OK people, Time for another wide update... It's been a year since I did it and a bunch of cool apps have been mentioned. I hope this helps everyone rediscover some of these gems. Enjoy!
Internet (web, mail, ftp, etc.)Safari - This has become the default browser on Macs anymore since it now comes bundled with the OS and it set to be the default browser. It's fairly capable and has some nice user protections like the ability to block pop-ups and such. It also displays pages with a high level of competency!
Camino - This is a browser project originally started by Dave Hyatt who has now been working for Apple on Safari. Camino used to be known as Chimera and uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. What pages Safari has trouble with Camino usually handles very well. Camino is an excellent browser choice if you're stuck with an older version of OSX.
Firefox - Current Mozilla open-source effort, and a great alternative to Internet Explorer, or, if you run into a page Safari doesn't run, this will probably handle it just fine. Supports a wide range of extensions, skins and plugins to help customize and manage web browsing to your personal specifications.
AcidSearch - AcidSearch is a search enhancement for Safari. It adds unlimited "Search Channels" to the Google search field. Channels can be customized in a nearly infinite variety of ways. AcidSearch also includes powerful features such as JavaScript support, the ability to import iSeek and Butler Search Sites, true hierarchical menu organization, and the ability to search multiple search engines at the same time. Also does a lot more, and it's free.
Fetch - great FTP app. Really easy to use, and is full-featured. Great for beginners or those who just want a simple way to manage their transfers.
Mail - For a free e-mail client Apple's Mail is very capable. Except for the most demanding organizational tasks Mail is a really nice e-mail client. It can handle POP and IMAP mail and has a really well designed anti-spam processing system. It also supports encryption if you've got a personal certificate from someone like Thawte. A plug-in will let you use GPG for encryption and signing.
Entourage 2004 - Entourage is part of Microsoft Office. Unlike it's counterpart on Windows, Outlook, it is actually a really useful application that doesn't open your system up to every exploit and malicious bit of code on the internet. It's biggest drawback however is practically no integration with the rest of OSX. Mail uses OSX's Address Book to manage contacts and such, Entourage uses its own address book and such.
Transmit - A good FTP application is worth its weight in cybergold. Where Transmit really shines over some other Mac FTP apps is its relatively fresh codebase. It has excellent AppleScript support and very much feels like an application designed from the ground up to run on OSX.
Cyberduck - Cyberduck is an open source FTP application for OSX. Like Transmit it is very capable and is a well written OSX application. My favorite feature is the ability to open files in a number of different external text editors.
RBrowser - SFTP Remote file management, file transfers and folder syncing. Good all-around FTP app.
GyazMail - email client for OS X. Has a multitude of helpful features, and is pretty lightweight.
ThunderBird - Mozilla's email client. Features a smart junk mail filter and is a good all-around alternative for Mail or Entourage.
Productivity (text editors, word processors, programming apps, etc.)TextWrangler - This is the more modernized cousin of the venerable BBEdit. It replaced BBEdit Lite and serves as a much cheaper version of BBEdit for folks who have no use for BBEdit's extensive web-oriented capabilities. To some people it seems strange to pay money for a text editor but if you really want to streamline programming or administration work TW is well worth the money. It allows you to do the sorts of stuff you'd need to roll your own Awk, Perl, Sed, and shell scripts to do all with a sensible interface.
Google Docs - Don't want to pay for a word processor? Want a web-based one? Google offers it, and it does spreadsheets too. It's basically a web-based word processor that can do quite a lot, and lets you save your documents online so you have access to them wherever you can log into GMail.
iWork - iWork 06 features two powerful applications for creating everything from school newsletters to business presentations. With Pages 2, you can quickly create a wide variety of stunning documents. With Keynote 3, you can produce cinema-quality presentations, storyboards, and more.
Word 2004 - My second listed Microsoft application. On Windows Microsoft office has largely killed its competition through various means. As such Office has a monopoly position on the office productivity market. This has caused a bit of stagnation in the progression of the suite however and Office XP is little if any better than Office 200 was. On the Mac this is not the case, Microsoft still has lots of competition in the productivity market and as such puts a lot of effort into Office for the Mac. Word is a very nice word processor and is quite a bit nicer to use than its Windows counterpart.
