goodapps

iWork, by Apple. This suite of three applications demonstrates that you really don’t need Microsoft Office to play well with others. These solutions are plain better designed. They simplify by doing really well what you trully need, and de-emphasizing or supressing what you hardly use. The results are a very intuitive word processor where you can compose graphics on the fly, spreadsheets that are powerful but at the same time beautiful… And presentations that feature sophisticaded animations with total ease. It is a steal for less than $80!

Growl, is a utility for geeks only. It basically unifies all the notifications from most of your Mac software and gives you total control of how every background action or event is brought to your attention: Pop-overs, sounds, email, events or even remote computers can receive alerts on the style that you stipulate. A must for any technically-oriented Mac user. (To be honest, it should be integral part of Mac OS).

Stuffit Expander, by Smith Micro. This is the grandad of the archiving utilities for the Mac. Although the OS can archive and decompress in Zip, Stuffit will open vitually any other format out there. I suggest you install it, and in preferences, assign all types to be opened by it, then activate to delete the source archive after decompressing, and set to watch the Downloads folder to open archives automatically.

Awaken, by Embraceware Software. A multi-purpose alarm clock and timer. Programable to do almost anything you wish on your computer at a determined time. A lesser alternative is Aurora, by Metaquark.

Flip4Mac, by Microsoft. This component will allow Quicktime to play the popular WMA and WMV video formats. You need this as much as Perian!

Perian, is a package of codecs for Quicktime that will allow it to play any video format that may not play already natively (AVI, DIVX, MS-MPEG4, etc, etc). You need this (non-optional, really). For additional support of WMA, get Flip4Mac

Coda, by Panic, is a friendly, inexpensive alternative to Dreamweaver. Probably not what you would use to develop a full-fledge web service, but pretty handy to tweak a static microsite

MediaLink, by Nullriver. If you have a Playstation 3, and you want to stream your media (photos, video, music) from your Mac. This is it.

Connect360, by Nullriver. If you have a Xbox 360, and you want to stream your media (photos, video, music) from your Mac. This is it.

Fluid, creates an application out of any web service. Pandora, Facebook, Last.FM, Google Docs, Gmail or whatever you check daily, will benefit from having its own running app:
1. If browser goes down, this app stays live
2. You can switch among web services as if they were apps
3. You can choose to present the iPhone interface for widget-like behavior

OmniFocus, by OmniGroup. The ultimate outliner for anal-retentive people. Beautiful overkill of to-do lists for personal task management. Awesome iPhone app as well, for a price

Mint.com, the best finances manager in the web. I literally don’t have to think about where my money goes… and the iPhone companion app brings it all on a moment’s notice

Linkinus, by Conceited Software. The IRC client for the rest of us (Mac). Simple and with all the technicalities out of the way

CSSedit, a simple and dedicated solution for CSS authoring in the Mac

Hootsuite, the best advanced Twitter manager, and twice as useful when you link it to Ping.fm