Mac Software I Own Licenses For

Even after years of using and contributing to open source software, I think good software is worth paying for. To inspire gift ideas this holiday season, here's a list of the Mac software I own licenses for:

• 1Password - the best password manager ever.


• BluePhoneElite - when I had a phone this was compatible with, it was awesome. Control your phone from your desktop, pause music when you get calls, all kinds of future-is-now stuff.


• growliChat - long since rendered obsolete, but was worth paying for at the time. Hooks up the Growl notification system to iChat.


• Hazel - moves around files for me. I mostly use it to file away downloads and clean up after deleting applications.


• MailPlane - A lovely Cocoa wrapper around Gmail. The best of the web and the desktop. This is how I survive email.


• MarsEdit - I'm writing this blog post in it.


• NetNewsWire - if I could tear myself away from Google Reader, I'd probably read my feeds with this. I used to live in it.


• PandoraJam - another web/desktop fusion, this time making the Pandora streaming music service a joy to use on your Mac.


• PodWorks - it gets music off your iPhone or iPod. Essential.


• SuperDuper - the only backup utility I have total and complete faith in.


• TextMate - the ur-editor. All the power and flexibility of arcane editors like Vim and Emacs with a beautiful Mac face.


• Twitterific - how I interact with Twitter more often than not.


• Videobox - a simple, cute way to get videos off of sites like YouTube and Google Video and onto your iPhone or hard drive.


• Visual Hub - a simple, fast way to get other kinds of videos onto your iPhone or iPod.


• Xtorrent - My preferred Torent client. Subscribe to feeds of torrents (great for shows) or search right from the application. Speedy and stable.


• Yep - they say "like iPhoto for your PDFs", I say it's more like iTunes. Regardless, I can't live/work without it.

I've also been given licenses for the following applications by their generous, attractive developers:

• Acorn - a superb, lightweight image editor that completely obviates the need for me to keep Photoshop on my system.


• Pukka - a pleasant way to save bookmarks to del.icio.us on your Mac.


• VoodooPad Pro - a desktop wiki notebook thing that I use from time to time.

Good software is good. Buy some!