Top 10 Mac Applications

16 January 2007

Everybody loves lists.

Although I would hazard a guess that in actual fact everybody loves compiling lists. Ah well.

Here’s my top 10 favourite Mac applications, in alphabetical order:

While I do like iChat’s video and voice ability, Adium beats it in almost every other way. If you want to use either MSN or Gtalk it’s hands down the best client on the Mac, let alone if you want to use more than one protocol at once.

Of course, if it looked bad or or if the interface was poor then it would be a non-starter but Adium has one of the best interfaces around, packed full of customisability which is vital in a IM app. Not only can you customise the look of the buddy list, but you can completely change the look of the message window as well; amusingly enough the message window is built on WebKit (the rendering engine that powers Safari), so in fact you can change the look just by re-writeing the CSS!

Adium is also easily the best Twitter client as well – none of the other widgets and applications for Twitter seem to have got it quite “right” yet, and the integration with Growl for system-wide notifications is key here as well.

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Photoshop obviously needs no introduction, but any list of applications simply has to include it. I spend a large proportion of my day in Photoshop – alternatives such as Fireworks or Illustrator (obviously depending on what I’m doing) have never really gelled for me, and Photoshop has an answer for every question I throw at it.

The CS3 update is really quite impressive; other than the immense speed boost on Intel macs the interfaces changes work really well. On my 13.3” Macbook the auto-collapsing palettes work incredibly well, compensating perfectly for the small-ish screen size, or the lack of a second screen.

Aperture

Aperture simply has one of the best interfaces or any software product I’ve every used. You can tell that the team behind it have sat down with a group of photographers and meticulously analysed their workflow, and produced the perfect set of tools to optimise it.

Workflow is all that matters in Aperture; the tool set it provides is all you need, and works very well, but can be found elsewhere. It also can be slightly slow, but that’s more due to my Mac’s graphics card than anything else.

iTunes

Another application that needs no introduction; but has made such a huge impact.

For me iTunes = my music.

It really is that simple. I have about 60gb of music, and more every week, and the only way I can grapple control over 16 days worth of music is by judicious usage of smart playlists, filtering by all sorts of different metadata so that I hear all my new music without loosing track of the old classics.

Then there’s the iPod as well…

Mail.app

Mail.app works in the same way as I do when it comes to email. It does almost everything I want from an email client – including vital things like smart folders, which I use every day – and wraps it up with a visually attractive, brilliantly useable interface. It also seems to be pretty much the only mail client that uses the “one inbox” metaphor, where you can view all the mail across all of your accounts (I probably have about 20 email accounts).

What really makes Mail.app perfect though is it’s extensibility. I use two plugins for it which are indispensable – Mail.appetizer and MailTags.

Mail.appetizer puts up a transparent notification when you receive an email, which is really handy for quickly scanning a mail for anything important or urgent – vital if you don’t want to end up living in your inbox.

MailTags allows you to add tags and notes to your email, which I use instead of filing my email as it’s much more flexible.

OmniWeb

With the release of version 5.5, OmniWeb is now back at the top of web browser tree. It’s based on the same rendering engine as Safari (WebKit), which is currently the best renderer (I think, at least) when it comes to CSS, and not far behind Firefox for Javascript.

On top of the excellent rendering speed that it shares with Safari, it adds a huge raft of features that every serious web surfer needs; Workspaces allow you to auto-save different sets of web pages – almost like virtual desktops for your browser; graphical tabs on the sidebar work much better than normal tabs, as you can identify tabs much quicker and they still work well if you have lots of tabs; customisable search shortcuts; ad blocking; site specific preferences – the list goes on.

Quicksilver

A Mac without Quicksilver is like a Mac without a mouse.

Once you get used to using it (and it does have a steep learning curve), it really is that fundamental to how you use a computer. Quicksilver is not just a program launcher – although obviously it does that very well – it can be used for a huge range of things, like accessing address book entries (find someone, then hit the right arrow key to see their phone numbers, email addresses etc. Select one of them to paste it, create a new email to it and more) or controlling iTunes.

SlimBatteryMonitor

Obviously a much simpler application than Photoshop or Aperture, SlimBatteryMonitor is still a must have for any laptop user. It’s simple, but very effective and lightweight – it just gives you a bit more customisability over the way the battery menu item looks.

The killer features for me is that you can set it to hide when you’re using a power adapter and fully charged; it’s such a simple feature I’m surprised Apple haven’t thought of it, and until they do I’ll keep using SBM.

SubEthaEdit

Being a web developer, having a good text editor is a must and SubEthaEdit is the best one I’ve used for the Mac (yes, I’ve used TextMate – It just doesn’t “feel” right to me). The code completion is perfect, the web preview is always handy and the file-type specific add-ons (like the html colour picker) are perfectly integrated.

WriteRoom v1

The v1 is very important in this case – version 2 costs $24.95 and adds features that don’t interest me in the slightest, and version 1 is still available for free.

What WriteRoom offers is a distraction free writing environment, free from layout, formatting, document handling – everything that distracts you from writing. It auto saves everything, so you don’t have to worry about it, and has a very nice full screen mode.

Everything I write – all my blog posts and documents I write at work – are all done first in WriteRoom.

From: Articles

16 January 2007