Yes, I am lazy. More often than not I have one hand already on the keyboard. SO instead of moving the mouse to the buttons in dialogs. I have “Full Keyboard Access” turned on.
As more and more of my friends switch to the Mac and – of course – ask for software recommendations, instead of just resending an email, here is my list. It’s the software I use daily, for which I purchased licenses and without which my Mac wouldn’t help me half as much to get the job done. If you don’t find something for your specific need here, I suggest taking a look at versiontracker.com and doing a search there. In some cases there are cheaper or free alternatives to what I use, but this list is not about what is available, but what I recommend.
The first thing people seem to worry about: playing movies.
The combination of Perian (for playing almost everything in QuickTime-Player), Flip4Mac (for Playing WMV files) and VLC (for everything else and if Perian and Flip4Mac fail) should take care of all your needs. To get DVDs into my Mac I use Handbreak.
To stay in contact with people on MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, etc I almost exclusively use Adium (probably because most are on ICQ) and of course there is also Skype.
For small image-editing needs there is Pixelmator, though I actually spent most of my time work-related in Adobe products. (Which I do not recommend if you value your sanity.)
Every now and then I encounter a file that is not compressed as a ZIP and then I fall back to TheUnarchiver.
Because Flash is the most annoying thing on the Internet and responsible for most program crashes I use Click2Flash to get rid of most annoying stuff on the web ;-)
Instead of carrying around an USB-stick I mostly put files simply into my Dropbox to have them available and sync them to multiple computers. It’s also great for collaboration with different people as a central repository and you get 2GB for free.
The there is the esoteric Quicksilver. A good description here and a beautiful HUD-like-skin for it is here. What is it? I mainly use it as a launcher (just type the first letters of an applications to launch it). Yes I am to lazy to move the cursor to my dock or open the application folder. Along these lines DefaultFolder greatly enhances the open- and save-dialogs if you work with lots of files everyday.
To keep my data save and have a boot-able backup I have been using SuperDuper for a couple of years now. It just work’s! The best backup strategy is worthless if you never tested your backups, but with SuperDuper I often migrated my data to newer and bigger hard-disks and it never let me down.
Though I am not big into customization (I’ve been using the same desktop picture for years!) and have set the colored bubbles in the top-left of each window to “grey”, but I do change my icons with Candybar.
While not completely adhering to GTD (Getting Things Done), I use Things to keep my ideas and ToDos in check.
For webdev you’ll find my 99% of the time in Coda for coding and managing and CSS-Edit for visual css-editing (as the name implies). If for whatever reason I just need an FTP client it’s Transmit. For getting screenshots of websites I mostly use LittleSnapper (because it keeps the picture linked to an URL and takes screenshot of the whole page, not matter how long).
To keep track of time spent on different projects I rely on TimeLog as it not only records the time, but also ads it to iCal so I can see when I did what and not just have a sum at the end of a month.
To get my Mac to open different applications when I connect different cameras, I use Cameras. Makes life way easier if you have more than one digital camera (like an iPhone or iPod).
DeliciousLibrary, while initially started as a book cataloging app, now catalogs almost everything. With the terrific interface and the ability to scan barcodes it’s almost fun to input all your books. The really nifty thing is also cataloging your gizmos together with serial number, should you ever need it. (For example in Case of an insurance claim!)
If you really need this new ‘nix distro and want to get it via bittorent, at least do it in style with a native client: Transmission
The last app for this list is Tweetie, a beautiful Twitter client.
So, this list should get all recent converts a good starting point for getting productive with your Macs. Feedback is appreciated via phil@off-and-on.com Have fun!
Multitouch really made it into the mainstream. The question is: does the audience really recognize what this is about, or is that just something that works for us and the Apple nerds at the ad agency?