Songbird

-Songbird is a free open source application for listening and organizing your music collection.  It is compatible with most if not all ipods and other mp3 players.  Songbird is a total replacement for itunes and takes up about a 4th of the space Itunes requires.  It is built on firefox and can traverse any website, if that site hosts any music files Songbird will create an easy to use playlist and allow you to download them if possible.  Go check it out you won't be Sorry. http://getsongbird.com/

Pidgin

-  A free opensource chat client, it supports all major chat procols and some minor ones as well.  It has everything you would expect a chat application to have and a little more.  The client is sleek fast and unobtrusive.  If you don't have all chats in one client get it now! http://www.pidgin.im/

Aptana

- Is an eclipse based ide for web development.  It's actually better by a long shot than the eclipse for java or any other version of eclipse I have used.  It allows you easily organize and create html, css, xhtml and many more file types.  Web languages have so many attributes it can make your head spin Aptana provides them as pop-ups so you don't have to keep all that info in your melon. http://www.aptana.com/

Twhirl

-If you don't know what twhirl is I am surprised your reading this.  Thwirl is an application built for the adobe air platform that allows you to post messages to twitter from your desktop.  However, it also support for many other twitter like websites which are mostly based off laconica.  It doesn't have as many features as tweet deck, but if  you are a member of a laconica community twhirl is right for you.  http://twhirl.org/

Evernote

-It's the note taking powerhouse of the century, for work, school, or any other reason Evernote is your best notetaking friend.  It allows you to write and organize notes. The best feature is obviously the organization abilities which are outstanding.  It's helpful thats its available as a desktop client or online so you can reach your notes from anywhere. http://evernote.com/

Launchy

- A free opensource application launching utility.  You will never to hit the start button again.  It's saves tons of time and in addition to launching apps has; math functions, can traverse your file structure, and perform google searches. www.launchy.net

VIM

- Vim is an opensource text editor with tons of features built in.  It comes standard on linux but can be installed on windows or mac.  It's amazing how much faster you can acheive most programming tasks from Vim and all of the functions you can perform with Vim.  www.vim.org/

Picasa3

- Picasa is the end to be all of photo organization and storage, I can't live with out.  It comes with a host of features from minor photo editing and enhancement to back up assistance. It's very well polished and offered by google for free. http://picasa.google.com/

Super Duper ( Mac Only )

Probably the Mac App I use most often. SuperDuper allows you to create A full bootable back-up of your internal HD to a FW or USB external HD for an emergency. And that's just the free version. When you buy the paid version it lets you create what is called a Smart Update. A Smart Update compares the two HD's in real time, and copies only whats necessary to make both HD's Identical to eachother, much like Raid Mirroring, but a lot safer. In fact I'm the one that told Leo Laporte about it, and now he uses it too. SuperDuper can be found at this Web Site : http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html