It’s funny how quickly you go from, “I’ll keep this Powerbook as lean as possible” to adding that one last app which makes work easier or life more fun.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 is a necessity for me. I don’t bother with the Nikon RAW editing apps. I find them to be slow and kludgy, whereas Photoshop works. If Photoshop is faster than something else, that’s just a call for help.
I got rid of X-Chat Aqua and Colloquy and am trying out Conversation. The latter takes some getting used to if you’re moving from irssi and more stripped down IRC apps as the GUI can be a little too close to iChat for some, but overall it works well.
You have to have a Gecko-based browser, and I use the optimized for G4 Firefox 1.5. Actually, I use the nightly DeerPark build, but it’s essentially the same.
With Microsoft killing Window Media Player for Mac, you might as well play Windows Media in Quicktime. You can do that by downloading Flip4Mac, which is now being promoted by Microsoft as the Mac solution.
If you want to sync your music across several machines, iPodRip is another great little tool. It’s shareware, but for $15, it’ll save you a lot of trouble.
Skype, TeamSpeex, and Ventrilo have me covered with VOIP, when paired with iChat.
Roxio products Popcorn and Toast 6 are two I probably won’t use that much. With a DVD burner in this laptop, though, I felt compelled. I do download and burn the latest Ubuntu ISOs at work, so Toast does come in handy.
Ah, Stickybrain. I used an earlier version of the app, and it just did not click with me. Now, however, I find it one of my Powerbook essentials. It’s great for work – all my notes categorized, selected notes synced to the Treo, some synced to the Palm, hotkeys for importing data from any app.
Panic makes some of the best Mac apps out there. I use Transmit for FTP/SFTP/SCP quite a lot. Sure, I can do it via CLI, or something OSS, but Panic’s apps are perfect Mac apps. I use Unison at home for Usenet, and it’s likewise an awesome app.
World of Warcraft is not as much of the addiction for me as for others, but it still has its draw. This Powerbook has a Radeon 9700 Mobility, so playing WoW is definitely passable. I’m looking forward to a Universal Binary release, and seeing how it plays on Vetril’s new MacBookPro. I also have Neverwinter Nights installed for those times when I am out and about with no connectivity.