In humankind’s never ending quest to find more ways to do the same thing, the Mac world presents to you—Dialectic. Placed squarely at the top of the Do We Need This? category of Mac software is Dialectic. A phone dialer. That’s right. A Phone dialer. Yes, it’s cool.

Dialectic is a highly versatile telephony tool that unites your Mac, data, and phones — mobile, landline, & VoIP — enabling you to be more productive. Dialing has never been so much fun. Fun? How can that be? Simple: Dialectic. See a phone number on a webpage? Two clicks of the mouse and the Bluetooth-enabled phone in your pocket is connecting your call — and iTunes is paused and your iChat status is set to ‘On The Phone.’ While Dialectic is a wiz at dialing, there are many more tricks in its bag. There’s the system-wide Address Book menu that allows instant access to all of your contact data, monitoring of incoming calls, a call timer, a comprehensive call log, & much, much more. Best of all, it’s all scriptable which means you can integrate it into your own workflow allowing you to get more done in less time.

9WR - Dialectic: Classy, unique, telephony tool dials phones from your Mac.

Update of Photoshop wannabe with attractive interface, buckets of tools, filters, effects, including advanced color correction tools. Well done.

Pixelmator is a layer-based image editor. You can quickly create layers from your photos, other pictures, from selections… allows you to blend layers, change their opacity, create clipping masks or even add layer masks to hide some portions of layer.

9WR - Pixelmator: Mini Photoshop with tools, filters, effects, layers, color correction.

Great utility to upload and manage files to Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service of very inexpensive online file storage. JungleDisk is a one trick pony that runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux.

Jungle Disk makes it easy to store any data securely online, and access it from any computer just like a local disk drive… even better than adding a larger hard drive or an external USB drive to your system.

9WR - JungleDisk: Utility to back up, upload files to Amazon’s S3 service.

Minor update to the popular but poorly named Leopard maintenance utility. Does far more than clean Leopard’s caches, including creation of bootable Emergency Disks, and built-in ClamAV antivirus system, opens many hidden settings.

Makes system maintenance simple with an easy point and click interface to many OS X functions. LCC can improve system performance by tuning internet and file cache settings, implementing ram disks, and cleaning out various cached and stale data. LCC includes tools to help optimize files and memory. LCC can recover wasted disk space by eliminating language localization files and slimming Universal Binaries.

9WR - Leopard Cache Cleaner: Utility cleans caches, creates bootable emergency disks, ClamAV antivirus.

Minor update to the popular general purpose maintenance utility. Checks disks, runs system maintenance, clears caches, optimizes network, clears logs, keeps things tidy under the hood.

A scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail’s major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

9WR - Cocktail: Maintenance utility, Leopard interface tweaks, Pilot for repair, optimization.

Updated version of the easy to use utility to convert video to Flash files. Creates customizable video players in Flash with sound controls, scrub bar, and more. Capture a movie, click to convert it to SWF with a player.

Video2SWF is an extremely easy program to convert your video files to Flash. Output Flash SWF or FLV files, HTML, and self-executables. Supports .avi, .dv, .mov/.qt, .mpeg (video only), .mp4, .wmv (Mac requires Flip4Mac plugin), .aiff, .mp3, .wav, .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .pic, .png, .psd, .tga, .tiff.

9WR - Video2SWF: Utility converts most video files to Flash or FLV files.

The perfect gift for the truly obsessive compulsive Mac user. Hazel handles every Mac file and folder organization task, automatically. Files, cleans, empties trash, remembers rules (you create them), keeps files and folders tidy. Clever but geeky.

Hazel is your personal housekeeper, organizing and cleaning folders based on rules you define. Hazel can also manage your trash and uninstall your applications.

9WR - Hazel: Unique file, folder organizer; moves, sorts, cleans, empties, uninstalls.

Handy utility which converts Microsoft’s Windows audio files so they’ll play in iTunes. Doesn’t convert protected DRM (digital rights management) files.

EasyWMA allows you to convert wma, wmv audio, asf and ogg vorbis files to aiff, mp3, m4a or wav so that you can play your favorite songs in iTunes or any other player on your Mac.

9WR - EasyWMA: Drag and drop conversion of Windows audio files to Macs.

