Got a Mac? Here’s Walt’s list of software you just gotta have. Some is free, some costs a small fortune, but all of it is worth it.
If you know of any others that you use often, are of high quality, and simply represent the best of the best of your favorites, please drop me a line at wls@wwco.com.
| PRODUCTIVITY | |
 | Quicksilver Hot keys and events trigger different actions on your computer. Never require the use of the dock to open an application again. |
 | Speed Download Download software super fast, resume if dropped, and peer share once you have it. |
 | Carbon Copy Cloner Duplicate your drive, making a bootable, live backup. |
 | Parallels Windows, DOS, Linux and other operating systems on your Macintosh under OS X. |
 | Toast Burn CDs and DVD and make disc images for data, music, images, and videos. |
 | Virtue Wonderful virtual desktop software with many effects and customizable hot keys. |
 | iClip Multiple clipboard and scrapbooks. |
 | Disk Inventory Scans your hard disk looking for large files. |
| SECURITY | |
 | Peer Guardian Outbound firewall that prevents applications from accessing the internet, whether to control worms or to stop them from phoning home. |
 | Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia Anonymous networking and browsing. |
 | iStumbler See what wireless networks are available and use the information to prevent drops by choosing unused channels. |
| PHOTOGRAPHY, DIGITAL EDITING, AND WEB ALBUMS | |
 | Aperture Manage tens of thousands of digital pictures instantly: download from your camera, organize them, perform non-destructive editing on them, extensive color correction, make many versions, export to different formats while resizing, build web pages, give slide shows, make books, and so much more… Raw formats supported. |
 | Photoshop The defacto-standard for 2D pixel editing of just about every image format there is. Handles layers, color corrections, and automated workflows. |
 | Picasa Upload web photos right from disk or from iPhoto, making web albums instantly. |
 | JAlbum Totally customizable web album generator. |
| MULTIMEDIA: Players and Converters | |
 | Quicktime Pro Play, record, edit, and convert video and audio. |
 | VLC Media Player Play and stream video in quite a number of formats. |
 | MPlayer Play many different video formats. |
 | Popcorn Convert and upload videos from disk and DVDs into the iPod, PlayStation Portable (PSP), and 3GP phone. |
 | VisualHub Universal video converter for iPod, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG, Flash, and TiVo. |
 | iSquint Convert video to play on the iPod. |
 | HandBrake Backup commercial DVDs that you’ve purchased, or portions of them, to hard disk where you can use the above applications. |
 | Mac The Ripper Backup commercial DVDs that you’ve purchased, or portions of them, to hard disk where you can use the above applications. |
 | Senuti Beam content on your iPod back to your computer. |
| OFFICE APPLICATIONS | |
 | Open Office Word Processor (Writer), Presentation Tool (Impress), Equation Editor (Math), Drawing Tool (Draw), Spreadsheet (Calc), Database (Base) — all Microsoft compatible and all beautifully integrated. |
 | OmniGraffle Pro An amazing full featured drawing tool that blows the socks off Visio. |
 | OmniOutliner Pro Fantasic graphical outliner and list manager. |
 | OmniPlan Project management software. Manage tasks, resources, and schedules using Gantt charts, calendars, and other tools, producing reports and data that can be exchanged with Microsoft Project. |
| PROGRAMMING TOOLS AND LANGUAGES | |
 | TextMate Simply the best programmer’s editor there is. Works with multiple files, works with huge files, has astounding regular expression and macro capabilities. Totally extensible and programmable. Handles just about every programming language you can think of for formatting and syntax shortcuts, including web design. |
 | SubEthaEdit Real-time multi-user collaborative editor. Have multiple people edit the same file, each gets their own cursor and color. |
 | Eclipse Extremely flexible, customizable, and automatable development platform for numerous languages. |
 | Locomotive Instantly set up and configure the latest Ruby on Rails development environment on your Mac without disrupting anything about the operating system configuration or default installs. |
 | MAMP Instantly set up and configure the latest Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Macintosh without altering your standard OS X’s configuration. |
 | Fink Install all kinds of Unix free and open source software to your Macintosh. Includes many development tools. |
 | Aqua Data Studio Database administration and query tool that supports numerous database servers graphically. |
 | Cocoa MySQL Manage local and remote MySQL databases in the native OS X GUI. |
| COMMUNICATION | |
 | Skype Free internet calls and video conferencing. Has voice mail and even call forwarding to non-internet phones. |
 | Adium Instant messaging for ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Bonjour (iChat), Google Chat. |
| DRAWING, SKETCHING, AND CARTOONING | |
 | SketchBook Pro Simple tablet drawing software that produces great looking art via the simulation of brushes, pens, and pencils using very nice stroke capturing technology. |
 | Manga Studio EX Fantastic tool for creating black and white line art, ready for export into Photoshop or the coloring tool of your choice. Customizable brush styles and behaviors, comic layouts, halftone patterns, perspective rulers, and tools that just do not exist in Photoshop or The Gimp. |
 | Comic Life Deluxe Edition Quickly build comic strips from your own photo collection. |
| OS X AND DESKTOP CUSTOMIZATION | |
 | Pixadex Import, organize, and assign icons. |
 | CandyBar Change the icons in OS X that you’re normally not able to. |
| FILE TRANSFER AND SHARING | |
 | Fugu Full featured BitTorrent client. |
 | Azureus Full featured BitTorrent client. |
 | Tomato Torrent Download, generate, or server torrent files. |
| ATOM, RSS, AND NEWS GROUP READERS | |
 | NetNewsWire Atom/RSS reader sporting many features, including sorting by the attention you give a feed. |
 | Vienna Atom/RSS reader with tabbed browsing and apple script support. |
 | Unison News group reader: join discussions, find and download music, photos, and programs. |
| THE EARTH, SKY, AND BEYOND | |
 | Google Earth View imagery of any point on the Earth, find your house, and get directions between points. |
 | Stellarium Planetarium software to see the night sky from any point on Earth at any time. |
 | Celestia View over 100 thousand stars from any vantage point in the universe. |
| Web Cams, iSight | |
 | iGlasses Adjust the focus, sensitivity, rotation of your iSight camera, as well as apply special effects. |
 | EvoCam Publish a streaming webcame, record video, make stop motion movies, detect motion and trigger actions. |
 | EvoBarcode Hold a bar code up to your camera and have the computer type it in. |
| ALTERNATE BROWSERS | |
 | Firefox Minimalist browser with lots of features, security, and the ability to add extensions to alter or enhance the browser’s capabilities, deal with kinds of file types, or to change the look’n’feel theme. |
 | Opera Perhaps the fastest, W3C compliant, and cutting edge featured browser that exists that boasts a very small footprint. |
| CATALOGING: Music, Videos, and Books | |
 | Readerware Maintain a shareable, networkable database of your CDs, DVDs, and Books that can be exported to a number of formats, including for use on your handheld organizer. Also acts as a checkout library system. |
| Movie, Soundtrack, Tutorial, and Podcast Creation | |
 | Final Cut Studio Linear video editor, multi track sound studio, motion graphics, author DVDs with menus and special features, video and audio conversion and encoding. |
 | Snapz Pro X Capture screen, windows, regions, and movies of your desktop. |
 | WireTap Pro Capture audio from different devices, including your computer. |
| Games | |
 | X-Plane A realistic flight simulator that actually performs the physics of the airplane. Earth model is to 1-meter. FAA allows simulator time to be logged as flight training time. Everything is instrumented and automatable via programming. |