Glims

My major frustration with safari was that it could only support Google as it's search engine, and there was no way to change this without editing Safari's coding, a risky process that crashed safari if your modified version didn't have exactly the same file size as the original.

Enter Glims, a small app with allows you to add about 20 different search engines to safari and put them in order of your preference.

Other long-awaited features include:

• Full screen browsing 
• Undo close tab using Cmd-Z
• Favicons show at the top of tabs
• Thumbnails in Google and Yahoo searches.
• Session saving

If safari supported all the features that Glims provided, a lot fewer mac users would be switching to firefox.

Main Menu

Main Menu is a small app that sits in your menu bar and provides you with easy access to a large number of maintenance tasks for your mac, such as force emptying trash, cleaning cashes and logs, and repairing permissions and indexes. It also lets you create scheduled tasks and execute these every set period of time for you. Everything it does is posted to you via Growl.

Developer's site

Bricksmith

Bricksmith lets you create lego models using your mac. There is a large array of parts available and once you get the knack of assembling these in 3D space you can make very realistic looking models. The highlight is probably the Minifigure generator which builds lego people for you - perfect for creating a forum profile image of you which stands out.

Developer's site

Processing

Processing is an open source Java-based development environment that aims to make it fast and easy to program prototype software (each project is known as a "sketch"). While the basic syntax is of a Java nature, many libraries have already been created to make programming using Processing simple and fast.

It supports serial communication, making it a useful tool to work with electronics boards like the Arduino (a versatile opensource project, which can even be used to send data back to your mac to run applescripts using Applescript Proxy)

For budding programmers, this is a great environment to learn, with a large amount of support from their website.

Developer's site

Portable Apps

After a short break, I've decided to get the ball rolling again with a link to an array of standard mac applications which have been made portable, allowing you to keep them on your USB key-ring and run them directly from flash memory on any mac you visit. The list of apps that have been modified to do this is substantial, containing the core mac apps like Mail and iCal as well as other major opensource programs like Gimp, Audacity, Nvu and Openoffice.

Developer's site