Hopefully this page can act as a springboard for useful Internet applications for OS X. If you have any questions or comments do not hesitate to email me at tapella@hotmail.com. Check VersionTracker for more recent updates, particularly their MacOS X Internet Utilities section. Another update site that is good for this is MacUpdate. For game-related utilities and updates, the best spot is MacGameFiles.
Additionally, I'll just mention one MacOS X application I couldn't live without : LaunchBar. Now I also use Quicksilver, which is similar in many respects.
World Wide Web:
Camino : Like Firefox, Camino is built on the open-source Netscape project called Mozilla. It is very fast and supports the Quartz rendering style, which means that text will look good.
OmniWeb : This is a Cocoa web browser that used to be for OPENSTEP. These guys have lots of experience writing applications to what is now MacOS X. OmniWeb uses Quartz rendering exlusively, and pages that draw properly tend to look better here than in any other browser I've seen. [Trialware $15]
Safari : Apple's very own lightweight web browser. Small, and quick, like Speedy Gonzales.
FTP:
Interarchy : I used to use Interarchy exclusively for OS 9. Now I feel that the price has increased too much to support all the gadget features I don't need, so I stopped using it until I recently found a special for $10. Still, if you have intensive FTP needs, it's a good program. [$60 Shareware]
Transmit : Another FTP client. This has a pretty good interface on it; very easy for new users. It almost universally receives high review scores. [Free Demo, $30 Commercial]
News Groups:
MT-Newswatcher : Great multi-threaded news reading program. Not only my favorite news reader, but it's free.
Google Groups : If I need to read newsgroups these days, I tend to just go to Google's web-available archives. These used to exist as Déjà News.
RSS:
NetNewsWire : This is a great RSS client for Mac. There is a free Lite version.
Safari : Apple's web browser also has RSS built-in starting with the version written for OS X 10.4.
Telnet:
Telnet is built in to MacOS X. You need to use the Terminal application. Open up a new terminal window and then type: telnet 123.456.789.012:1234 (that last part being an example IP address and port number; domain names in words are fine too). Another example would be: telnet sneezy.saw.net:7900