text messages on mac.

POV-Ray

POV-Ray is a three-dimensional ray-tracing engine. It takes information you supply and simulates the way light interacts with the objects you’ve defined, creating stunning 3D pictures and animation
Overview:POV-Ray Homepage.
Download:POV-Ray Download Page.

Gnuplot

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility for UNIX, IBM OS/2, MS Windows, DOS, Macintosh, VMS, Atari and many other platforms. It was originally intended as to allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data. It does this job pretty well, but has grown to support many non-interactive uses, including web scripting and integration as a plotting engine for third-party applications like Octave. Gnuplot supports many different types of terminals: interactive screen terminals (with mouse and hotkey functionality), pen plotters (like hpgl), printers (including postscript and many color devices), and printings to output file as vectorial pseudo-devices like LaTeX, metafont, pdf, svg, or bitmap png. Gnuplot is easily extensible to include new devices.
Overview:Gnuplot Homepage.
Download:Gnuplot Download Page.

Useful Mac Apps For Designers Windows 10

DAZ Studio

DAZ Studio is a feature rich 3D figure posing and animation tool that enables users of any skill level to easily create stunning digital imagery. Whether youre a 3D newbie or an avid 3D artist, you’ll find DAZ Studio is the perfect tool for designing unique digital art and animation with virtual people, animals, props, vehicles, backgrounds and more. Experience total creative freedom with DAZ Studio and express yourself in 3D like never before. Version 2.2.2.20 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.
Overview:DAZ Studio Homepage.
Download: DAZ Studio Download Page.

Bryce

Create breathtaking realistic 3D landscapes and animations with DAZ 3D Bryce 5.5. The easy user interface simplifies the design process for a novice or the seasoned professional. Start out building or importing a landscape as impressive as the Grand Canyon. Populate it with buildings, people or any other object you create or from the extensive DAZ 3D library. The Light Lab provides you robust control over your sunsets, moonlight nights or high-noon ambiance. Tree Lab allows you to plant your landscape like the gardens of Versailles. You’ll have to register your copy of Bryce 5.5 on the publishers web-site to gain access to your free Bryce serial number.
Overview and Download:Bryce Homepage.

Goldberg

Goldberg is a freeware image and movie viewer with image-editing capabilities and support for applying QuickTime and other effects.and its new version affering rotation capabilities, free zooming, and undo support.
Overview and Download:Goldberg Homepage.

Image Tricks

Rosetta stone software for mac. Image Tricks is an image editing application that allows you to easily edit and apply various effects and filters to your photos and images. This program allows modification of around 50 core image effects and filters, import over 20 image formats (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PDF, EPS among them), export to TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats, resize images, and iPhoto integration.
Overview and Download: Image Tricks Homepage.

Inkscape

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Ip camera app mac os x. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. Inkscape’s main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development process, and by making sure Inkcape is easy to learn, to use, and to extend.
Overview:Inkscape Homepage.
Download:Inkscape Download Page.

NIH Image

NIH Image can acquire, display, edit, enhance, analyze, and animate images. It reads and writes TIFF, PICT, PICS, and MacPaint files, providing compatibility with many applications, including programs for scanning, processing, editing, publishing, and analyzing images. NIH Image supports many standard image-processing functions, such as contrast enhancement, density profiling, smoothing, sharpening, edge detection, median filtering, and spatial convolution with user-defined kernels. NIH Image can be used to measure area, mean, centroid, and perimeter. It also performs automated particle analysis and provides tools for measuring path lengths and angles. Spatial calibration is supported to provide real-world area and length measurements. Version 1.62 fixes bugs and improves compatibility with PowerPC machines.
Overview:NIH Image Homepage.
Download:NIH Image Download Page. Free mac cleanup software.

Comipro Plus

Comipro Plus is a cartoon production software. You can produce the cartoon work with the kind of feeling which compiles the document with the word processor as the material using the picture and the photograph. Version 4.0.20 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.
Overview:Comipro Plus Homepage.

Scratch

Designed for children, this freeware multimedia programming tool makes creating animated stories, video games and interactive artwork a snap. Scratch uses a simple graphical interface that lets users put together multimedia programs without any programming knowledge.
Overview:Scratch Homepage.
Download:Scratch Download Page.

iPhoto

Whether you have twenty or twenty thousand digital photos, iPhoto 4 keeps track of them all, automatically organizing them so you can find them fast. Lightning fast. Easy to use, iPhoto puts you in charge of your photographs-helping you import them, organize them into albums, enhance their appearance, as well as, share them in print, via email, over the web and in stunning coffee-table books.
This update addresses several issues with using multiple text rules in Smart Albums and it also eliminates some problems with creating iPhoto books in the German and Dutch languages. Additionally, 4.0.3 keeps users informed about new version of iPhoto that have become available.
Overview and Download:iPhoto Homepage.

Well thats it, I hope I haven’t missed any. (Let me know if I have).

