Top 10 Mac Apps
- September 10, 2005
- 2 comments
There’s a new meme going around. This one is fun because it’s Mac related. Om Malik started it, apparently, by posting his top 10 favorite Mac apps. Not included are commercial apps like Microsoft Office, anything from Macromedia or Adobe, etc. I figured I’d put together a list too. Who knows? Perhaps someone may discover a really cool app they didn’t know about before?
I’ve ordered these by how much I use them.
Quicksilver is already widely known. People either love it or hate it. It’s an app I can’t live without on my Mac. I use it to quickly launch apps, find and display contacts, find a buried bookmark, control iTunes and many other things. And the real kicker is it’s free!
VoodooPad is like a little, desktop Wiki. It’s where I dump all kinds of stuff I want to keep track of. I store information on my current projects, handy references, quotes, personal project ideas, game information, Sindarin and Quenya information, you name it. It’s in there.
TextMate is an excellent alternative text editor to BBEdit. It’s extremely customizable, light-weight and cheap compared to BBEdit. Then again, a new computer is cheap compared to BBEdit too. I recently made the switch to TextMate and haven’t regretted it once.
YummyFTP is an excellent FTP client which I think is even better than the well-known Transmit. I used to use Transmit, but it was always so buggy. With Yummy, I get the same feel and functionality (plus some!) without the bugginess.
NetNewsWire Lite is the best RSS newsreader out, in my opinion. I’ve tried others like Shrook, Newsfire and PulpFiction, but I always keep coming back to NetNewsWire. It’s easy-to-use and customize and does what it’s supposed to do very well.
iRatchet is an up-and-coming project/time tracking application. The developer is friendly and responds quickly to bug reports. Even though this is just barely into version 1, it’s already better than anything else I’ve tried.
iPodBackup is a nifty, free utility that uses the built-in rsync to make backups of your Users directory onto your iPod. Backups are customizable too, so you can leave out what you don’t want backed-up.
PasswordMaster helps me keep track of the countless username/password combinations I’ve amassed over the years. It also helps me keep track of software licenses I’ve purchased. A clean, simple interface makes it easy to use and the price is decent too.
Seashore is a simple, open-source image editor. When I just want to shrink an image and save it for the Web, I just open it in Seashore instead of starting up the Photoshop juggernaut. I used Seashore for the icons in this entry.
MainMenu is an easy-to-use menubar item that allows you to run a large set of Mac OS X maintenance, cleaning and optimization tasks. It runs the same maintenance scripts as Cocktail and OnyX, but is easier to access and use.
There are other nice apps I use every now and then like Paparazzi, MPlayer, OmniOutliner, Sogudi and PixelStick, but these ten are the ones I use the most.
Thanks for the compliment. I just discovered your well-done Mac software site tonight.
The Linkbox section on the homepage is a dynamic list that changes as I add new quick links to sites I find interesting and worth sharing. It only displays the latest five on the homepage, but the RSS feed displays the latest 20. I add two to three news entries per week on average.
Hi Chris,
I came to your site via:
http://gigaom.com/2005/09/03/10macapps/
What a beautiful site you’ve created! I looked around and my immediate thought was to contact you and ask if perhaps we could link to each other; then I saw that you’re already linked to me!
Many thanks for that. I will of course reciprocate…
Regards,
Andrew Burke