Decaflon

Cyberduck for FTP
Vienna for RSS feeds... I don't really like viewing them in Safari.

I second Cyberduck for FTP — but I switched out Vienna for NetNewsWire Lite (which I'm actually not happy with either, but I think it's better than Vienna).

OpenOffice (called NeoOffice in its native OS X splendor) is good to have, I use that instead of Word.

If you want to track your time in various applications (could help with productivity) I recently came across Slife. I haven't tried it but want to.

Oh, Flip4Mac is a must-have. It allows you to view Windows Media files as Quicktime in your browser — much better control and better usability.

Hm. That's about all I can think of for now in the general-department.

Any more specific applications would also be welcome. While I'm looking for general purpose and writing related applications, the fact is some may read this and find something they really like from a more specific point of view, so don't be shy about recommending them. (For example, if you know of a very good financials application, or an app that, say, tracks home prices near your area -- actually, that'd be pretty damn cool -- then name it here.)

OmniGraffle is my favourite; I wrote a mini-rave a couple of years ago.

I use if for making graphics for my site, laying out my CV, mind-mapping ideas, flow charts (using my own home-rolled stencil).

Just some of the basics I'm afraid:

Adium (IM)
Camino (browser)
NeoOffice (seconded from Hrafn)
GIMPShop (GIMP for Mac)
Smultron (HTML/CSS editor)
Conversation (IRC)

iTunes? :)

Just a couple I use, not necessarily the best. And they don't look for houses, so sorry.

I'm mostly an online guy, though; don't have many apps...

But have a browse through the Apple downloads page. There's tons there.

OmniGraffle is my favourite

Oh yeah *high-five* Can't believe I forgot that.

@Nils & hthth: NeoOffice as opposed to, say, Pages (iWork)?

Though I will confess than on this front, I'll probably end up using Word. Layout is important for some of the work I do, and since most of my clients have Word, then that's what I'll need to work with. For 90% of things OOo Write is fine, but once you start getting picky about borders and the way fonts are represented in the application... well then, that's your missing 10% right there. (This is especially true of very customized resumes being sent via email.)

For most of my non-client-related writing, I'll probably end up using Scrivener.

@Nils & hthth: NeoOffice as opposed to, say, Pages (iWork)?

I'd say you need to have NeoOffice handy. I'd even put it very crudely like this:

• Pages does incredibly beautiful stuff using an incredibly simple and pleasing interface.
• NeoOffice is for writing stuff for your publisher — basically anything that you'll have to share as .doc with another PC user

If you're running Leopard, Quicksilver is pretty redundant... Spotlight has been VASTLY improved and covers a LOT of what most people use QS for.

basically anything that you'll have to share as .doc with another PC user

You can export documents as .doc's for Pages. I would highly recommend the new Office 08 for mac though. It's pretty damn nice, and drastically faster than the 04 version.

I love Pages, but I don't use very complicated documents. That will explain why I haven't had any trouble moving back and forth from .doc with it.

Daily I use

Skype (IM and VOIP, I have a real phone number tied to my account)
Mail
Transmit (FTP)
Transmission (Torrents)
Safari
TextMate (code editor)
iTunes
Terminal
iChat
Pages
Chicken of the VNC (Best named VNC client ever.)

Have you looked at MacHeist? I think today is the last day, and it's a serious deal!

I recommend the following:

Adium
Transmission

Paparazzi (just did a post on it)
Newsfire
Flikr Uploader
Photoshop (if you like editing photos)
Ecto ( for blogging)
Cyberduck (FTP)
Toast Titanium (burning cds)

For work I use MS Office 2008 on my Mac which is awesome so far!

You can export documents as .doc's for Pages.

Yah, as long as they're not overly pretty.

Adium, Transmission, Panic, TextMate, Coda, iWork 08. iLife 08, NetNewsWire, Firefox

I would highly recommend the new Office 08 for mac though. It's pretty damn nice, and drastically faster than the 04 version.

EXCELLENT recommendation, I have iWork AND Office '08 and I have to say, I LOVE THE HELL out of iWork, but it sucks royal ass when it comes to sharing with Office on Windows. Unless you're doing Office 101 type documents Office will ruin your iWork layouts.

I booted up Office '08 on my iBook and I have to say, this is THE first version of Office on ANY OS that I can say I actually ENJOY using. It's REAL nice.

Well, I just got my Mac. (Yae!) I'm working on it now, though it sort of feels like I have two left hands. (Not a fair statement, since I've always been pretty ambidextrous, but that's neither here nor there.) Now it's time for me to go through these and try them out. ;-)

I just wish more of these were free. :-(.

