o(ther)l/log

Recently, a friend of mine switched to the Mac, from Linux/x86. So I compiled a short list of applications I'm using or that might be interesting for him, and other tips and tricks and URLs to ease his acclimatization on the platform. I'm posting this here in case it's useful for somebody else.

IRC client: Colloquy. The holy grail ? an IRC client that I find useful and nice to use, and I think I tried absolutely every IRC client on the platform. Really customizable, including the display styles, open-source, nice architecture.

Camino. If you're a regular Firefox user on another platform and a little uneasy with Safari, then you should try Camino. It is the Mozilla Gecko engine, embedded in a native GUI, including with what you would expect from an OS X browser (keychain integration, etc).

Adium: a multi-procol Instant Messaging client. I'm not -really - using this one (I'm an iChat user), but it looks quite nice and I often read good reviews about it.

Chicken of the VNC: a simple and cool VNC client. Note that with 10.4, every mac comes with a VNC server (in System Preferences, choose Sharing and then "Apple Remote Desktop", in the "Access Privileges" sheet, you'll find settings for VNC viewers).

DiskInventory X, a graphic disk usage tool. I'm using it a lot.

Non-X11, native UI Emacs implementations:http://www.wordtech-software.com/aquamacs.html or http://mindlube.com/products/emacs/index.html

A really nice port of GraphViz to OS X

MySQL Administrator: they have a native OS X version of the administration tool. Update ! they released also the Query Browser at the WWDC.

NetNewsWire: an excellent RSS aggregator. Freeware and shareware versions available.