I use the Mac OSX daily for my job as a developer. It’s a Unix based OS so it has a very ‘hackerish’ feel to it if you get past the shiny GUI. In fact, Leopard has PHP, perl and python installed and ready for use from the get-go. Here are some tools that I use for the Mac to make my life easier.
ITerm
ITerm is free Terminal replacement with a couple of useful features. One that I find useful in particular is the bookmark feature. This allows you to store CLI commands and execute them with a single shortcut key. An example is launching an SSH tunnels so I don’t need to enter the entire command everytime.
This is a completely awesome SQL client that is available for Windows, Mac, Linux. There are also different flavours that support other databases such as Postgres. The lite version is pretty useful with the ability to save queries, edit tables on the fly and view query results in a snappy manner. Previous versions had some stability issues, but with the latest version 8.0, it’s been pretty rock solid. The Lite version is missing some features such as table/data/structure synchronization, but it’s definitely a great tool so you can avoid using phpMyAdmin.
If you hack around PHP, then you’re probably already using Eclipse PDT. It’s the platform to which Zend Corporation creates its Zend IDE. The free version is pretty comprehensive with built in SVN, and tonnes of add-ons.
If you’re hacking around in Java and don’t quite like Eclipse, then give Netbeans a try. It is a Java based IDE that also doubles as a RAD (rapid application developement) tool. You can by pass pesky Swing programming and simply drag and drop components onto forms and tie that all in with Java logic. Useful for making quick applets.
TextWrangler is a good freeware text editor that has some basic support for development languages such as PHP, C, C++ with syntax highlighting. It’s a pretty competent text editor that doubles as a code editor in a jam.
The venerable GNU image manipulation program. This is not a developer tool per-se, but it is useful if you’re doing simple web tasks such as resizing images, and working with screenshots. The tablet support is lacking in the OS X version, but it has features such as layers and effects to make itself more than useful.