inluminent

Since everyone else has a published list of their favorite software for OS X, I figured I’d post mine:

• BBEdit - A truly fantastic text-only editor. Extremely powerful and yet also very simple. (you can still download the old free “lite” version if you don’t want to pay for it, but if you find yourself using it alot, I’d recommend buying the new full version) ($180)
• NetNewsWire - RSS Aggregator. Bought version 1.0 as soon as it was available, and happly waiting for version 2.0 (currently in development). ($40)
• Interarchy - FTP client (and more). I’ve been using Interarchy (and it’s parent Anarchie) for about 10 years now and I’ve never been unhappy with it. ($40)
• VLC - alternative media player for when Windows Media Player won’t play the Windows Media files it’s supposed to play. (free)
• LaunchBar - super cool launcher utility. ($20)
• WindowshadeX - at it’s worst this little haxie brings back Mac OS 9’s Windowshade functionality to OS X, and at it’s best extends that old idea and brings it into the present with their “minimize in place” feature. ($10)
• Fire - Great chat client for multiple different chat environments. Supports the two I need - AIM and MSN’s chat. (free)
     Close second: AdiumX. (free)
• ClearDock - quickly and easily makes the background of your dock clear. (free)
• Mailsmith with SpamSieve - a great compliment to BBEdit and a fantastic replacement for Mail. I’ve written about Mailsmith before, if you’re interested in reading deeper on this software.
• Cocktail - A fantastic easy to use program to perform system maintenance on your machine manually. Thanks to Lon for this recommendation ages ago. ($15)
• Quicktime Pro - Yes, I paid for this, so that I could easily and quickly download movies and/or edit them via copy/paste right in Quicktime after downloading. ($30)
• SnapzProX - Great Screen-shot and screen-movie utility. Works as advertised and used to capture movies of other movies that I find in WMA format, or something else that’s non-quicktime friendly, as well as screen-shots. ($30 - $70 for movie capture)
• SafariNoTimeout - Changes the default time-out for Safari when it has a hard time connecting to a web site. A must-have for web developers.
• MenuMeters - Great little Menu Extra that I use to tell me how hard my computer is working and to monitor the connectivity of my internet connections all from the menubar. (free)
• USB Overdrive X - If you’ve got a multi-button mouse, then I’d highly recommend you check this software out. I used it to get back the 5-button functionality of my MS Intellimouse Explorer. ($20)
• TinkerTool - let’s you set a lot of preferences for your system that are just hard to find or totally inaccessible via normal means. (free)

And here’s a list of stuff I’ve tried, but couldn’t get used to using because they weren’t polished enough, didn’t offer a strong enough feature/benefit vs. performance trade-off, or just didn’t fit me, but might be good for some one else, based on their needs:

• iTerm - tabbed Telnet/SSH client, that I’m sure does more than I understand, but it overkill for me.
• MPlayerOSX - a capable Divex and Realcodec movie player for OS X (free)

This list will be updated as it changes.