Indispensable Mac apps

I’m almost certain I did up a list of my favourite ‘must have’ mac apps on this blog, but for the life of me I cannot find it. I guess it doesn’t matter though since it would be old now and definitely needs updating.

So here it is, my list of ‘must have’ mac apps. Apps I use everyday and love using. Listed in no particular order.

[AppZapper](http://www.appzapper.com/)
I don’t know how I went without this app for so long. Drag an app you no longer want installed onto the AppZapper window and it will scan for all those annoying preference, cache, library files that are usually left behind when simply dragging the app to the trash.
Select the items in the list, and hit the ‘zap’ button to remove all of them in one hit. No more left over preference files!

[TextMate](http://macromates.com/)
I’m a text editor junky, or rather, I was. I’ve tried a heap of them, [BBEdit](http://www.barebones.com/), [TextWrangler](http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/), [Smultron](http://smultron.sourceforge.net/), [SubEthaEdit](http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/), yet none of them appeal to me as much as TextMate. I think the main thing that sets it apart from the others is the bundle support and it seems to have an awesome community behind it. Now it is my text editor of choice.

[XCode](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xcode/) + [Interface Builder](http://developer.apple.com/tools/interfacebuilder.html)
I like programming on the mac, therefore I use the dev tools. Simple as that really. XCode and Interface builder are nice to use as well.

[Mail](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/)
I like Mail. It’s simple and easy to use and supports everything I so far have needed to do with it. Things like [MailTags](http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html) and [MailAct-On](http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html) only add to Mail to make it a pretty cool app. On a side note, if you like mail you gotta check out [Hawk Wings](http://www.hawkwings.net/). It’s a Mail lovers dream site with heaps of awesome tips and add-on info.

[Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/)
Probably the most popular multi-client instant messaging app for the mac. It’s a very slick program and sits nicely in my dock. I use it whenever I am not expecting multiple group chats at the same time. Unfortunately it has a nasty bug with multiple group conversations that causes all messages from all group chats to display in a single chat window. Making it impossible to use. It is a known bug, but is not planned to be fixed until 1.5. With 1.0 the current milestone in development, I’m not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.

[MSN messenger](http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/MISC/msn_messenger3.asp)
I hate its interface. I hate how it randomly ‘fails to deliver’ messages. I hate how it randomly disconnects due to ‘network issues’ but seems to be able to reconnect again straight away just fine. I hate how it is so far behind in features compared to the windows version. I hate pretty much everything about the ‘official’ MSN client for mac except for one small thing, It supports multiple group chats better then Adium. That is the only reason it is still on my mac.

[PhotoStickies](http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/photostickies/)
Only a new entry in my list. I got it as part of a [MacZot](http://maczot.com/) bundle. It basically lets you display images on your desktop above the standard wallpaper. You can choose the image, then scale it or add a filter to it and a lot of other things. I like it because I tend to get sick of my standard wallpaper quite frequently and with this I can have a wallpaper and also a bunch of other photos of family and stuff as well. I like it a lot.

[Google Notifier](http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/)
A little menu extra that lets you know when you have new mail in your [gmail](http://gmail.google.com/) account. Also hooks into [google calendar](http://www.google.com/calendar) as well, but I’ve never used that part of it. I wish they would release a version that supports multiple gmail accounts. If you use gmail, you need this.

[Colloquy](http://colloquy.info/)
A free cocoa irc client. Nothing fancy, but handles the basics extremely well. I’ve tried other clients but none have the nice and simple UI that colloquy has.

[MenuCalendarClock](http://www.objectpark.net/mcc.html)
Another [MacZot](http://maczot.com/) bundle app. It displays a little day calendar in the menu that when clicked displays a month calendar. The neat thing is that it integrates with iCal and by hovering over the day you can see appointments and to-do items for that day. Great for quickly seeing what you have in ical without having to actually launch ical itself. The little month calendar comes in handy as well.

[NetNewsWire](http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdID=NetNewsWire)
In my opinion, the best RSS feed aggregator for OS X. It has everything you could want in an RSS reader and more. [NewsFire](http://www.newsfirerss.com/) apparently gives it a run for its money, but with the few times I’ve tried it I’ve had crashes and general trouble with it. NetNewsWire all the way.

[Transmit](http://www.panic.com/transmit/) My FTP client of choice. It looks nice and works nice. Does the job and does it well. I only use it for basic uploading and downloading but it has oodles of other features that make it an awesome FTP client.

[VLC](http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html)
The ‘play all’ solution for media files on OS X. You get the odd file every now and then that doesn’t play properly but overall VLC will generally play pretty much anything you throw at it.

That finishes off my current ‘must have mac app’ list. I use most of these apps daily, and the rest weekly. They make the mac user experience even better.

EDIT:

Holy crap! How could I forget [Yojimbo](http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.shtml)?
Looking at my list again and it is actually on there, I just forgot to blog about it. oops.
So yeah, [Yojimbo](http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.shtml) is definitely on my list as well. I tried it back when it was first released and loved it, but for some reason I stopped using it until recently when [Luke](http://www.ldaley.com) mentioned that he was using it.
It suits my ‘write ideas in seperate text document’ organisational strategy really well, and makes it so easy to find what you are looking for. The recent addition of tag support makes it even better. It now contains all my notes and web-site logins and serial numbers that i had previously stored in my ‘~/Stuff/Misc text pdf’ and ‘In progress’ folders. Awesome app!