(Why am I in the water? See Jumping Ship.)

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks - and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

• Quicksilver

- A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

• Firefox

- The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

• Mail.app

- Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

• Adium

- Great cross-service IM.

• TextMate

- For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

• VirtueDesktops

- Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

• Parallels

- Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

• iTerm

- The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.