People talk about there not being enough software for the Mac, but oddly I find the opposite is true — there are a lot of Mac programs that I wish I had on Windows. Here's a list of software for MacOS X that I use and recommend (or not). Obviously these are just my personal preferences; if I don't recommend your favorite programs, you should make your own page.

Text editing and common office tasks

Recommended (free): The Mac comes with several useful text editors, including vi, emacs, TextEdit, and Stickies. TextEdit's a fine analogue to Notepad, but I find Text Wrangler 2 is a superior basic text editor. One cool thing to note is that you can print to PDF from most (all?) applications, and you can read PDF and postscript files in Preview -- so there's no need for Adobe Acrobat or Ghostview.

Recommended (cost): For editing structured document types such as XML and HTML, I recommend BBEdit 8. For diagrams, I highly recommend OmniGraffle 3 — it's a fantastic tool on par with (or better than) the Windows-only Visio 2004. For WYSIWYG editing, it depends on what you want to do: If you've used Office before, then Microsoft Office 2004 will seem familiar, although I find some components (notably Excel) to be missing a few features compared to the Windows version and there's no One Note for the Mac. For a more Mac-style experience, Apple iWork 2005 can make some beautiful documents and presentations, although power-users of Word and PowerPoint may find it lacking in some areas. Of course, both Word and Pages can be used to edit HTML documents.

Not recommended: I've used Dreamweaver MX 2004 to create a lot of this site, but I'm just not impressed with it. Its FTP upload feature has issues, templates are cool but buggy, and the text editor's just missing "oomph" given the price of the software. I find Dreamweaver to be better than Front Page, but not as good as BBEdit.

Communications

Recommended (free): MacOS X comes with many essential command-line communications programs like ssh, telnet, ftp, etc. Personally, my web browser of choice is Apple's Safari (included with MacOS X), but you may also want to try Internet Explorer or Firefox. Safari's adding RSS/Atom support in the next version, or you can grab a standalone RSS reader like NetNewsWire. For instant messenging, I love Fire because it talks to all the different IM networks. I'm still looking for a great email client; for now I'm using Microsoft's Entourage

Recommended (cost): Apple's iSight video cam (with iChat) is kinda cool. (It would be a lot cooler if it weren't tied to AOL.) You can use the camera with other programs, including the nifty Delicious Library.

Not recommended: Apple's built in Mail program was functional but failed to impress.

Multimedia

Recommended (free): Most of the software included with the MacOS is truly excellent. iTunes is awesome, and iPhoto's most glaring defect — creating HTML albums — is completed compensated by the excellent utility Galerie. Apple's iLife comes with some other nifty programs, notably Garage Band. There's also a useful utility called Art Director's Toolkit 3 that may be pre-installed with the MacOS or else can be manually installed later (I can't remember which). I also use Graphic Converter.

Recommended (cost): Adobe's Photoshop is clearly the most powerful photo-editing software you can buy (although I've heard GIMP might be an acceptable free alternative).

Software development

Recommended (free): Eclipse is probably the best development environment you can get for the Mac. It's got many of the best features of Visual Studio and Source Insight, but better. You'll also want to download the Apple developer toolkit (free registration required) to get performance tools and other Mac development utilities like Shark and CHUD.

Recommended (cost): Back in the day, I used Metrowerks' CodeWarrior. I haven't used it recently, but at the time it was pretty good. However, I think Eclipse and some plugins are really all you need.

Not recommended: Apple's developer toolkit includes XCode and the older Project Builder. I used both for a few months, before finally deciding they just really aren't that great for developers used to full-featured IDEs like Visual Studio.

Windows interop

Recommended (free): Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client is excellent.

Recommended (cost): Microsoft's Virtual PC for Macintosh is slow (about 1/6 to 1/4 the speed of your Mac) but otherwise works very well.

Command line

Add the Terminal app to the dock, and adjust its preferences to match your style. Transparent command-line windows are kinda cool. Use fink to install and update a large number of free, UNIX-based software pages. Don't forget there are many available shells to choose from (csh, tcsh, bash, ksh, etc.). Knock yourself out.

Other sources

Some places to go to find Mac software:

Disclaimer and copyright information