Some of you may remember my "Pigs can fly!" posting here where I explained why I've finally gone and gotten myself a Macintosh (Macbook Pro 15"). Well, it's been well over a year now of Mac bliss. I remain absolutely convinced that Macs are the right choice for me, and in fact are right for a whole heck of a lot of people. I'm certain that Apple's growth is representative of a renaissance in computing -- a new age of enlightenment. Strong words, but they're not without meaning.

In my 1.25 years of Mac-dom, I've found several pieces of software that I consider to be essential to me. Things that I really wouldn't want to be without. I thought I'd share those here, for what they're worth. Mind you, I've installed quite a bit of software on my Mac, but the list below will focus on the things that I use daily and that (by and large) are in my system dock.

My list of essential Mac software (other than the basics that come with the system), in no particular order:

• Firefox with no-script. Let me first say that I really like Apple's Safari browser. I'd be using it now except for one little thing -- control over JavaScript. In my opinion, JavaScript, is responsible for the vast majority of web-related security bad things. I need to have control over what sites I want running JavaScript on my computer. Mozilla's Firefox, combined with the No-Script plug-in give me exactly that. No-Script starts off disallowing all JavaScript, but you can add sites one at a time into a "whitelist" of sorts. That way, you can turn on JS for the sites that you want running it, and all the rest can't run scripting at all. Not perfect, but it's a LOT more control than I had under Safari.
• Newsfire. I read a lot of news sites on a daily basis, from tech news to Mac stuff, wireless stuff, and even world events. Oh, and news from the wine/culinary world as well. My only hope of keeping up with all this information is RSS. I was introduced a while back to Newsfire, which is an absolutely splendid RSS reader. Now, I should note that I'm currently experimenting with Apple's own Mail program's RSS reading capabilities -- which is a new feature of Leopard. But I still have my Newsfire and may well go back to it if/when Mail fails me. It's commercial, but not particularly expensive.
• Parallels. I was a VMWare user way back in the day, and I loved it. When I moved to the Mac, I needed a way to occasionally run another OS. So, a few months ago, I added Parallels to my list of apps. I now run a Windows XP box in a virtual machine. It's great for the training I do. I can load up XP, install stuff on it, hurt it, make it beg for mercy, cry like a baby, or whatever -- and then go back to the pristine XP configuration at the click of a mouse. And it's quite fast, too. Absolutely fantastic for my needs. It's commercial, but isn't very expensive -- look for it on Amazon for a discount.
• Callwave SMS widget. I do a lot of text messaging. Although my phone plan includes a huge bucket of messages for U.S. numbers, international SMSs are still quite expensive (in the quantities I send). This little SMS widget provides me with free messages. There's a daily limit, but I rarely hit it. Great stuff, and it's really easy to use. Oh, and it's free.
• Rapid Weaver. This one is my newest addition to my must-have list. But I've come to really like Rapid Weaver. What a great tool for building and maintaining web sites like this one! It is commercial, but not very expensive, and there are some coupon codes floating around the net that can get you a few dollars off the retail price.
• MacGourmet. Another inexpensive and highly worthwhile commercial tool, I've come to really like MacGourmet for organizing my favorite recipes. (I'll be putting at least several of my recipes on this site in MacGourmet format shortly, by the way.)
• Missing Sync for Blackberry. I used a Blackberry years ago, and now I'm back. I love the email comms, and my provider (T-Mobile USA) has a great all-you-can-eat data plan and an all-you-can-eat international roaming data plan that are fabulous. This essential (and commercial, but cheap) app enables me to sync my Blackberry data over to my Mac. For various reasons, the iPhone isn't yet ready for me, but the Blackberry serves my needs very well. Without Missing Sync, I'd be sunk.
• Spanning Sync. As a small business owner, I don't have a calendaring/groupware server for my company. I have an email and file server hosted externally, but not a calendar server (yet). Google Calendar came along and helped me with that enormously. Spanning Sync takes Google Calendar to the next level -- it syncs bi-directionally with my Apple Calendar data. Awesome add-on! It's sold on an annual service subscription basis, but is way cheaper than a calendar server. Finally, Caren and I can share a calendar.
• Chicken of the VNC. I use Virtual Network Computer a lot for administering the computers on my internal net. Chicken of the VNC is a great and free VNC client for the Mac.
• Macports. One of the things I like so much about Apple's OS X operating system is its UNIX underbelly. I've been a UNIX guy for over 2 decades, and I'm just more comfortable there than I ever was on MS-DOS (or its derivatives). Macports is a collection of (mostly) BSD-UNIX derived applications that have been ported to the Mac. All open source, free, and excellent!
• TiVo Desktop. I love my TiVo. I love my Mac. A few months back, we upgraded our old Series-1 TiVo to a Series-2, thanks to TiVo's offer of transferring our lifetime service subscription over. Now, my TiVo is finally on my data network, and I can move things back and forth between the computers and the TiVo. TiVo Desktop is the piece that enables me to share movies, shows, etc., from my Mac over and play them on the TiVo. Absolutely essential, and it's free from the wonderful folks at TiVo.
• TiVo Download Manager. I still love my TiVo. This enormously useful piece of free software allows me to download files from my TiVo onto my Mac -- and convert them into MPEG-2 format at the same time. It's actually a front-end to curl and TiVo Decoder, but it puts everything in one easy-to-use bundle. I can now grab anything from my TiVo and put it on a big honkin hard drive on my Mac, and then watch it whenever I choose to, without taking up valuable space on the TiVo itself. Great stuff.
• iWork '08. As you might expect, I require the ability to read/write MS-Word, Powerpoint, and Excel formatted files quite frequently in my work. I've been a fan of Apple's iWork for some time now. When '08 came out a few months ago, I grabbed a "family pack" (with 5 legal installations available) for about $100 on Amazon. That's $20 per seat, and it's some of the best money I've spent. I still keep MS-Office around, but I find myself using iWork more and more instead of Office. Keynote (the Powerpoint equivalent) alone is worth the price of admission. I build presentations with it that look worlds better than any I've ever seen in Powerpoint.

There they are. Great stuff, each and every one. I run all of these (as noted) on Leopard, which I'm absolutely thrilled with. Nothing I ever experienced in PC- or Linux-land ever came close for me. I'm a believer.

It is the age of enlightenment.

Cheers,

Ken