About a month ago I bought one of the new MacBook Pros with 4GB of Ram and the back-lit LCD. This is seriously the best laptop (and computer) I have ever owned. Ignoring the OS for a second, just the hardware is incredible. I understand why people are buying these even if they still want to use windows.

I have been getting used to Mac OS and doing some rails development, but still heavily using Fusion since I do alot of .NET work. I have found a couple useful apps:

Adium for IM Cyberduck for FTP Textmate for Rails/Blogging CocoaMySql Transmission for bitTorrent Firefox (of course) Twitterific Bean for simple word processing Writeroom for cool word processing

What am I missing? What are your favorite apps for the mac?

Generally open on one or the other of my Macs these days -

• Cyndicate for RSS (I still detest online readers and think NewsFire is vastly overrated)
• Navicat for dealing with MySQL
• Aqua Data Studio for times when I still have to touch a SQL Server database
• QuickSilver for general spiffiness…I know I’m not tapping most of its power yet
• CSSEdit for CSS editing.
• OmniFocus for task tracking. Not sure I’m sticking with this; best of a bad lot so far.
• NeoOffice for office apps. Plus: optimized for Mac, good MS Office compatability. Minus: hideous memory issues. Looking at the new iWork as well.
• Chamonix for opening CHM files.

Mike, let me know how Pages 08 works out for you. I’d like to get away from NeoOffice too, but need decent Word 2007 interoperability.

James – how do you like Fusion? I’m trying to decide between Fusion and Parallels. Parallels is cool but kind of slow and memory-intensive.

Thanks for the good tips Mike, I downloaded CSSEdit and QuickSilver. CSSEdit is awesome, still figuring out Quicksilver.

Fusion is incredible. I have my main work VM (still on a .NET contract) setup for 1.5gigs of memory and dual processors. It runs faster than my old Alienware laptop straight up. No complaints. (and I can copy the VM to my PC server and open it right up)

-James

Cool. Looks like I’ll need to upgrade the 1Mb currently in my MB, though.

It should run pretty good with 512MB (at first I was running with the default 256MB which was pretty slow), but it won’t be like a full on windows box. I only give it 1.5 because I am drunk with the power of 4 gigs. :D

Here’s what I use:

• Navicat for MySQL
• for RSS originally had Newsfire -> NetNewsWire -> Google Reader with Hicks (OS X like style plugin)
• Yojimbo
• QuickSilver (lots of tutorials out there), personally I use the Clipboard history at least 100 times a day…http://theappleblog.com/2006/10/24/quicksilver-screencast-the-clipboard/
• Mozy for offsite backup of very important files, I’m still under the 2GB free limit since I don’t backup every file
• I prefer Fusion to Parallels, things just seem snappier
• TextExpander for global snippets, shortcuts
• OnTheJob (time tracker for projects)
• AntiRSI (tells me to take breaks so I don’t get RSI)
• AppFresh (tells me what software needs to be updated)
• Coda (just a cool app for web development)
• TextMate
• Camino (main browsing)
• Growl (system notifications)
• Transmit (FTP)
• iTerm (tabbed terminals)
• Mail.app with Mail Act-On from http://www.indev.ca/
• Color Schemer Studio
• Mailplane to manage my many Gmail accounts
• OmniGraffle to make cool looking charts
• Paparazzi (full screenshots of webpages) http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/
• Pukka (del.icio.us client for bookmarking)
• Skim (notes for PDFs) http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
• SuperDuper (backups)
• AppZapper

Also browse www.iusethis.com to discover new OS X apps.

Like others here….VMWare Fusion rocks. Every time I tried Parallels I was just depressed by the performance.