So Victor comes to us and says, "Quick, what are your favorite apps?" Without pausing to breathe or think, the words "OfficeCreativeSuiteQuickeys" tumble out of my mouth. That's because these are the three software packages for Mac that I cannot live without. These three apps are where I spend 80-odd percent of my working life.

By the time I can pause and reflect, I realize that I have picked three apps that provide the least Mac-like user experience. With all the rich and beautiful OS X software landscape out there, I've picked the plain but reliable dinosaurs. They're ugly. They're ported (at least Photoshop and Office are). They work.

This isn't to say that I'd change my list upon further thought. Between Word, Excel, Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop, and Quickey's Macros (so I rarely have to actually touch a mouse, eek), these packages get the job done. Throw in the equally ugly Eudora mail program (the original, not the almost unusable open source update that's floating around) plus Apple's cadre of less beautiful utilities, namely Terminal, Safari and TextEdit, and we're talking maybe 90% of my work time.

Sure, I've used Apple's Mail, Preview, iPhoto, iWork, Pages and so forth but I always end up going back to the more capable name-brand power-houses. The user experience might not match the slick Apple software but my efficiency goes way way up.

As for the built-in Keyboard prefs or QuickSilver, QuicKeys gives me all the programming control I need for creating and executing my macros. If I'm going to do a job more than once, I'm probably going to write a macro, whether it's sorting my mail or writing my TUAW posts.

In the end, I'm really happy with my paleo-software. One of the big reasons that I'm still (still!) using my 733 G4 Mac as my primary computing machine is that I know I'll have to re-buy these programs should I switch fully to Intel-based computing.

Instead, I'll hang with my favorite dinosaurs and keep getting the job done.

John Casasanta has written up a pretty damning condemnation of the vulture venture capitalists (VCs) hovering around the iPhone's App Store lately. While many developers are smelling a lot of potential in the iPhone and its SDK, VCs are smelling lots of money, and unfortunately, as was apparently the case between Mike Lee and Tapulous recently, sometimes those smells lead the two in different directions.

It's not that there isn't money to be made in the App Store -- there are some great programs coming out of there, and those programs are certainly worth paying for (even if a lot of them are offered for free anyway). But Casasanta describes a situation where venture capitalists are willing to pay out in spades even for shovelware, and in that kind of environment, no one profits. Not the VCs and developers who lose their money because no one wants their crappy programs, not the consumers who have to sort through a flood of terrible apps, and not the platform -- the Mac, as Casasanta says, is thriving because of the quality of the software, and the iPhone (though it will likely always be a popular phone) will thrive as a platform for the same reasons.

Casasanta's solution is for the developers to do things on their own, and that's a possibility everyone has to consider for themselves. Even well-funded developers can create valuable pieces of software. Whether you receive funding from a VC or from your own bank account, the focus while developing should always be on quality. And any developer pushing out 100 apps by the end of the year (as Casasanta's VC asked) lacks that focus.

If you're looking for a creative application to collect and organize notes, ideas and more, check out Curio. Curio provides a free-form interface for collecting pages which can contain notes, images, links to files, mind maps, sketches -- just about anything you'd need to get ideas and notes out of your head and into your computer.

Zengobi, the makers of Curio, are celebrating the "Back to School" season with TUAW and offering 20% off the academic price of the software. The Pro version retails at $149USD, but it's only $69USD in the academic store. With the discount, students can pick up a great app for about $55USD. Enter TUAWBTS at the academic store to take advantage of the offer, and hurry, it's only good for today (August 27th).

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.

Going back to school isn't all about the students; the educators are often just as excited or stressed out as the kids about the beginning of a new school year. What can make life easier on the poor teacher? Great Mac software! Read on for information on a grab bag of Mac and web apps to help out your favorite educator.

A few weeks ago we took a first look at Astraware's GTS World Racing for iPhone; now they're back with another title -- Golden Skull. Golden Skull was developed by Deluxeware and published by Astraware.

If you're familiar with the Bejeweled 2 genre of jewel-matching games, then you're well on your way to understanding Golden Skull. In this game, you're introduced to a character who has gotten into debt and needs money, so he takes on the job of finding the Golden Skull. In each stop along the way, you tap groups of jewels of the same color to make them disappear, which accumulates points -- more points for more jewels eliminated. When you get to a certain point level, you get a gold coin. Five gold coins gets you to the next village on your journey.

