Let’s kick this off the right way. The ten essential applications for the cheapskate in all of us. These gems are great, useful, and won’t set you back a pretty penny.
1. Firefox – (Duh!) – When I get a new machine up and running the first thing I download is a fresh copy of Firefox. I then grab a few plugins before downloading the next applications. These plugins are.
2. Adium – Sure iChat is great, looks good, and integrates some 30 features that I would feel strange doing with my friends, but it still doesn’t have the flexibility to connect me to people on something besides aim and mobile me (without shenanigans). So Adium is a great all-in-one chat client that supports everything from yahoo to facebook chat. It also has a great deal of addons, but none are essential before moving on.
3. The Unarchiver – Sometimes when you download these open source software they have extensions like rar, 7zip, tar, etc. I find that The Unarchiver does a great job of getting them uncompressed. I have noticed some problems with this on Snow Leopard that it won’t extract. I usually just repair file permissions on my disk and then reboot and everything is right again.
4. Transmission – In my opinion, the best bit-torrent client on mac. If you are looking for torrent files, just try google.
5. Bean – I know that Apples Pages is great and that MS Office for Mac is decent, but they aren’t free. Also, they are both fairly bloated for just your basic word processing. When it comes to just cranking out a document, I don’t think that anything beats Bean. That is, unless you have Attention Deficit Disorder in which case you should download JDarkRoom. Which is a free alternative to WriteRoom.
6. AddressBookSync – After you get your contacts back into your address book it’s good to update those mug shots of your friends. If your friends are like mine, they aren’t to keen on having your phone in their face 24/7. For this reason, I use AddressBookSync. It’s the best way to sync your friends facebook photo, birthday, and current location to your Address Book. Ah, very handy.
7. Seashore – Out of all of the “out of the box” apps for Mac, there isn’t one that makes for a decent image editor. Most people would put GIMP above Seashore or even Inkscape for that matter, but these applications are just to much for simple tasks. Seashore is like MSPaint for Mac. In case you were wondering, there is a MSPaint clone for Mac and you can download it here.
8. Fugu – Fugu makes it easy to transfer your files to a remote server. Not useful to most people, but here for a well-rounded list.
9. Handbrake – The video swiss army knife. I use this to convert movies into Apple Tv format. Very nice app. If you’re looking to spend some money on a video converter, I’d recommend getting iFlicks. I just love how it puts the right meta data on files.
10. Dropbox – Great for syncing files to and from multiple computers. However, it’s also good for backing up entire directories. This is helpful when you need a file on the fly and you can just pull up their free iphone app, find the file and email directly from your phone. This is super nice and the first 2gb won’t cost you a penny.
Well that’s 10 of the essential Snow Leopard Applications (Mac OS X). If you have some recommendations please post them below.
October 16th, 2009 @ rmclain
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