Focus is a free app for OSX that shows you which application currently has focus by displaying an icon on your desktop.  Typically the dock gives you no information about what application is active.  You could just look at the menu bar to see, but a large floating icon like the one Focus gives you is a great visual cue.

Alright - the title of this post might be a stretch, but Namely certainly is one of the best I have come across lately.  It works so well that I have already removed at least a dozen app icons from my dock!

The idea behind Namely is quite simple.  Hit a customizable hot key and start typing in the name of the application you want to launch.  Once Namely finds your application, press enter to launch it.  Namely works much like Spotlight, but is optimized for filtering and finding applications so Namely works very quickly.

What is your favorite launcher?

Tangerine is an application for OSX that hooks into iTunes and creates playlists based on the beats per minute (BMP) of songs in your library.

Mark this as nifty… VirtualSafari is a Web-based frontend for Apple’s WebKit HTML rendering engine. It makes it possible to host a website which looks like the Safari browser and allows the end-user to *load* pages rendered with the WebKit engine (see the demo). When you load up VirtualSafari in any browser, you are shown a window that looks like the Safari browser. Enter an url into a text box, and your URL is sent to a PERL script that processes the page in Webkit and sends it back to the VirtualSafari page. It should be noted that VirtualSafari is an application that must be run on a Mac with a working web server, so if you have one Mac in your office that is used for testing purposes, all PC client can remotely look at pages as they would display in Safari.

StartupSound is a prefPane plugin for OSX that allows you to control the volume of the Mac startup sound.  You can make it quieter, louder (not sure why) or silent.

Home and Away is a neat utility that allows you to automatically mount specific volumes and launch certain applications based on your location. For example at work you may want to mount a volume your corporate fileserver, while at home you may want to just mount a drive on your home network. You may also want your IM client to launch automatically at home but not at the office.

Visor is a SIMBL plugin for OSX that exposes a terminal session via a very cool visor effect (much like the consoles found in games such as Quake). The visor can be activated by pressing a customizable key combination. To make your visor start on login, check out these installation instructions.

Here is a wonderful list of simple Mac OS X Tips that will let you really customize your OSX environment. I the tip that lets me make my dock show hidden applications with a transparent icon, and the tip that lets you move Dashboard widgets directly to your desktop!

Yummy FTP has quickly become my favorite FTP/SFTP client for the Mac. I like it so much, I even bought it! This client is packed with some great features like fast threaded transfers, failure auto-recovery, uploading from finder, auto-upload folders, directory synchronization, scheduling and remote editing.

Mac only: Textmate Shortcuts Desktop Wallpaper is a handy wallpaper for those of you who are just beginning to learn the powerful code editor for OSX. If you want to add your own favorite shortcuts, the author has made the PSD version available.