No one agrees with me. My vote for the best software ever created may surprise you. Maybe not.
I have used SO much software, between Office, Graphics/Video, Internet, Sound, and Utility apps. There are so many great applications.
TextWrangler or BBEdit. VMWare.
Photoshop. Dreamweaver. InDesign. Illustrator. Flash (OK, Adobe, stop showing off). Aperture. Final Cut Pro.
Firefox. Google Earth. iChat. Skype. VNC. Email.
Soundbooth. iTunes.
DiskWarrior (wow, you saved my bacon SO MANY times, you shoulda won!). Time Machine.
Well. Here’s my answer. Same answer for years. My father showed it to me in 1984, but I really didn’t appreciate what it was or what it did until a few years later. It slices. It dices. It’s rock solid. It sorts. It grooms databases. It does math. It does formulas. It does graphs & charts. It even does labels! It is the Swiss Army knife of software:
Microsoft Excel.
And the only product I normally buy from this company is a 2-button mouse ; )
What’s your favorite?
While I would agree Excel is an excellent application and it must be remembered that it was a spreadsheet which made the IBM PC the success it became (as Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979 created VisiCalc for the Apple II and probably led IBM to the PC), there are other candidates.
As a genealogy researcher I spend more time on my family history than spreadsheeting stocks or other. REUNION which runs only on the Mac is an incredibly excellent piece of software allowing one to create a family tree and attach to persons or families pictures, biographical details or videos. It never crashes and the Leister people hop on any problem in but moments.
Final Cut Pro has my vote !