Here is a list of my favorite Mac OS X programs, which I use on a regular basis. Feel free to post your own, but to get on my list programs must be freeware or open source, and they must use native widgets.

FFview - an image viewer. Great for large, organized photo collections (see my iPhoto rant earlier). Designed for reading manga.

MPlayer OSX 2 - _the_ movie player. Handles everything, no questions asked. I don't even bother with that quicktime shit.

Adium X - IM client. Connects to all the networks I care about. Small and unintrusive if you change the dock icon. Themeable. Very nice program.

Frozen Bubble - game. More like an addictive, polished game. A must have for any platform.

Temperature Monitor - self explanatory. I leave this running, because I like seeing graphs of sensors. This guy makes lots of other great software too. Be sure to check out TinkerTool.

Ogg Vorbis Quicktime components - lets you play .ogg files in iTunes.

I understand why everybody likes Apple's interfaces. If you try to do something simple, it usually works. However, for more complex or repetative tasks there is generally no good way to do various things. Worse still, the UI gets in your way. For example:

In iPhoto, I already have my photos organized into directories. When I import them, I get film rolls corresponding to my directories. So far so good. However, the files can not be sorted by anything inside the film rolls, so when I do a slideshow it is all out of order. No sweat, you say, I can just make albums from each film roll. Have you ever tried creating multiple albums in this program ? Good god! It is fucking terrible! You have to drag each one - the command "make album from selection" is greyed out if you select a film roll - then it switches to the album, and you have to scroll up the list back to the photo library, locate the next album, and continue. Honestly, this program is fucking irritating.

(update) Ackk! It's even worse than I first believed. There is no way to automatically sort all albums by filename either. Why Apple, Why ?!! Why does it have to suck so bad ?!! Auggghhh!!!

Is it just me, or is it impossible to buy a normal keyboard and mouse these days. Every keyboard now has at least ten "multimedia" or "internet" keys, and god help you if you want a mouse without a scroll wheel. I have on my desk a fairly ordinary keyboard (although it has those blasted "windows" keys) and a Logitech 3-button mouse. I dread the day when I have to replace the mouse. Does anyone have a source for "no-shit" keyboards and mice ? I'd be very interested.