I’ve be a Mac user now for just 9 months now but already I have accumulated several apps which make my life easier and faster on the Mac…. Here they are (in the order that I noticed them on the dock):

1) Firefox… Although Safari is a good web browser Firefox is still a winner, especially since I use it on other platforms as well. But the BIG thing about Firefox are the plugins, little modules that enchance the functionatily of the browser. I use about 5 or 6 and they add some great little extentions to Firefox… Hmm, that could be another Top 10 list…

2) Adium X is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo etc. Who needs 10 different IM clients when you can have 1.

3) jEdit. I spend quite a bit of time writing PHP code and HTML, CSS etc and having a good programmers editor is essential. jEdit is a well developed text editor, written in Java, that runs on Mac OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows. jEdit features plugins, auto indent and syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages.

4) Skype… I don’t live in the same country as my parents and calling home can be expensive… But not with Skype… And let us not forget the free Skype to Skype calls, plus video chat, plus a built in IM.

5) MAMP: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! As I mentioned above, I develop my own PHP applications and websites and having a local web server with MySQL and PHP is essenital and all OS X.

6) My dock is overflowing with great OS X apps, and to be honest I don’t like the whole applications folder thing on OS X. But wait… Overflow is an application designed to quickly launch applications, open documents, or access folders while keeping the size of your dock in check. Brilliant.

7) As a compliment to Overflow there is of course QuickSilver. If you don’t know what QuickSilver is go find out now! An absolute must.

Most of the software I have listed above is either free or comes at a low price. There is one and only one exception to this on my list: Roxio Toast 8 Titanium. Toast is a CD & DVD burning application with all the bells and whistles including Blu-ray support and Fit-to-DVD™ compression of 9 GB onto a 5 GB disk. It is expensive, but it does do just about everything.

9) NeoOffice brings the power of OpenOffice.org to OS X. NeoOffice gives you a full set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. It also integrates dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

10) ffmpegx. Working on a Mac naturally means working with multimedia and Apple’s applications like iMovie are very powerful. ffmpegx is a video encoder/decoder tool. It is great for converting your multimedia files into differnt formats. The slogan reads “the power of 20 Unix tools in a single application to quickly encode and author video in any format”

This could have been a list of 20 OS X applications I can’t live with out as there are plenty more great OS X apps out there. Maybe I’ll do another list soon!