Recently i have shifted to mac, although what i feel now is somewhat similar to a jet lag but still overall experience is great.Expose and spaces are really useful,and by using widgets useful information like currency convertor,calculator is just a button away.Overall i must say experience is lovely.

For most of common day to day needs products from Apple’s iLife suite work just out of the box but what about common need on a developer ?

Here is a list of application that i have recently fallen in love with, they are gr8 to use and increase productivity a lot.

**This list is not complete in any way nor the application listed are in any order of greatness or usefulness.**

Coda for Web Development

In my opinion Coda is a must have application for all developers working on mac. its a one stop solution, after starting coda you don’t need to leave it and go to shell for remote login,publishing,documentation because all feature are inbuilt.As they say

text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.

Textmate – the missing editor

while coda is great for web development, what about all other needs like writing shell scripts, perl, python, objective-c ? Textmate is there to save your day. It supports more than 50 languages, you can run commands from whithin documents, access SVN and lot more.

TIP: If you use YUI heavily, then there is a YUI bundle for textmate too.

Cyberduck – FTP/SFTP and lot more

Cyberduck is an Open source application for all your FTP/SFTP needs.It supports WebDAV, Mosso Cloud files and Amazon S3 too. It also has a dashboard widget which is really handy.you just drag the file over the widget and voila ! it will be uploaded to the configured location.

Growl notification system

Growl is a notification system, it lets any application display alerts/information unobtrusively. You can customize the look on notification and control which application can show alerts using growl.Notifications can be sent to you on email OR can be spoken to you too.

TIP : If you want similar functionality in your web applications you can use jQuery growl OR growls mootools.

Adium – instant messenger

Adium is an open source instant messaging solution which can connect to Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, Jabber, AIM etc.Adium team is working hard on IRC support too.It integrates well with growl notifications which makes complete experience much better.And, it has got a lovely icon too. :)

Fluid App for Site Specific Browser

Fluid app is gr8, it lets you create what they call site specific browser or native application of your favorite web application.So essentially gmail, google reader etc will behave like any other native application.although similar thing can be achieved on windows using Mozilla prism or google chrome but what i really like is little badges that appear over the icons in dock just like in the image displayed at right.

Omnigraffle

Omnigraffle is easy to use,powerful diagramming application.You can easily create beautiful graphs, diagrams, flowcharts, mockups easily.There are lot of ready to use stencils available like iphone mockup,YUI design elements and much more. You can download stencils from graffletopia which is integrate inside the application very seamlessly.

ScreenFlow for making wonderful screencasts

If you create screencasts of application, ScreenFlow is best app out there.It has got very good editing tool, ability to add callouts,cursor highlight and much more. It lets you easily add pan & zoom effects, trim clips, add shadow and reflection. You can combine exiting media too.It allows you to add mouse effects and and overlay showing your key strokes too.

AppCleaner – name says it all

although uninstalling a application in mac is as easy as drag n drop, but it leaves some some files here and there in the system. AppCleaner finds all these files and safely deletes them.Application usage is very easy, you just have to drag n drop application onto the AppCleaner window.

Backdrop

while you are taking screenshots or making screenshots,you don’t want whole wide world to see whats there on your desktop Do you ? use Backdrop so you don’t have to clean your desktop before taking screenshot or creating videos.You can also use this to let you focus on one window a time.gr8 app.

So, all said you must be thinking is there any application that i miss. Yes, there is. Take a guess,..let me give you a hint : Its a microsoft’s application. Does that ring any bell ??

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is a desktop blogging tool, and NO its not just for microsoft live.It supports all major blogging platform out there like Wordpress, LiveJournal, typePad, and many more.Features include in place photo editing, Instant preview etc.You can find many useful plugins too.I really miss this application on mac, in my opinion there are aren’t any competing application in windows too. one of the best application created by microsoft i guess.

If i have missed your favorite application then please let me know in comments, i will make sure it gets added to the list.