OK, I’ve been meaning to record all this for a while now, so this thread is a welcome excuse. This list represents about 33% of the apps on my 2021 MacBook Pro (M1 Max) — honestly!; I often use another 33%; the remaining third consists mostly of legacy apps I keep around for opening old files, and new apps I’m trying out. Here goes…
- 1Password (but I may not renew, due to their persistent refusal to support the Orion web browser): storing my passwords since at least 2013.
- Affinity Photo, Publisher, and especially Designer: for working with and, ultimately, publishing a book about Tolkien’s draft maps for The Lord of the Rings.
- AirFoil by Rogue Amoeba: AirPlaying to and from various devices over the last 10 or 15 years (but I may be phasing this out, to be replaced by Roon, which I’ve been experimenting with for the past month or so and like very much!).
- Amadeus Pro: for editing audio files, I find this much more intuitive than any other app I’ve tried; I’ve happily used it since the ’00s, but it’s beginning to need a refresh of its UI.
- AnyList: We’ve used this, mostly on our iDevices but also our Macs, for grocery-list management.
- Arq: Not Arc the new web browser — which I find absolutely confounding! — but Arq the backup software; I’ve used this for a good decade now to backup my Mac, originally to Amazon AWS but now to Wasabi.
- Bartender: Even with Bartender I have too many things in my Menu bar; without it, I’d be complete toast!
- BBEdit: I’ve been using this literally since 1994 for all text editing, whether for local text files or for PHP, HTML, CSS, or even COBOL (OK, so, no COBOL since about 2004!); BBEdit has played a big part in the Tolkien Art Index, Tolkienists, and Anduin™.
- BusyCal: Our macOS calendar app of choice since Now Up-to-Date gave up the ghost.
- BusyContacts: Our macOS contacts app of choice since Now Contacts gave up the ghost.
- Carbon Copy Cloner: Four or five years ago there was some issue that made me switch from the equally excellent SuperDuper!; I’ve long since forgotten what it was, but I’m equally happy with CCC…
- Choosy: I’ve used this for decades now, I think, to override my default browser (currently Orion) for the few sites where I’d prefer to use a different browser; I can go a year or two without changing any settings — it just works!
- ChronoSync: Though it’s capable of so much more, I use it exclusively for cloning subdirectories of
~/Library/CloudStorage/into other folders so that they can be backed up properly by CCC and Arq; Econ Technologies should be commended for their very generous upgrade policy: buy the app, and all upgrades are free, forever. - Cloudflare WARP (1.1.1.1): We live in the thules, so our only reasonable option for high-speed internet is StarLink, whose implementation of IPv6 (or maybe whose IPv4 hacks) causes problems with quite a few web services; WARP works around most of these very effectively.
- Default Folder X: When St. Clair made this available for OS X in 2001 or so, I knew I could finally make the jump from Mac OS 9; to this day, I find Macs without Default Folder almost unusable.
- Dictionary: I actually really like Apple’s stock Dictionary app; I’ve adjusted the list of dictionaries it uses and have added Webster’s “New” International dictionary (1913); now, if only I could find a way to add the American Heritage dictionary and Cal Watkins’ dictionary of Proto-Indo-European Roots!
- EasyFind: Devon’s simple but robust file finder that doesn’t use Spotlight; Spotlight’s improved a lot since Tiger, but sometimes it’s more effective to use brute force! See also Find Any File…
- Emailchemy: OK, I don’t use this often — but it’s really helped me over the years bringing ancient Claris Emailer, Apple PowerMail, and Eudora messages into my megalithic email-since-the-dawn-of-time trove at Fastmail
- Fastmate: Sometimes I want the speed and ease of Fastmail’s default interface; when I do, Joe Lekstrom’s excellent little app is what I turn to.
- FileMaker Pro: It’s Claris now; before that, it was Apple; before that, it was Claris; before that, Nashoba Systems of Concord, Mass. I first bought it as a Nashoba product when I lived in Concord in the early ’80s; I no longer do any active development work in FileMaker, but both the Tolkien Art Index and LR Citations are (currently) static pages exported from FMP databases.
- Find Any File: Thomas Templemann’s app and EasyFind are pretty similar, but often one will find a well-hidden file that eludes the other.
- Find Empty Folders: Sometimes you just want to find empty folders (or folders that are otherwise empty but do contain a
.DS_Storefile); Thomas Templemann again to the rescue! - Flux: With ambient-light-sensitive displays, True Tone, Night Shift, and “dark mode,” you’d think Flux would be unnecessary — but somehow it still manages to improve life.
- ForkLift: Like others here, my first FTP app was Fetch (unless it was Anarchie, the FTP app Peter N. Lewis made before Keyboard Maestro!), but for quite a while it hadn’t made the jump to OS X; I used Panic’s
TransitTransmit for a while, but Forklift has really “clicked” for me. - GraphicConverter: I’ve been using this ever since I first needed to convert a .jpeg file into a .gif (which we pronounced with a hard “g” back then!), probably in 1994; nothing else will do!
- Hazel: An indispensable glue for so many workflows!
- HoudahSpot: Sometimes Spotlight is your friend, but Apple’s interfaces into it just don’t cut it; I love Pierre Bernard’s app — and, amazingly, he seems to be able to improve it year by year.
- ImageOptim: The easiest image compression app I’ve found; I love the “lossless” options, which will frequently save 50% – 60%.
