Seems there are a bunch of these lists online… but I figured I’d go ahead and have my own available. I’ve had this machine for about a week now, and I’m well on the way to filling up that 120 GB hard drive! Since my biggest concern with making the switch was that I would not be able to stay productive, one of my first goals was to research the major applications that I used all the time.

Adium
This is the most clever little duck you’ll ever see! When I was with the ‘dark side’ (microsoft / PC) I used an instant message program called ‘trillian’. This multi-IM tool allowed me to connect to Y!, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and other chat services. Since no-one can seem to settle on any one IM service, it was handy to have them all available in one client. It would have been a shame if that same thing was unavailable for my shiny new Mac… so I’m glad I found Adium.

Growl
Growl is a notification system that sits in my tray… it ‘listens’ for notification events from all my software (like Adium) and acts as a sort of ‘dispatch’ for all of them, keeping the incessant blinking of all of my applications to a minimum, and constraining them all to one area of my screen (top right corner). One of the most annoying things about working with the ‘dark side’ was all the different ways that software developers found to get my attention. PCs are always so rude and interruptive! Not my shiny new Mac, especially with Growl!

Google Notifier
While I’m talking about notifiers… I use GMail for my jimrising.com domain, and it’s always a pain to have to keep a browser window open in order to check my email there. GMail Notify tells me (via growl of course) when I get new messages, how many new messages are waiting for me, and will allow me to compose new mail or open my inbox. Very handy!

FileZilla
This had become my favorite FTP program on PC, with multi-threaded FTP capability (allows you to connect multiple times to the same FTP server so that you’re not waiting to download every file one at a time). I was very happy to see that this was also available on Mac.

Thunderbird
I haven’t really played with Apple’s ‘Mail’ application… I had used T-Bird on my PC prior to switching… so again… very happy that this kickin bird was available for my shiny new Mac.

QuickSilver
If you saw my first post about the Mac, you’ll know that I am not a fan of the dock. Quicksilver is a sort of application launcher, but so much more. This little application is very understated, and I would recommend any Mac owner install it.

Parallels
ok… this is the only commercial software on my list, but it was actually my initial justification for purchasing a Mac in the first place. Parallels allows you to run any operating system (linux, unix, XP, Vista… etc… ) within a window on Mac OSX. Not only that, but it has this feature called ‘convergence’ that merges the two open operating systems into one. The first time I ran Parallels with convergence turned on and saw my XP start menu at the bottom of my Mac’s screen with the OSX Dock on the left… i giggled like a little girl. At $80, this application is definitely worth it, but I’ll be completely honest… I haven’t used it all week other than to show a few Microsoft drones what it does.

Remote Desktop Connection
I sometimes find myself in the unfortunate but inevitable position of supporting windows servers… (go figure, right?). I already knew that I would be able to use the RDC client within my XP Parallels instance, but was very pleased to see that even the Sith Lord provides an RDC client for OSX.

Eclipse
This was my primary software development IDE on my PC … and of course since it’s built in Java, it works on my Mac.