My Favorite Mac Apps

There are many great tools out there for Macs. In this post I’ll go over some I use often. I highly recommend you try them if you haven’t already.

Package Manager: Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for Mac, similar to apt-get and yum on Linux boxes. The installation instructions amount to running a command from their main site. To install applications simply type brew install [app_name]. To update packages run brew update and brew upgrade. If you run into issues, brew doctor may point you in the right direction by showing common issues found on your system.

Shell: Fish

Fish Shell is basically a bash replacement with out-of-the-box colors, autosuggestions, man page integration, among other features.

Spotlight Replacement: Alfred

Alfred is Spotlight on steroids. I recommend going into System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Spotlight and unchecking Show Spotlight Searchfield - Command + Space. Then open Alfred, go into Preferences (Command + ,), General tab, and pick Command + Space for Alfred’s hotkey.

Besides searching for applications, you can search for files by typing a single quote before the file name. For example 'move.mov. Pressing the Right Arrow key will show more options like Reveal in Finder and Open With….

By default Option + Command + C will show you things that have been on your clipboard. You can change settings for this feature in Alfred’s Preferences under the Clipboard feature.

Music: Spotify

Spotify has an amazing music library. I no longer miss the days of searching high and low for an album I wanted to listen to, or going to YouTube to get my music fix. There’s a free version with ads, but this is a service worth paying for.

Notes: Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking application that has clients for iOS and Android devices. I always use it to store notes when I travel (flights, hotels, places to see, etc.) and just general notes.

Backup: Dropbox

Dropbox will give you up to 16GB of free space after inviting your friends. Since my music, videos, emails, and code live in the cloud, there’s not a lot to back up. Dropbox is great for storing pictures taken from your mobile phone (they have an app for Android and iOS) and random files.

Finder Replacement: XtraFinder

XtraFinder is basically what Finder should be. My favorite features are tabs, folders on top (instead of mixing files and folders), and the ability to cut and paste files and folders.

Password Manager: 1Password

1Password password-protects my passwords and private notes. It’s not free, but there are free alternatives like Dashlane.

Source Control: Git

Git is an amazing version control system — you can learn the basics in about 15 minutes.

Code Hosting: Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a great place to store your code in the cloud. Unlike GitHub, they give you unlimited private repositories for free.

Git Graphical User Interface: SourceTree

SourceTree is really useful when you need a better, nay, graphical view of the history and changes in a git repository. A good non-free alternative is Git Tower.

Markdown Editor: Mou

Mou is the best Markdown editor I’ve ever used. I highly recommend playing around with the themes. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find it more calming to write with a dark background. You can also enable Check spelling as I type in the options to mitigate typos.

Chat Client: Adium

Adium is basically Pidgin with a Mac look and feel. It’s compatible with AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, IRC, and many others. If you’re only looking for an IRC client I recommend Colloquy instead.

TV: Netflix

Netflix needs no introduction. It does for TV shows and movies what Spotify does for music. If you don’t mind ads, check out Hulu. If you have Amazon Prime you also have access to their streaming video service, Amazon Instant Video. You can also buy videos from the Google Play Store and the Apple iTunes Store.

Twitter Client: Tweetbot

Tweetbot is by far the best Twitter client for desktops, but it’s not free. TweetDeck is a good free alternative.

Text Editor: Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text 2 is a very extensible text editor. The first thing I always install is Sublime Package Control. Here are some packages worth checking out: LiveReload, SublimeCodeIntel, SublimeLinter (my settings), and TrailingSpaces. You can enable vi mode and get vi goodness in your editor.

Mail Client: Sparrow

Sparrow is a lightweight desktop email client. It’s always a keyboard shortcut away, option+/ in my case. A cheaper alternative is AirMail. There’s a cool little application called Fluid that lets you treat web applications like desktop applications, for those that like their email client’s web interface but still want it outside a browser context.

Image Editor: Photoshop

Photoshop is Adobe’s answer to editing pictures, and it’s expensive. GIMP is a good free alternative.

CloudApp sits in your menu bar and waits for you to take screenshots. When it detects a screenshot has been taken, it uploads it to the cloud and stores it on one of their Amazon S3 servers. The URL to the image is automatically added to your clipboard.

VPN: Cloak

Almost every time I travel I download Cloak. It’s a VPN application for Mac and iOS devices. It automatically encrypts your traffic when connected to an unsecured WiFi network.

Uninstaller: AppCleaner

AppCleaner won’t just remove the .app sitting in your Applications folder — it will go into /Library and ~/Library and remove any files left over.

FTP Client: FileZilla

FileZilla is a free FTP client that works almost everywhere. Alternatively, Cyberduck provides a more Mac-like UI, if you don’t mind being nagged for a donation every once in a while.

Diff Tool: Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope is a very Mac-like diff tool, but it’s not free. KDiff3 is a good free alternative, if you don’t mind the UI.

Office: Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office for Mac comes with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. A less expensive alternative is iWork — Keynote is way better than PowerPoint anyway. There’s also LibreOffice, which some people may call a free alternative.

Charts: OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle is the best application I’ve ever used for creating charts and diagrams. Moqups is a good web-based application for creating some types of diagrams. Another web-based alternative is Google Drawings.

Browser: Chrome

Chrome Canary is Google’s bleeding-edge browser. Paul Irish wrote about Chrome Canary for developers; from the article: If you do front-end web development and already use Chrome as your development browser, I encourage you to use Chrome Canary.

To Do: Reminders

If you have Mountain Lion installed (OS X 10.8) you already have Reminders.

Games: Steam

Steam provides an application and a great place to buy games online. They usually have big discounts around the holidays. If you need the extra disk space, you can just delete games from disk and re-download them later from Steam’s servers. As of the time of writing there’s a Humble Indie Bundle — it’s a pay what you want system for buying indie games. If you pay at least 1 USD, they’ll send a Steam key.

Torrents: Transmission

Transmission, for downloading all those Linux .iso files.

Unarchiver: The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver will work with common formats such as Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, and many others.

Video Player: VLC

VLC will play almost every video format you throw at it.

MySQL Client: Sequel Pro

Sequel Pro is a beautiful UI for working with MySQL databases. It’s a refreshing experience coming from phpMyAdmin.

Virtualization: VirtualBox

VirtualBox is the application you want to use if you need to set up a virtual machine. There are sites like BitNami that provide already-configured virtual machines with common open source software.