Mac Software

Posted by Randall Shinn
Apr 18, 2008 at 11:57 AM

Stephen,

I am crimping away, having just made the switch. So far Eaglefiler, Curio, Circus Ponies Notebook, OmniOutliner Pro, and Scrivener have all seemed potentially valuable enough for me to license.

There are a wealth of sources for information. Some people feel that Mac users are much more likely to upgrade their operating systems and stay on the cutting edge than Windows users. (In my case I was unwilling to move to Vista, having heard so many unfavorable reports.) And since OS X Leopard offers software developers some nifty possibilities, new software and updated versions are rampant.

One interesting site is http://tagamac.com/. Ian Beck has interesting insights into tagging practices, and recommends programs that he feels offer exceptionally good tagging capabilities. He is, for example, an Eaglefiler fan, but he also recommends Together and Leap (both of which I am considering). MailTags is a program he recommends for helping sort your e-mail, and some programs that you can use for long-term e-mail storage will import the tags as well.

As others have suggested, some of the newest programs require Leopard to operate, and I think one way to gauge how up to date the software development process is in a given company is to check whether or not their program has been updated to Leopard. And if you notice that a program requires Leopard to operate, that may well be a sign that the program takes particular advantage of the new OS capabilities.

One last mention. MacSpeech Dictate http://www.macspeech.com/ apparently brings the Dragon Speech engine to the Mac world, so that Macs can now equal Windows in speech recognition software if that interests you.

Randall