Firery little Mac apps

I use a Windows PC most days at work and use a Mac at home and I have really come to appreciate some of the Mac software that I use day in and day out. So here's a list of some of my favourite downloadable apps (in no particular order):

Fire

A multi-protocol chat client. I have Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ accounts and people that I work with use all three. It's nice to have just one chat application running at once. I like Apple's iChat (even though I haven't even tried its video features) but it only talks to other iChat clients and AOL clients, neither of which I use.

NewsFire

A kick ass RSS reader. It's real pretty and cool to use. Way better than any Windows client I've come across.

VLC

A great open source media player. I haven't tried it on any other platform, but for my purposes it's pretty damn good. MPlayerOSXis good too and supports some audio codecs that VLC doesn't, but doesn't quite have the fit and finish of VLC.

Firefox

Unless you've been under a rock, I'm sure you've heard of this snappy little cross platform browser. My default browser is still Apple's Safari because it's faster and a better Mac application, but Firefox is a solid contender and is nice for validating my HTML work. Internet Explorer on Mac was pretty abysmal before Safari rained on Microsoft's parade so let's just bury it and forget it was even inflicted on the Mac community.

Fink

A fantastic way of getting thousands of ported open source software on your Mac. Think Subversion, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ruby, KDE etc. If you want a graphical front end use Fink Commander.

Eclipse

If you do any Java development at all, definitely go download Eclipse. It rocks! Refactoring support is fantastic and its CVS integration is second to none. Also don't be afraid to pick up some plugins along the way.

And don't forget those sweet little bundled Mac OS X apps and features like Mail, Exposé, X11, and the iLife suite which containes apps like iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD.