It’s been a good year for software. I’ve had the pleasure of using and exploring a ton of new apps. I took inventory of the apps installed on my main Mac, ran it through SearchLink and put together this post1 to share the ones I use the most often.
The apps are roughly broken into categories, however arbitrary they may be. They’re also listed in alphabetical order, not by preference or awesomeness. Check out the ones that sound interesting!
I’m a “basement” musician these days. Logic Pro X, Garage Band and the following Mac apps (plus a lot of great iOS apps) make up a pretty decent virtual studio when mixed with the right hardware:
My favorite effects processor for guitar and bass. Combined with an iRig HD and a good pair of headphones, this is a complete replacement for a practice amp and recording setup.
My favorite tool for converting both audio and video files to various formats. It uses the usual tools (ffmpeg, et al) but it has an excellent interface and high-speed process management for batch conversions.
Video
I don’t have a ton of video apps these days; most of my video output is in the form of screencasts. I love using Motion and iMovie, but my needs are pretty simple.
Great screen capture and image annotation. I use Droplr for sharing, but for screenshots on my blog and elsewhere, this is my pick. See also, Monosnap.
ImageAlpha is the best PNG compression tool I’ve seen, and it’s free. So is ImageOptim for lossy compression of other formats, and it works seamlessly with ImageAlpha.
My favorite tool for live previews of web designs. Yes, you can use Grunt, but LiveReload is much easier to set up, especially for quick projects. See also, CodeKit, another favorite of mine.
This has become my vector graphics tool of choice, especially when creating icons and web graphics. @2x export and automatic batch updates make it ideal for app and web development.
PaintCode turns vector graphics drawn in its editor into Objective-C code you can use in Cocoa applications. I don’t always use this code in final productions, but it’s a great learning tool.
A handy tool for automatically formatting your header and method files based on various style rules. Indentation, bracket placement, etc. are all adjusted to consistently fit your choice of code style.
My favorite Git utility. I use the command line 90% of the time, but when I want to do a large commit, check file histories on multiple files and handle badly-mangled merges, this is my tool of choice.
Still my favorite FTP app, over five years later. Don’t get me wrong, Transmit is awesome, but I feel very at home with Yummy and its powerful features.
Regular Expressions
I like enough of these that it gets its own sub-group. Each of these have their special talents, and all of them get the job (of building and testing regular expressions) done:
My top choice for Markdown editing this year. I still love Byword and Sublime Text for writing, but MMDC has taken the lead with great new features (including excellent CriticMarkup support).
I don’t play many games, especially on the Mac. This one has helped me while away some time with challenging puzzles while waiting for other processes to finish, though.
The runner up for favorite email client. If you use Gmail and want to keep your email in the cloud instead of on your Mac, this is the best tool for it.
My pick for quick mind maps. It’s not as full-featured as iThoughtsX, but if you just want to lay out an idea with beautiful iCloud sync to your iOS devices, this is a great app. MindNode 3 for iOS is a perfect companion.
I’ve used this app on and off for at least five years now. It’s a file manager akin to Evernote (without the cloud). Version 3 adds a lot of great features, and the most recent updates allow great integration with Marked.
This great little app has changed my reading habits by breaking long stories down into bite-size chunks that I can quickly navigate through while walking at my treadmill desk. I even set up my Leap Motion controller with BetterTouchTool to let me page through using simple hand gestures while I walk.
This handy app loads web previews of App Store apps when you hover over them in App Store.app, preventing the need for recursing into every app you want to learn about and then backing out. If you’re an app junkie, it’s indispensable.
My favorite backup utility. It does automatic incremental backups to Amazon S3. A recent update added the ability to use Glacier storage, lowering your storage bill (you pay more to get stuff back out, but it works out to be more affordable in most cases).
One of the best “send to iPhone” apps yet, with support for a multitude of data types, and with two way communication with your iOS devices. You can even add new devices by scanning a QR code that pops up on your iPhone using your Mac’s iSight, instantly connecting the two.
This is it. It’s buried in here, but it’s my top-number-one-double-plus-awesome pick for 2013. If you want to assign custom keyboard hotkeys, multi-touch gestures, Leap Motion gestures or even commands you can send from iOS devices, this is what you want. And it’s free (please donate).
My favorite tool for sharing screenshots, files and notes (plain text, code, or Markdown). The devs recently added support for basic image annotation before sharing, making it a perfect replacement for what I used to use Skitch for.
Dropzone saw a couple of updates this year, but even without them it’s still one of my most-used apps. Just drag files to your menu bar and get a palette of “destinations” you can drop on. You can even write your own.
This is an awesome app if you need to manually maintain a feed for a podcast, Sparkle updates or blog RSS. I use it for handling all of Marked 2’s updates.
I like the notification system in 10.8+, but not as much as I like Growl. Custom notifications for different apps, with an array of awesome popup styles.
The best Spotlight augmentation there is. Perfect for searching your files, emails, tags… whatever Spotlight can search, HoudahSpot can do it better and more easily.
If you want any control over the background processes running on your system, or you want finer, GUI-based control over your own custom scheduled tasks, this is the one.
I love PopClip, which gives you an iOS-like popup when you select text anywhere on your Mac. Once you get the hang of it, you don’t want to work without it. It’s also fun to build on.
This isn’t an every-single-day app for me, but when you need it, it’s awesome. Grab any part of your screen and turn it into a floating window for reference.
This is definitely a utility I use very, very frequently. It gives me hotkey control of my microphone inputs, allowing me to mute quickly with just a keypress. It also handles push-to-talk and cough button modes, with a double-tap of your hotkey to toggle between them.
I couldn’t live without TextExpander making my repetitive typing tasks trivial. With the fill-in snippets and ability to run shell scripts, it’s a productivity monster. It’s also a blast to create new snippets.
A drawer that slides out from the side of your screen (or at your mouse location) when you start to drag a file, giving you a resting place to hold the file (and collect more) for dragging out when you’re ready.
Unmount all types of drives with the press of a key, including safely unmounting Time Machine disks.
So there you have it. Out of all the amazing apps I’ve played with over the last year, these are ones that are still being used frequently, most of them daily. Happy Holidays, go get yourself some new apps.
I make that sound trivial. This was a long edit process… ↩
