3. Caffeine is small program which puts an icon on menu bar on which you can click to prevent your Mac from going to sleep,dimming the screen etc. Very useful when watching long flash movies. http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
4. MPlayer This is a video player which plays almost anything you can offer. Also comes with excellent keyboard shortcuts support making it the best video player on any platform. Most people prefer VLC though http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
8. Virtualbox This virtualization product from Sun Microsystems totally eliminates the need for parallels or Vmware if you plan to use the VM sparingly. http://www.virtualbox.org/
Why does anyone recommend Quickisilver? It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness compared to Spotlight and LaunchBar?
I really wish it wasn't the case, but Quicksilver seems to have had its run and no one is stepping up to the plate to preserve it.
Most everything else you list is awesome though (although I think Evernote is far from essential and I'm not sure "free" is the right word for it ;)
QuickSilver is quicker than Spotlight. I don't want to have to wait a few seconds for Spotlight to find stuff... QuickSilver is usually instantaneous or very near it. Also, it doesn't depend on the spotlight indexing, so this means I can disable the spotlight indexing jobs which have a nasty habit of using up 100% of my CPU at random times while I'm doing something.
Also, I haven't had any problems with crashes or anything like that... works great here.
I've found that it is consistently a few seconds slower. It's not slow as such, just slower than QuickSilver. And when it come to app launching, these few seconds kill, imho.
Quicksilver crashes on me a couple of times a week. But when it's working, it's glorious and wonderful. I think people stick with QS due to momentum and familiarity (muscle memory). I tried LaunchBar 5 for a few days and it's pretty good, very close to QS in terms of functionality, but there are slight differences in usage and plugins (social bookmarking plugin - access delicious links and tags) which keep me sticking with QS.
I don't know about LaunchBar, but Spotlight doesn't offer the same things that Quicksilver does. Sure it does application launching, but Quicksilver does more, not to mention Quicksilver's recommendation algorithm is, in my opinion, better.
I'm surprised people can speak ill of Quicksilver, it is one of the things I just can't be without, I'm running an out of the box QS with just a couple plugins installed and have no complaints at all.
I only use it because it lets me define app-starting hot keys Command-F1, F2, etc. Mac OS X doesn't, as far as I can tell. Is there any other freeware app that will let me do that?
Why, Dave Fayram (http://www.google.com/profiles/dfayram), does anyone use Windows anymore? "It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness."
Hmm. Sounds familiar. Or it would if I were still eating your company's dog food.
This list is great. Here's some more "FREE" software (some would appreciate a donation/purchase but are not crippled):
1. This may be obvious but as of the latest version, you don't gain much from a corporate email program like Entourage. I use Apple Mail, with IMAP and Google Apps for Your Domain. One account has 3.8GB of email and another has 4.1GB, according to Google. It scales fine and stays in sync across devices. Plus Address Book links to Google Contacts, and iCal links to Google Calendar.
2. I prefer MagiCal (http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/magical) rather than Eigenclock as it includes options to put "yyyy-mm-dd [day] hh:mm:ss" by the Spotlight icon, with [day] clickable for the calendar.
3. I like SpeakTime (http://www.mecanisme.net/software/speaktime/) for putting a row of glance-able analog clocks at the lower left of my screen (semi-transparent so they look like part of the background) to be aware of alternate time zones.
4. I use Skitch (http://www.skitch.com) for screengrabs with annotations to share with colleagues/clients.
6. I use Foxmarks (http://www.foxmarks.com/) to keep bookmarks in sync across all browsers and computers.
I don't use QuickSilver, Spotlight gets the job done.
I'd also recommend the following paid apps depending on your needs:
1. iWork '09 (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) for all office apps needs with MS Office 03-07 compatibility. It's worth the $79 for the polish and usability. The "free" alternative will cost more in the long run.
2. OmniGraffle Pro for diagramming with Visio (even Visio binary file) compatibility.
3. OmniPlan for MS Project compatibility.
4. Coda for text based web development. (Yes, TextMate is in my dock. But so is Coda.)
5. 1Password for credentials management across browsers and computers
6. Things for "GTD" methodology (or OmniFocus for more features)
I find GrabUp (http://grabup.com/) better than Skitch, mainly because I never use the extra features that Skitch gives on top of just taking a screenshot and uploading it.
Skitch adds annotations and sharing with almost the same simplicity as the built-in keystrokes. I typically use "⌘-Shift-4, Space" as well, when using the screens in my own work, but not when annotating or sharing.
For quick annotations, pointing things out, highlighting things, and instantly pasting someone a viewable image URL (with one click to capture, and one click to share), Skitch is tough to beat.
I find a combination of the native key shortcuts with Dropbox works for me (you can also get a viewable image URL if you drop it in your Public folder.)
I would use uTorrent for a bitorrent client now. I find it's just more effective as a BT client. NetNewsWire is a good RSS client. And I would use VMWare Fusion as a virutalization software vs. Parallels.
There's a new effort to make a native OSX interface for mplayer incidentally; seems fairly active so far, and includes apple remote integration, etc:
http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/
We're forced to regularly ban Mibbit users on Freenode technical channels due to abuse masked by Mibbit's proxying, and for that reason I must say I'm not a fan.
That's the double edge that comes from any ease of access. Mibbit makes IRC very simple and very easy, and so more people use it, and with people come trolls.
That said, if you're looking to access IRC easily, that's the way to go.
It would be quite easy for axod to pass along user's IP to the server instead of masking it through Mibbit. Having the user's IP as their realname isn't a real fix..
Give me a fucking break. It's a method of connecting to IRC. To the best of my knowledge, the various programs don't bestow special powers on people. They let you type lines of text and post them to a live room. Occasionally they let you format messages.
How is Mibbit for idiots? It lets me give URLs to people who want to join chat rooms, so if I want to invite somebody to a channel I don't have to say "Download this, then fill out this and this and this in the boxes," I can just link them and they click it and they're in. I can style it to my heart's desire. It's customizable as anything. It supports tabs for multiple rooms at once.
I use mibbit all the time when I'm behind a firewall that blocks IRC traffic. I don't consider myself an idiot. It's probably also a great option for thin clients.
1. Adium for chat. It is just awesome.http://www.adiumx.com/
2. Quicksilver. if you just want an app launcher spotlight is already good at that. http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list [edit: updated link to point to the recent versions]
3. Caffeine is small program which puts an icon on menu bar on which you can click to prevent your Mac from going to sleep,dimming the screen etc. Very useful when watching long flash movies. http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
4. MPlayer This is a video player which plays almost anything you can offer. Also comes with excellent keyboard shortcuts support making it the best video player on any platform. Most people prefer VLC though http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
5. Flip4Mac For those videos that MPlayer plays poorly, typically WMVs Flip4Mac provides a fee codec which integrates with your quicktime player. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcompo...
6. HandBrake For ripping your DVDs to MPEG4, there is no better tool. http://handbrake.fr/
7. Tweetie. if you use twitter, tweetie is the best mac twitter client by far. http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/
8. Virtualbox This virtualization product from Sun Microsystems totally eliminates the need for parallels or Vmware if you plan to use the VM sparingly. http://www.virtualbox.org/
9. Evernote http://evernote.com/
10. Eigenclock. I find the OS X, menu calendar extremely limted. Eigenclock is a good replacement http://www.twistedtheorysoftware.com/eigenclock/
11. Onyx for system tweaking http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html
12. Transmission - bittorrent client http://www.transmissionbt.com/