What’s on your mac? (Part I)

Since getting my MacBook, I’ve been scouring the web for interesting and useful software to check out. So now, after a month, I’ve come up with a list of some of the software that I’ve become accustomed to using.In no particular order, I give you the list:

• Quicksilver – This is the multi-tool of app launchers. At first glance, I didn’t see how it was very different from Spotlight, aside from its interface. But I learned quickly and now it saves me a few steps when I want to open new emails, recently edited files, or add events to my calendar. It’s far more than just an app launcher, and worth more than the $0 it costs to get it.
• Adium – This is a versatile chat client that aggregates all your IM accounts into one client. It supports AIM, MSN, Jabber, and others. You can also get a bunch of plug-ins that change the look, feel, and function of the app.
• Growl – This little utility comes with bundled with Adium, though you can obtain and install it separately. From the FAQ, Growl is a “notification system for Mac OS X.” It basically will bring unobtrusive pop-ups to your display, letting you know that you got a new email, or so-and-so just IMed you, or your ethernet plug just came loose. If you’ve ever used MS Outlook or Trillian, you’ve seen notification pop-ups perhaps a little similar. Growl is very configurable with different skins and preferences. You can even control what it will notify you about. It’s a neat app.
• Camino – Camino is a web-browser that uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, like Firefox. Unlike Firefox, it has a more native look and feel, like Safari. One might ask, “why aren’t you just using Safari?” Well, I have two reasons at this point. The first is that Camino has ad-blocking built into it. To the best of my understanding, you need to purchase the PithHelmet plug-in to get similar functionality. My second reason, is that Camino seems to load pages faster than Safari. But, I’ve not run any benchmarks to prove that fact. If you can prove me wrong on either count, I’d gladly use Safari.
• AppZapper – Coming from a Windows/Linux background, it makes me a little nervous to just drag-and-drop applications. I have no idea where anything is going. Are there any extraneous files being installed? AppZapper is an app that attempts to track down all the files associated with an application’s install and remove them. So I can feel more comfortable about trying out new software and trust that I’ll be able to remove it cleanly if I need.

Okay, so that’s just a few of the apps that I’ve been using. I’ll follow up with some more of them later on. If you haven’t checked them out, you really should. And let me know, what’s on your mac?