Mac Tricks and Tips has a great post listing their Top 100 Essential Applications for the Mac. Some are must-have, some are good, and some I would avoid like the plague (Quicken 2007, why must you suck so?). Some, I even question the use of the word “Essential” in the article’s title (come on, Aperture? Seriously?), but this list is a nice collection of some great Mac applications in one place. Of course, the clincher for me was finding GrandPerspective which is an open-source Mac OS X re-imagining of SpaceMonger, one of my all-time favorite Windows utilities.
Here are a handful I have had good experiences with and can recommend:
- GrandPerspective
- Adium
- CSSEdit
- Cyberduck
- VLC
- Audacity
- Delicious Library
- Handbrake
- Pixelmator
- iAlertU (only for notebooks with the sudden motion sensor)
- Carbon Copy Cloner
- Flip4Mac (warning, Microsoft product)
- Growl (comes conveniently packaged with Adium)
- Parallels (if you must run Windows)
- iWork (nearly half the price of the cheapest MS Office package)
Here are a couple that didn’t make the list, but I still love:
- MainMenu
- miniStat2 (a widget and the only one I’ve been willing to pay for – $5)
- TextMate (a must if you do any coding)
- 1password
- Peggle
- and, of course, Safe Eyes (to keep your family safe online)
Sorry I was too lazy to include links to all of them, but all the ones from the “Top 100” list are linked on their site and usually Google does a good job of finding them too.
Good list of items..thanks for that….just a little correction; Flip4Mac is made by a company called Telestream. They are NOT a Microsft company. They only have a licensing agreement with them because of the WMV code ownership.
Anyway…F4M is essential on my Mac. I’ve found iusethis.com for a source of popular apps and such. Off the top of my list would be the Unsanity products HERE, and a few other good ones, iBackup, info.xhead, and one other good dvd copying app called, Drive In.
I guess I was confused by the fact that I downloaded it from Microsoft.com and at the time, Google actually put the MS.com page as the top search results for Flip4Mac. Thanks for the correction.
I have to say I’m not a big fan of Unsanity simply because I’m somewhat of a purist when it comes to the look and feel of the UI (both on Mac and Windows). I played with ShapeShifter for all of about 10 minutes before deciding that every theme and skin I could find for it looked like crap compared to the Aqua of Tiger. I suppose they make other products, so maybe some of those are good.
As far I can see you like small tools. Give a try to iStatMenu.
I Just Love VLC Player, it truly is the best media plr out there, even though the GUI is kinda dull. Does anybody have a good skin for it?