Okay, so maybe the title of this post is just a little melodramatic. I could certainly live without them. In my fits of whimsy, I sometimes imagine a life where I got rid of all my software and all my computers and went to live in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, only peeking my head out long enough to release some bone-crunchingly beautiful prose like Annie Dillard or something.

Until that day, here’s the five pieces of software I couldn’t live without

(In no order)

Instiki

I don’t like Word documents because they’re mean and nasty and hard to access and I tend to get so bogged down in making my documents look pretty, I never get anything actually written. At the same time, I don’t like text files because they’re so plain and isolated and static. Yet I need some way to keep track of a lot of things.

Enter Instiki.

Just a small personal wiki site that lets you keep all of your documents together. It has all of the advantages of a full website such as links to other places and documents, and the ability to view it from anywhere but with more like an easier markup language (I am fluent in MarkDown) and an easier management interface.

I use my Instiki to keep track of work projects, personal tasks (e.g. “Move bank account”) and various other notes that I want to keep in a local place, such as my personal ‘wishlist’ of all the fancy stuff I want to buy myself.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is like a remote control for my Mac. It has cut the amount of time I spend doing noddy things like finding the application I want to launch or browsing to files to append a word to the end of them.

And I’m constantly finding out new cool things to do with Quicksilver. Browse over to Merlin Mann’s 43 folders if you want some real Quicksilver evangelism.

Synergy

Like many people working in the IT community, I need to have a Windows machine on my desktop in work for all the proprietary applications that we use and that I can’t get a Mac version of. Using Synergy, I am able to control both my PC and my Mac from the same keyboard and mouse. Without it, my desktop would be a mess of cables, keyboards and mice. With it, my desktop is empty and zen-like beautiful.

Virtue or Desktop Manager

Coming from Linux, I learned the amount of joy that virtual desktops can bring. Now, it’s hard for me to imagine working without them. You might as well ask me to work with one hand tied behind my back: they’re that essential* to me (Microsoft has finally picked up on the importance of Virtual Desktops and included it as part of the ‘Power Tools’ for Windows XP and then went on to try and patent the idea).

Both Virtue and Desktop Manager are fine, free Virtual Desktop managers. I have yet to see someone fail to be impressed by Virtue’s window-switching animations (if you’ve seen Panther’s fast user switching in action then you know what I’m talking about), but it doesn’t seem to be written as well as Desktop Manager, so you will end up fighting with it a little bit more.

But it’s so pretty, it’s almost worth it.

Pheeder

I’ve tried a lot of RSS readers on the Mac, and until Pheeder, I wasn’t blown away by any of them. They either try out some fancy interface tricks and end up looking just plain dumb, or else they just lack basic features (how can we have an RSS reader in 2005 without a “Mark all as read” button?!).

Pheeder is by far the best RSS reader I’ve found on the Mac.

I love its simplicity and its power and even the elegant choice of colours and fonts. What I especially like is the ability to click on a feed name and get a one-page overview of all the articles in that feed. This way, when I’m in a rush, I can scan over a feed quickly without lots of clicking.

I only have two complaints. It is expensive, for what it is. At $25, it’s roughly a quarter of the price of Panther but with only a fraction of the functionality. And I don’t know how relevant it will be after Tiger launches with its built-in RSS support.

There was loads of other stuff that deserves a mention, so quick shouts to blender, ImageWell, del.icio.us and Romeo