1. My Adium set up: as you can see this offers little clue as to who’s online apart from their avatar(display picture, buddy icon etc.) However, I find that this approach uses far less screen space than having their name displayed. Growl is highly utilised with this approach as I assoiciate their icon when they log in, or mouse-over to find it. It’s also set to auto-hide on the left hand side of my screen.
2. iClip4, this is essentially a multi-clipboard, which; for me is essential. I use it at the bottom of my screen where the Dock would usually go, and although it’s slightly sluggish on my PPC mac mini- it’s reasonable.
3. The precise location of the dock- right and bottom aligned. (Using deeper) Small icons, hiding on and no magnification.
4. Cytv this lets me watch tv on my ibook, whilst the tuner is plugged into my mac mini.
   
5. Letterbox Mail plugin, because I spent too much time in Outlook 2003 before switching. Quicksilver and Visor. Emminently neccessary. Visor especially for living in a terminal window.

Firstly there is the venerable QuickTime.

Although it certainly is a worthy media player it is held back by QuickTime pro, the version that has all the useful features unlocked. Firstly fullscreen is unavailable in QuickTime- but not in iTunes, both programs based on the same framework. Also much of the functionality can be regained by running applescript. It has support for all major media formats and is easily expandable by use of plugins (such as flipformac).

Next is iTunes.
By using the same frameworks as QuickTime, iTunes is also able to play any QuickTime file- however when using fullscreen mode there is no OSD. iTunes is primarily used for media management, and copying music and video to the iPod. Oh, it also has a music store.

Although the best way to play media files on any mac is through frontrow, however it is only available on late G5 imacs and intel macs.

Finally two other programs useful for media playing:

EyeTV

Elgato’s EyeTV program is perhaps the only viable DVR solution for OSX. Especially now with its’ full screen menu display and front row integration.

VLC

Videolan is probably the best multi-platform media player, it has the best OSX specific integration, such as growl compatibility and a custom interface. It has good compatibility playing video files. But most importantly- it’s playback window can float on top of the others without hacks.

What can I say about Microsoft?
They make the best Office suite.

When I used Linux, there was only one thing that drew me back to using Windows; Microsoft Office. It always pulled me kicking and screaming back to Windows. But when I switched to mac I also installed Office 2004. Unfortuneatly iWork only had a limited trial and although keynote showed immense promise. Seriously, I think a fairc comparison is a peashooter (powerpoint) versus and ICBM (keynote), it was really that pronounced. For essays and the like I like to use Lyx because of its’ output and the formatting niceness of LaTeX. 00

For inter-service compatibility, there is none to beat AdiumX. Being open source I can always run the latest version on the svn tree- not suggesting this as a smart thing to do. The SVN version occasionally has it’s glitches but on the whole is very stable. Just before writing this article I ran svn update and recompiled from the latest build (17291), actually a later build as that one wouldn’t compile.

Adium is an open source Instant Messanger with full support for XMPP, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, gTalk, bonjour and several other protocols. Originally it used libgaim for this but now it uses a mix of libgaim, libezv and joscar- with smack soon to be used for XMP (this will have jingle support and will eventually allow Adium users to talk with gTalk users.

Adium 1.0 was released in 2001 by a student called Adam Iser, but was re-written to form AdiumX (originally planned to be Adium 2.0). Adium uses OSX’s built in html component (WebKit) to display each chat, and this allows for easy themeing of the chat window with only knowledge of HTML and css). Also the contact list is easy to theme and in the SVN version will hide on an edge of the screen and can be configured to only show as little or as much user information as it takes to show who’s online.

Adium has full out of the box support for Growl, a universal notifications protocol for OSX. Which allows you to be constantly informed of when someone comes online or sends you a message. Also possible is to have notifications read out using the system voice.

On any other platform, the choice for a good powerful tabbed web-browser is fairly easy; Firefox. But on OSX it looks nasty:

1. It uses custom widgets.
2. It uses Aqua and a menu. Not unified.

So I looked for an alternative, deciding against Safari because I didn’t like it and eventually settled on Camino.
Camino shares a lot with the Firefox project, a need to create a seperate Navigator only version of Mozilla- but for OSX will full native widget use and utilizing OSX only features.

Unfortuneatly Camino has recently suffered development stagnation with long waits between versions and lacks the support for extensions that Firefox has. Otherwise Camino is a very stable and useful web browser with a solid and standards compliant rendering engine.

My future browsing choices:
Camino is a solid browser but with little chance of seeing a version 2 anytime soon, I’m going to look at the emerging alternatives:

1. Firefox 3.0 Minefield
2. Shiira 2.0 currently in beta

Firefox.
Firefox has all the cool features found in firefox that make it highly probable that it will regain it’s crown as king of the Browsers. However:

Shiira.
The early beta of Shiira 2.0 shows much promise and has many new and interesting features that turn up the heat for other web browsers. (Shiira has quite a long way to go yet, as some settings are greyed out and some parts still in Japanese)

Mail.app

It could be said that there is only one real choice for an email client for OSX: Apple Mail. For one it comes pre-installed with OSX and secondly; it genuinely is the best email client available.

The roots for Mail.app lie in NEXTSTEP and NEXTMAIL which bears great resemblance to the current Mail.app- especially the contact photographs and the way attachments are handled.

There are several features in Mail which set it apart from other Mail clients:
Use of a systemwide address book.

• Smart Mailboxes.
• Image handling.
• Expandability.

Address Book.
Unlike Outlook or any linux email client, Mail uses an Address Book which is universally present for other applications. This means that if I add a contact using Mail, I can also add IM accounts to that card and set up my IM software to add their picture automatically. This Address Book, being present as part of the OS not the mail client allows its data to be used by other applications with ease.

Smart Mailboxes.
Smart Mailboxes utilize spotlight and act as a way to sort messages, with a Smart Mailbox set up for emails sent regarding certain projects, sent photos or attachments.

Image Handling.

When you are sent an email with image attachments, you have the option to view the images as a slideshow. In this slideshow you have the option to navigate between images, to view a contact sheet or to add them to iPhoto.

Expandibility.
With its’ plugin architecture and AppleScript, Mail allows for lots of expandibilty. Three notable plugins are:

• MailTags.
• Letterbox.
• GrowlMail

MailTags is a productivity app, allowing messages to be assigned to projects and to dos.
Letterbox is a simple hack which forces Mail to display in a three column way instead of the default.
Vs.
And GrowlMail which is part of the growl notification framework, allows for a growl message to be displayed. This allows for you to get a grasp of the emails content before switching to Mail and needs no interaction.

Future.
The future looks good for Mail in OSX with the addition of HTML stationary, a system wide framework for RSS, TODOs and support for Notes. Whereas some people have concentrated on the pure evil that is inherant in HTML emails, my question is how will this affect the slideshow and import into iPhoto features of Mail.