essential mac apps?

[DJZILCH]

Coconut battery - makes sure you take care of your battery
Battery health rapidly decreasing? Time to calibrate the battery, it would usually help

Istat pro - shows your activity/ram/temperatures

[D.S.M.I.T.]

Caffeine.

+1

[mostapha]

Quicksilver. It takes some getting used to, especially if you've only ever used Windows before. But it's the GUI thing I've been praying for since GUIs were invented. It (and its counterpart, gnome-do on Linux/Unix) is about 40% of the reason I can't get anything done on Windows because everything takes forever. There are times I forget where my mouse pointer is for hours at a time; I disabled Launchpad 2 minutes after upgrading to Lion; and I haven't seen my (hidden) dock in about a month except for when the Adium icon bounces to let me know someone IM'd me.

Chrome + Vimium. Same. Not OS X specific afaik, but it's a godsend. Well…for whackos like me that honestly prefer typing to mousing.

MacPorts or Homebrew: they're package managers. They're good. If you don't know what that is, you probably won't benefit from it.

I used to use Caffeine before I realized that I hadn't turned it off in months and only ever turn on screen saver with a hot corner…so I got rid of the app and just set it to waste as much power as possible (never dim, never sleep, never screen saver, etc.). Haven't had a problem after like a year.

Adium. It's based on libpurple, but it's not butt-ugly.

coconut battery for reasons already mentioned.

I keep wanting to like Divvy, but I can never bring myself to pay for it because it either relies too heavily on the mouse or takes 2 keystroke combinations for what should be done with one.

InsomniaX. It lets you close your display without the computer going to sleep. That can be dangerous and lead to overheating (to a damaging degree) but there's no better way to carry a laptop and controllers into a DJ booth. Resuming from suspend usually doesn't break things…but when it does, it's a PITA.

Keynote. Simply better than Powerpoint in every conceivable way. $20 at the app store.

Pages. Simply better than MS Word in every conceivable way. $20 at the app store.

Numbers. It's not as good as MS Excel, but I don't think you can buy Excel by itself. Also $20.

TextMate/Vico. If you do plain text editing (manual web/software development, etc.), they're great. TextMate uses emacs keybindings. Vico uses vim keybindings. They each cost like $40, but they're well worth it if you don't live your life in terminal. (I just use vim since Vico went out of beta and the developer started charging…but I'm debating it because Vico's syntax highlighting is better).

VLC. It plays everything QuickTime and iTunes can't, and it doesn't crash as much as MplayerX or the other crap I've tried.

ClamXAV. It's free. I've been using some version of the clam antivirus engine since I switched to linux years ago, and I like it. Don't use on-access scanning if it's a production/dj machine…just scan every now and then.

Journaler. Great for note-taking and blogging if you're a student and/or into that kind of thing.

Oh yeah…and, well…zsh and all of the gnu tools…but if you know what those are or have any inclination to use them, you already know what they are and that they're already on your system.

[Quenepas]

Softwarewise ppl has mentioned very well everything you need.... but there are quite a few other things you may need.

A docking station http://www.hengedocks.com/ . A well padded bag. a keyboard condom for when people spill drinks on top of the Mac during performances. Microfiber cloth to clean your baby glary screen.

[jerrywc]

rapid evolution....i wouldnt use anything else to key and bpm my tracks
it kicks ass and it is free

[tyfurious]

General/Audio/Video
AppCleaner
Caffeine
Adium
Audacity
Firefox
Freemind
iWork/Word Suite
Livestream Procaster
Mixed in Key
Skype
VLC

Programming:
Coda
xcode
TextWrangler

[josh@firestorm]

smc fan control

[mostapha]

Softwarewise ppl has mentioned very well everything you need.... but there are quite a few other things you may need.

A docking station http://www.hengedocks.com/ . A well padded bag. a keyboard condom for when people spill drinks on top of the Mac during performances. Microfiber cloth to clean your baby glary screen.

Those things will cause your computer to overheat if you do anything the least bit CPU-intensive with the lid closed.

[photojojo]

Can anybody recommend a good way to remotely control my macbook pro with my iphone? I need just basic stuff, no special keys or anything like that.