There are two possibilities (well, actually just one…):

1. MacTeX packages: this is the new “standard” for LaTeX on MacOS, it is based on the official TUG TeX Live distribution. Just install the “TeXLive-2007.dmg” (full TeX Live distribution from TUG, unmodified).
2. Gerben Wierda's i-installer: Mind that Wierda dropped the support for its i-installer; therefore the future of this software is unclear. Moreover, the i-installer may conflict with any of your custom installed software, so: do not use it by any means. Download the i-installer application and use it to install and keep up to date the package gwTeX based on TeX Live.

You need to install ghostscript as well. . To this purpose you can use MacPorts.

You can use Aquamacs, an easy-to-use, Mac-style Emacs for Mac OS X (sic.). It comes with LaTeX support built in. The only caveat is that you need to install ispell (or aspell) to get the internal spell checker to work. To this purpose you can use MacPorts or cocoAspell.

On top of Aquamacs (or of your favourite emacs) you can install the Enhanced Carbon Emacs (ECE) plugin: Enhanced Carbon Emacs is now a universal enhancement plugin for arbitrary (unix, carbon, or aqua) emacs distributions (such as Yaced, Aquamacs, CarbonEmacs Tiger, or the native darwin emacs in /usr/bin/emacs). This includes a fully customisable LaTeX editing environment based on AucTeX, RefTeX, Preview and other packages. Basically, ECE is a convenient way to properly install a large number of pre-configured useful packages for LaTeX users, which includes a hack of AUCTeX, that allows to have a more intuitive handling of the “view” command in a macintosh context (in particular, for non-pdftex users willing to preview in pdf). From emacs, you can launch directly any latex process or any mac application on files or regions you are working on.

There are other alternatives, like iTeXMac or TeXShop.

Apple Preview.app doesn't reload the file when it changes, which is king of annoying. A good previewer for latex is PDFView. You can use TeXniscope which works with DVIs as well; but it doesn't seem to play well with intel macs.

Check out LaTeXiT, handy in combination with Keynote, Powerpoint, or other software in which you want to include latex snippets.

As for bib files, BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X; it also allows you to export to HTML and RSS (added by Rosella, 14 Feb 2007).

• Getting Started With TeX