Jonas and Joi blogged their favorite applications. I'm but a meek sheep, I bleat, then follow. So, without further ado, here's my hitlist, sorted alphabetically.

	BBEdit Best text editor, hands down. It does all my editing, apart from my blogging. I code my HTML, my Perl, and my PHP in BBEdit. Text manipulation and the like, all in BBEdit. Version 8.0 also fixes the only gripe I had with it: Proper handling of encoding.
	Carbon Copy Cloner The cheapest option in making backups. I use it frequently to back up my hard disk to an external FireWire drive. CCC not just copies over files, it can synchronize the two disks, and make the external disk bootable.
	ClipboardSharing A really simple and unobtrusive menu bar addition to give you the power to access previous clipboard contents and to transfer the current clipboard to other Macs on the network. Indispensible.
	CocoASpell My replacement of Apple's own internal spellchecker. It's more intelligent and it can also filter HTML and URLs.
	Docoa Browser A great utility to quickly look up Apple's Cocoa frameworks documentation. I'm actually still using version 0.3 as I don't care much for AutoDoc and AutoGraf, plus the new metal look of 1.0 is ugly.
	DragThing This is my favorite application launcher. It gives me quick access to frequently used applications and it handles drag and drop very well. Here's what it looks like on my desktop: I have set the window to be completely transparent, even the tabs, so that it seems merged with my desktop.
	DropDMG This simple utility makes my disk images. It's very configurable yet easy to use.
	ecto Duh...
	Fugu My choice for a graphical frontend to sFTP, one which knows how to handle ssh keys.
	GeekTool It's a preference pane to show system logs, unix commands output, or images on the desktop. I got it to log the system console, run my email retrieval script, and to show world time. Indispensable.
	GraphicConverter The best graphic utility hands down. I use it to convert between formats and to apply batch processes like scaling and renaming. It's actually more powerful than I need it to be.
	iComic This is a desktop client for browsing all your favorite online comics. I wrote a bunch of plugins for this to get my own favorites in the list.
	JEDict I'm in Japan so I need quick access to a Japenese dictionary every time I bump into a word or kanji I don't know about, and believe me, that happens a lot. This app uses publicly available dictionaries and wraps them in a brilliant UI. It even has a drawing field in which you can draw a kanji and then let the app analyze what it is. You will need to draw the kanji in the correct stroke order, but if you know your basic kanji, this is not hard.
	LoadInDock A simple Dock application that shows the current CPU. Simple, but it gives a great quick glance on how much processing is being down now. Here's how it looks in my Dock:
	Monolingual MacOSX apps can come with a wide variety of language files, from Slovakian to Swahili. I only want English and Japanese, so I use this app to get rid of the unneeded language files and save myself quite a bit of diskspace.
	MT-Newswatcher I sometimes read up on Usenet news, in particular, alt.humor.best-of-usenet, nl.sport.voetbal, and the various NBA and programming newsgroups. I wouldn't want to do that with anything else but this app.
	NetNewsWire I've been using this app since it was first released and am so used to it that I wouldn't know how else to read my RSS and Atom feeds. Version 2 got everything I need and nothing more.
	Proteus iChat is cool, but apart from being able to chat with iSight it doesn't offer much. Proteus lets me chat with people who use MSN or Yahoo and has a nice customizable interface to boot. The only downside is that it doesn't handle file transfer, but perhaps that's a blessing in disguise.
	RBrowserLite For all my FTP needs (apart from sFTP) I rely on this app a lot. I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives, but this one does what I want and it does it well.
	SuperCal What is this doing here, you ask? Well, by default Apple's monitor settings suck. The colors are either too bland, too bright, or just suck. SuperCal lets me adjust colors, brightness, contrast, and whiteness the way I want them to be using sophisticated control panels. A must have, especially for graphics designers.
	TinkerTool & TinkerTool System If you know me, then you know that I love to tweak my OS. If something can help me do that easier, then it's in my bag. TinkerTool and its professional alter-ego, TinkerTool System, do just that.
	X-Chat Aqua I hang out regularly at #joiito, and since it's IRC, I want a plain ASCII text interface, quick connecting, and easy access to the more l33t commands.

Of course, I also use the standard MacOSX apps like iCal, iDVD, iMovie, iTunes (with Kung-Tunes!), Mail.app, Safari, Stickies, Terminal.app, XCode, and sometimes even OfficeX, but let's not talk about that now.

Comments

I would be lost without Windowshade, Konfabulator and Shapeshifter in addition to some of these.