What Mac Software Titles Get Your Seal Of Approval?

Thursday, March 19, 2009 | Opinion | Read or Post a Comment

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.... (excerpted).

11 Reader Comments

Andrew said:

Bento, the most practical, useful program I have ever used.

Darryl Rehr said:

POPMonitor.

This is the simplest way to streamline your e-mail. It allows you to peek into your incoming messages while they are still on your ISP’s server.

POPMonitor lets you zap them before you retrieve them with your e-mail program. And much faster than doing the same thing online on one of the web-based retrieval sites.

Art said:

We are moving our office over to Marketcircle’s Daylite and saying goodbye to workarounds with iCal, Mail and Filemaker.

Mac360 did a review a few years back and we should have checked it out more seriously and saved ourselves a lengthy crossover since the number of clients and volume of data is much higher now.

I’ve never really paid much attention to Productivity software but this is truly an amazing product that’s going to help us reduce errors and stay on task.

TinkerTool System is another piece of software. It allows you to tinker with your Mac’s interface. Much more than that, it allows you to set ACLs for File Sharing goodness on Apple’s client OS.

Editor’s Note: “Daylite is a great product for a Mac office. Very capable, but requires a built-in Mac sys admin.”

Jeff P. said:

A few of my favorites:
LaunchBar (quick way to start programs)
PathFinder (much better than the Finder)
NetNewsWire (easy way to manage RSS feeds)
SpamSieve (almost eliminates spam)
MaxMenus (hit one key to get a menu with all your recent apps, documents, mounted volumes, etc)
SuperDuper (reliable backups made easy)

Joe said:

BBEdit tops the list for me too. This is the one program that puts me ahead of the game. I would happily pay twice as much for it as it pays for itself in a couple of days. Photoshop CS4 stinks. I have it but I prefer CS1 by far. QuicKeys and Default Folder are invaluable. Filemaker Pro I use every day too. I prefer FireFox to Safari because of the developer tools. Sound Studio, excellent. Interarchy, brilliant. Parallels Desktop, hard to beat. Script Debugger for integrating everything with AppleScript. And yes, SuperDuper has aved me lot of heartaches.

Cody the Coder said:

It’s Bare Bones BBEdit all the way. Best editor for the Mac. So good that you should buy a Mac just to use it.

Damned expensive, though.

terry said:

Eye TV for me. I travel every week so I use it to record TV shows and movies, copy them to my Mac Book, and watch what I want, when I want.

cloner said:

Carbon Copy Cloner, fer sure, dude. It’s as good and fast as Super Duper but totally free, has extra features and an automatic scheduler.

Highly recommended!!

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