Mini update to the long-awaited update to the popular and aging Mozilla browser. More gaudy, more features, fast page rendering. Worthy competitor to MSIE and Safari.

Web browser that empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking and a number of other seamless innovations.

9WR - Firefox: Free faster browser, more features, more security, more hype.

What Mozilla’s Firefox would be if it was Mac-like and didn’t have extensions. Uses the latest Gecko rendering engine (1.8.1.19) strapped on to a less Windows-like user interface. Click Here to find out how to migrate from Safari (sorry, couldn’t find a link to tell us why).

A browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

9WR - Camino: Mozilla’s web browser for Mac users; thin on features.

The latest non-beta update to AOL’s Desktop version for Mac users now features, um, uh, well, email and browser and keywords and instant messaging. If you’re a Mac Tiger or Leopard user, and you must have AOL, this is the way to go. It looks similar to the old AOL desktop, includes advertising here and there, but it’s free—for AOL users.

AOL Desktop for Mac 1.5 — the new all-in-one application — was built from the ground up for Mac users, by Mac users. It puts your Web browser, instant messaging, email and other popular features all in one place for you, so you can get more done with fewer clicks.

9WR - AOL Desktop for Mac: Latest desktop features email, browser, instant messaging, handy toolbar.

Marc Moini’s one trick pony with extra tricks to enhance scrolling on your Mac. Makes scroll wheel or trackpad smoother, faster. Goes in reverse and uses keyboard, too. Nice.

Smart Scroll offers smooth and easy iPhone-like scrolling… Other features include Universal Scroll Keys that let you scroll from the keyboard, FileMaker Pro and AppleWorks enhancements, and more.

9WR - Smart Scroll: Utility improves scrolling, reverses, adds keyboard scrolling, grab scroll.

Image editing utility takes your digital photos, stuffs them into attractive templates, prints through the iPhoto Kodak photo print service. Like iPhoto’s print services but with more options and a price tag.

Posterino creates stunning life-posters, photo frames, and postcards… choose a template, an iPhoto album and hit a button. Posterino will choose, place, crop, enhance and render your images into a poster.

9WR - Posterino: Designs, prints attractive posters, postcards, frames from iPhoto’s images.

Seemingly weekly and usually minor update to the major update of a classy multiple clipboard utility. Not only stores multiple clips in the clipboard, but clips are editable, archived for future use, multiple view capable. We prefer PTH Pasteboard (it’s free), though CopyPaste is very good.

Never lose a clip again—every copy is saved and available in a clip browser. Edit any clip instantly with the handy built in word processor. Create archives to keep any important clips you want to save and use later.

9WR - CopyPaste Pro: Stores multiple clips, edits, archives, accessible history, multiple views.

Highly beneficial Mac utility to track and chart depression and mood disorders, causes, trends. Monitors daily health using simple selection criteria. Impressive.

An advanced health and mood diary. Optimism helps you discover your depression triggers, the symptoms that they produce, and based on this knowledge, effective strategies for staying mentally well.

9WR - Optimism: Effective mood diary discovers, tracks, monitors depression triggers, influences.

Excellent Mac utility that monitors all files installed by other Mac applications and utilities and smart deletes via drag and drop. Highly recommended if you try out many different Mac applications and utilities.

Uninstall, archive, backup and analysis… CleanApp analyzes, archives and removes applications and on your Mac, complete with all relevant files.

9WR - CleanApp: Tracks installed files, uninstalls, archives, removes application, utility files.

The latest Pro and standard versions of the premier diagramming and design application for the Mac. Many tools to create and modify diagrams, export to different formats. Pro version has Vizio support.

OmniGraffle Pro helps you draw beautiful diagrams, family trees, flow charts, org charts, layouts, and (mathematically speaking) any other directed or non-directed graphs, to organize your thoughts, your projects, or even your friends graphically using boxes and lines.

9WR - OmniGraffle: Top Mac diagramming app, styles, tools, exports, Vizio support.

Feature packed CD and DVD label printer for discs, covers, and cases. Burns iTunes playlists, easy access to iPhoto images.

Create, print, & share CD labels, jewel case inserts, and DVD covers that look truly professional.

9WR - DiscLabel: Professional disc label printer—CDs, DVDs, uses iTunes, iPhoto.