A little while ago I got a new MacBook and I spent a good amount of time finding and collecting up all the various applications and tools I commonly rely on when I try to do something geeky (or not) on a Mac.

I thought it would be good to share them here for reference purposes. Besides all of these applications are free to download and use.

Aptanta (http://www.aptana.com)
This is a full featured IDE for coding. It has great support for Javascript and xhtml. However the auto-complete can get a little intrusive. It also has support for FTP and SFTP in its internal file browser.

Battle For Wesnoth (http://www.wesnoth.org)
This is a great turn based tactical game that has tons of additional scenarios and strong online community.

Colloquy (http://colloquy.info)
This is a nice IRC client, with a very slick and easy to use interface. I don’t really chat much on IRC but it is always good to have a client around just in case.

Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch)
This a really good, easy to use transfer client that supports FTP and SFTP.

Fugu (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu)
This is another transfer client that supports dual window mode as well as FTP and SFTP. Its window layout is designed for a more power user; however it doesn’t seem to have as many features as Cyberduck.

Gimp (http://www.gimp.org)
This is a bitmap editor similar to Adobe Photoshop. I would say that it is just as capable as Photoshop, but there is a learning curve. There is a reformulation of the Gimp called GimpShop (http://www.gimpshop.net) that restructures the interface and menus to look and act more like Photoshop.

Mozilla Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox)
Mozilla Firefox is a top notch browser for any operating system. On the whole I like it better than Safari (which comes with your Mac). There are things that like about each of the browsers. For example I like Safari’s RSS browser better than Firefox’s. On the same token I like the plugins and built in spell checking on Firefox.

Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird)
Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client, very much similar to Mail. I keep debating back and forth about which one I like better. They both are very solid email readers but each of them has a few little things I don’t like.

MySQL GUI Tools (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools)
These are great tools for anyone who works as an administrator or a developer in a MySQL environment. They are very well integrated into OSX and can really make life easier.

NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org)
This is an open source office suite (similar to Microsoft Office). It is an implementation of OpenOffice.org that is fully integrated into the OSX window environment. I find it to be stabler than the OpenOffice.org implementation for Mac; however it is usually a release behind OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org)
This is the open source office suite that NeoOffice is based on. This is probably my most favorite open source project to date. However its distribution for Mac has to be ran through emulation using X11 or the like; which makes it a little awkward to use. The OpenOffice.org team has committed to releasing a native version of it for Mac soon (should have a preview in the next 1-3 months). When they come out with it, I get the feeling that it will put NeoOffice out of business.

Opera (http://www.opera.com)
This is another web browser alternative for Safari. For me it is an ok browser, but I can never really get into it. It is very full featured; so much so that I find it a little intrusive. I do give in credit for being one of the few browsers to pass the Acid2 test.

TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler)
This is a good lightweight text editor that supports syntax highlighting for a large number of languages. It also has built in FTP and SFTP support. It also has a good number of features, but it doesn’t get in your way like an IDE would if you just want to do some text processing.

UnRarX (http://unrarx.sourceforge.net)
This is a utility I just picked up. It allows you to extract RAR compressed files. I needed it because OSX’s built in tool doesn’t support the format.

Windows Media Components for QuickTime
This is a great implementation of support for Windows Media file formats (.wma and .wmv). It runs natively in Quicktime, which means a high level on integration with the system. I would say it handles streaming media better than Windows Media Player on Windows XP because you can pause a live stream and then pick it back up later from where you left off. Whereas on Windows, once you lose the buffer you can only join back in missing out on what streamed by in the gap.

I also plan to write a review on my experience with my new Mac, but it may be a few months (considering it took me about 2-3 months to get this one out).