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I use my mac for something like 3 years now.
There is more and more switchers currently… And people often ask what I’m using.

Keep in mind, this is a work machine, and my work is related to software development.

Here’s a my list, most software are free, unless noted.

General Stuff

• Google Notifier : Pings you when gmail or google calendars events pop up. Works with google for your domain accounts. I just have to think to quit it before sharing your screen during keynotes.
• QuickSilver : a quick launcher or “visual shell”, a quick press on “alt-space” runs applications, call contacts and the like.
• Growl : Display nicely various events sent by other apps.
• iStatMenu : Shows cpu, memory and network usage in the menu bar, useful to launch the activity monitor to kill a task.
• DiskInventoryX : Visually display which files are taking so much space on your pricy disk.
• VMWare Fusion To be able to launch virtual machines of windows and linux. (not free).
• DropBoxA “network drive” useful for sharing files between office/home, between colleagues and between multiple personal machines.

Network apps.

• VPN Tracker: A VPN Client with a nice ui, and works for contacting my office. (not free)
• CyberDuck : Client for FTP, SFTP, S3 protocols and others.
• Transmission: A bitTorrent client, to download your lastest linux distros of course.
• JollyFastVNC : A VNC Client, maybe there is one included with MacOSX, but I keep using this one.
• Skype : Works really well on mac, with the webcam
• Adium : Multi protocol IM client. I’m using iChat for gTalk at home and Adium with a specific configuration at work to be allowed through the firewall.
• EchoFon: Twitter client, with nice mac-style UI, do not eat 95% CPU like others, and have a companion app on the iPhone.

Sounds, Images, Videos…

• iPhoto : I store every photo from my dslr and my iphone inside it. It takes a awful lots of place, but I really enjoy the program.
• Audacity For the rare case where I have to edit sounds, most of the time to send it to the nabaztag @ work.
• Gimp For image editing, not very integrated to the mac platform, need to link to tips and tricks to make it a bit more integrated.
• VLC: Plays every video with no codec to install and mess up your system… like on windows.
• DivX : DivX Codec, only useful to have divx video preview in the finder (and also watch divx in default QuickTime Player)

Browsers

• FireFox My default browser. My current plugins : YSlow, Firebug, EchoFon, CoolIris & JetPack
• Safari Nice and slick, quick, but I’m used to firefox.
• Google Chrome Fast an convenient, for now still in beta on MacOSX, very promising though.
• Opera Used only to make some sort of web tests.

Dev Stuff

• Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ exists on the mac. I use eclipse, too much intoxicated to compile-on-save to switch. You need to change or disable some default system key shortcut to be fluently switch from windows, more on this in another post.
• TextMate Simple text editor (not free)
• Araxis Merge To compare, merge files and directories alike. (not free)
• WireShark Network analyzer, useful to debug web service and network traffic.
• XMind To draw MindMap, not THAT good on printing, but IMHO the best in the free mind map software.
• Subversion Up to date command line subversion client.
• Version Graphical subversion client, not as good as TortoiseSVN. I don’t use it much. (not free)
• Git Up to date command line git client.