update: well, this is quaint.
productivity
omnifocus - the most powerful productivity tool on my mac. i used to use a collection of text files, scripts, etc. this just slurps it all up and syncs to my phone. i use a hacked version of GTD for my workflow, which omnifocus is oriented to. however, as a catchall for things that need to get done, this can’t be beat. infinitely customizable and tweakable. i haven’t found too many things that it doesn’t just do.
adium - the last word in instant messengers for the mac. covers pretty much every protocol out there and a few that you really wish would just die already. the latest beta builds include support for twitter. integrated twitter support is a lot handier than i expected.
gitx - gui git client for the mac. this actually rocks pretty hard. graphical display of what you have going with your local git repo and useful for dorks like me who do everything in emacs before they shove it into word to share with coworkers.
vmware - i used to be a parallels fan. then vmware fusion came out and the performance was awesome, i could use other folks VMs and it didn’t sporadically suck up all available CPU. joy ensued.
cord - the best remote desktop client i’ve seen to date. full screen mode rocks, there’s support for font smoothing and unlike the microsoft remote desktop client, it just works. neat features like connect in full-screen mode and drawer storage of configs, etc are quite handy.
the usual apps
keynote - this is part of the iWork suite and i’ve personally found it to be a better presentation package than pretty much anything else i’ve seen. which isn’t a particularly high standard to beat, given that pretty much all presentation software sucks rocks. this is a notable exception it’s an excellent package.
microsoft word - over the years i’ve made my peace with MS word. under the mac it’s proven to be a more than capable platform for crafting those internal missives.
entourage - quite frankly i regard this as a flaming hunk of shit. i’ve made my peace with it and perturb it as little as possible with the fear that it will flame out and crash horribly. the sync function is barely passable. that it talks to exchange servers is nothing short of a miracle. it’s consistently had issues with parsing timezone information and the management of meeting invites and lack of a plug-in architecture has me consistently wondering if they’ve taken explicit pains to make this a royal pain in the ass to use. treat with care it will likely fsck you over. i refuse to put real email into this given the proprietary database backend and repeated exposure to horror stories involving corrupted databases from coworkers. if i can’t edit my email with a text editor something’s gone horribly wrong.