Our favorite free non-iChat audio, video, and chat utility. Good for VoIP phone calls, decent video and audio, good chat sessions. Live and talk dangerously with the new Skype.

Talk to friends, family and co-workers across the internet without long distance telephone charges. It works by using P2P technology for the data transmission, meaning there is no central server as a middle manager.

9WR - Skype: iChat-like VoIP utility for audio, video, chat, free phone calls.

Finally out of beta, out of release candidate status, is the highly attractive and capable task manager with project management capability. Reduces complex project and task management to simple, enjoyable process. Highly recommended. Syncs with iPhone version.

Things is task management solution that helps to organize your tasks in an elegant and intuitive way. Things combines powerful features with simplicity through the use of tags and its intelligent filter bar. A Leopard style source list allows for quick and easy focusing. Together with a beautiful user interface, Things aims at the seemingly impossible: making task management both easy and fun.

9WR - Things: Task, project manager, excellent user interface, many handy features.

Popular utility to create and manage MySQL databases, remotely, locally, on Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X. Elegant, somewhat utilitarian, interface.

It works with any MySQL version from 3.21 or above and supports most of the latest MySQL features including Trigger, Stored Procedure, Function, Event, View, Manage User.

9WR - Navicat for MySQL: MySQL database server administration, create, sync, back up, report.

Everyone wants to manage your money these days. MoneyWell takes a different approach. Think digital envelopes. Think buckets. Lots of easy access reports, schedules.

Powerful personal finance organization and analysis tools in a simple, single-screen solution. Without running complex reports or having to trudge through six levels of pie charts, you’ll know immediately if your spending is on track.

9WR - MoneyWell: Gentle learning curve, comprehensive ‘envelope’ budget management, one-click reports.

Our favorite information manager. Highly intuitive and easier to use than Yojimbo. Love the shelf. Organize files however you like. Holds almost everything. Now with auto tagging, nested groups, editing.

Together lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly.

9WR - Together: Personal information organizer, stores text, documents, images, movies, whatever.

Major update to the pricey but increasingly popular way to run Windows or Linux within Mac OS X. Share files between Windows and Mac. Support for Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3.

Run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. Run Mac OS X and Windows at the same time. You can even drag-and-drop files between desktops!

9WR - Parallels Desktop: Runs Windows, Linux with Mac OS X on Intel Macs.

Yet another Menubar application and file launcher. Set up categories, icon size, add files. Barely not bad. Developer’s complete description of aLunch:

You can chose to display icons at 32 pixels or 16 pixels. Files and folders can be registered with aLunch as well. Folders will be opened in the Finder. Different categories can be registered by using groups and separators.

9WR - aLunch: Now how many items are in your Mac’s Menubar?

Yet another seemingly every-other-day and ever-so-teeny-tiny and more minor-than-minor update to the rather clever utility for people on the move. Literally. Plans routes with maps, graphs, locations, and calculates distance. Check the ancient Mac360 review.

TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more.

9WR - Trail Runner: Route planning for runners, bikers; maps, diary, exercise plan.

Yes, another Mac browser to try, with not so regular updates. Flock does browser social networking angle, Sunrise aims a few features towards developers, otherwise it’s Safari under the hood.

Sunrise is the open-source web browser that (is) based on (the) WebKit framework for Mac. It is light and fast.

9WR - Sunrise: WebKit, visual bookmarks, multiple search engines, thumbnails, window fader.

Better than a simple image editor. Affordable, fast, easy to learn, many image editing tools and options, from gradients filters to layers. Nicely done. Now with a cool brush designer, and improved performance via your Mac’s GPU.

Don’t let Acorn’s size fool you; it’s a powerful little guy. Fancy math to keep your pencil strokes from having sharp edges, squeezing as much performance out of your computer’s GPU as possible, and simple innovations to make your life easier.

9WR - Acorn: Simple image editor, layers, filters, effects, vector shapes, text.

Network utility to monitor, well, uh, your Mac’s network. Combined traffic log, calculator, reports, and stopwatch with seven graph types.

Graphs network activity of local and remote computers. Records traffic activity. Calculate total traffic between dates. Measures traffic speed. Highly customizable.

9WR - Net Monitor: Monitors and graphs performance of local and remote Macs.

Basically, Mail Steward is a database to store all of your email. If you have a lot of email, archiving is the only way to go. Plenty of import and retrieval options for plain text email, HTML, attachments, even raw email. Lite and Pro versions available.

MailSteward will archive all of your email in a database for easy retrieval. Click on the Archive button and MailSteward will go to work storing copies of all your email text, HTML, attachments, and raw source, into a relational database.

9WR - Mail Steward: Archives email to relational database; import, tag, save, export.

Let your children use your Mac? Right. Like that will happen, and despite AlphaBaby, a Mac utility which lets children use your Mac without destroying your Mac. Uh huh. Right.

My kids love to play with the computer. Unfortunately, they also have the habit of renaming my hard drive to ‘axlfkaj.’ So, I wrote AlphaBaby so they could safely use the Mac without inflicting too much damage!

Too much damage? What do you expect for free?

9WR - AlphaBaby: Hides Mac screen from children, adds fun keyboard effects.

Elegant utility captures your Mac’s screen and saves as a movie. Records audio and exports movies at different sizes and quality. Not as feature heavy as my favorite, iShowU, but easier to use than the popular SnapzProX. Nicely done.

For software screencasters and software trainers, Screenflick offers the ability to display keyboard commands, and highlights mouse clicks to better communicate which actions are being performed during screen recording.

9WR - ScreenFlick: Captures action on your Mac’s screen, saves as movie.

Geeky tool manages and monitors network performance and mapping by device and in real time. Geeky but cool.

SNMP and ping probes discover and query elements across your distributed network - whether it spans several rooms, a building, an office park, or distributed locations. Synthetic transactions test critical applications and alert you to email, web, or directory server problems.

9WR - InterMapper: Network performance, device mapping tool monitors networks in real-time.

Powerful, feature laden Finder replacement for Mac power users. If you like to customize Finder features, Path Finder is your heaven. Stable, fast, with so many features your eyes will hurt.

Want to move sidebar items such as the Shelf, Volumes list, or Preview pane to any location in the file browser window? Interested in creating a sidebar pane that shows the contents of a specific folder? Want to hide the new Split Preview pane?

9WR - Path Finder: Ultimate customized replacement Finder; tabs, shelves, split Preview pane.

Free utility to run OS X system maintenance, configure hidden features, muck around and customize your Mac. A more detailed review.

Configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files.

9WR - OnyX: Enables hidden Mac features probably hidden for a reason.

Because you can never have enough tools to tinker on your Mac, there’s MacPilot. A huge list of utility functions, features, fun tweaks for the Mac geek hiding inside.

Easily enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X, optimize and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button! Optimize your network for broadband connectivity, completely customize Apple File Sharing, perform essential maintenance without having to remember mind boggling acronyms.

9WR - MacPilot: Geeky utility tweaks Mac, opens hidden features, cleans caches.