What's on the Wheaten's Mac?

In returning to the Mac last year, after a fourteen year absence from the platform the Wheaten found lots of familiar elements that drove the switch away from Windows. As well as a significantly enhanced operating system in OSX that makes the experience much more stable and less frustrating than living in the Windows world. This post will provide a list of some of the better applications that the Wheaten has on his Macbook with the best part being that a large number of these apps are open source!

Text Editing
Skim - every wanted a more advanced version of the native Preview.app included with your Mac? Well Skim is the app for you with the ability to highlight, outline and better annotate PDFs Skim is a must have for students, researchers or anyone that needs to read and manage PDFs.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/skim-app

Utilities
Firefox = an alternate browser for your Mac and open source. A must have for any Mac user since you still need two browsers given that Safari still doesn't always work well with others.
http://en.www.mozilla.com/en/firefox/

iStumbler = the easiest way to check-out the available Wifi networks in range and get all the relevant details about the network. iStumbler is much stronger than the the native Airport Manager that is built into OSX making life on the go much easier. Two Paws Up!
http://www.istumbler.net/

TextWrangler = need to edit and manipulate text files on your Mac or quickly manage .txt or other text based files then look no further. TextWrangler allows the Wheaten to make short work of manipulating text files. Another free tool that should be on your Mac.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

Seashore = a free image editor that allows you to handle many of the basics that go beyond the simple tools in iPhoto but is short of the overkill that Photoshop represents for many users. Seashore is a GIMP based open source editor that has been modified to run on the Mac and may prove handy in those situations when a photo needs a bit more extensive touching up.
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/


Chicken of the VNC = allows Mac users to setup remote access to between their Mac and other computers. Very handy for helping a friend out with fixing their computer.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/


SuperDuper! = remember to backup your Mac or any computer for that matter. Until Leopard arrives SuperDuper is a must - there is a free version and a more feature rich product for a modest upgrade fee.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/


MenuMeters = a handy tool that installs in system preferences and displays on the upper menu of your Mac showing a variety of system data (e.g., hard drive space, CPU utilization, memory management and much more). Definitely worth a download.
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/#intro


In all fairness to Apple a number of small lesser known apps that come bundled with OSX definitely deserve mention and use given the ease of use and their ability to boost your productivity.

Image Capture = useful for quickly importing pictures to your Mac. Also the Wheaten uses Image Capture to download his pictures and rename the files before importing into iPhoto.

Automator = a great addition that allows the novice Mac user to record a macro and have your system manage routine or repetitive tasks. This was one of the biggest positive surprises for the Wheaten upon his return to the Mac.

TextEdit = A built-in basic word processor included with your Mac well worth putting on your dock. The Wheaten has taken to writing in TextEdit on the Mac and WordPad on Windows as a means of boosting productivity (more on this in a future post).