General
Some of the best applications on the mac are made by Apple itself. Seems like a no-brainer, but is often overlooked.
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The iLife suite is an incredible line of applications that let you organize photos, create videos, create music, design webpages and master DVDs. The current version of iLife comes with new macs, with new releases taking place about every year. Another great application suite from Apple is iWork. iWork is like office, but the workflow is completely different. While I own and use Office for the Mac as well as iWork, I prefer iWork for all design-oriented tasks, like desktop publishing, or spreadsheets that will go to clients or other outside entities. Why? Because the end result is so beatiful and takes so little time and effort. |
Communication
Aside from the built-in iChat application, the best application to use for instant messaging is Adium. Adium shines at multiple-accounts across different services and does so with a distinct mac style. Almost everything in adium is customizable. There is a very active beta in development now with even more to offer with parts of the UI being completely re-written here.
Twhirl is not a mac-only product, but it is a very well crafted AIR-based application. Twhirl is a twitter and friendfeed client. It allows you to view current activity and includes an integrated popup alerting system.
If you are into oldschool chat, you need an IRC client, and Linkinus is the most beautiful, functional and elegant IRC client I have ever used. The developers of linkinus hit the nail on the head for building the perfect Mac IRC application, from the alerts to growl integration, to the default themes, to the preferences and options. All was very well designed.
Finance
| If you think finances are boring, you are in for a surprise. This is one I didn’t know about until it won one of the 2008 Apple Design Awards. Meet Squirrel, which is not your father’s quicken. Finance management has come a long way since then, and the user experience of Squirrel proves that you can get just as much done in a simple, elegant app that works well and is designed well as you can in the overpriced, clunky standard that we all love to hate. |  |
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Receipt Wallet is one of those apps that I don’t know how I lived without. We all have that drawer full of receipts, we keep them for taxes, or maybe just to remind us of how much we spend. I no longer have that drawer. Receipt Wallet lets you scan, categorize, and store your receipts while letting you monitor how much you spend per category, per merchant, etc. I use it as an organizational tool, and a constant reminder of how much is being spent at any time. Now with a cover-flow mode, it is another very elegant solution to an old problem. |
Internet
RSS feeds are a huge lifesaver to me. I don’t have to go to hundreds of websites in order to read their content. And it’s nice that Apple built RSS reader capabilities into Safari and Mail.App. But those readers are very limited. By far, one of the best RSS readers available to the Mac is the free NetNewsWire. With a familiar interface, many available themes, and wide range of capabilities, NetNewsWire is my primary RSS reader.
Web Design
I would be remiss not to mention the application with which this site was built and maintained, RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is a very easy to use website creation package with an enormous set of very customizeable templates and diverse range of supported content types. With RapidWeaver, it takes literally minutes to put together a very professional looking site, complete with a blog, comments, photo gallery, etc.
Coda by Panic Software is an indispensable tool. It is not in the same class as RapidWeaver, as it is a code-based editor versus a template-driven, drag-and-drop environment. It wraps file-transfer, terminal access, CSS design, code editing, reference documents and live preview into one beautifully mastered environment and is an integral part of my design process.
Misc
Sometimes a simple screenshot is not enough, or the workflow is awkward. You hit [command]+[shift]+3, track down the file on your desktop, open it, annotate, resize and/or censor it, change its format, name, etc, copy it, paste it somewhere, resize again, etc. Skitch does all of this for you. You call it with [command]+[shift]+5, select your area for a screenshot, it takes the shot and prevents you with a window you can perform all operations to the screenshot in, and even upload it straight from one interface.
