OS/X Essentials

Free stuff that improves OS/X

  • FireFox (Beta 3.1 is nice)
  • Camino (if you don’t like FireFox; I’ve switched to Safari 4 though)
  • ThunderBird (Mail.app doesn’t always handle IMAP subfolders properly)
  • Adium/X (multimessenger)
  • MoreInternet (to setup Adium as default xmpp handler)
  • iTerm (slightly nicer then Leopard’s Terminal)
  • TextWrangler (superusable editor, also for coding)
  • QuickSilver (keyboard-based launcher)
  • Colloquy (slick irc client)
  • Transmission (BitTorrent client)
  • Eclipse (for proper developing)
  • CyberDuck (FTP/SFTP)
  • VLC (Media Player which works with everything out of the box)
  • QuickTime codecs for all media formats (so FrontRow plays everything)
  • Skype
  • SSHKeyChain (graphical ssh agent, not 100% Leopard-proof)
  • SleepWatcher (run command-line stuff on sleep or wake)
  • Iconographer (icon creation tool, formerly Shareware, now free)
  • Journler (note-taking)
  • iStat Pro (Dashboard widget for system monitoring)
  • Rudix (for Linux-folks; bunch of pleasant tools)
  • Disk Inventory X (figure out where your disk space went visually)
  • GPG Keychain Access
  • GPGFileTool
  • iSquint (convert any video to iPhone suitable content; bit dark though)
  • NeoOffice (Aqua styled OpenOffice port)
  • iChm (.CHM eBook reader and PDF exporter)

Non-free stuff:

  • Saft (enhances Safari in a bunch of ways)
  • VMWare Fusion (for booting your BootCamp partition)
  • Spanning Sync (for bidirectional iCal / Google Calendar sync)
  • CanCombineIcons ($10, simple way to combine icons)
  • AppZapper (remove all traces of an application)
  • Wallet (nice and simple password/serial/creditcard safe)

Selection of hints:

Under investigation by me:

  • ChronoSync
  • Duover
  • Flip4Mac
  • JellyfiSSH
  • MPlayer OS X 2
  • SlingShot
  • Senuti
  • Synk Professional
  • VisualHub
  • WaterRoof