I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm – Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox – Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird – Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia – I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium – Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna – Great RSS reader
• Things – Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend – MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity – This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper – Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice – This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection – Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS – Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus – One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC – Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC