The Best Mac OS X Software Tools

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

Re:The bit i like

[Watson Ladd]

Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner. With Labview it is easy because it has a very limited domain. Not so with general programing.

Re:Essential Mac tools...

[Stamen]

I think your post needs to be repeating. People love stereo types, so I'm probably whistling in the wind, but there are many people like you out there, I'm one of them. People who are love Unix and also love OS X. However I do own an iPod, a few of them.

People have to realize that OS X is mostly open source, except for the windows manager and the user-land stuff. The first thing I install on OS X is XCode so that I have gcc, and then DarwinPorts so I can "port" myself to happy goodness.

Of course I'd rather OS X run on any PC (you can if you work at it), but Apple hardware is pretty decent, and contrary to popular belief it isn't much more than equal hardware from Dell or whomever (that was the queue for someone to point out that you can buy that 9 pound 2 inch thick Dell laptop for 600 bucks; come on, you know you want to). It's OS X that I really like, what it runs on isn't as important to me.

I think there a 3 distinct groups of people using OS X.
* The home user who is attracted by the commercials that say how easy it is to use

* The artists/designers who use Photoshop/Final Cut Pro/etc

* People like me, *nix peeps that enjoy a really nice windows manager and seamless hardware drivers

Now saying all that, OS X on the server isn't so good, for that it's hard to beat BSD or Linux.

Re:Quicksilver

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, there's a little application for KDE called Katapult that does the exact same thing as Quicksilver.

Please get access to a Mac and try Quicksilver before you make such statements.

Just because they're both launchers does not mean that one does the "exact same thing" as the other. That's like saying GIMP does the "exact same thing" as Photoshop.

And I'm not even a mac fanboy!