(Emoticon overuse is purposeful. The Finder icon scares me.)

Of course the native apps like Mail.app, iTunes, Safari, etc. are all musts, but in addition:

- Quicksilver
- Adium
- Twitterific
- TextMate
- Cyberduck
- NeoOffice
- Airfoil (if you have an airport extreme)
- VMware Fusion (for when you must run Windows)
- And my latest favorite app (acquired from MacHeist), CoverSutra

I just made the switch at the end of August, and several readers from my blog gave me a ton of suggestions you might find helpful: http://www.elliotswan.com/2007/08/31/made-the-switch

Hey, Elliot. Just checked out the link. That's a LOT of recommendations! I'll give it a closer look through over the next week, as I sort of feel my way around the system.

Edit:
I just noticed that I had checked out that post back in September:

Oh, heh, so you did. Looks like you finally convinced yourself. ;)

I have to second a few that Ozone42 already mentioned, TextMate is hands down the best editor for Mac and Transmit is my FTP client of choice, both excellent apps.

I would also highly recommend Pathfinder. I like it way better than Finder.

Transmit and Adium for sure
(I haven't tried Cyberduck yet.)

Nice to hear positive things about Office 08. I'll check it out when I can.

I like Textmate for coding, native Mac apps for Mail, browsing etc., Transmit for FTP (but I've heard good things about Cyberduck). I don't use pages... if I want pretty pages, being a designer, I do it in Adobe InDesign. Photoshop is expensive but a joy. I tried GIMPshop -- it's vomitware. I use an ancient version of Word and Excel when (rarely) necessary, but have NeoOffice... it's pretty ugly, but useful. I've got Numbers but haven't had a need to use it yet.

As a web designer, I love having Parallels with Vista and XP running IE7 and IE6 respectively... just for browser testing.

Skype and iChat...

Default Folder X!!!

I also keep all my notes and stuff in VoodooPad.

I love iTunes and PearLyrics. I work at home alone, so no one has to hear me sing.

flickr uploader
firefox

Here's a few suggestions:

For coding: TextMate
For FTP: Transmit
Opening Apps, plus more: Quicksilver or Launchbar.
For RSS: NetNewsWire
For Blogging: MarsEdit

I did a post about this a while back (quite extensive -- not all are 'essential', but they're recommended) about this. Also got around 100 useful comments with even more suggestions. ... /selfplug.

Hope this helps!

As of Leopard Spotlight does a VERY good job of launching apps, Quicksilver trumps it when it comes to more detailed and power user functions.

This is a great little app for mac that takes full size and customizable screenshots of web pages, it's called Paparazzi
Well worth checking out.

If coding is your thing check out Smultron a neat little text editor that supports XHTML/HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript etc. It's free and I use it from time to time.

Also try out Flock a little social networking browser that displays your flickr feeds.

If you do some hand-made web design, you might like CSSEdit. It's pretty useful.

man I'm late to this game. It's a shame. Here are my recommendations anyway, even though some of them might be up here already (I only skimmed down the list):

Adium - I don't care what anyone says, I still think it's way better than iChat.

AppCleaner - drag a .app file you are planning on deleting, and it finds any other files it might have left somewhere and deletes them too

Audio Hijack Pro - record audio from anything. literally.

Caffeine - a really simple app that allows you to easily tell your machine not to sleep/run screen saver by just clicking on the coffee cup in the system tray. That's all it does but it's helpful for me to not have to go into the power settings whenever I want it to just stay up while watching a video

Cocktail - runs tasks that do maintenance/cleanup/repair of OS X with a very sleek gui. Most of the things it does you can do yourself if you know how, but if you don't it's handy to have.

Transmit - very awesome ftp and more

Growl - Just get it. Trust me. Hooks into all kinds of OSX applications and allows you to have a notification of all kinds of events in a uniform manner. Also get GrowlTunes and HardwareGrowl.

Quicksilver - if you have leopard, spotlight does the quick search thing just as well, but all the plugins QS is capable of are really why I use it (like controlling iTunes)

Omni "Everything" - Omni is probably going to be your new overlord. They make all kinds of goodies for Mac and have been for a very long time. Choice programs are Outliner, Graffle, and DiskSweeper (for finding out which files/folders take up a lot of hard drive space).

Pacifist - You will almost never use this. But when the time comes and you need it, you'll be glad it's there. It allows you to open up discreet package files, which is handy when you need to do a repair of OS X and you've got the disc, but you don't want to reinstall EVERYTHING, just one thing. This is analogous to breaking open .cab files in windows installs and reinstalling only that data to the right location.

