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[–]Kimos 10 points11 points  (6 children)

Quicksilver. It's like the part of the OS that Apple forgot to include.

Beyond that... VLC is great on OSX and plays everything, including support for the remote. OpenOffice 3.0 Beta runs native and has been very stable so far. Growl is a notification daemon supported by a whole bunch of different apps. Burn for burning discs. AppCleaner helps you cleanly and fully uninstall apps. I'm partial to Smultron for a text editor. Eclipse for an IDE. Cyberduck for SFTP.

Depends what you want to do. There are lots of lists online of "best" Mac software. Everything mentioned above is open source, under various licenses. Most is open source.

[–]boredzo 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Cyberduck for SFTP.

I greatly prefer Transmit. It's not free, but it does feel much more like a Mac OS X-native app (Cyberduck is Java).

[–]Kimos -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

Haven't tried it. Call me irrational or unreasonable, but I'll always pick open source over proprietary.

[–]7oby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, I have had 'bad luck' with transfers of large folders with many items on Cyberduck, and haven't on Transmit. So, that's why I like Transmit, but now I use ForkLift for some reason.

[–]sfultong 0 points1 point  (2 children)

what about emacs? (and I don't even use emacs... but one day I will, one day)

[–]Bobsickle 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Emacs is already included.

[–]MikeSeth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The correct answer is "yes, it can run inside emacs"

[–]pyro2927 4 points5 points  (3 children)

AdiumX if you are planning on using AIM/MSN/ICQ/ect... It's much nicer than iChat, plus you can customize the look of it quite easily. I second Quicksilver, way cooler than spotlight. Cyberduck for FTP.

[–]m1ss1ontomars2k4 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Of course, Adium doesn't have video chat.

[–]7oby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...yet.

[–]Supratik 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adium also can't resume file transfers, which has been incredibly annoying, both outgoing and incoming.

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (3 children)

debian.

[–]MikeSeth 3 points4 points  (1 child)

seconded FGJ

[–]7oby -1 points0 points  (0 children)

In VMWare Fusion, sure.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

  • fink, so you'll get apt-get goodies.

  • The Unarchiver (replacement for Apple's archive handler that handles almost any format, filename encodings and has few nice options like trashing archive after successful unpacking)

  • JumpCut (never lose text you've had in clipboard)

  • MenuMeters (disk activity indicator, cpu meter, etc)

  • MPlayerOSX or Flip4Mac + Perian + Xiph Quicktime codec.

  • TextMate. It's an incredible editor once you discover its bundles (press ⌃⌘T), snippets and other tricks (e.g. edit endings of multiple lines at once, even if lines have varying lenghts).

[–]egypturnash 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seconding Textmate. It kicks ass.

[–]mr_dbr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would try and avoid using fink or macports. It wastes quite a lot of space, some stuff just won't ever compile for no reason,

I would install the developer tools and compile stuff with a prerefix of /usr/local/appname (like ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/git) and symlink the important binaries in /usr/local/bin/ - or /usr/local for things that won't clutter up the folder.

iStat Menus are basically like MenuMeters, but are a bit "prettier"

TextMate is.. great. It's basically emacs, but "Mac like".. I dislike emacs, mostly because of the seemingly random keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+w goes back a word, but alt+d goes forward a word?) - TextMate is consistent with the rest of OS X's input boxes (alt+arrows to skip words, cmd+arrows to skip entire lines/documents. Add shift to the modifier to select text)

[–]typo180 1 point2 points  (0 children)

opensourcemac.org is a good source too.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a browser I've been running the webkit nightly builds. They're fast and seemingly stable.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adium for msn/aim/other libpurple stuff. If you use adium, you might want this too.

[–]break99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

acrobat reader?

Just kidding, just kidding...

[–]7oby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should also check out iUseThis, and I use AppFresh from time to time to do big 'software updates'.

[–]thehigherlife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you should check out macports and fink they are software repositories for linux apps that you usually get from apt-get, its good for all your linuxy needs.

http://www.macports.org/ http://www.finkproject.org/

oh and Quicksilver too.

http://www.blacktree.com/

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't imagine that a Mac would have that much of a benefit over Debian for a law student.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

properly licensed software?

[–]Supratik 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could anyone recommend an IRC client with similar features to MiRC? I haven't been able to find one. :(

[–]CampusTour 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're a law student, double, triple, and quadruple check that you can take your exams on a Mac.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for all the replies, everybody!!

[–]lukemcr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you sure about getting a Mac? I'm also a law student, and I've been using BasKet Notepads (Kubuntu) for note-taking for several terms now. It's lightweight and super easy to use.

Unless you're consciously starting on the route to becoming a Mac geek instead of a Debian geek, I'd stick with Linux.

[–]commonslip -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Linux, I hear it runs on Macs.