This is an absolutely must have. This app is basically a far more advanced Spotlight App. But the best part of it is that is adjusts to you by learning what you use. So if you have frequently used app it will make suggestions starting from the first two letters - and it makes it absolutelly accuratelly. It is not free but it absolutelly worth the money.

Adium has support for most common IM such as: MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Google talk, Jabber, Facebook, AOL, LiveJournal and many many more, and the best thing is that it is absolutelly free. Furthermore it has massive themes library so that you can personalise the look and feel.

Here is the official link: http://adium.im/

I simply adore the integration between AddressBook app and the iCal app, but for reasons unknow iCal only synchronizes birthdays in address book. After searching the web I have found this nifty plugin. It allows you to add any date that you assign for a contact in address book to be displayable in iCal. It is not free but it is cheap and works perfect. One thing to mention is that is sometimes takes a few moment for the new type of date to be synchronized to do not worry, just wait a little.

Here is the official link: http://www.nhoj.co.uk/datestoical/

If you want to have a worldwide file share that does not require going onto web this is an absolute must. It works lightning fast and if you require under 2Gb's of storage it is free. It creates a directory on your hard drive and synchronizes files in the background. Also you can have several shared account budled together, so that if any of other people in your group update files you almost instantly see them on your Mac.

Here is the official link: https://www.dropbox.com/

Personally I like to read small articles and blog post, or sometimes during my work I found usefull stuff and I had always had problems with keeping it all together and then finding the right stuff in the pile over piles of files. That was until I got this app. Evernote is a notes repository that allows to store any kinds of files and web clips. Further more it provides excellent searching utilities and not only in text documents but pdf, doc, xsl and even images! There are lot of features like tagging and notebooks organizers and more. And what is best is that is it free to use, with some little limitations but in my experience of using it for over 9mts now I have never exceeded the limit which is replenished every month.

Here is the official link: http://www.evernote.com/

This is a life saved when you transfer music from PC to Mac. Without any doubt iTunes is a great utility for music BUT it is just trying to be too smart sometimes. For example I had a lot of russian music on my PC and when I transfered it to Mac the names all turned into "funny" characters. Later I read about the cause of this - it turns out that iTunes encodes the mp3 ID3 tags differently depending on timezone that is set for your OS. So unless you set it to Russian you are not gona see russian names, same with chineese and other that require UTF-8. Now obviously you can set different time zone to correctly import the music, but when you switch it back it re-indexs the names and turns them into ?##?#. So the ID3Mod2 alows to manually recode the ID3 tags and set the character encoding manually so that iTunes uses the correct encoding. This utility also auto detects the encoding. Great stuff but very hard to find. There are a lot of unofficial sites that allow to download it. But if you have trouble drop me a line using feedback form.

To say this app is amazing is to say nothing. It provides excellent screen/ web cam video capture, built in audio, microfone audio capture. Recording editor allows to mix in media and add additional audio tracks, resize the video on the fly, encode it to different format. This is absolutelly fantastic app for creating professional looking presentations. But to understand this you need to use it because no word can describe how perfectly it works. Absolutelly worth the money spent!

Here is the official link: http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm

This app allows to read *.chm file (Windows help files). I like to read electronic books and sometimes they come in CHM format. This is a must have app for this. It also allows to conver chm file to pdf. And the best part that it is free

Here is the official link: http://www.robinlu.com/blog/ichm

I know that MacBook already has it's utility for this BUT some people (myself for example) do not always agree with MacBook on when to switch the keyboad lighting on. I found myself struggling with this since it does work but MacBook's sensor is kind of working strange. So I found LabTick which is a free utility to manually manage keyboard lighting - very cool.

Here is the official link: http://labtick.proculo.de/

MacPorts provides a repository for all developer apps that might think of. So DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT attempt to install anything by hand it is a waste of time, because MacPorts had done it for you already!

So fisrt you need to install MacPorts, then whatever you want. Say you want MySQL just open Terminal type:

port search mysql

Then chose the package you want and type:

port install mysql5

And you have it on your sustem fully configured and ready to use.

Any other software is intalled in much the same way, so to recap: DO NOT TRY TO BE SMARTER AND INSTALL BY HAND - USE MACPORTS

Here is the official link: http://www.macports.org/

The best SVN Client I have ever used on Mac. I think better that Versions is only SVNTortoise but that is only for Windows. The interface is adorable and user friendly. Allows to save bookmarks and keep track of working copies in addition to the SVN functions. Not free but worth the money.

Here is the official link: http://versionsapp.com/

If the target environment is important for you then this is your best choice. It is free and if configured properly allows a seemless transition between the OS's. Basically you run your other OS as an application. In order to do this you need to install VirtualBox, install and OS that you want on virtual machine and then install on that OS VirtualBox client that will allows to on the fly grand your mouse and keyboad controls whenever you are in the Virtual machine window. This is amazing stuff try it.

Here is the official link: http://www.virtualbox.org/