Top 10 Mac Apps 2006
- October 28, 2006
- 2 comments
Last year, I made a list of my Top 10 Mac Apps in response to a meme started by Om Malik. I wrote that list over a year ago. After reading it again this evening, I noticed I wasn’t using over half of them any more. So I decided to make a new list of my most used Mac apps. There are some return appearances, but most are new.
Quicksilver is still at the top of my list over a year later. I use it so often now, I can’t imagine what OS X would be like without it. I still use it to quickly launch apps, find and display contacts, find a buried bookmark, control iTunes and many other things.
PathFinder has now replaced Apple’s standard Finder on my Mac. It’s how Apple should’ve made the Finder, or at least used some of the key features. Tabs, switchable shelves and especially the drop stack. Kind of pricey, but worth the money in my opinion.
No change here from last year’s list. TextMate has continued to evolve into an amazing text editor. I use it nearly every single day. I’ve even made an ExpressionEngine Bundle for it. It’s worth every penny I spent on it.
Transmit is now my FTP client of choice. They finally worked out the bugs that were keeping me from using it. It’s easy to use and nice to look at and handles many different kinds of connections. One of the best OS X apps out.
Another app I still use from last year’s list, iRatchet is hands-down the best time-tracking software for the Mac. It was good last year, but has improved considerably since then with more good things sure to come. One of the best looking and most useful productivity apps for the Mac.
Yojimbo is an app I bought within five minutes of first using it. It’s taken the place of both VoodooPad and PasswordMaster from last year’s list. I’ve got all kinds of information stored in it from my enormous list of usernames/passwords to various notes on whatever I’m interested that day. Finding items is a snap with the built-in search and adding new items is extremely easy now that there’s a Quicksilver plugin that works with it.
Jumpcut basically gives you clipboard buffering or multiple clipboards. Invoke it with a customizable key combination and a bezel window pops up letting quickly view the various items you’ve stored in your clipboards. Selecting one pastes it just like the default paste command would. This comes in very handy when programming.
NewsFire is a very well-done RSS feed aggregator. Minimalist but still very functional with just enough eye-candy to make it nice. It’s not free, but it’s worth the money especially if you’re a news junkie.
AppZapper is a simple, but very well-done app that lets me easily delete apps and their associated files. I’m always checking out new software, but usually trashing it after a few minutes. AppZapper lets me keep my Mac from getting cluttered up with orphaned preferences, directories or other app resources.
CLIX is different from the other apps on this list in that it’s not your typical Mac app. It’s not pretty, but man is it powerful. It’s a visual interface to the underlying Unix belly in OS X. It comes with over 1000 different, useful commands and lets you create your own custom commands. Not for the faint-of-heart, but for Mac power users it’s a must-have.
And that’s it. I didn’t include major commercial apps. I use Photoshop and Quicken fairly often, but there’s no real point in writing about them since most people either know about them or use them on their Macs.
Nice list! I found a few new things on here I’ll have to try. For example, I use iBiz for time tracking, but may give iRatchet a try (never heard of it). I have a similar list here: My List of Apps. I completely agree about Quicksilver – I don’t know what I’d do without it.