OS X Applications

Here's a list of some of the apps that I recommend to others - especially those who are new to OS X. It doesn't include the standard apps that most people know about - instead it is intended to be a heads-up for some apps that you might need or want but might otherwise escape your attention.

Of course this list has apps that appeal to me and so you are likely to find that some of them are of no interest or use to you.

The two main places to look for apps are:

Fink: for getting open source software

(There is also DarwinPorts but I don't have any experience with this)

System Utilities

keyboard-based launchers (and pasteboard extenders)

system monitors

X Resource Graph

wireless (Airport) monitors

iStumbler
Airport Management Tools (Apple) (see the link on the bottom right of that web page)

disk space utilities

removal of extra languages & architectures (to save disk space)

Monolingual

screen capture utilities

FreeSnap (free and quite good)
SnapZPro (great but costs $$)

remote control of other (Mac or otherwise) computers

VNC (server & client) - google to find out about this - note that Tiger's "Apple Remote Desktop" in the Sharing preferences provides a VNC server

contextual menu utility

OnMyCommand (provides access to Unix commands and AppleScripts via the contextual menu - i.e. via right-click)

man page utilities

Bwana (man pages in the browser)

backup utilities

preference panes

RCDefaultApp (to set file associations for extensions, MIME-types, etc)

Text editing

Text Wrangler (an extremely capable text editor - free!)
SubEthaEdit (collaborative editing over the network)

Graphics

image editing & browsing

Graphic Converter

technical drawing/diagramming

OmniGraffle

Audio

Audacity (general audio editor)
Audacity tutorial
SignalScope (oscilloscope)
Play Sound (faceless background app for playing sound files)

Video

VLC video player (alternative to QuickTime Player, has some advantages)
Perian (component for QuickTime that supports almost all "other" video formats)
EvoCam (webcam software but more generally useful)
DivX Doctor (converts DivX .avi videos to 3ivx QuickTime (.mov) videos)

Music

iTunes utilities

pearLyrics (finds lyrics for songs)

Web

offline web page viewing

SiteSucker (downloads a copy of a web site to your Mac)

web page RSS reader

NetNewsWire Lite

P2P

Acquisition
BitTorrent
Bits On Wheels (alternative BitTorrent client that shows more info)

Running MS Windows

VirtualBox Free and open-source virtualization (you need a valid MS Windows CD)

Software development

AppKido (Cocoa docs)
Apple's performance tools (Note especially "Shark" - comes with the "CHUD Tools" - allows easy determination of hot spots)
ValueConverter (allows you to easily convert between various numerical formats: decimal, hex, binary, etc)
Hex Fiend (hex editor that handles very large files)