Inspired by Fletch, here’s my list of top 10 11 applications that I wouldn’t really want to use OSX without.

• Quicksilver. Now this is something that really impacts how I use and work in OSX, what’s more there’s nothing like it for any other OS. Once you get your head round how to use it and what for (it’s so much more than just an application launcher) you’ll wonder how you could function in OSX without it.

  Check this out for example. I use the del.icio.us plugin so that I can quickly hit Apple-Space, type in a tag (such as ‘daily’), press ‘/’, and then quickly browse the list of sites tagged with that. I can select multiple entries with ‘,’ and then when I hit `Return’ they’re all opened up in individual tabs in Safari. Awesome.

• Growl. A notification system for OSX, it’s highly customizable and supported by an awful lot of applications. It tells me when I have new mail, when I receive a message via Adium when the client isn’t in the foreground, when my downloads in Safari have completed, when transfers in Transmit have finished, and so on.
• Adium. Or more accurately, Metal Adium. Decent all-round IM client that supports MSN, AIM, YahooIM, Jabber and also IRC if you really wanted to. I prefer the integrated look of Metal Adium.
• Newsfire. This looks and works like it could have been written by Apple. Simple, powerful, fast, and well thought out. Well worth a tenner of anyone’s money.
• mutt. I’ve given up on Apple’s Mail.app and have reverted back to mutt for all email stuff. It’s not without its flaws but it’s about the best there is, assuming you can live without a GUI ;)

  Here’s my current mutt configuration (with personalisations removed), and here’s what it looks like. It’s probably worth mentioning that mutt relies on a couple of other things like vim (obviously) and esmtp which I’ve written about before here.

• irssi. Probably the best IRC client there is. It doesn’t look like much, but it is.
• lftp. Easily my favourite application for all ftp / sftp / scp actions. lftp supports pretty much any protocol you can think of, as well as other niceties like session management, parallel transfers, mirroring, bookmarking, and so on.
• screen. GNU screen, I don’t think I could live without this on *any* platform. Here’s my .screenrc.
• Terminal.app. Should go without saying really considering some of the above….
• Safari. I tend to stick to Apple’s own web browser instead of using Firefox or Camino. It renders 99.99% of the sites I visit just fine, is speedy, consistent, and looks the part. It seems to chew a lot less RAM than Firefox as well.
• iTunes. Again, obvious ;)

There’s a few honourable mentions such as VirtueDesktops (will be obsolete once Leopard is released with Spaces), iPodrip (for retrieving songs back off my iPod), Firefox (still useful especially with the web developer plugin), OmniOutliner, and VLC but those are the main ones.