Mac apps for switchers
A list of my favorite Mac OS X applications.
Today another colleague of mine got himself an iMac. After a sleepless night he is looking for some extra software, so I looked in my Applications folder and here is my list of most useful Mac OS X apps. The ones with a ♥ are the ones I need; the others are great applications I do not need every day or the ones I download again next time I need them for a specific task.
- Adobe Photoshop ♥ is the image editor, no questions asked. Tried numerous alternatives from Pixelmator to GIMP but I keep going back to Photoshop.
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ♥ a must have if you regularly edit photos or shoot in RAW.
- TextMate ♥ is an editor that combines the power of command line editing with a nice GUI wrapped around it.
- Firefox ♥ as development browser. I use Safari for my daily browsing stuff, but the Firefox extensions make it indispensable for web development.
- Aquisition X a peer-to-peer file sharing program which connects to Gnutella and BitTorrent networks.
- Adium X ♥ is a free and open-source instant messaging application that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Facebook, GTalk and more.
- Skype ♥ makes calls from your computer - free to other people on Skype and cheap to phones and mobiles around the world.
- Transmission is a fast, easy, and free BitTorrent client with a focus on being lightweight yet feature filled.
- Transmit ♥ is still the best FTP program for Mac OS X in my opinion. It supports Amazon S3, iDisk, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, TLS/SSL.
- Spanning Sync ♥ synchronizes iCal with Google Calendar on a scheduled basis.
- Handbrake is a free and open-source multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter.
- iSquint is a free movie converter from many movie formats to iPod, iPhone and Apple TV compatible formats.
- VLC Media Player ♥ plays all obscure movie formats QuickTime doesn't know about.
- With Flip4Mac ♥ you can play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) directly in QuickTime player and view these files in a browser.
- Screenflick ♥ is a screen capturing app that can record portions of the screen and record audio simultaneous from microphones and the system audio.
- Zattoo free real streaming TV. For Belgium it shows VT4, VIJFtv and La Une.
- Versions ♥ is still in beta and it already replaced my command line SVN skills or how a GUI can make life easier.
- Quicksilver is a fantastic application launcher with a simple shortcut, but Spotlight replaced it. Still, it’s much more powerful and has loads of plug-ins.
- HoudaGeo ♥ is a one-stop photo geo coding application which can read GPS log files or use Google Maps to add geographic coordinates to photos.
- The Unarchiver ♥ is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. It supports Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other obscure formats.
- Yojimbo ♥ is an information organizer to store unstructured information like password, notes, etc. I use it to keep website payment confirmations, flight numbers, passwords, code snippets, etc.
- Parallels is an OS virtualization tool that lets you run Windows or Linux on Mac side by side.
- Caffeine ♥ is a tiny program that puts an icon the menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Greet free app to keep around.
- MacPorts is a software package manager for Mac OS X, not the tool for everyone but a major help if you need to install UNIX software from time to time and don’t like the ‘configure, make, make’ install way. Free, of course.
Duplicate applications that do the same as the above but for free: