I’ve added quite a few applications to my Mac over the last year. Here’s the list:

Adobe Photoshop

And I’ve paid for it.

Aperture

I take thousands of images each year and managing all those photos can be a real problem. Aperture (like Adobe Lightroom) is designed for just that purpose. Previously, I could hesitate taking pictures because I knew I had to sort them out later. I don’t hesitate like that anymore.

AppZapper

It truly is the application that should have been included with my Mac from the start. I fail to see why Apple still has not bought the company and made it part of the OS X.

Disco

Yeah, like you really need a CD burning program. I bought it because my backup disks started spanning multiple DVDs and Disco handles that automatically. And it smokes. Like, really smokes.

Emacs

Emacs. Can’t do without Emacs.

LicenseKeeper

LicenseKeeper keeps all those license keys in order. Sounds a little silly; all you need is a text-file and a mail folder, no? I dunno but LicenseKeeper is one of the neatest little utilities I’ve yet to come across.

Parallels

One of the reasons I bought a Mac was that with Intel Core Duo and Parallels you could run hardware supported virtualization, promising almost native performance for Microsoft Windows. A year later, I can only attest to that promise: it works great.

Picturesque

Neat little thingie to batch process images for a small set of available effects. It doesn’t do a lot but it does it really well.

RapidWeaver

I looked for an alternative to iWeb which is really underwhelming and RapidWeaver seemed an obvious choise. It’s pretty neat when you want to make a site quickly, without any fuss. If you like to fuss, this is not for you.

Scrivener

Don’t use it much anymore but if you are a writer, or needs to write something non-trivial, it makes a lot of sense for the capturing phase. It’s not a word-processor and it’s not a mindmap thing. It’s somehwere in between… a note taking editor organizer, perhaps.

SpamSieve

I use Mail.app and the built in spam filter wasn’t good enough. I was used to the excellent performance of bogofilter on my Debian box and needed something just as good for the Mac. SpamSieve is good. I don’t get as good results as with bogofilter, but close.

SuperDuper!

Stupid name but a nice backup application. In Leopard there is Time Machine, of course, but SuperDuper! is still my choice since the application is so simple to use. But who in their right mind puts an exclamation point in their product name?

Tangerine!

Another application with an exclamation point in the name! What’s wrong with these people? I don’t use it much anymore. It has a lot of promise but fails to deliver. Needs an update!

TextMate

I got it for the buzz and because I heard that die-hard Emacs users where switching. I quickly went back to Emacs again though. I think that you can write plugins to TextMate in several different languages, which seems pretty interesting. Of course, Emacs is not only an editor, it’s a full Lisp interpreter which makes it the undisputed king of all editors.

Transmit

You’ll need a good ftp application and this is the one you are looking for.

VMware Fusion

I’ve always thought less of VMware because of how they case their company name, but they make good hypervisors. I grew tired of Parallels lack of Linux support and got VMware Fusion to replace it.