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Here are some essential extra programs I’ve found that make my OS X Leopard experience that much better.

They may not be all that killer in that they may not convince you to switch (although some could) but at the very least they’re all totally awesome programs. And consider these all reasons why Windows and Linux both suck!

Fanboyism: Great apps that already come with Leopard

Safari
This browser has come a long way. It used to suck but now it’s possibly the best. Firefox is an ideal replacement on Windows, because everyone knows how much IE sucks… But I find Mozilla much slower and buggier than Safari on Leopard. Modern versions of Safari (3.x) are available on Tiger (10.4) through software update as well, so really you have no excuse to go to Mozilla.

Mail
Gets the job done. Smart folders and searching are amazing. Inclusion of RSS subscription rounds it out nicely. Can become slow when you start to accumulate many messages.

Preview
Looking at what’s in the files should be as easy as looking at the files themselves. Quick View is even faster (tap space). It will show you the contents of literally almost anything, with many options like saving as another format or presenting multiple items in a slide show.

Stickies
A great way to brainstorm. A better than perfect representation of real world post-it notes. Stop killing trees and use Stickies instead!

iTunes
Monolithic solution to all that is music, media and entertainment. The iTunes store has tons of free content too. You’ll probably want to use this especially if you have an iPod. Like all things, it’s not without shortcomings. Still, a great accomplishment for the designers and engineers at Apple.

Screen Sharing
Hidden away little VNC viewer.. Or you could still use CotVNC.

Xcode
Integrated development environment for creating software on Mac. Includes Interface Builder for GUI editing. Clean, intelligent and inspiring. Robust debugging and documentation.

Free software, for all you techno cheapskates

Vienna
Professional, fast and slick RSS aggregator (web news reader). Nicer than Mail if you subscribe to a lot of feeds. See here for how to get your feeds from Mail to Vienna (and/or other RSS readers).

The Unarchiver
This will unpack almost any compressed format (zip,rar,bz, etc) quickly in Finder and assign beautiful icons to associated formats too! Only drawback is this tool only uncompresses, not compresses archive files.

Transmission
Minimalist bittorrent client. Works well, clean and simple user interface. Supports DHT and encrypted peers. Includes web interface. Linux version also available.

Adium
Multi-protocol chat and IM client. Amazing customizability, but no IRC (and sometimes flakey). If you need MSN and don’t have a Jabber server with gateways setup for iChat, this may be your next best choice.

Perian
Watch XviD, DivX, and a bunch of other codec formats in your regular QuickTime player. Export them to new formats with QT Pro. Thumbnails show up in Finder and CoverFlow too, sweeeet!

Handbrake
Easy way to get DVDs in to other device formats. You could also try the command line FFmpeg which most encoding tools are actually built upon.

X Lossless Decoder
Also known as XLD this awesome little tool quickly and easily converts your lossless audio files (APE, FLAC, etc.) in to any of the encoders supported by iTunes, including ALAC.

ScrobblePod
The most reliable tool for synchronizing play counts from your iPod to Last.fm.

iScrobbler
Submit the songs you listen to in iTunes to the Last.fm music database and build your own personal charts. Requires an account there, but much nicer than their official client. Also submits when listening to shared libraries where other clients do not.

iChm
Nice CHM reader if you have a lot of documentation in that other ugly Microsoft format.

atMonitor
Keep an eye on attractive graphs of your system’s usage and temperatures.

GraphViz
Construct and render professional diagrams and flow charts using DOT syntax.

svnX
Graphical user interface for Subversion repository usage for those who fear the command line.

NodeBox
Use Python code to generate Quartz-accelerated images and animations.

DockColor
Simple tool for changing your Dock’s background colour.

Clutter
Update the album art in your iTunes without a store account and have fun with it on your desktop!

Burn
Free and robust (BIN/CUE, ISO, VIDEO_TS, etc) optical disc burning for everyone.

DiskInventoryX
View a graph of filesystem storage space used to quickly address wasted space.

Monolingual
Free up hard drive space by removing the numerous language translation files you’ll probably never use.

ATIcellerator
Easily overclock your ATI based GPUs. Unfortunately this only seems to work with the Radeon 9000 series and earlier.

OpenMark
Benchmark your graphics card to see how well and to what degree it supports OpenGL.

Xbench
See how your system performance compares to other Macs but don’t pay too much credence to their graphics benchmarks.

WebKit
Live on the bleeding edge and see what the next versions of Safari will be like before they’re officially released. Works with existing Safari extensions too!

Valuable software that’s worth the price…

iWork ($80)
At one-tenth the price, this really blows Microsoft Office out of the water. Much easier programs to pick up and intuitively use include Pages, Numbers and now Keynote for presentations. Slicker templates even too!

TextMate ($65)
A slick text editor designed for programmers. Small quick and powerful. Excellent colours and many syntax packages. Way better than the default TextEdit.

Geekbench ($20 $15 with coupon)
The basic 32-bit version is free but if you upgrade you can test x86_64 and ppc (for Rosetta) performance as well. Site has a results database of systems so you can really find out how your machine stacks up to the other guy.

ScreenFlow ($99)
Record screencasts in like a pro. Allows you to include webcam footage and choose from mic or system sound inputs. When you’re done recording it has a great little video editor too.

Disco ($20)
Burn your discs in style. Rips and writes most DVD image formats, as well as audio CDs, video DVDs, etc. Did I mention it even comes with animated smoke?

CoverSutra (€15)
More eye-candy than anything, but still a fun and stylish way to view and control your iTunes.

VisualHub ($24 abandonware)
Quick and easy way to make high quality video conversions, for iPod, iPhone, PSP, FLV, etc. Basically you’re paying for a nice, user friendly frontend to FFmpeg. Edit: This is officially abandonware but Torrents are out there for the old versions.

VMWare Fusion ($80)
Run Windows and many other OS’s virtually inside your Mac environment with minimal performance loss. More convenient than Wine or BootCamp and great for testing, development, or just multitasking with legacy apps. Intel only though sorry PPC!

And some great cross-platform tools, so nobody feels left out!

VLC
VideoLAN Client is a solid media player with most codecs already built in. It will play FLV, MKV, OGG and many other weird and obscure formats the kids are using these days. More reliable than Perian on OS X as well and should be everyone’s default.

Blender
Powerful and free 3D modeling and animation tool, with plenty of import and export options.

GIMP
Perhaps the ultimate 2D image manipulation program. I actually prefer it over Photoshop for many things, but not always. Unfortunately, the GIMP sort of sucks on OS X.

ImageMagick
Suite of tools for processing (and even generating) images on the command line. Tricky to set up but worth it, especially if you need to modify a lot quickly.

Python
Everybody’s favourite cross-platform object oriented scripting language. You can make just about anything in Python!