In a few months, I’ll probably nuke the system for a move to 10.4. There’s all kinds of applications I have on my machine that I make use of that I might forget about, and end up wondering what they were.
- SoundSource
This makes it easy to switch where audio goes (in and out). - Quicksilver
This became invaluable incredibly quickly. - ecto
Where weblog posts come from. - Firefox and Thunderbird
Although these aren’t small utilities, I’ve switched from Safari and Mail.app to these two (excellent) open-source tools. I installed the Google toolbar plugin for Firefox as well. - Disk Inventory X
A handy little utility for seeing where disk space went. - Skype
Suddenly, this is how I make all my phone calls, both in the UK and to friends and family in the States. Amazing. (It’s also how I annoy my oficemates.) - MORE
Still, my favorite outliner available for the Mac. Hopefully Apple doesn’t kill the Classic environment anytime soon. - OSXvnc
Along with the VNC client, I can help my parents out with things on their Mac from across the Atlantic. Mind you, I rarely need to do this, but it’s a powerful tool just the same. - Postman Query and CocoaMySQL
These two apps are quite handy for database work; both of them play a role in my research. - Taco HTML Edit
A handy, and pleasant-to-use HTML editor—for when I actually have to author HTML, and not write programs that generate HTML. - TeXShop
There’s no other way to author LaTeX documents on OSX, in my opinion. - VLC
Video Lan Client plays all kinds of video content, and (I think) manages to play any region of DVD, although I’ve not tested this yet. - WireTap
This lets me record audio from any source direct to the hard drive. Occasionally useful. - Temperature Monitor
This little utility tells me how warm my Powerbook is. Handy. - Fink Commander
For installing all those UNIX utilities I don’t want to build and install myself. - PLT Scheme
I do most of my programming in Scheme. I sometimes use Emacs for editing code, and sometimes I use DrScheme. Either way, PLT Scheme is my implementation of choice, as it is robust, runs everywhere, and is free. - R
R is a statistical programming language. Also very important in my research, as it gives me more power and flexibility than Excel.
That’s most of them, I think.