Now that Leopard has been released, I’m going to order a new Macbook. Sorry PowerBook G4, you’ve served me well for many years, but its time for an upgrade.

As part of the upgrade, I took a quick inventory of the applications I use. In addition to the built-in apps such as Address Book, iCal, Mail and iTunes, there are several applications that have become necessities for me. When the new Mac shows up, I’ll be busy downloading and installing these popular applications:

• Adium
• CocoaMySQL
• Colloquy
• Firefox
• Growl and GrowlTunes
• NetNewsWire currently using an old version (2.0.1), will try the lite (free) version
• Quicksilver
• TextExpander
• TextMate and the Vibrant Ink Theme

Ruby on Rails is bundled with 10.5, so I don’t think there is much to do there–other than move my Rails projects. iTerm is nice when working on Rails, but it no longer seems necessary since Terminal is tabbed now.

I’ve been using Microsoft Office X since I’ve had the PowerBook and have very few complaints about it. So, I’ll probably stick with MS Office rather than spend the extra $79 on Apple’s iWork. I’m less positive about the other Microsoft product I use regularly, Virtual PC. There are one or two applications I need to run that have no Mac equivalent. Using Virtual PC has always been painfully slow for me. While Virtual PC will run better on a faster machine with more memory, Microsoft is no longer upgrading the product, so I think it is time to try something else. I’ll probably purchase Parallels or VMware Fusion as a replacement.

This list of applications was longer than expected and I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. I’ll update this post when I find out what those missing applications are. This will undoubtedly happen while I am franticly trying to complete a task on the new computer without the proper tool installed.

The mouse and other pointing devices are great innovations for personal computing. Excessive use, however, can really slow you down. Since I’m not a fan of deceleration, I’ve been loving Quicksilver lately. Other Quicksilver users I’ve talked to share the same feeling. In addition to giving you quick, keyboard access to applications and files, it can do more advanced actions like providing speedy access to contacts in your address book. Many of these advanced actions are provided through a growing library of plugins. Applescripts can also be run with the tap of a couple keys. This makes Quicksilver exceedingly flexible. As a simple example, I made this basic Applescript that launches my most used applications in one go.

Unfortunately, Windows users are out of luck, Quicksilver is Mac only. But, there are alternatives. Launchy is quite popular and Lifehacker points to a promising alternative called Skylight. I don’t have any first hand experience with either of these Windows applications, but if they share at least some of Quicksilver’s features, I recommend trying them out.