If you twist my arm I’d say the second best reader is NewsFire so check it out if you don’t want to pay for Reeder. I’m running an older free beta, but nowadays Reeder will set you back US$10. If you’re invested in the Apple ecosystem it’s available on iOS too, so you’ll feel right at home on whichever iDevice you’re using it. Is Reeder the best RSS reader of all time? You decide, but it’s fantastic and integrates swimmingly with Google Reader. There’s not much more I can say here, it’s pretty much the be all and end all for instant messaging clients on the Mac and, it’s free. Adium consolidates communication across these services and many more into one application. You’ve got friends on Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook Chat and if you’re old school, IRC. It’s a brilliant text editor to have lying around and I’d feel incomplete without it. Although I don’t use it primarily for development, it can do syntax highlighting and it has built-in FTP/SFTP support. When it comes to text editors on the Mac, BBEdit is king and TextMate is queen, but they both cost around US$50. It’s free for 20 days, but you’ll have to drop a hefty US$15 to keep the party going. The ebb and flow of my OCD absolutely makes Overflow critical to my sanity. Everything I don’t want to display in the OS X Dock goes into Overflow. My Dock has only three icons: Finder, Downloads and Trash. Also check out Launchbar and Quicksilver to compare functionality. You can also extend Alfred’s functionality with third party extensions and global hot keys. I use the free version, but if you get the paid version you can control iTunes, see and save your clipboard history and email people, all directly from Alfred. You can also use the built-in Mac calculator and dictionary directly from Alfred. It’s the killer feature that makes it impossible for me to live without. There’s no need to switch to your browser to search Google, Wikipedia and Amazon for anything. One of the biggest ways in which Alfred excels is the way it can launch web searches directly from a keyboard shortcut. Spotlight is great, but it can be better. It’s one of the most indispensable free apps I have. AppCleaner does its very best to remove all remnants of an app from your system. Often preference and application support files remain on the file system which can add up to lost disk space over time. Sadly that’s not really where the story ends. I opted for the paid version to use Fluid apps in full screen mode, but the free version is just as great. Think about web applications like Gmail, Facebook, Campfire and Pandora all running the same way. I can now launch Docs from Spotlight, place it on the Dock, Force Quit if I need to and run it as a full screen app in Lion. Unfortunately, until Google releases a native Docs client most of us are stuck with using Docs in a browser tab, or are we? Meet Fluid, the app that lets you create a real Mac app (or “Fluid App”) out of any website or web application, effectively turning your favorite web apps into OS X desktop apps. If you asked me which is more indispensable, Google Docs or Gmail, I’d stare at you blankly. The paid version gets rid of the ads and lets you use multiple accounts. I used Gmail’s web app for years, but now that I’ve experienced Sparrow’s unified Gmail inbox for multiple accounts and built-in Dropbox support, I will get into a physical altercation with anyone that tried to make me use anything else. Mailplane came close, but Sparrow changed my life, for the better. Until Sparrow came along there were no good alternatives. It had to be a client specifically designed with Gmail in mind. Firstly, I am - like many of you - a massive Gmail fan, so not just any native Mac email client would do. It’s difficult for me to express in words the love I have for this email client.
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