Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least some of them):

All of them are free. One or two are ad-supported.

The only three things guaranteed in life are death, taxes… and your periodic update to the Ahimsa theme. Fortunately only the first two are injurious to your health, while the surgeon general actively encourages use of the Ahimsa theme by pregnant women and children ages four and above.

So, here it is, Ahimsa 3.3!

What’s new?

• Bottom bar fading in index page now uses jQuery
• Show permitted HTML tags when comment box gains focus
• Edit/Reply for Comments hide/display on hover
• Added a download box style (use a div with class=downloadbox and within that a link to the download with class=download)
• New “comment guide” option to display some help text next to comment box
• Fixed comment date/time display weirdness
• Added Google “Droid Sans” font as fallback for “Trebuchet MS”
• Converted all relative font specifications to absolute pt format
• Lightened blockquote and list backgrounds in default skin
• Removed first letter styling for post content
• Changed behaviour of blockquotes and lists not to stretch background under jacent elements
• Handle lists within blockquotes by not styling them
• More spacing between posts in the index/home view
• Fixed the “single pixel offset” problem when sidebar is collapsed
• Made background colour more consistent during slidebar slide in/out
• Fixed an issue where post bottom bar background colour did not extend all the way to the bottom
• CSS cleanup and many, many small fixes
• Tested on Firefox 3.6.3, Safari 5, Chrome 5.0

Fotile is a simple web app for generating a tile puzzle from an image, which can then be solved by swapping pieces. Images can be loaded from a URL, from a local directory (under your Fotile installation root) or from Flickr’s “interesting” page. You can read more about Fotile here.

Slipcover is a free Mac OS X app that can be used to “create custom case icons for all your media files”. In other words, customise the icons of your files, typically media files. Its a slick app and provides means for creating custom “cases”. Worth a download.

If you recently got a Magic Mouse either because it came with your new Mac or because you got excited by the hype and bought one, only to find that the dratted thing is missing the third and fourth buttons which you had so cleverly bound to Expose and Spaces, there is good news. A free application calledMagicPrefs lets you not only add this functionality to the Magic Mouse but lets you define gestures and perform other kinky mods that should be worth a lot more than the millions that Apple paid to acquire Lala.

UPDATE: TUAW has a pointer to another free tool called BetterTouchTool.

Say you are not a PC. And you use MySQL in some manner that is compliant with the rules and ordinances of your community. And you are part of the dying breed that considers web GUIs nice and all, but a native client application is where it’s at. Then, the go to tool on the Mac for your MySQL interaction needs was CocoaMySQL. And if you thought the awesomeness of this tool could not be improved on, you didn’t reckon on SequelPro, the son of CocoaMySQL. And the hits keep on coming. The latest version (0.9.6) delivers on the SSH tunnelling capability that has always existed as a teaser in the UI. Did I already say awesome?