Mark Pilgrim gives his list of essentials for 2006. Not too surprising. Here’s a few of my essentials and why. I’ll only list the non-obvious ones (for instance, you can probably assume that I’m using iTunes and iPhoto and you’d be right).

1. OS X - Simply the best operating system for me. It gets out of my way and doesn’t annoy me. Every other OS does one or the other. 2. TextWrangler - I bought TextWrangler before it was free. It worked for everything I need and has great Applescript support. Applescript support means a lot to me. 3. Safari - I use a stock install of Safari. No plug-ins or anything else. Of course, my biggest complaint, the bookmarks, are moved to SiteTagger. 4. Adium - Just plain lovely. A great AIM client for anyone who doesn’t care about voice chat and video chat. 5. Mail - Mail has recently become dog-slow for some odd reason. I still use it. I miss Claris Emailer but Mail suits my needs better than any other email client that I’ve tried. 6. subversion - I hate subversion. It keeps breaking on me and I rarely, if ever, need a backup that I don’t have handy via another method. Still, I keep pretty much everything in a repository just in case. I think the peace of mind knowing everything is held in a (corruptible) database and the fact that I’ve gotten into some kind of habit with it are the only reasons I keep with it. It’s still essential this year. 7. ZigVersion - Makes subversion somewhat useful. It’s essential as long as I use subversion. 8. MarsEdit - Every post to this weblog goes through MarsEdit. 9. SiteTagger - I wanted better bookmarking so I rolled my own. Now I can’t stand to be without it. 10. SuperDuper! - I keep regularly scheduled, rotating backups. SuperDuper! works great. Before SD!, I used rsync. I just can’t trust the command line for some reason…