Paying for college is hard enough. Especially after dropping hundreds of dollars on books, you shouldn’t have to worry about spending even more money on the software you need. And you shouldn’t be forced toward piracy to save a few dollars so you can eat this month.

 

So in the spirit of free and legal and helping out broke college students everywhere, we’d like to offer this list of no-charge, must-have Mac apps that can save you hundreds of dollars and pretty much see most of you through your college years.

 

 

1.     NeoOffice: Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Slideshow Presentations, All in One

 

You could get Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, of course, but the Microsoft Office suite can run you upwards of $400 if your school doesn’t offer student licenses. And even when you buy the student-teacher edition, it’ll still cost you $150.

 

Google Docs is free and comes in handy if you need to remotely collaborate with multiple people, but it just isn’t versatile enough for a power user.

 

So our vote goes to NeoOffice, a full-featured set of office apps for Mac, including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs. Not only is NeoOffice free, but in some ways it’s better than MS Office and definitely more Mac-like.

 

NeoOffice has attracted a few complaints in the past, but the recently released version 2.1 addresses most of them. There’s still a minor hitch or two here and there, but dealing with those is well worth the money you save.

 

 

2.     Firefox: The Ultimate in Browsing

 

There’s no question that the best and most versatile browser to use either for research or for entertainment is Firefox (which has a Campus Edition for students). Available as a free download for both Windows and Mac, Firefox is powerful, flexible and highly customizable (with themes, search engines, plug-ins, and more), without compromising on security or convenience.

 

You can add your favorite search engines (like Webster’s, Wikipedia and del.icio.us) to your Firefox search bar and use plug-ins like Zotero to make Firefox your ultimate college tool.

 

 

3.     iGTD: Get Things Done

 

When you’ve got a T3 Internet connection, Facebook, YouTube, Halo 3 and a million other distractions just a click away, you’re probably going to need something to help you keep track of everything you have to do for your classes so you can make sure it all gets done on time.

 

The iGTD app for Mac is like an organizer on steroids. You can divide your tasks into projects and subprojects, then browse them, search, apply filters and create smart folders. Archive anything you want to reference later—links to Web pages, links to files or folders, your own deep thoughts at 3:00 AM—and tag and categorize it, so you can speed right to it when you need to. And forget about reaching for your mouse every two seconds: Awesome F-key and other keyboard shortcuts mean you’ll be able to do most of what you need to by flying over the keyboard.

 

iGTD includes all the standard features you would expect from any GTD software, but it’s much more integrated into the OS (Finder, Mail, TextEdit, Safari), as well as with third-party applications (Firefox, NetNewsWire, and more). Drag Web addresses from your browser, e-mails from your inbox, or contacts from your address book into iGTD to instantly create tasks. You can also sync your tasks to your laptop, PDA or iPhone, so you’ll always know what you’ve got left to do, no matter where you are on or off campus.

 

 

4.     Adium: Stay in Touch

 

Some of your friends are on Yahoo! Messenger, some are on MSN Messenger, others are on AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, and then you’ve got the ones who insist on being different and use Jabber or ICQ instead.

 

So how do you communicate with all these people without using e-mail or downloading six different IM programs and running them simultaneously on your computer? You use Adium, of course.

 

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac that lets you connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported IM services, which include AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber plus, eight more.

 

 

5.     Mozy: Back Up Your Life

 

Imagine you’ve spent the last two weeks working on a term paper, or worse, the whole semester working on your senior thesis, and your just computer crashed … and you didn’t have a backup.

 

To help prevent your total nervous breakdown, download Mozy and you can back up as much as 2 GB of data, which should be more than enough to cover everything you’ll write during your four-plus years of college.

 

Forget about those $200 external backup drives. Mozy’s free, and it backs up your files online, using 128-bit SSL encryption and 448-bit Blowfish encryption to protect them.

 

Pick what you want backed up—specific files, folders, or types of files—and schedule when you want it done, and Mozy will run your backups automatically. Mozy can detect even the smallest changes you make to these files, so it always knows which files have been added or modified and need to be backed up each time.

 

Maybe you’re a computer science major writing huge memory-sucking programs, so Mozy sounds great but 2 GB just isn’t enough? For just $4.95 a month, you can go with MozyPro and get unlimited backup.