There are well-known best-in-class Mac apps for tackling many tasks. In fact, many Mac users are Mac users because of certain tools (Final Cut Pro) that are well known and highly regarded. Aside from the obvious choices (Creative Suite, unfortunately, is still the only serious contender for design work), there are a handful of programs that every serious Mac user knows about - Quicksilver (and now, Google Quick Search Box) for a launcher, TextMate for a text editor, Transmit for an FTP client, Dropbox for cloud storage, and Quinn for Tetris. There are excellent alternatives to most of these, and power-users know and have tried them all. But we each have our own lesser-known favorites, without which we probably couldn't make it through the day…
brian hefele's untidy space