10 Awesome Free Apps on the Mac App Store

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The Mac App Store is a great way to discover new apps for your Apple computer. We already showed you the best apps to buy with your $100 Apple Student credit, but there are tons of great free apps to download as well. Here’s a look at ten fantastic offerings from the Mac App Store that won’t set you back a dime.

 1. Alfred - This robust productivity software will make getting around your Mac so much easier. Granted, a lot of the really useful features are only available with a Powerpack purchase (£12), but the free version still lets you open applications and files without lifting your hands from your keyboard. 

2. Calendar - Manage your iCal calendars and Facebook events all from the menu bar. View your schedule at a glance, without the need to open iCal or any separate program. 

3. Cloud - Cloud App offers quick, intuitive DropBox like file sharing. You can drag images, documents, web pages, and even entire folders to the Cloud menu bar icon and Cloud App will put a link to the file in your clipboard so you can send it to your friends. Bonus: when you’re sharing a folder, Cloud will automatically compress it into a .zip archive for you!

4. Caffeine - Are you tired of the screen dimming every ten minutes when you’re trying to watch a movie on your Mac? Caffeine provides a simple fix for this problem. Clicking the Caffeine icon in your menu bar will prevent your Mac from going to sleep, dimming the screen, or starting any screensavers. To go back to normal, just click one more time.

5. iMedia Browser - Don't want to launch iPhoto every time you need to view or select an image in your library? iMedia Browser lets you instantly browse your iPhoto images, your iTunes videos and audio files, as well as Safari bookmarks in a Finder-style interface. 
 

6. Skitch - This fantastic screen-grabbing/image editing tool just recently went free after it was acquired by Evernote, another must-have Mac App. (Evernote is also free, but I intentionally left it out of this list because I wanted to talk about less well-known apps that you haven't as likely been introduced to.) You can annotate your screenshots, flip, rotate, crop, and resize them, and even upload them online for free to Skitch.com.

7. MPlayerX - MPlayerX can handle almost any video file format you throw at it, plus you can use trackpad/mouse gestures to control it. Unlike iTunes or Quicktime, it is compatible with Lion full-screen mode even when you are on a multi-monitor setup. So you can watch a video in full-screen on one monitor while, say, writing your research paper on the other. (Not that we recommend this!)

8. Wunderlist - A lot of to-do list apps are so bloated with unecessary and confusing features that many corporate users don't even need, let alone college students. Wunderlist is a simplistic and easy to use yet powerful task management app with a gorgeous interface and a free iOS app that syncs wirelessly with the Mac app. 

9. Color Tag Gen - Your Mac comes with a great built-in color picker. It can retrieve the hex code for the color of any pixel of your screen. However, this tool is only available in certain applications. Color Tag Gen is basically the Mac OSX color picker wrapped into its own application, so you can bring it up from anywhere on your Mac.

10. Bowtie - This attractive application lets you control iTunes from any application with customizable keyboard shortcuts. You can choose from a variety of user-submitted themes or, if you're feeling extra adventurous, make your own. Last.fm scrobbling included! 

Would you have added anything to this list? Would you have taken anything out? What are your favorite free Mac App Store apps? Let us know in the comments!