I will be upgrading my laptop’s hard drive soon, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to share a list of the Mac applications I plan to keep:

  • Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage. Poorly written, but essential, especially for email and calendar sync with Exchange Server.
  • OmniFocus for keeping track of tasks
  • Evernote – my virtual file cabinet, for effortlessly keeping track of all information (text, photo, and otherwise)
  • iTunes – essential for backing up the iPhone
  • Firefox – increasingly the web browser is where work is done, and Firefox is the best.
  • TweetDeck – the best Twitter client.
  • OmniOutliner – a powerful outlining tool – much better than Microsoft Word. I will need to manually copy this, as I’m also upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard, but it’s not included
  • VLC Media Player – a free, universal media player. More useful than QuickTime.
  • Aperture, reluctantly – it’s out of date, but it has all of my photos trapped inside. Waiting for Aperture 3 to come out to upgrade.
  • Fetch – FTP application.
  • Caffeine – keeps the computer from going into “sleep” mode when you don’t want it to.
  • UpOneLevel.app – a little script that adds a folder navigation keyboard shortcut for Finder.
  • Curio – a great project planning tool, like a digital creative space. I use it for planning professional development.
  • JungleDisk – for accessing backup data stored on Amazon Web Services.
  • Skitch – a quick screen capture utility. Lets you annotate and publish/export screen captures very easily.
  • Skype – I’d like to start using Skype to talk to people around the world, but I haven’t done so in years.
  • TextWrangler – the best text/html file editor, capable of handling just about any plaintext file.
  • Transmission – for managing large file transfers.
  • Handbrake – for converting video from old to new formats.
  • Quicksilver – a keyboard-based launching utility. They just released a Snow Leopard-ready version, after a long time without any new releases.

OS X Snow Leopard by Adam Smith

There are of course tons of other applications on my computer now, but I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of reinstalling them unless I had a specific reason.

What applications – Mac, Windows, or otherwise – do you find essential? If your computer was erased tomorrow, what would you reinstall immediately?

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