PopChar - really awesome character map and typeface manager

Pzizz - Ok, this might not be cool for everyone, but it was for me. Personalize and generate binaural music for sleeping restfully with nature sounds or speaking or just ambience. I use it to generate stuff and then sync it to my ipod easily.

TextMate - I highly recommend TextMate over Coda. It's like Emacs on crack, except also easy and pretty (maybe like old girlfriends). The fact that you can drop an entire folder onto it and it organizes it as a little project is very nice.

Salute - another tiny app that allows you to do a three finger salute (ctrl cmd del) and from it easily open up a terminal, the activity monitor, or tell your screen saver to run. I use it to lock my machine easily since you have to enter a password to get the screen saver to turn off

Show/Hide Files - ok this is more a applescript hack put into a .app file, but it's handy if you want to see all those hidden files, but don't want to go through the hassles of manually showing it or not showing it. Run the app and simply say on or off. You can find it here

Snapz Pro X - FANTASTIC utility for taking screenshots, saving video, anything that is on the screen at the time. It even binds to the normal cmd shift 3 keyboard shortcut that osx uses for taking a screenshot of the screen, except it pops up the Snapz dialog. It can even save any pictures or video in any format you wish. It is truely handy and highly recommended.

Sweet Home 3D - ok this is just for fun. It's a freeware 3d blueprinting program. You can use it to draw out the layout of a room or house or whatnot, and then see it in 3D and manipulate it. Good for when you want you mess around with the space in a room and you want to plan out where things will go before going and moving everything. I used to do that with tiny paper cutouts, but now I just use this. This is technically a cross platform app, but I thought it was nifty to mention anyway.

Toast 8 Titanium - Really fantastic CD/DVD burning and mounting program.

Stuffit Expander Pro - in some ways it's better than osx's built in archive expander. Doesn't handle everything though. If you end up with really really weird archive files, like .7z archives, then you can use 7zx.

Web Snapper and Video Box - Web Snapper allows you to save a webpage you are looking at to a file, as images or vector-based, multi-page PDFs. Video Box allows you to snag embedded flash video files from web pages and save them as something else (like .mov).

xScope - xScope is good for designing, measuring, aligning and inspecting graphics and layouts as you see them on your screen. I use it to precisely figure out how many pixel dimensions a certain graphic is without having to save it and open it in photoshop or something.

TrackTime - useful for logging your productivity. Basically it's a timer for everything you are doing, so you can see later how you spent your time. Privacy options and nifty timeline analytics too.

Macam - this program installs every friggin webcam driver there is, and allows you to use webcams that weren't really supported for macs. Doesn't always work, but it works a good enough amount of the time.

Carbon Copy Cloner - clone hard disks or backup files from one disk to another very easily.

Blogo - maintain all your blogs from one thing

Lastly you should check out Mactopia, which is really just a mac dedicated section on Microsoft's website located here. Not too many people seem to know about this for some reason. There are various mac related goodies on here, with the choice ones being the osx version of windows media player, as well as the osx version of windows remote desktop connection utility (for connection to xp/vista machines that are enabled over remote desktop). You could use Chicken of the VNC to connect to your windows box over VNC, but if you've got remote desktop enabled, just use this, it's way faster.

I'm sorry for that being so long, heh. Maybe I'm a big machead.

Edit: I forgot Split & Concat. Very useful and does what it says it does.

Adium, Firefox, Growl, CoverSutra, AppZapper, QuickSilver, Coda, Transmit, Transmission, Pixelmator, Cha-Ching, Wallet

As you already have Apache on your mac heres an easy peasy way to run it with a MYSQL database
MAMP

Essential app

My Top 10 Mac Apps

I love almost all the above apps but the small(est) ones always get missed:

Pathsnagger - for grabbing the local url of files - good for sharing file locations with yourself or peeps on your network

Handbrake - not small app but the don for ripping DVDs with no fuss

SIteSucker - for stealing entire websites for offline viewing/ or to grab images from an entire site/blog

Linotype FontExplorer X - free, stable and easy to backup... no one ever mentions that the OSX fontbook application is terrible - make the swop.

Make up your own mind :)

Coda - Text Editor/FTP Program
Transmit - FTP, really good
Adium
Flip4mac
iEatBrainz - Labelling the ITunes I listen to whilst coding
Handbrake - For ripping DVD
opensIFR - Used to create the .swf for the flash text replacement easily
MAMP - Get the widget too!

Also, if you trade stocks, the yahoo stocks widget makes life much easier, just press the scroll wheel to check your stocks - awesome.

TagTicket.com

What kind of mac are you getting? Dont buy apple memory with your mac either, its cheaper to buy from crucial.