Late 2009 Software List (Mac)

Following right behind my list of standard Windows applications I have installed, here is my list of developer tools, utilities, and general purpose software I have installed for Mac OS X.

Development

• SubEthaEdit: Great text editor that includes revolutionary collaboration support through Bonjour
• TextWrangler: Free text editor for Bare Bones Software; subset of their BBEdit product
• TextMate: Powerful text editor used by the Ruby on Rails team
• Xcode: Apple's IDE; bundled with Mac OS X, but not installed by default

Browsers

• Safari: Apple's built-in browser, and my personal favorite
• FireFox: Fully featured and extensible browser; very popular for its features and standards support; you'll probably want to install FireBug, a web development plugin for FireFox

Web

• Tweetie: Fantastic Twitter client for the Mac
• Transmission: Free Mac-native bittorrent client

Media

• VLC media player: Plays every file I've ever thrown at it, with a minialistic and Mac-native interface

Communications

• iChat: Apple's instant-messaging client; works with Jabber and AIM
• Windows Live Messenger: Connectivity with my Windows friends and coworkers; bundled with Office 2008 for Mac

Office Suites

• Office 2008 for Mac: I got a great deal on Black Friday 2007, otherwise, I wouldn't have a copy; it is nice for working with the latest native Microsoft formatted documents
• iWork: Consists of Apple's word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers), and presentation software (Keynote); great for the price, and does everything I need it to

I didn't include a utilities section this time, because OS X comes with a plethora of small application. Here's the list of bundled applications I have in my Dock:

• Dictionary
• Calculator
• TextEdit (defaulted plain text mode)
• The whole iLife suite (iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, and iWeb)
• DVD Player
• Time Machine
• iSync
• Software Update
• Activity Monitor
• Console
• Network Utility
• Terminal

I've also trimmed my Dashboard widgets down to Weather only.

The only other observation I'd like to make is that besides having the OS come with more applications, the applications I do pay for are a lot cheaper altogether than the applications I pay for on Windows.

Late 2009 Software List (Windows)

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developers and Power Users Tool List for Windows (the latest version I could find was 2007), I'ved decided to create my own. FYI, I'm running Windows 7 (64-bit) on a Mac Pro.

Update: You can find my Mac list here

Development and Design

• Visual Studio 2008: The standard IDE for .NET development; free Express editions are available; if you have it, don't forget to install Team Foundation Client (in the TFC folder) before SP1. If you don't care for Visual Studio, there's always MonoDevelop.
• SQL Server 2008: Microsoft's database offering, including tools. Yup, there's an Express version of that available, too. There's an SP1 for SQL Server 2008, too.
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0: Microsoft's own Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework built on top of ASP.NET
• Reflector: Decompiler for .NET assemblies
• Silverlight 3 Tools: Includes Silverlight and add-ins for Visual Studio
• Silverlight Toolkit: Contains many custom controls and the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework if you poke around in the source
• Expression Studio 3: Has a web editor, XAML editor, graphics editor, new prototyping tool (SketchFlow), and video encoding tools

Browsers

• Internet Explorer 8: Built into Windows or available as an upgrade; be sure to upgrade to version 8 if you haven't already!
• Google Chrome: Google's browser; fast and small, but lacking in extensibility; I'm also subscribed to the Dev Channel, giving me frequent auto-updates
• Mozilla FireFox: Fully featured and extensible browser; very popular for its features and standards support; you'll probably want to install FireBug, a web development plugin for FireFox
• Safari: Apple's browser; allows for Mac and iPhone compatility testing, since all of Apple's version are based on WebKit; version 4 plays much nicer with Windows

Web

• uTorrent: The best and fastest torrent client out there
• 7-zip: Open source zip file utility; integrates nicely into the shell
• Adobe Flash Player: Only on the list for youtube and the occasional game trailer
• Foxit Reader: The free and best PDF viewer out there; dump your Adobe Acrobat garbage immediately if you haven't already

Media

• QuickTime: Yes it's slow and doesn't play nice on Windows, but the video quality is good, and there are a lot of movie trailers on Apple's website
• iTunes: Only installed to get MP3s on my iPod
• PowerISO: Great utility for creating and extracting .iso files; supports CD/DVD burning too
• VLC media player: Plays every file I've ever thrown at it, with a minialistic interface

Communications

• Windows Live Messenger: While others are available, supports what I need without much fuss after some tweaking
• Skype: Free voice-over-IP (VOIP) client; you can upgrade your account to make phone calls too
• SharedView: Screen sharing application from Microsoft; very handy for remote folks

Utilities

• WinSplit Revolution: Great utility for moving/resizing windows; includes quite a few defaults and can be customized

Office Suite

• Office 2007: Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others, depending on the version; if you can't afford Office, don't want to pay for Office, or don't care for the ribbon interface, give OpenOffice a try