Mar 31, 2010

Essential Mac Software - 2010 Edition

It’s time for the yearly update for my list of Mac software which I consider essential for my daily work. There are a couple of new entries, but also a couple of applications that have been retired.

The following list presents a choice of my favorite MAC applications (in alphabetical order):

  • Aperture iPhoto’s big brother - I love the new photo editing capabilities added in version 3, which go much beyond iPhoto. Also the user interface seems much more MAC-like than Adobe Lightroom.
  • BibDesk The best BibTeX frontend ever.
  • CSSEdit Beautifully designed CSS editor from the makers of Espresso.
  • Flip4Mac Adds support for Microsoft video formats to QuickTime.
  • LaunchBar 5 The ultimate application launcher.
  • Macports Install command line Unix tools on OS X.
  • NetNewsWire My favorite RSS reader.
  • OmniGraffle In my opinion the best vector graphics drawing program for technical illustrations in computer science and engineering.
  • OmniOutliner Although the outliner hype has faded in the last years, still a useful application for collecting hierarchically structured data.
  • Perian QuickTime support for many popular video formats.
  • RipIt Rips DVD movies to disk images that can be played with the standard DVDPlayer application.
  • Skype VOIP and instant messaging.
  • Skim PDF and DVI viewer, perfectly integrated with TextMate’s LaTeX mode.
  • SuperDuper Harddrive cloning tool, perfect complement to TimeMachine.
  • TextMate My standard multi-purpose text editor for writing and programming. Provides good support for LaTeX.
  • Things Elegant and simple task management application.
  • Transmission BitTorrent client.
  • TubeTV Rip YouTube and Flash videos to disk.

Plugins for Mail.app:

  • Mail Act-On Control Mail.app with your keyboard.
  • Mail Tags Adds Tagging to Mail.app. I love this plugin as it allows me to classify archived emails with tags rather than using different mail folders.

I don’t longer use these applications, that were still on my last list:

  • Cocoabooklet Booklet printing is now supported directly by Preview.app.
  • GPGMail Plugin Still no SnowLeopard compatible version available. Also it seems that SMIME is much more popular for signing and encrypting email these days.
  • MarsEdit Excellent Blog post editor, but I switched static website generator for blogging, which makes MarsEdit obsolete.
  • OmniFocus In my opinion an over-hyped GTD-inspired TODO list manager, that is too clumsy and overloaded with features. I like Things much better.
  • Quicksilver Obsoleted by LaunchBar.
  • SSH Keychain In recent OS X versions, the SSH version shipped with OS X has gained basically the same functionality.
  • VLC Videoplayer For years I haven’t met a video file that QuickTime player X with the Perian plugins cannot play.
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