As the game progresses, more types of jewels are added to the screen, making it even more difficult to match them. When you get to the last village, accumulating a certain number of points reveals your goal -- the Golden Skull. There are four different skill levels, and you can either listen to the built-in soundtrack or your own music. To see a video of Golden Skull in action, click here.

Golden Skull should be available in the App Store today (August 27th) for US$2.99. Check the gallery below for screenshots!

Note: We'll update this post with an App Store link when it becomes available.

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for a timely app update useful for students.

PDF management app Papers has been bumped to version 1.8.5, bringing what the developers claim are 100 improvements. Top on the list is a new sharing feature called Papers Archives, which lets you share a PDF file and its associated metadata with a colleague.

Papers isn't for everyone. Instead, it's specifically designed for students and academics, particularly those who deal with a lot of scientific periodicals in the course of their research. It lets you search them, sort them (manually or using Smart Folders), find them on any one of 14 different online repositories, rate them, browse your library in tabs, and much more.

Papers costs $42 for a single-user license, but students qualify for a 40 per cent discount.

Panic has released Coda 1.5, a free update to my favorite all-in-one web development application.

Coda 1.5 adds several major new features, including find-and-replace across multiple files and a fully-integrated Subversion client.

Also included in the update is a user-customizable bookshelf, which allows you to specify any given website as a "book." You can also enter a sample search URL with a wildcard character, and command-click on terms to look for them in the book you created. Syntax highlighting has also been improved, as well as performance running under Leopard. Full release notes are available, too.

The update is free for all registered Coda users, and $99 for new users. Discounts are available for registered Transmit owners, too.

RapidWeaver is our "favourite" WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web design tool that gives you more flexibility than what iWeb. Realmac Software, the developer of RapidWeaver, has updated the software to version 4.1, and included some new features that are worth a look, including:

• QuickLook support is now standard
  
• .Mac references have been changed to show "MobileMe"
• Images pasted into a Styled Text area keep their names as specified in Finder
• Page inspector updates when/if a page changes
• PPC support for iMedia Browser
  

Owners of RapidWeaver 4.0 and 3.6 are eligible for a free update to version 4.1. You can see all of the updates on the RapidWeaver Version History page. RapidWeaver 4 is available from the Realmac website for $79 (US). There is a free demo available as well.

[via Ars Technica]

Multi-service, open source and free chat client Adium received a new point release tonight, with new features and a redesigned interface for viewing contact information.

Adium 1.3 features the following goodies:

• Get Info Window is now called the "Contact Inspector"
  
• The aforementioned Contact Inspector has a newly redesigned interface that allows for faster retrieval of contact information
  
• Facebook chat is now integrated into Adium 1.3
• Standard contact window list now features a search box (found by pressing command + F)
• Improved MSN support with personal messages
• Speed improvements
  
• Multiple bug fixes
  

To download this new revision of Adium, just visit the Adium website and click the download link. If you would like a complete list of all the changes in Adium 1.3, just visit the Version History page.

An employee of Cyan Worlds (proprietors of the legendary Myst series of games) has announced that they will be porting the original Myst to the iPhone. Apparently it's an "outside-funded" project -- though who might be funding it isn't yet clear -- and is apparently proving to be an "interesting and fun" project with a small team of just three people. No word yet on how it might work (or work differently) from the original, but the classic puzzle/exploration of Myst is good gaming no matter what platform you're playing it on.

Starting with the NES emulator, the iPhone was following the evolution of gaming pretty well -- at least until the App Store started mixing things up a bit. After Myst, I think we're right around Wolfenstein and Doom at this point -- those were available jailbroken, but it's about time we get an FPS officially as well. Carmack, you interested?

[via TouchArcade, which is strangely down as of this writing]

Another venerable title from the world of Palm OS and Windows Mobile has made it to the iPhone and iPod touch.SplashID for iPhone / iPod touch is now shipping. With over 500,000 copies of SplashID sold, it's by far the most popular secure personal information manager for handheld devices.

Developer SplashData has provided features that make this application very attractive. For example, there are Mac and Windows desktop apps that sync wirelessly with the iPhone version, so you can do a lot of your editing and data entry from the desktop instead of using the iPhone's keyboard. Data is protected by 256-bit Blowfish encryption, and there's a built-in generator for creating unguessable passwords.

SplashID is available now from the App Store (click opens iTunes) for $9.95 and the desktop version is available at the SplashData website for $19.99. There's also a 30-day free trial available.

