It’s been a few months since I bought my Mac now. It’s really become my main operating system at work and I use it fairly frequently at home, so I thought I’d list a few of the applications I’m using frequently:
An enhanced terminal application. I was used to gnome-terminal on Linux and the tabbed window feature was something I missed in the Apple supplied Terminal. One minor gripe was some broken keyboard mappings, but I fixed that.
Basically this is VMware Workstation for Macs. The Unity feature is excellent, allowing me to embed Windows applications on to my OS X desktop without having to have an entire Windows desktop running in a window. My main requirement for this is to run Linux and also for Windows XP (my work use Microsoft Live Communication Server - Windows Messenger is the only client that I can use to talk to it and the Mac version doesn’t seem to work). I’ve always been really impressed with VMware’s products and Fusion also excels.
FUSE for Macintosh. It allows me to mount filesystems on machines just using SSH. Another great piece of software which I was used to from Linux.
A cross-platform Java BitTorrent client. I’m not too keen on what they are doing with v3, but v2.5 is ok. I’ve also been using Transmission - tranmission.m0k.org, although sometimes it doesn’t have some features that I want to use.
Virtual Desktops for OSX. If you used Virtual Desktops before you’ll find this to be a really nice implementation with some clever features that allow you to use the tilt and light sensors to change desktops (although they’re more of a gimmick than anything else). Development of VirtueDesktops has stopped as it is about to be out-moded by the inclusion of a Virtual Desktop feature ( Spaces) in the next release of Mac OSX. Until then, VirtueDesktops is great.
The best web browser out there for my purposes.
Decent synchronisation for my Treo 680 phone.
Synchronises my iCal Calendars with Google Calendar. I’m not usually that keen on “Subscription Software”, but this application seems to work reliably.