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace's hosting solutions here.

Mac OS X is a popular platform for developers and designers of all stripes. Apple has always had strength in the graphic design market, but even before Apple's shift to Intel processors in 2006, developers started migrating to Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a popular choice because it combines the power of BSD and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems with an elegant user interface. Mac OS X comes with Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Subversion already installed, which makes it easy to turn a factory-fresh Mac into a local test server.

There is also a really robust and talented community of developers for Mac OS X, making some of the best apps around for designers and developers alike. Apps like Coda, CSSEdit, TextMate, Acorn, Pixelmator and LittleSnapper are just some of the many apps we love to use when designing or developing projects for the web.

As the end of summer approaches, we wanted to highlight six more Mac apps that have been released in the last few month for developers and designers.

Now it’s just an ad trap.Back when I had an iPod gen 2, the gen 3 was coming out with camera and microphone. You could call anyone in the US for however long you wanted. Jango the Hedgehog, This used to be the best app for people without iPhones. Mine didn’t have any of that. So I used the original apple earbuds that came with it. Safelink mac desktop texting app.

1. Flux 3 - ₤69.99 for new users, ₤34.99 for upgrades

Useful Mac Apps For Designers Free

Indie shop The Escapers just released version 3.0 of its fantastic website design program, Flux. I like to think of Flux 3 as Dreamweaver reimagined.

It offers a visual and code-based approach to page design, along with support for plugins and code snippets, support for HTML5 and HTML5 video, ePub, WebKit transforms and other effects, and the Google Font API.

All of this power comes in an app that is easy to visually navigate or to edit as raw code. There is a learning curve, but once you've spent some time with the app, it's easy to use to create and manage projects.

2. Gitbox - Free

One of the great things about the version control system Git is that it is super simple and super lightweight. Git was designed for the terminal, and oftentimes, the terminal is the fastest way to commit or merge changes.

Sometimes, however, it can be faster or more comfortable to add a visual element to the process. This can be especially useful if you are changing folder or file names or frequently switching between different places on your desktop.

Gitbox is a lightweight, single-window client for Git that makes it easy to see branches, commit, pull, merge and push all with a single click. It also supports diff viewing in either FileMerge.app or Kaleidoscope.

3. Kaleidoscope - €29

Useful Mac Apps For Designers 2017

Kaleidoscope is from Made By Sofa and it's a file comparison application that goes above and beyond a simple diff viewer.

Not only can you compare text files or code blocks, you can also compare images. If you're working on a web coding or design project and you need to quickly view the changes between two versions of the same file, Kaleidoscope might just be your go-to tool.

It supports multiple layouts, syntax highlighting and searching, and multiple image formats. It can integrate with version control systems like Subversion, Git, Mercurial and others via the command-line or drag-and-drop, and the app is super fast.

4. Xmplify - Free while in beta

If you work with a lot of XML, you might want to give Xmplify a closer look. It's a new app that is still in beta that makes editing XML and XSLT (XSL transformations) files really easy.

On the XSLT side, the program includes a Web Preview feature that shows a live look at the XHTML document created by the XSLTs.

You can also search using both XPath and by using regular expressions.

5. Loremify - Free

Loremify is a Dashboard Widget that can quickly and painlessly generate Lorem Impsum style text in the length and style that you specify.

This can be really useful when needing text blocks for filler content while creating a design. You can specify how many words and how many characters for a paragraph, header or list. You can also choose to automatically insert HTML tags into the generator, which makes the tool that much easier for using when designing in a browser or in a text editor.

6. Slammer - $20

More and more web designers are using grids, either of their own creation or something like the 960 Grid System, to create really flexible and great-looking layouts.

Slammer is a tool for applying and modifying grids to your designs or to existing content anywhere on your Mac. The app is an overlay that you can use on documents, web pages, images, previews, and the list goes on.

You can then customize the grid, get a feel for dimensions and pixel placements, and alter the layout of the grid to see how your content aligns.

Useful Mac Apps For Designers List

You can then export your own templates as a JSON file that you can integrate with your designs or use pre-made templates for certain grid systems to use with future projects.

Basically Slammer is an interactive virtual blueprint maker that you can use for your web designs. You can try the app for 30 hours with no restrictions.

Bonus: Courier

Mac Apps For Designers

Courier from Realmac Software won't be available for another week or so, but as you can see from the awesome teaser video (above), it's a utility that will likely appeal to many developers and designers.

Realmac is the same team behind RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper and Socialite, and they know how to deliver a Mac app that's feature-packed and easy on the eyes.

I've been beta-testing Courier and really love the app. Keep your eyes peeled for this one!

Your Thoughts?

What are some of your favorite Mac apps for design and development? Let us know!

Series supported by Rackspace

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Implement Google Font API on Your Website - Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS] - 40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners - 10 Tools for Getting Web Design Feedback - 10 Free Wireframing Tools for Designers

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, David Benkovic