I’m making one final pass at cleaning off my hard drive this morning before installing OS X Leopard. As part of the process, I’m making sure I have license keys for all the software I’ve purchased over the last year or so. Here is a list of the software I have purchased that I recommend.

Parallels – Lets you run XP or Vista on your Mac. I am having a heck of a time getting my vista image off my hard disk, because it is 30GB, but Parallels has been great.

TextMate – I haven’t been happy with the selection of Software Development Environments’s for OpenSource software, but TextMate is light weight and gets the job done. Others I also use in are NetBeans and Aptana.

iWork – I Tried OpenOffice, but upgraded to iWork for Keynote. OpenOffice was too slow.

Flex Builder 3 – You can do Flex development without buying Adobe’s SDE, but when learning something new, every advantage helps. I found the this Eclipse derivative to be stable, and worth the price for the visual layouts and built in documentation.

Market Samurai – A great SEO keyword research tool that helps you plow through tons of keywords. It also tries to optimize the process of getting backlinks, but that is a tough problem to solve. I haven’t found Market Samurai’s ability to search for content and back links opportunities to be all that useful, but I haven’t really tried that hard.

Pixelmator – Excellent affordable Photoshop replacement. I like the support of gradients. Little bit of a learning curve (probably the same as Photoshop).

I will likely soon buy:

MacSpeech Dictate – Tried a demo of this and the speech recognition was “good enough.”

ScreenFlow – for making screen capture videos with web cam picture-in-picture.