name the applications you couldn't live without, any gems you've stumbled across. I always get sidetracked when I go to look for free software, because most of it is quite specialist (workflows for Photoshop etc), not just general use

anyway

- iSerial Reader. easily the best thing I have. after a week of using it, you'll be glancing over your shoulder for fear of angry developers.

- iCal ... I just realized you can use this to schedule events on your computer, ie. tell it to run an Automator flow or Applescipt at 8am to wake up to internet radio or whatever. Just go to 'create alarm'. btw, the Energy Saving panel in system prefs lets you schedule startup or wakeups and shutdowns and sleeps

- GoogleEarth Beta... yes, you can get it on Mac. If you've not tried this, you need to. Satellite images with different layers of detail mapped over a 3D model of the whole globe. 'Fly To' any location, find your house, find where JFK got shot (with 3D buildings), switch on all sorts of markings like stations, roads, borders, historical info, webcams. I typed in 'Area 51' and it started zooming in on Nevada... then crashed, lol. Worked eventually though. I don't think this is officially available from Google... inbox me if you can't find it

- Adium... as someone else put it, "iChat on crack". Supports all the messengers (MSN, AIM etc)

- ffmpegx. Shareware program (*cough*iserialreader*cough*) that can take almost any video format and convert it to almost anything else (in theory... I found that .rm files only converted directly to .avi files). Also has loads of detailed encoding settings like resolution and aspect if you need them. Can rip audio out of videos and stuff like that. Can also play files itself.

- D-Vision. Shareware. I use it to combine AVI files into one big file.

- Limewire. Best and fastest thing for downloading songs and popular files

- Azureus. Bittorrent client

- ircle - internet relay chat client. Mainly worth mentioning because of the stuff you can get on irc... google: #macfile

- ssx - Soulseek program. (i think it's called SoulSeeX in full... which is distinct from SoulSeekX, which is a piece of crap) Very nice interface and fully functional. I've not used it much so I'm not sure if it gets search results and downloads as well as it should. But at least you don't need to install FINK or anything like for Nicotine.

- soulseek classic - Soulseek client for Mac OS 9. Obviously you can run it on Classic mode. This is what we used before someone invented a decent OS X client (even now, those others require 10.3 or higher I think). Doesn't support chat, uploading, or browse host... but I got a hell of a lot of stuff of it nevertheless. I think it may even let you cheat a bit in terms of queing.

- Chicken of The VNC. Use this to remote control your mac (first switch on Apple Remote Desktop in the target Mac's Sharing preferences. you can download the ARD client from apple if you don't have it already). It runs the target computer's screen inside a window of the remote computer.

- Salling Clicker. Shareware program that lets your Bluetooth mobile phone control the Mac. It has a bunch of scripts to run commands for most common programs (and you can add your own), and can do various other cool things like proximity detection - ie tell iTunes to pause when you leave the room, with your phone obviously, or when you receive a phonecall. Incidentally, OS X has bluetooth remote control built in. Just go to the bluetooth settings on your phone, then 'remote control' then choose your computer from the device list (you'll need to pair the devices from the bluetooth Mac menu first). It has basic controls for programs, and you can control the mouse with the minijoystick.

- 'Create Disk Image' automator workflow. Makes a file into a .dmg, which means your computer can recognize it as a drive or an inserted disc. Or you can use Toast to mount it as a CD in the CD drive. Get your Automator flows from www.automatorworld.com

- Xkeys. Basically lets you assign your function keys to do anything, like open a program, or run a script, and other things i've forgotten, finder operations probably. I used to have F10, F11, F12 set to play/pause, bck skip, fwd skip on iTunes (I think they were actually applescipts it was rrunning. Get your applescripts at www.dougscripts.com). It runs in the background invisibly all the time. Doesn't show up in the dock, only in the Force Quit menu and system prefs.

- you know you can make .zip files by right clicking (control clicking) and selecting 'create archive' ?

- Google Maps widget. works in all countries supported by google maps. gets the maps without having to open the webage

- SysStat widget. gives you readouts on ram usage, disc space, network activity, CPU activity, bandwidth usage, uptime. you can minimize the info you don't want to see always

- obviously you'll want to visit divx.com to get your codecs to play avi files

- you can force an application to open a file by holding the apple key and dragging the file to its dock icon

- you can connect straight to ftp (and afp and other) servers from the 'go' menu, or pressing command-k. often neglected

- Terminal lets you access a good command line text editor called Vim. You can do things like compare two similar text files side by side with the differences highlighted

you should be able to find all this stuff easily by googling

please mention any that you know

and happy new year motherfukas