Great Mac Software

While there is a great amount of discussion and debate about digital audio workstation programs like Logic and Digital Performer, I’ve received a number of email asking what software I use for different kinds of day-to-day tasks, so I thought I’d share some experiences and recommendations about some Mac programs that I find indispensable for my daily work.

Yes, we’re only talking about Mac software here as I’m a devoted fan of the Macintosh. Years ago I worked as a computer consultant and financial software designer, and spent a lot of time with Windows. Suffice to say, I won’t be going back any time soon. For me, the Macintosh operating system is simply better and the user experience can’t be beat. The operating system feels like a finely engineered piece of machinery where every corner, every moving part has been precisely designed from top quality components.

Macintosh software I use regularly and highly recommend:

Web Browsing
Firefox and Safari – two great browsing applications. I prefer Firefox for most of what I do, as it’s more customizable and third-party support is better.

Word Processing
Pages, part of iWork 09 from Apple. Far more streamlined than Microsoft Word 2008, and not as sluggish as Word can be, especially with larger documents.

Spreadsheets
Numbers, part of iWork 09 from Apple. A different user interface than the widely-used Excel, but the same kind of streamlined, solid performance as Pages.

Presentation
Keynote, part of iWork 09 from Apple, is far superior to Powerpoint, and can create some eye-popping presentations even using the built-in templates.

Email
Mail.app, part of Mac OSX. As I’m away from the office frequently, I use an iPhone to handle email and net tasks when I’m not at the office. To avoid the need to manually sync email from my Mac to the iPhone, I use a Microsoft Exchange based mail server service called ExchangeMyMail.com – with an Exchange account, I can see the same email boxes, calendar events, and contacts on my iPhone that I do on my Mac, and everything automatically syncs. For years I used Microsoft Entourage, because it supported Exchange, but recently switched to Mail.app when I upgraded my Mac to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, which includes integrated Exchange support built right into the operating system. Mail.app is faster, works better with Exchange, and doesn’t store all my emails in one giant database file the way Entourage does.

Contacts
Apple’s Address Book, part os Mac OSX. Works with Exchange, any change shows up on my iPhone automatically, and integrated across the OSX operating system to other programs.

Personal Information Manager
I use a great program called Yojimbo to organize everything from serial numbers for software to account numbers, notes about any topic, various access information, and literally everything I used to put on yellow post-it notes. Very handy program, allows sensitive information to be encrypted, easy to use.

Task Management
Things is an award-winning Mac program that works nicely with its iPhone version to provide an easy to use, full featured to-do list.

Graphics Editing
Pixelmator does everything I need and more, without the bulk and extra features of Photoshop.

PC Emulation
On those occasions where I have to test web pages using Windows, I use VMware Fusion running Windows XP. Works better and faster than Parallels.

Instant Messaging
I use Adium, a free program for the Mac that allows you to communicate with anyone with an AOL, .Mac, Yahoo, or MSN instant message account. Although it doesn’t support video, it’s fantastic as a single program to handle all IM tasks.

Video Chat and Video Calls
Skype and iChat, depending on the situation. I spend a good deal of my time traveling, and routing calls to my Macbook Pro via Skype makes staying in touch easy.

Blog and Twitter Posting
Blogo is a great program that allows me to compose blog posts on my Mac and upload quickly and easily to my blog. Also includes multiple-account Twitter support, providing a single place to post to blogs and Twitter.

HTML Web Page Editing
Coda from Panic is great for HTML level web page editing, including a built-in preview window based on Safari and built-in FTP to upload and download files from your site.

FTP (website file transfers)
Transmit from Panic provides rock solid FTP, and its Favorites list works well even when you’re managing a large number of sites.

PDF Archives
I’m a big fan of being as paper-less as possible, and Paperless by Mariner Software is a big help in this regard, although I’m now looking at DevonTHINK as a more fully-featured PDF archive program.

Backup
Apple’s Time Machine (part of OSX) is handy, but I use SuperDuper because the end result of the backup is a disk that is a match for the disk you are backing up, and is bootable. In case of a disk problem, just switch to the backup disk and you’re instantly ready to go.

These are some of the programs I use that I find most helpful. I welcome any comments about Mac programs you find useful!