Apps on my Mac I can’t live without

A couple of days ago, I posted Me, Mac and "i". This post talks about what most use on my Mac. Some of the listed softwares are free, and some aren’t. But who said that all good things in life come for free.

So here they are (not arranged to any criteria):

Entourage: Working in an Environment that uses MS Exchange, sadly entourage was the most convenient choice to work (easily and without some useless initial pain). Sadly, I have to admit that Entourage was not a bad choice, although the previous releases experiences some database crashes, specially with the 7+ Gb of emails that I have archived. Although Entourage still misses some of the most essential options that could only be found in MS Outlook :S – options like the "Out of office" and "Recover deleted emails" – but Entourage still does a good job. The search feature is far better than that of Outlook’s – could be that it uses spotlight’s powers. However, I still don’t like the way Entourage handles HTML emails (as for some reason it just keeps messing them up), the flag colors are not there, and when syncing emails that were sent with my E61 using Mail4Exchange, the sent items folder shows the email with the To and From empty, and the sent time is the time the message was synced. Apparently, this problem will be fixed with the Kerio Mail Server, which is currently being installed for our office on the Mac OS X Server.

Mail: Yeah – for all my other email accounts, I use Mail. Simple, clean and it just works – turned out to be better that Entourage. Mail is far more flexible and reliable than Entourage. If you can avoid Entourage than just do it.

Safari: My browser of choice for it’s simplicity. For not so Mac Friendly websites, I use Firefox.

Textmate: One of the best text editors I have used for a long time. In fact, this blog post has been posted using Textmate.

Adium: Making it easy to connect to all my IM accounts. One clean app.

Skype: Just can’t live without it. Use is daily for personal and business communication.

Parallels: Not being a Windows user, doesn’t mean I do not need it. Some of the engineering software I use only run "properly" under a windows environment. For these reasons, I start windows inside OS X using Parallels.

Cyberduck: Really nice FTP client.

Keynote: My favorite app. Been doing really some of my best presentations ever since I started using Keynote. I just can’t live without it.

Quicksilver: Not being so fond with using mice, QS is just a great way to start your app by just a few key strokes.

Mindmanager: Having a messed up mind, I need something to organize it. Mindmanager has been a favorite tool ever since a year and a half. It have since then been my favorite mind mapping application.

That’s not all what I use. These are just the ones I use on regular basis. I hope you might find some of these useful, and if you have some suggestions to better applications, I’ll be more than happy to receive your suggestion.