Mariner Write - For a majority of users the full capabilities of Word 2004 will go entirely unrealized. Mariner Write is a good alternative for Mac wielding folk. It supports all of the formatting options available in Word as well as more advanced features like styles and mail merge features. It can read but not save to Word format (.doc) which is a bonus and then a drawback rolled into one.
SubEthaEdit - Consider yourself cool if you get the literary reference in this application's name. SubEthaEdit is a free-for-personal-use text editor in the same vein as TextWrangler. It doesn't have all of TW's advanced edit, search, and transformation features but it is a very nice editor. It support syntax highlighting and has easily written syntax definitions. It's claim to fame however is its ability to let multiple people edit the same file all at once. If you're interested at all in "Extreme Programming" this is a very interesting feature.
OpenOffice - The free alternative to expensive word processors and programs such as the Office suite, this crossplatform, open-source (Mac, Windows, Linux) suite of programs is ideal for anyone who wants productivity on par with processors, without paying the price.
ThinkFree Office - Free service/apps lets you create, access and edit Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. New Online service lets you do all this from within your web browser. Very neat.
Abiword - Free word processor similar to MS Word.
XCode 2.0 - Fast way for developers to create OS X apps, and easily take advantage of new Apple technologies. Brought to you by Apple itself, it's a great tool for development, coding and compiling.
xScope - xScope is a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. Always quickly available via the menu bar, xScope's flexible tools float above desktop windows and UI elements making measuring a breeze.
TypeStyler - a highly profesional word graphic editing application. So you could think of it as like Adobe Illustrator mixed with Microsoft Word Art. It has the ability to do animations, and it can export, beyond the standar gif, jpeg, eps etc... it can also export to Photoshop and Illustrator.
Nisus Writer - Great app and alternative to Word. Fluid and faster than Word, and works great for typing up normal papers and has lots of good advanced functions. Also supports many file formats and can export to .doc formats.
TexShop - for the real in-depth word processing guru, this app lets you use LaTeX. Works kind of like HTML, but you use tags to describe how you want your document to look. Open source, and very flexible.
ScholarWord - App lets you enter the information from any book, and it will automatically format a Works Cited entry for you. Great for lazy college kids! woot.
RapidWeaver - one great template-based application. Lets you design and edit a template in very little time and post it online really quickly. Works really well with iLife, too.
VoodooPad - Great little text editor app that acts a lot like some crazy, crazy brainstorming session. has quick HTML layouts, internal document searches, movie and image support, full functionality to BBEdit, email support, file encryption, sketching, export to iPod Notes, and much, much more. And free.
Business graphics (charts, presentations, fonts, etc.)
OmniGraffle - Few traditional graphic design apps are geared for use by non-artist types who need to have balanced organizational charts and wow-the-PHB diagrams, not Pantone support or umpteen dozen image filters. OmniGraffle is one of the best applications I've ever used for this purpose, ever.
Keynote - I just recently started using Keynote after years spent hassling with PowerPoint. The difference is ridiculous, especially compared to the Mac version of PowerPoint. Keynote uses Quartz and OpenGL components to do 3D and 2D transitions and can output to .ppt files, movies, or even PDFs.
Stone Create - Not everyone needs XPress but a lot of people want or need to publish small business documents. It's a really nice graphic design app that doesn't overwhelm you with a fantastic array of features.
Font Sampler 0.5 - A small program that gives you a good overview of all your fonts.
celtx - Great software for writing out scripts, movies, plays, and creating rich outlines for these things. Free!
Professional Graphics/3D Art apps -QuickImageCM - QuickImageCM is a contextual menu plugin that lets you view image file directly from Finder. It also has some other feature like add/remove thumbnail icons, copy image to clipboard, move image to trash, view size enlargement/reduction, etc.
Graphicconverter The swiss army knife of graphics apps. Reads/writes a ridiculous amount of formats, sweet interface, decent animated GIF building, etc.
