Got A Fresh Mac? Start Here - So Much For Out Of The Box

Similarly looking, simple lists of applications that will make almost every Mac user really, really happy. Not having most of these tools is like having half a Mac. The information might have looked better if organized in the form of something other than lists.

http://opensourcemac.org/
and
http://bestmacsoftware.org/

A few more freeware apps:

Transmission and Azureus - very good Bittorrent clients for the Mac:
http://transmissionbt.com/download/
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

The Unarchiver - an archiving utility that works with a ton of formats - http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

MainMenu - a utility that offers a GUI to enable various Unix tasks, as well as doing convenient things like disabling that resource-hogging dashboard - http://mainmenuapp.com/

Safari beta 3 - unlike the Windows version it's quite stable and well designed, and has a vastly improved search feature, as well as being the fastest browser on the Mac in terms of rendering: http://www.apple.com/safari/
To easily block ads - http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

VMWare trumps Parallels and Q Emulator any day.

Also check out:

https://webkit.org/

if you have problems with FireFox or Safari on the Mac.

LaunchBar - an alternative to QuickSilver:

https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

Bean is a great free application that serves basic word processing needs.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

(By the way, IUseThis is a great site to find popular Software for the Mac)

Cabos - an alternative to Acquisition:

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Cabos-for-Mac-OS-X/1101753564/2

RSS Menu - simple, lightweight RSS software, it just sits in your menu bar for when you feel like checking it.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Growl - a system wide "notification system":

http://growl.info/

Pixel - an RGB, CMYK and HDR image editing, photo retouching, graphics manipulating and animation program:

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

You DON'T HAVE TO have these software. Macs are still more out of the box than Windows is. It takes me 30 minutes to restore a Windows installation, if I do it very quickly, 20 minutes on a Mac and 40 minutes on Linux (because I have a lot of manual settings that I have to set on Linux). These times DO NOT include installation itself. Only data transfer and the set up process.xboxrulz

I agree other than needing to get the latest Stuff-it expander as the archiver built into OSX doesn't get along with some of the formats out there out of the box. And while yes, Safari 3, is the latest and greatest, you still have a Safari out of the box. Now X11 needs to be installed, unless you did so in the custom set-up process during the install, but other than that it's installing the rest of the packaged software I have like FCS, Adobe et. al., and MS Office. Now that can take the better part of a few hours for no other reason than FCS is about 40 - 60 GB installed.