Blacktree's QuickSilver

This is by far the best, independently created software for the Mac... ever. That a handful of developers are behind this incredible application (with no corporate support and no definite plans for a 1.0 release), what the lead developer, Alcor, has brought to life is nothing short of a phenomenon.

More than a simple launcher, QuickSilver enables you to build commands through a beautiful bezel interface. But it does more than that. Use it to set hotkey triggers for automatically executing a command, use it to email or IM files to a friend or run just about any other command you can think of.

The community is currently devising ideas on how to better reveal the hidden power buried within QuickSilver's miniscule interface. If you have questions, the forum is first place to go.

Mozilla's Firefox

I used to swear by Safari as my browser of choice, but once I started using Firefox 0.8 on my Mac, I realized what I had been missing. Firstly, when you store a large number of autofill entries (passwords, logins and whatnot) in Safari, you begin to notice huge slowdowns overtime. That in and of itself encouraged me to look elsewhere. But when I found Firefox's Web Developer Extension, I became hooked. And now that I volunteer for Mozilla, I doubt if I'll ever stray again!

Octiv's VolumeLogic

If you live in iTunes like I do, your music is important to your daily functioning. Why not listen to your music the way it was meant to sound?

Octiv's VolumeLogic is a revolution in music fidelity and sound quality. What you thought sounded good with iTunes SoundCheck sounds incredible running through VolumeLogic. Go download the demo and see for yourself. I kid you not, I can't stand listening to music without it!

Monolingual

Okay, so this software might not save your life, but, if you're like my roommate and are looking for a way to reclaim precious hard disk space, you need this! Monolingual works by removing unneeded language files from your applications and system files. You might not realize it, but every time you install a new application or install a Software Update, you're likely adding a few megabytes of unnecessary junk to your system. Well, if you only need one language on your computer, the aptly named Monolingual can help.

And its savings are nothing to sneeze at: my roommate's 20GB harddrive was down to just under 1GB and he was looking for a way to grab back some space. He asked me if he could trash anything in his System Library folder, since it seemed to be a duplicate of the stuff in his User Library folder. My eyes grew big and I shrieked, "NO!" Instead, I grabbed Monolingual for him, and after 30 minutes or so, had removed 471MB of unwanted language files! (and it also helped that I removed a 7.3GB log file!)