These are some of my favorite programs for the PC.
Graphics
Photo and Image Editing
- Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite If you can afford the Creative Suite 4, I highly recommend it.
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 is a scaled down and more affordable version of Photoshop.
- The Gimp 2 is free and really good, but a bit hard to learn.
- Adobe Illustrator Creative Suite for drawing
- iPhoto (Part of iLife 05) is quite good actually
Desktop Publishing
- Adobe InDesign CS (Excellent)
Web Authoring
- Dreamweaver for web page creation, also look at Flash.
3d Animation
- Maya Complete or Unlimited
- Maya PLE (free but stupid water marks)
- Poser 6 for people creation
Stop Motion
Video Production
- Final Cut Studio HD (If you can afford it, it is a great deal) - Does it all
- Final Cut Pro Excellent professional level program for video editing
- Final Cut Express HD (Great step up from iMovie) for video editing
- DVD Studio Pro For DVD menu creation (Professional Level)
- Adobe After Effects For compositing
- iMovie (Part of iLife) for Video editing
- iDVD (Part of iLife) DVD menu creation and burning
Office Suites
- OpenOffice is free and works incredibly close to Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Office does work great, and you can get the student version for usually $150.00 or less.
Computer Utilities
- Toast 6 for burning CDs/DVDs
- Stuffit for unzipping files
- Preview (Part of OSX) works just fine for reading pdf files
Spyware & Security
- Turn on and configure your firewall :-)
Multimedia
- VLC for playing DVD's (Besides the native player that comes with it)
- DiVX 6.0 for movies
- iTunes (Part of iLife 05 and free to download) for mp3 playing. Ok, but all I am aware of
Internet
- Firefox For web browsing (Safari is good as well)
- iChat (Part of OSX) works just fine for instant messaging
