The following applications are just a few of the freeware/donationware applications for OS X that I use fairly often. They are useful enough that they should be included in the OS yet for one reason or another are left out (read: limited interest, legal concerns, and redirected focus of R&D). To be perfectly honest I have not donated money to any of these applications yet; however, as soon as I am out of college and have a little bit of spending money I will certainly pay back. Rambling aside, lets look at some software…
Alarm Clock
This small, simple, and elegant application sits up in the menu bar taking up almost as little space as it does system resources. That said it is by no means a weak application. It serves as an alarm clock, timer, and stopwatch. Alarm Clock can also wake the computer from sleep to set off the alarm in time. It is easy to figure out and quite configurable.
Camino
Camino is a wonderful web browser for OS X. It is strong, quick, stable, and in my opinion and on my machine much more all around reliable than Safari, and far less of an eyesore/resource hog than Firefox. A quick google search will reveal lots about this application.
Plex
Plex is a unique approach to media playing and user customization. Perhaps the largest niche that his application filled that nothing else could was that of cataloging and streaming data from a SAMBA share. The need for a library to manage digital content has become important with the large amounts of digital content that we compile. Another need that arises with all of that content is the inevitable number of filetypes, and instead of transcoding them all into an itunes friendly format and then accepting that using a network share is going to be difficult to manage at best, you could use plex. Not to mention the eye candy factor.