What Mac Software Titles Get Your Seal Of Approval?

Starting with Mac OS X, most Mac users have favorite software, applications and utilities which are used often, recommended often.

Besides the obvious choices of OS X and iLife, what’s on your list of personally certified seal of approval Mac software? Mail? Safari? Microsoft Office? What we use regularly may not be what we truly like and would recommend to others, right?

For example, I’m a known worshipper of Microsoft’s Office for Mac. There’s that whole business world stuck on Microsoft thing, and the Mac version of Office helps me remain fully compatible.

However, for all the bells and whistles in Office, the only application I truly love to use is Entourage (email, contacts, schedules, projects). Word and Excel are too cumbersome to be pleasant, and PowerPoint is overrated.

I prefer Safari 4.0 and the new tabs to the archaic and arcane mess of Firefox, but that’s just me. It’s not religion. It’s taste. Apple has taste. Mozilla’s religion isn’t as tasty.

The Photoshop crowd would chime in with their worshipful praise of Adobe’s biplatform flagship product. What’s left after that?

My Mac360 cohort has a site where he lists “certified Mac software.” NoodleMac is a regularly updated list of Mac software that Ron likes, uses, follows, trusts.

For example, high on the list of so-called certified software is 1Password, the premiere password organizer. As is the popular utility Onyx, and the MySQL utility Navicat. Oddly, Firefox is on the list. Go figure.

CleanApp is there, along with VectorDesigner (sort of a poor man’s Fireworks) and the eye candy CoverStream. Also on the list is one of my favorites, Together.

These are more a certified list of favorites than anything, though taste and experience come in to play when selecting Mac applications and utilities.

This brings up an interesting question. Take a look at your Mac software, the titles that do not come from Apple, Adobe, or Microsoft. Which applications and utilities are essential to you and why?

What is it about a particular app that makes it a favorite to you, but maybe not to someone else? For example, when talking about Mac utilities to help you out when your Mac goes wonky, AppleJack shows up on the list, though I don’t know many Mac users who know what it is or what it does.

It’s likely that most of us have favorite software. Are the favorites on your list of software really good?

Are they so good you’re willing to recommend them to someone else (and suffer the lost friendship consequences when something goes wrong?)?

If you like it and use it then there must be a reason or two, right? With so many Mac software bundles going on these days you can try out a dozen or so apps and utilities for the price of one.

So, back to the future with the original question. What Mac software titles get your personal seal of approval and why? Share in the Comments section below.