What Are Your Essential Apps?

[Disko]

Hey there, you crazy mac users.

What are the essential apps you use in your professional and home life. I'm making up a large list of software, shareware, and freeware for Mac OS X that can be used as an index for people not knowing which app they can use for a certain task...

So far, my (very short) list includes:

Instant Messaging

• Proteus
• Adium
• Fire
• Msn Messenger default client
• ICQ default client
• Yahoo defaut client

Mail

• Apple's Mail
• Entourage
• Mozilla Thunderbird

Browsers

• Safari
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla
• Camino
• Opera
• Shiira

Video Players:

• VLC
• Mplayer
• Windows Media Player for Mac wmv, wma only
• Quicktime

Then generally:

• Transmit (ftp client)
• jView (basic image viewer)
• Toast (CD/DVD burning tool)
• YuBurner - a free CD burning app, as an alternative to toast
• Photoshop (Pro Graphics)
• SubEthaEdit great text/code editor

This will be more comprehensive as time goes on, and my research improves. I'd like to set out the list so that all the apple apps that ship with MacOS X are at the top, then everything else is categorised.
All apps will have download or manufacturers website links next to them, and hopefully, users will be able to search the database to find free apps for a certain task, for an example.

If you have any essential apps that you think other mac users can benefit from, please post them here with a short description, and i'll add them to the list.

Thanks.

[~Coxy]

Snapz Pro X - best ever image capture app
WireTap - rip appplication audio to hard disk
Windows Media Player 9 - play all .wmv files
vlc - play everything else
UnRarX - unsegment those pirated DVDs you download...
Poisoned - FastTrack client of OS X
Pacifist - peek inside installer packages
HexEdit - edit the data fork of a file
GraphicConverter US - best ever image converter/slideshow/editor
0SEx - remove encryption and region fron a DVD

[elvis]

Apple X11, Fink and Fink Commander. Can't live without them.

[Radar]

Instant Messaging

• X-Chat Aqua. A clone of the popular X Chat IRC Program. xchataqua.sourceforge.net/

General

• MPlayerOSX. A clone of the popular media player MPlayer. Plays almost any format of video in excellent quality.mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/

[macropus]

Email - Mail
Browsers - Safari, Mozilla Firebird, OmniWeb
Bookit - Bookmark organiser
SpeedDownload - for resumeable downloads (I'm stuck with 28k modem speeds)
Newsreader - MacSOUP
Graphics - Gimp (can't afford Photoshop) with X11, Fink, Fink Commander
Burner - Toast
Wordprocessor - AppleWorks, TextEdit - who needs M$
Back-Up - Carbon Copy Cloner
FTP - Fetch
VLC - Plays any region DVD
For those unused CPU cycles - Folding@Home, http://teammacosx.homeunix.com/

[jameso]

apps i install on every mac

desktop manager <-- free virtual desktops
http://wsmanager.sf.net

Launchbar <-- Application launcher
http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/

Konfabulator <-- Widget program, very very easy to write a widget for anything with little or no experience
http://www.konfabulator.com

XShelf <-- Its a little shelf that you can dump stuff onto. Basically it will take anything you drag-n-drop onto it and hold it for you as long as you need, when you are ready you can just drag-n-drop it to it&#39;s final resting place
http://homepage.mac.com/khsu/XShelf/XShelf.html

They are the apps i need to have installed/configures before i feel at home on a mac

jameso

[stevejay]

Final Cut Express
Photoshop (5.5 under Classic, can&#39;t afford to upgrade yet)
iDVD and Sizzle (nicely complementary DVD authorwares)
DVD imager and Handbrake
FFMPEG-X
Mail
Safari
Appleworks
Filemaker Pro 6
Macroplop "Wooooooooord" (only because PCers insist on emailing Woooooord docs when text would be fine)
"Excess" (only when Appleworks&#39; spreadsheet doesn&#39;t cut it)
iLife in general
Tony Hawk 4
The Sims

but most of all...

Garageband (even though I don&#39;t have it yet) in the words of Blackboard off Mr Squiggle, "Hurry up&#33;"

[slowly]

I use a lot of what&#39;s already listed. Two more I use all the time are Ircle and MT-NewsWatcher... oh and an online game called Lineage (any other players out there?)

[decryption]

Originally posted by slowly@Jan 20 2004, 11:51 AM
oh and an online game called Lineage (any other players out there?)

I&#39;m not usually a fan of RPG&#39;s, but Lineage looks pretty cool for a *free* game.
I might download it when I get back to TAFE (10mbit Ethernet connection straight to AARNET ) and check it out.

[kaisersozay]

Microsoft Office is an essential if you wish to communicate with THOSE h34r: PC people, always remember to include the suffix.
BlueBox is a great invoicing and recording app. Cheaper than MYOB and Filemaker based.
Filemaker Pro is a superb Data Baser.
Acrobat Reader is a must.
PrintToPdf is exceptional and a substitute for Acrobat Distiller.
Disk Tracker catalogues all your files on ALL your media.
ImageViewer is a smooth and simple viewing app for your pics.
Norton Utilities, Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior for those unhappy moments.
Retrospect for the back ups I am sure everyone does, or at least does AFTER that unhappy moment.
Naturally, choose the version specific to your OS and I must say, that in my field I could not survive without Photoshop and every tutorial I can lay my hands on.
There are quite a lot of other handy small apps and utilities, I utilise from time to time. If I remember [list=1] I will post them if they appear to be relevant. If anyone wants more specific details <links etc> let me know.

