What's on my Mac

What follows are the 3rd party applications I've installed on my mac and continue to use. Unless otherwise noted they are free.

• Camino - I use this as my main web browser. Safari is good but there are few things missing that bother me, namely ad blocking and bookmark keywords. I think PithHelmet might add those to Safari but haven't tried it. Camino is based on Mozilla code but unlike Firefox is a well-behaved Cocoa app. I used Firefox for a while but then some of the differences bothered me, mostly that Emacs-like editing didn't work in the address bar and that it didn't use the KeyChain for remembering logins. Camino uses the Cocoa toolkit not the Mozilla XUL one, so Firefox extension don't work, but I haven't really missed them. Camino 0.9 adds builtin AdBlocking.
• Carbon Emacs - Based on current CVS builds of the development branch of emacs, this is the best Mac version. It has many packages bundled with it including ispell which is nice. It's from Japan so some Japanese stuff is there too, but you can turn it off easily by deleting one file. See the EmacsWiki entry CarbonEmacsPackage for details. There is also AquaEmacs which seems to be updated more frequently and now supports two-finger scrolling on my PowerBook's track pad, but it's a little too mac-like and has deprecated ~/.emacs for ~/Library/Preferences/ stuff (though ~/.emacs still works for now). The most annoying thing is it opens a separate frame for each buffer, though there's a menu option to turn that off. See the EmacsWiki entry AquamacsEmacs for more info. Use the Option key for meta so, that your fingers don't get confused with the Command (aka Apple) key. Also you'll want this hack to add more emacs keybindings to every cocoa app.
• Quicksilver - This is really a wonderful and hard to describe application. Think of it as a command-line for a GUI. Via a trigger key (usually Command-space) you activate it and via typing can enter a noun, verb and perhaps an object to do things. Nouns can be file names, bookmarks, Address Book entries, iTunes songs, iPhoto albums, Applications, services, users, random text, etc. Verbs are things like run, copy, paste, open, compose email, send IM, append to file, etc. Objects are needed to specify things like what address to send a file to, etc. It's all modular and is really remarkable. One of the great advantages is that it's matching algorithm is very clever, working with a variety of abbreviation techniques and it learns your preferences over time. So after not too long you can do very complicated things with just a few keystrokes. The documentation isn't great so you're left learning by doing, but this basic and intermediate tutorial are quite good and this page on 43 folders hints at some powerful things.
• NetNewsWire Lite - This is the free version of the best RSS reader on the mac. 2.0 added atom support so it works well with blogger. I find I use this as much as Mail. I'm thinking of springing the $25 for the full version.
• Adium X - Until iChat adds support for Yahoo IM I need something else. Adium is the closest thing to Trillian on the mac. It uses libgaim, works very well and there are lots of extras available. I use the Dock theme which can get pictures remotely or from the Address Book. So I have a small dock-like thing on the right of my screen that has pictures of my online buddies. It seems very personal. It can't yet do video chat, I have to use iChat for that but I haven't been able to get it to work.
• VLC - This is a video player and it can play just about anything.
• Microsoft Office - I can't say I use it too often but I did buy this to open docs people send me. I found the Standard edition online for $257. Many like Entourage which is the included Outlook-like app, but I use Mail.app, iCal.app and AddressBook.app and am very happy. Now there's a free option, NeoOffice/J based on OpenOffice, but I haven't tried it yet.
• iWork - This is the suite from Apple and includes Keynote for presentations and Pages for documents (and it's rumored the next version will contain Numbers). Keynote is very impressive and Pages is ok for a 1.0. Both integrate nicely with iLife and it's interesting to see the different approach from Office. A lot of features are dealing with typography and making things print nicely but I find I need hardcopy less and less. It's $79 from Apple.
• Azureus - This is the BitTorrent client I use.
• Delicious Library - This is a clever app to help you keep track of your books, DVDs, CDs and Games. It only runs on Mac and won all kinds of awards when it shipped in late 2004. It's a little expensive at $40 but I've enjoyed it. Basically it's a database for your collections but it's very very pretty. It's also easy to enter information into, you give it a name or a UPC code and it looks it up on Amazon and downloads all the info, including a picture, it can even suggest similar items you might be interested in. The really neat hook is that it can use a video camera (I bought an iSight) to scan in UPC codes. I entered all 150 DVDs in about an hour.
• Cyberduck - This is a GUI-based ftp client. While OSX has a command-line client, this is convenient to use from the finder with drag and drop. The other popular client is Transmit which does have a Quicksilver plugin, but it's $30 and I don't do that much FTP. Update:MacWorld reviewed 3 FTP clients in July 2005.
• MoinX - I tried a lot of outliners for personal notetaking but found myself drawn back to wanting a wiki. I wanted a python based one and MoinMoin seems to be the best. This is a prepacked version that trival to install. If your more comfortable with the mac command-line you can probably install whatever you want.
• Windows Media Player - There are a few things that VLC won't play, though this doesn't always play them either.
• Real Player - In case VLC doesn't play it. It's good for NPR audio streams.
• SilverKeeper - I bought a LaCie d2 drive for backups and this came with it. It works with any drive and is freeware. So far it's been fine.
• Google Maps Plugin - Not a separate application but rather a plugin to the Address Book that lets you click on an address and have your browser show a google map of that address. This plugin works well at normalizing the address to work well, e.g., removing apartment numbers.