The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is running a series of posts about their favorite apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPod.

I love looking at what other people use, and this is a great series. I’ll follow up in the next few days with a series of post about my top three to five apps for the iPhone and Mac.

For now, here’s the TUAW series:

• Victor Agreda Jr. for the iPhone: ShoZu, Texas Hold’em and ToDo
• Steven Sande for the iPhone: Twitterific, DataCase and NetNewsWire
• Mike Schramm for the iPhone: Aurora Feint, Characters and Midomi
• Robert Palmer for the iPhone: Exposure, time:calc and Trism
• Christina Warren for the Mac: Coda, Aperture 2 and MarsEdit
• Mike Rose for the iPod Touch: ComicTouch, Pandora Radio and Scrable
• Erica Sadun for the Mac: Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and QuicKeys

And, yes, Erica admits to the surprise she will cause many Mac users.

What’s your favorite apps?

MacUpdate is offering another software bundle, this time aimed at students who are heading back to school. There are 10 apps in this bundle, with a total value of $401.80. You can get all 10 apps for just $49.99.

There are a few great apps in there, such as MacJournal, Mellel and Bookends. Those three alone are worth the $49.99 price tag. Considering you get DEVONagent — and the interesting looking HookUp — I’d say it’s a good buy.

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No sooner do I post about Google Apps and mention the shortfall of not having Gears for Safari than does Google announces they are introducing Gears for Safari.

I have no real intention of testing this for a few reasons, but the main two are:

1. I don’t have a real need with my current workflow configuration.
2. Everything I’ve read thus far says this is fairly unstable beta release.

If you are interested in reading about it, here are several places to check out:

• MacUser: Safari is getting some Google Gears
• TUAW: Google Gears beta for Safari
• MacNN: Google releases Gears beta for Safari

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.

Saturday will mark a big day for Apple users in Mississippi. The first Apple Store in the state will open in Madison at the Renaissance at Colony Park.

While I would have much rather them chosen a more central location like Dogwood Festival Market, I’m just happy we’ll have an Apple Store close to here.

And while I love to visit the Apple Store in Birmingham, and while I’ll most definitely make trips to this one, I hope folks in Mississippi will also remember User Friendly.

User Friendly has been in Mississippi for decades. They were originally located in Jackson but have since moved out to Madison.

As for the Apple Store, doors open at 10 a.m. Saturday.

One of the reasons I prefer Safari to Firefox is the way Safari handles its bookmarks bar. In Safari, clicking the Command key and a number opens a corresponding bookmark from the bookmarks bar.

In Firefox, doing the same thing will select an open tab. I’ll be honest, I like the Firefox option, and I wish there was a similar keyboard shortcut for Safari. But for my workflow, I like Safari’s function better.

Here’s another bookmarks bar related functionality that I like better in Safari: How to open all bookmarks stored in a particular folder in tabs.

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Note: This is the final part of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

Like I said in Part 2 of this series:

Not everyone’s workflow is the same, and thus not everyone will use Google Apps the same. As I said, it has its limitations, and I’ve accommodated those in my workflow.

To say that I’ve fully let go of Microsoft Office or iWork would be a gross over-exageration. Both office suites are still an integral part of my workflow. Ditto for iCal, mainly because of having an iPhone and wanting to have the push capabilities of my schedule. And, for the same reasons, ditto to Address Book. I can’t live with my contacts online and my iPhone 3G empty.

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Note: This is the second part of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

I discussed in this post what Google Apps includes and why I chose to use it. Google Apps provides a lot of advantages and a few disadvantages. First, let’s take a look at the hesitations I had with Google Apps.

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Note: This is the first of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

I was not an early adopter to Gmail or Google Docs. My reasons were not from fear of “big brother”, though those are valid concerns.

My reasons were much simpler:

1. I had an email address and liked Mail.app just fine.
2. I was accustomed to using Microsoft Word and iWork.

It was not until necessity — or at least a minor annoyance — came along that I seriously considered joining Google’s ever-expanding empire of users.

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