Black Friday, the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, is one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the U.S. And, it is just around the corner less than 48 hours away now. It is also the only day of the year that the Apple store discounts prices. So, we may see some for-fee commercial Mac software on sale at the Apple store (both physical and online) as well as other retailers. So, I went back through the Mac software I commented on here during the year and picked out my top 5 for-fee Mac apps for you to consider as a gift to someone or even a special treat for yourself. I list them in more-or-less alphabetic order.
Mariner Software MacJournal - $34.95
MacJournal is more than a diary on a computer. It is a good general purpose note taking and information organization tool. It also has the ability to post journal entries to various blog platforms.
Blog entry: Surprised How Useful MacJournal Is to Me
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac - $110 to $500
Despite the availability of Apple iWork and OpenOffice.org office suites, if you work with people who create Microsoft Office documents, you probably want to buy and use Microsoft oFfice 2008 for Mac. It can read and write Office 2007 for Windows documents with full fidelity. Note, however, that Office 2008 lost the ability to work with Microsoft Visual Basic macros. You might want to look at one of the virtualization hypervisor packages plus Microsoft Windows plus Microsoft Office 2007 if macros are a must for you.
Note that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Professional Edition and Special Media Edition will be discounted by 75% on Black Friday (Nov. 28) at the Apple Store, Best Buy, and Amazon.
Blog entry: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac: What's New?
Pixelmator - $59
This has become my graphics editor workhorse on working with screen captures and photos for my blogging work (I'm the editor of a mobile applications website). It starts up and is ready to use in seconds and provides most of the image editing tools I need. The one thing that I have not been able to find is a free-rotation tool to fix those photos that are not quite level and need maybe a half-degree adjustment.
Blog entry: Pixelmator: Low Cost Image Editor
Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack Pro - $32
I've only used Audio Hijack Pro for a couple of weeks now. However, it has already proved itself to be a valuable tool as I dip my toes into podcasting waters. It has a reasonably simple interface and works well with Skype. I also like the fact that it lets a single user install it on multiple Macs for individual use.
Blog entry: Audio Hijack Pro: Record Audio from Almost Any App
VMware Fusion - $79.99
A virtualization hypervisor is a piece of software that either sits directly on the hardware and manages multiple operating systems (like VMware ESX) or sits on top of a base operating system (like Mac OS X) and manages Guest OSes alongside the base OS. It lets you run Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other OSes on your Mac without the need to reboot between sessions.
I've tried three virtualization hypervisors for the Mac: Parallels Desktop (the very first Mac hypervisor), VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox. Although I still have Parallels 3 installed on my Mac (I have not upgraded to version 4) I did not write any in-depth piece about it this year. I'm considering paying for the version 4 upgrade but have not decided yet. VirtualBox is a free Open Source hypervisor that is getting better but still has some issues from what I've seen so far. VMware Fusion is from the current virtualiation market leader VMware. It has the advantage of being able to work with virtual machines brought from VMware running on Windows or Linux. As the market leader, this is a big advantage since many companies ran VMware prior to the introduction of VMware Fusion.
Blog entry: VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1: Looking Better!
If you have your own list of top 5 for-fee Mac apps, please post your list here in the comments section.
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I use almost all of the apps you mention but one missing one that ties them together is CopyPaste:
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste
thank you for this post.
Hmmm - Interesting list but I'm not sure I would rank all of these highly.
MacJournal - Maybe has good blogging hooks, but Journler is very good as a journal/diary app with some blogging capability.
Office 2k8 - I have it and use it, because of it's cross platform nature and being a standard. But jeez, all these apps are brutally slow to boot up, even on my intel macs, and Entourage can't download anything without completely hindering any other task on the computer. I also feel typing in all of these apps has a delay. I also find the interface inferior and more cluttered compared to Office 2K4. How is it that MS puts out a product with such crappy performance?
Pixelmator - I have it, and occasionally use it. But it's not as intuitive or easy to use for quick crops/rotating/resizing. EasyCrop is the king of these tasks, though it lacks the image editing features.
Audio Hijack and WireTap seem to fill the same niche, but that's a very narrow niche for most of us.
VMWare - I've used both this and Parallels and found VMWare 1 was superior to Parallels 1 & 2. Unfortunately, I see performance hits with the same virtual machine in VMWare 2 that can be frustrating. I've yet to upgrade Parallels and give it another try. And CrossOver won't run my molecular biology app, so I have to toss it.
My top 5 pay-for apps would be: SandVox (webdesign), Yojimbo (info manager), EasyCrop, ReceiptWallet, and 1Pass.
With Pixelmator I use the crop tool to rotate pictures. I can see the logic, sorta, you need to crop anyway to keep within the bounds of a picture. But it's not the most intuitive place to look for rotation for sure.
John: Yes, if you want to use Microsoft Windows as a Guest OS, there is always that additional cost for its license involved. It may be possible to run WINE in a Linux Guest OS though that may be a bit slow. There is also CrossOver Mac that lets you run a specific set of Windows apps without installing Windows. I tested it a few years ago and found its app support too narrow for my needs. But, if you just have a small set of Windows apps you need to run, it might do the trick. I don't know how many Fusion or Parallels users run only non-Windows Guest OSes. But, I agree with you that most of them probably buy hypervisors specifically for running Windows as a Guest OS.
Jay: Yes, the are are NOT free. That is why I specifically state "for FEE" in the subject line. You might be imagining the "R"
those apps are not free
Heard great things about VMWare Fusion, but still need to buy Windows XP or Vista license with any/all virtualization solutions, so the true cost is higher unless you really do just need Linux. (Any stats on how many Fusion users don't use Windows in their virtualization? My guess is that it's quite low.)
Still, thanks for the list.