A while back (2003) I borrowed an iBook from a friend who was looking to sell it. Since then I’ve used Mac laptops for my personal development (and commercial where possible). With every major rev of the OS the common tools I use changes slightly. A few friends of mine have recently bought Apple laptops and have asked about what they should try out. Those questions have inspired this list. So without any more preface here is my list of must have apps and tools for Leopard:

• Quicksilver – my favorite launcher (think slickrun but better)
• Bezel Pro QuickSilver interface – Makes Quicksilver match some Leopard UI elements
• Adium – The best chat client for OSX. Supports multiple protocols and a host of great features. Including chat encryption and logging.
• Perian – Effectively ffdshow for OSX. Providing a large number of codecs for the native quicktime media player.
• VLC – Cross platform. Plays everything media player.
• Developer Tools – I think this is self explanatory.
• MacPorts – Almost every piece of free software that I use is covered by MacPorts. sudo port install ruby
• The Unarchiver – Think 7zip for osx. It’s free and has handled every archive I’ve thrown at it.
• Handbreak – DVD Ripper
• Aquamacs – Emacs gone Mac (I generally use vim, but I like to have emacs around in case I need to play sokoban.)
• MacVim – Vim with some Mac flair
• VMWare Fusion – I do .net dev and cross platform testing with this. It’s key and at the price point a steal. I prefer it over Parallels because the vmware player is free and the vm’s are cross platform so if anything goes wrong I can just fire up my image on another machine.
• Fugu – Simple and Free sftp.
• OmniGraffle – Like Visio only pretty.
• Little Snitch – I like to know when my machine decides to "talk" to another one.
• Xee – A lightweight image viewer. The closest thing I could find to the windows quickview stuff. Apple Preview doesn’t iterate over folders.
• svnX – For those times when I want to use a GUI subversion client. Incidentally those times are becoming rarer and rarer, mainly due to git.
• iStat Pro – It’s nice to see system stats at a glance in dashboard
• Dashalytics – I’m addicted to stats.
• TextMate – A very nice text editor

Most of my development is done using Vim in a terminal. Although I’ve recently been using TextMate a good bit. I tend to use macports for everything, ruby and python development included. Primarily because I’ve found it easy to maintain and upgrade using the macports installed versions. It’s worth noting that the macport for ruby is currently unstable in my opinion, due to their upgrading to ruby 1.8.7.

There you have it, please add your own amendments in the comments.