Two of SplashData's other mobile titles, SplashMoney and SplashShopper, are also now available for iPhone and iPod touch.

As if Mac gaming needed more problems getting off the ground. Transgaming has proudly announced that in the future, their games will include Sony's SecuROM digital rights management software. They don't mention which games will be getting the extremely restrictive DRM (that some folks have compared to malware), but we're guessing all of them, which means the Mac version of Spore will be on that list, as well as those upcoming Ubisoft titles, and anything else produced with the Cider technology.

Bummer. Why is it a bummer? Because all the evidence we can see actually shows that DRM hurts sales. While Transgaming is obviously proud of this decision, claiming that SecuROM will help them prevent piracy and unauthorized copying, most of the evidence shows that piracy will happen in spite of, and sometimes even because of restrictive DRM setups like Sony's. Transgaming is making a serious mistake here -- they want to protect their games, which is fine. But choosing DRM, especially SecuROM, as a way to do it is a mistake. It'll cause more problems for the company and their users before it prevents piracy in the way they think it will.

[via IMG]

Erik Schwiebert is one of the lead developers on the Mac Business Unit team under the Microsoft banner. I find their position constantly interesting -- even in these enlightened days of Safari for Windows, many dyed-in-the-wool Mac users still consider Microsoft the enemy, and yet the Mac BU has always been like a kind of diplomatic envoy. We have to use things like Office and Entourage, so we cautiously let them across the border, regarding them like strange visitors from the other side of the wall.

But maybe that's just all in my mind. Recently, the Mac BU released an update for Office 2008, and lots of users, apparently, have suffered from error problems while trying to install it. So many, in fact, that Schwiebert has responded to the problems on his blog, saying that the problems are most likely because users have deleted or otherwise messed with files inside the installation, causing the installer to abort. And that strange Mac BU/Mac users fragile truce comes into play here as well -- he specifically calls out Xslimmer and Monolingual, two programs that delete often-unnecessary files in OS X, for causing the issues.

There's a workaround floating around, but Schwiebert warns it leaves the application suite in a possibly unstable and unsupportable state. Unfortunately, Schwiebert doesn't really offer any solutions (other, we guess, than to reinstall the software so that it's back to the full install, and then apply the update). And the alliance between the Mac BU and their users remains fragile -- we've got to work together, but it seems that many are unhappy about it.

Fantasktik is a taskbar app for Leopard that makes it easy to see what windows and applications are open, and to switch between them. Dockland Software, the developer of Fantasktik, announced in a press release today that the app is available for US$9.99 through the end of September. On October 1st, the price rises to US$14.99.

After installing Fantasktik, a small taskbar appears either just below the menu bar or just above the Dock -- you can set the location from System Preferences. The taskbar shows all of your open applications and windows in small icons, and by hovering your cursor over the icons you see a preview of the window contents. The preview is powered by Core Animation and provides a look at all open windows for an application through a MultiTouch-like interface called Click and Slide.

You can minimize the Fantasktik taskbar by clicking one of the small buttons on either end, and double-clicking an application icon collapses or expands all window icons associated with that app.

Fantasktik requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. A 15-day free trial is available from the Fantasktik website.

Like many not-yet-released videogames, I'm a little worried that Astro Ranch won't be as good as the game in my head right now. Anytime a developer says they were influenced by great games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, as the Tag Games guys do in this interview with the cleverly-named iPwn Games, I get overly excited. A deep simulation game with a casual skin? It sounds just too good to be true.

But who knows -- maybe the upcoming Astro Ranch will be worth the excitement. Paul Farley certainly makes it sound good: they say they've been pushing the 3D system to new heights, and that they're aiming to provide a deep enough game to appeal to players with a lot of time on their hands, as well as a fun game that casual players can pick up and then put down after about 10 minutes.

They're aiming for connectivity as well -- the game is based on a '50s-style space ranch, and players will supposedly be able to visit each others' ranches, send messages back and forth and even compete and trade with each other. They even claim to be able to connect iPhone players to farmers playing on the DS, but we'll believe that one when we see it.

Unfortunately, the screenshots don't impress all that much, but just like the iPhone itself, it seems this game's got a lot of potential. Sounds like they're aiming for a release on the iPhone, DS, and the N-Gage (people are still making games for the N-Gage?) later this year. We'll keep an eye out for it.