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• Aperture, reluctantly – it’s out of date, but it has all of my photos trapped inside.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.

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?