I'd asked this on Twitter earlier, and got some nice feedback, including Kaleidoscope, BBEdit, Courier, Reeder, MarsEdit, Acorn/Pixelmator, NvAlt, Fantastical, Sparrow, Versions, Adium, and Coda.
Thoughts?
It's the natural successor to Quicksilver. When I had to work on Windows boxes, I never could find a replacement that felt anywhere near as good.
Ultimately it was these two programs that did it for me. Those and a terminal.
Really, with the Mac, it's the frameworks.
Acorn and Pixelmator are great and all, but I think that Paint.NET on Windows matches or exceeds them.
- fewer features - cannot handle huge spreadsheets - slower
, but it feels so much better. In particular, allowing multiple cell grids on a sheet and allowing users to name columns and rows are good ideas (I know it was done before, but AFAIK, nobody is shipping that at the moment). It also helps that it takes effort to have it make ugly charts (Excel has improved here, but it is as if it doesn't dare commit to a design choice for fear of losing some customers)
And in the growl package, there's an extra called growlnotify, which lets you pipe data from processes and show the output in growl form. I use this extensively.
Xcode, TextMate.
Adium is actually a clone of Pidgin, Pidgin can be used on Windows and Linux, so this is not a good example of a Mac only application.
Also take a look at Skitch.
http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ cathode is a beautiful mac only app that makes my windows based officemates real envious
and i also have an app of my own that dont have a windows equivalent: http://twitjustice.org
Terminal (jk)
I'd like to see something that does a better job allowing me to distinguish sessions to different servers (diff background colors, etc.)