$30 Shareware, requires 10.1.5, older versions for OS 8&9.
GIMP - free, open source and actually fairly decent and photoshop-ish. Mac OS X includes gimpprint so hopefully printing wont be as clumsy as it is with OpenOffice.
Wings 3D - nice little 3D app for modelling.
Photoshop - expensive, but the leading image-editing standard. Supports a huge amount of files and export formats, and the tools it gives you are unparralleled when you learn to use them all.
Blender3D - open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-prodution, creation and playback. Available for Linux, OS X and Windows.
Quartz Composer - comes with every Tiger installation. Lets you use the RSS screensaver template to modify whatever you want in it, create your own screensavers and nifty videos, and best of all, you get to mess around with Quartz.
Core Image Fun House - again, comes with Tiger. Found at /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools. A lot of fun to play around with. Lets you apply image filters and effects in real time.
ArtRage - Amazing freeware program that closely mimics classic art tools like paintbrushes and pencils. Looks really amazing.
IM, IRC, and communications -Adium X - Adium is the Trillian of the Mac world. It is highly customizable, works with all of the major IM networks, and best of all is open source. It uses the libgaim library for IM network connectivity but uses fully Cocoa front-end code. It looks and feels like a regular Mac application ought to. Adium is pretty featureful and is getting better all the time.
aMSN - aMSN is a free open source MSN Messenger clone, also supports webcams.
Proteus - Proteus is the closed source cousin of Adium. Like Adium it is built around the libgaim library but is not itself open source. Proteus isn't quite as customizable as Adium but it does provide quite a bit of customization options. It supports buddy icons for several networks (something Microsoft's official MSN client still isn't able to do).
Snak - Snak is one of the more mIRC-ish IRC clients available for OSX. If you've been using mIRC on Windows you'll feel pretty comfortable with Snak. It supports ircII and AppleScript scripts though it does not support existing mIRC scripts.
Ircle - Ircle is a very un-mIRC IRC client but is no less functional nor workable. It's interface takes some getting used to but it can end up being extremely handy with some practice. Ircle has been in existence for a very long time and if you look there's a huge number of scripts available for it.
Skype - VERY high quality, native OS X app with insanely popular Windows and Linux versions. Allows you to place unlimited computer-to-computer calls, and with a subscription, it will let you place and receive calls to/from computers and phones.
X-Chat Aqua - Another great OS X IRC app. Uses the IRC engine from XChat and has been designed to look and feel like XChat.
Colloquy - Very good, very "Mac-like" IRC client.
Conversation - very un-IRC interface, behaves more like iChat.
RSS aggregators and Usenet readers
Unison - This is a very new newsreader from the folks at Panic. Despite its age it has turned into a very capable and extremely useful newsreader. It recognizes media files in Usenet postings and displays them in lists so they're easy to download. If you grab any sorts of files off of Usenet Unison is a very useful tool.
MaxNews - MaxNews is an older newsreader that has been ported to OSX. It is functional and relatively light weight. It handled newsgroups in a typical three-pane fashion.
NewsWatcherX - NWX is a Carbon port of an older Mac newsreader called NewsWatcher. It is a very plain application with practically no Aqua fanciness included. If you're not into the all dancing all singing types of Mac apps this is a definite keeper.
NetNewsWire (Lite) - NNW and NNWL are both awesome RSS aggregators built from the outset for OSX. Their interfaces are very simple but not so simple they lack any function. NNW can not only read RSS feeds but also post to all of the popular blogging engines from inside of its own interface. The Lite version is free and lacks some features but if you're a cheapskate it works well enough to use on a daily basis.
PulpFiction - PulpFiction is an RSS reader that is styled more similar to Apple's Mail than NNW. it's got some very excellent features and is a bit cheaper than NNW. The per-feed refresh schedules and search functionality serve to make it a very nice RSS aggregator.
NewsFire - Lets you add RSS feeds from your favorite sites so that you can check on updates whenever you like. I'm sure your saying to yourself, "But I don't know if my favorite website has an RSS feed." Well, worry not. A special search function in the program will let you look for RSS feeds on any website you desire.
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