I’ve been on the Mac for a little over a year now, and I’ve been meaning to write about the software that I’ve found invaluable to me. I guess what’s driven it home to me now is the fact that I got a MacBook and I realised which programmes I have become dependant on that I had to have them installed on my new machine.

• Vector Designer - This was the gem from last year's MacWorld expo and for good reason. It's fast, it's constantly being updated with new features and improvement. If there was a negative comment I could make is that the team behind Vector Designer don't have the same marketing prowese as the Pixelmator team who have basically brought the quality of that application through to their website and everything inbetween.
• Pixelmator - The little photo editor that could. This has been on my radar since before I even bought a mac, so the fact that the guys have FINALLY gotten the application to a state in which I can actually consider to be a useful state is a godsend. It's only taken them about 8 months with constant improvements each and every month. I only have one final thing that I would like them to sort out and that's actual
• Taskpaper -
• Coda - Probably one of my favourite applications on the mac. Website development overall is just so many levels of easy and so many less clicks. Panic definitely know what they're doing and this little application is the culmination of years of trolling through the trenches.
• Adium - This is my messanger of choice. There are alternatives, however I've found this one to be the most flexible. So much so that you can customise anything really, from the icon used to the theme and the list goes on. It's as quick as you can get and it's constantly being updated.
• Twitterrific
• utorrent - For the past year Transmission has been my bittorrent client of choice. However
• Scrivener
• Coversutra
• Appzapper
• VLC
• LimeChat - When it comes to simple IRC chatting, this is the only client you need. I use it intermitently but when I do it's always a solid bit of software. This one's open source.

In addition to the above, I downloaded the following OS X specific enhancements:

• Perian - The so called swiss army knife of quicktime components. Definitely an essential unless you want to be using VLC all the time (does in most cases negate the need for VLC to be honest, but I like having that programme for watching DVDs.
• HTML plugin - This is a new aquisition, which is cool because I was using ipick in a horribly inefficient way. This makes it easy to flip between Pixelmator and Coda very simply swapping the various colour palettes between the two.
• Safari Stand
• GreaseKit

I guess everything else is just noise that I add in the hope that it’ll be awesome.