What are your essential programs?

Mac:

Firefox: Please don't make me explain this.

Final Cut Pro: Premiere, Pinnacle, and iMovie can kiss my ass as this is the best all-around nonlinear video app I've used in like ever lol. I mean, look, it even prompts a grammatically-incorrect "lol." Avid is powerful as all hell but FCP seems to be more intuitive and, to date, hasn't limited me in any way in terms of what I can and cannot do. I'm certain at some point my knowledge and skill will surpass some of the few limitations of FCP and I'll need to graduate to Avid, but for the time being Final Cut is THE app for me.

DVD Studio Pro: Companion app to FCP, takes movies exported with FCP and burns them to DVD with full animation and interactivity functionality in menus. Basically an insanely robust DVD authoring/mastering suite.

Adium: Nice multiprotocol instant-messaging utility. Gaim is nice, but I really don't want to have to open up X11 every time I want to use it. I only wish Adium supported GPG crypto on messages, as I'm a paranoid InfoSec student and privacy-obsessed Slashdotter who's convinced of any and all Illuminati conspiracy theories I've heard. Seriously, though, Adium is nice.

Cog: Basically Foobar2000 for OS X. Great for when I want to just spin some tunes and not have the memory-devouring iTunes open. Don't need gobs of metadata for playing back some metal, plzkthxbye. iTunes is fine for Podcasts and iPod updating, but for playback, Cog has a nice, small memory footprint and just plain works. If they'd only add a "new window" item to the file menu, I wouldn't have to quit and relaunch every time I accidentally close the playlist/control window.

Thunderbird: Again, please don't make me explain this. Best E-mail client in evar liek wut lol. LIEK WUT LOL.

VLC, Mplayer, and QuickTime Pro: Between these three, there's nothing I can't play back with the exception of the hideous WMV3 codec (that I avoid like the plague even on my Win32 box). VLC has some nice advanced features too, such as streaming over networks.

Mac the Ripper: DVD ripping app. Pretty straightforward, though I need to see if there are any updates that tell Sony's ARccOS Fair-Use-Denial scheme where to cram it.

DVD2OneX: DVD compression app. Squeeze DVD-9 to DVD-5, remove unwanted audio/subtitle tracks (great for ripping anime DVDs, removing the Japanese audio and subtitles, and watching my sub-whore friends puzzle over how to get JP audio. Yes, I am an asshole.)

Max: CDParanoia-based CD ripper with support for encoding with LAME, FLAC, OGG, and a few other codecs. Great app, and supports multiple drives so I can do 3 CDs at once with my FireWire burners. FF6 soundtrack rip COMIN LIEK WUT.

MP3 Alarm Clock: Most useful Mac app nobody's ever heard of...ever. Does exactly what its name implies: plays a playlist of MP3 files at a designated time, has a snooze button, and a few other nifty features like gradually decreasing snooze time and gradually increasing volume.

OSXvnc: VNC remote-access client/server pair for OS X. I'm a remote-access whore and hate being away from my box (Heeho, addiction for all!), so it's great to have in a pinch.

Toast: GREAT CD-recording app for OS X. Mac users in general should be no strangers to the splendours of Toast. Supports multiple image formats, has built-in transcoding for VCD/SVCD/DVD, does picture-CD, does all the stuff Nero does on Windows and looks prettier while in the process.

NeoOffice/J: Java-based OpenOffice implementation for Mac. Slow as hell to launch, but it supports OpenOffice's file formats and hey, it's open-source.

GIMP: Don't usually feel like going through the install steps for Photoshop (read: pain to crack, not worth it), and I've grown to like the GMP's interface better anyway.

And possibly the most useful Mac app of all, the Terminal. UNIX shell access to my whole box.

Jam it back in, in the dark.