- iMazing: Dead simple set-it-and-forget-it local backups for your iPhones and iPads! That is, until Apple broke it with iOS 16.1. Grrr!
- Jump Desktop: This was already very good VNC/RDP screen-sharing software, but then they introduced Fluid connections a few years ago — fast, flexible, easy, and free!
- Kaleidoscope: The high price kept me from buying this for many years, but I finally caved a few months ago. Boy, what I’d been missing! Excellent for diffs of both text files and images — or folders full of text files or images.
- Keyboard Maestro: Another indispensable glue for workflows!
- Keynote: So much better than PowerPoint!
- Mactracker: Listing every little bit of available information about basically every Apple product from the Apple I right on up to this year’s items.
- MacUpdater: I used to be pretty old-school with upgrades & updates: shut the Mac down, boot it, clone its hard drive, go to each app and update it if an update was available, make another clone, shut it down, reboot it. Now I use CCC to make incremental backups every hour and let MacUpdater scan and update things automatically. This saves so much time!
- MailMate: Every so often I survey the other options out there — and I run, screaming, back to MailMate…
- Marked: Brett Terpstra’s one-trick pony for previewing Markdown documents. I use it alongside BBEdit to see a beautiful rendering of whatever I’m working on.
- Name Mangler: There are a lot of utilities available for bulk-renaming of files, but this has been my longstanding favorite — very flexible and powerful, and fairly intuitive.
- Notebooks: I’d used this a bit back around 2017, but it never quite “took.” I gave it another look this last autumn, and it immediately replaced Bear, Craft, KeepIt, and DEVONthink for me, as well as a bunch of other note-taking apps I’d been auditioning (NotePlan was the best of them, but also Agenda, Taio, Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, and others). Alfons Schmid is a very talented and engaged developer, and he fixed several bugs and added a couple of new features I requested within just a couple of weeks. I’ll be sticking with Notebooks for a long time.
- Orion: My favorite web browser; I have it syncing bookmarks and lists of open tabs between my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Seems to take the best of Safari and the best of Chrome and then adds Firefox extension capability on top of it all.
- PCalc: I’ve been using James Thomson’s app since he first published it in 1992. Can’t be beat!
- PDF Expert: I don’t love any PDF app that I’ve found, but this one most closely matches my needs for features, aesthetics, and price.
- QLMarkdown: Easy QuickLook for Markdown; fully compatible with Apple’s stringent requirements; amazing array of choices and preferences; free! By the author of Syntax Highlight.
- RayCast: I’ve been a loyal LaunchBar user since the original OS X Public Beta, but they don’t even yet have a setting for it to auto-switch from a light theme to a dark theme when your system changes — and, tbh, there haven’t been any substantive updates in a number of years. RayCast is taking a little getting used to, but it’s really full-featured and I think LaunchBar will be leaving my system soon. Update re LaunchBar: I’ve been waiting for this feature for years; this just appeared on TidBITS literally 3 hours after I posted about this here!
- ReadKit: This is a not-very-well-known RSS reader; it’s as simple and straightforward as NetNewsWire, but I find it slightly better behaved and prettier, besides. I use it constantly on my iPad, but it’s on my Mac, too, for reference.
- Rewind: I’ve been using this screen-recording and indexing app for a few months now, and it’s saved me a lot of work twice — both times, I’d been filling in web forms with a lot of text without remembering to write the text first in BBEdit, and the web form timed out on me and lost all my text. Rewind had recorded it, and I was able to copy and paste it into a newly loaded form.
- SilentKnight: Howard Oakley’s app which does for system and security updates what Macupdater does for apps. Simple, clean, easy.
- SoundSource: If you’re trying to get audio from one place to another and their AirFoil app isn’t quite right, Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource almost certainly is.
- StopTheMadness: Fantastic Safari/Chrome/Firefox extension to restore proper behavior to web sites that are intentionally broken.
- Syntax Highlight: Easy syntax highlighting for QuickLook; fully compatible with Apple’s stringent requirements; amazing array of choices and preferences; free! By the author of QLMarkdown.
- Tailscale: I’m using this tool more and more for accessing my various devices “locally” from anywhere in the world. It also lets Roon (see above) work properly on remote devices even when the server is connected to the internet via a hacky StarLink connection.
- TinkerTool & TinkerTool System: Though often all you need to do to get your system to do what you want can be done via the command-line, in my case that often means needing to trust things that people have posted in obscure corners of the internet. Most of these things can be done by one TinkerTool or the other — probably more easily, and certainly in a more tested and controlled manner.
- VueScan: Horrendously ugly, but hands-down the best scanning software on the planet. I first used it in 1997 to eek another couple of years of use out of an old Epson scanner (their own software wouldn’t work on the brand-new Mac OS 8), and I still use it for all scanning. Its interface hasn’t improved even by a pixel in all that time, but it’s flexible and powerful and Hamrick is resolute in his aim to support all scanners forever.
- Warp: Not to be confused with Cloudflare WARP, this is a new terminal emulator. I think it may replace iTerm for me, but I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks.
- WiFi Explorer Pro and WiFi Signal: Indispensable for working out optimal placement and channel selection for WiFi access points / base stations.
- xScope: Like Kaleidoscope, its high price had kept me away for a while, but I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and have found it to be really useful for design and layout work — especially when I want to know how that screen I’m developing on a 5K LG monitor with Retina on macOS is going to look on a non-Retina Windows system on a Dell HD monitor…