[decryption]

My favourite apps in Mac OS X so far are:

Usenet: Unison
FTP: Transmit
P2P: mlMac and Bit Torrent
IM: Proteus
WWW: Safari
E-Mail: Mail
IRC: Conversation
Video: MPlayerOSX

and there&#39;s Apple&#39;s X11, DarwinPorts, Fink and Fink Commander

I&#39;m still looking for a good spreadsheet, HTML/CSS editor, and a word processor. Anyone got any recommendations?

[mbd]

Originally posted by kaisersozay@Jan 22 2004, 11:06 AM
Acrobat Reader is a must.

What does Acrobat Reader do that the new version of Preview that comes with Panther doesn&#39;t? I like AR for the ability to search the PDF, but now that Preview does that, I can&#39;t think of a good reason to use AR - especially since v6.0 came out - it takes so long to load compared to preview&#33;

[mbd]

Originally posted by decryption@Jan 29 2004, 06:58 PM
I&#39;m still looking for a good spreadsheet, HTML/CSS editor, and a word processor. Anyone got any recommendations?

For the 1st and 3rd, have you tried Open Office for OS X? It&#39;s not going to win any popularity contests over MS-Office for a corporate office suite, but it&#39;s still pretty good; http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

For HTML/CSS i use &#39;vi&#39;. But you&#39;re probably looking for something different I guess :-)

[Cory5412]

I use MS Office (powerpoint, excel word) for most of my general productivity

Adobe Illustrator 10 for drawing.

Carracho and FrogBlast for hotline and carracho

iChat and MSN messenger and Conversation for AIM/MSN/IRC respectively

I have the XGRID stuff installed and it&#39;s in my dock.

I use Xterm as my terminal, and I X11 in to other people&#39;s machines (like SGI) and run other programs there (mostly mozilla, and it&#39;s mostly for testing)

i use the OSX application half of QuickTime Broadcastor to play my walkmann through my TIBooks&#39; audio in port to act as an FM tuner until I can get something else.

Transmit is my ftp client

iPhoto to organize things from my camera

iTunes for my music.

Other than that, I have a bunch of different web browswers installed, safari is my main one and I use IE for local testing stuff.

(and that my friends, is my whole dock,oter than iGetter which I use to do big downloads from http and ftp servers usually)

[Secoa]

Apps I use frequently are:

Mail
Safari (I only use MS Explorer if Safari doesn&#39;t work)
iPhoto
iTunes - have not upgraded yet to iLife 04, but will soon. Got to convince my wife
iDVD - mostly to watch DVD&#39;s (not burn them)
MS Office - Excel, Word and Powerpoint
Speed download 2
iSync
Backup

Have some smaller apps but I rarely use them.

[cmetom]

Originally posted by Secoa@Feb 2 2004, 12:57 PM
Safari (I only use MS Explorer if Safari doesn&#39;t work)

suggestion: put Mozilla Firebird inbetween IE and Safari... so if Safari doesn&#39;t work use Mozilla. if Moz don&#39;t work, use IE.

an extra layer of protection&#33;

[Secoa]

[quote]suggestion: put Mozilla Firebird inbetween IE and Safari... so if Safari doesn&#39;t work use Mozilla. if Moz don&#39;t work, use IE[quote]

I guess I see no need to use another browser when by default I use Safari (approx 95% of the time) and fall back on IE when some websites won&#39;t work. IE has never been unsuccessful.

On a slight tangent the following websites do not work are:

Greater Union - buying movie tickets on line
St George internet banking - sort of works - it opens another window to say they support Mac&#39;s and I need to download some software. I choose to ignore this and the original tab lets me login

Does anyone else have problem webites witrh Safari?

[Disko]

BankSA&#39;s internet banking gives you a warning about using an unsupported browser - and promises that it will support "your browser" in the future.

edit: it still works fine for me though.

[elvis]

Once again folks, the problem is not with Safari. The problem is Microsoft uses non-w3c standards in their HTML. People then buy microsoft products to design webpages, effectively cutting off anyone using an officially w3c-sanctioned browser.

just another example of Microsoft abusing their monopoly.

Mozilla, Mozilla-Firebird and Camino are all available for MacOSX, and are all W3C sanctioned. I&#39;d use any one of them over IE. Infact, I make it habit to delete IE from any Mac I personally use. There will be NO microsoft software on my macs, thank you very much.

[EDIT] also, some websites still insist on using popups to get you to the next series of information. anyone in their right mind blocks popups from the word go, so they will fail to. It&#39;s a simple matter of adding the site to your exception list in your popup blocker.

Microsoft are introducing a popup blocker in ServicePack 2 for winXP, so hopefully web designers will get a clue and stop using popups all together.

[cogo]

i always seem to have these open in my Dock:

Entourage
Safari
ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/iChat
Toast
iTunes
Grab
FontBook
Terminal
Network Utility
MPlayer OSX
Zippist (drag n drop zip files&#33
SubEthaEdit <----THIS THING IS THE SHIZZ PEOPLE&#33;
OmniGraffle
World Clock Deluxe
iCal
Stickies
Photoshop
Illustrator
word/excel

And from a development/server management side of things, i am in love with these apps:

CocaMySQL
MacCvsX
Server Admin
Server Monitor
Workgroup Manager
Nefu
Project Builder
EOModeler
IntelliJ IDEA
Terminal (duh)
Carbon Copy Cloner
CronniX
VNC
Apple Remote Desktop