Ask YC: What great mac-only software do you recommend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: What great mac-only software do you recommend?

10 pointsBenS14 comments

Hi, I just got my first mac. I was wondering from long-time mac users, what software have you come to depend on and love that is unique to macs?

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Most useful stuff: OmniOutliner, Scrivener, OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, LaunchBar or Quicksilver, Path Finder, and VMware Fusion.

Also terrific, but less focused on pure productivity: Adium, Colloquy, Fission.

Great utilities for maintaining your system: AppCleaner, AppFresh, MainMenu, Service Scrubber, Name Mangler, OmniDiskSweeper, Winclone, Tunnelblick, Toast. Growl comes in handy, too.

You might also find Leap useful, depending on how you like to organize your data.

In terms of text editors, TextMate and BBEdit (TextWrangler is the free alternative) have their adherents. So does SubEthaEdit for collaborative work. Some people like MacVim. I personally use Emacs.app, easily built from the emacs source tree.

If you do any serious hacking, MacPorts is terrific.

LaunchBar or Quicksilver: tough call. I haven't seen any Quicksilver updates in about a year, since the original developer open-sourced it. Supposedly a rewrite is in the works. In the meanwhile, I switched to LaunchBar. It's a little more responsive and stable, although not quite as feature-rich or as good-looking.

Skitch is a small simple and free desktop/web application that makes it easy to capture screenshots, mark up mock ups, and share them via the web.

It's brilliant. If you haven't already, check it out now: http://www.skitch.com

I was going to list the usual suspects, but honestly, I don't think they are anything special. Yes, TextMate is cool, but I use MacVim. Quicksilver I use, but it's a glorified app launcher that has power features that I don't need. Spotlight (for me) would work just as well. Transmit is a cool FTP client, but it's just an FTP client.

Instead, how about: - Awaken: alarm clocks can be beautiful. - Coversutra: awesome and functional iTunes controller. - Screenflow: Probably the closest (functionality-wise) screencasting client to Camtasia Studio on Windows. - Simple Comic: an bare but perfect (for me) comic/ebook reader that just works.

You might want to check out Namely it isn't as powerful as Quicksilver but it is lighter and works very for launching applications quickly.

I second Awaken - one of my favorites for streamlining electronics overall.

Here's a quick list off the top of my head: Quicksilver, TextMate, Coda, Transmit, VisualHub, AppZapper.

Tranmission for torrents. Inquisitor for Safari's search bar (though at one point it was putting in sponsored links), CSS edit for troubleshooting CSS.

Check out http://osx.iusethis.com. Filter on genre, sort by popularity, read comments and download apps.

TextMate, DTerm, MacFusion, Quicksilver, Jumpcut

Life without DTerm... why, it seems absurd!

The Dashboard, Dashcode. I think it's a pretty awesome environment.

Also Versions (the best SVN client ever), Transmit (the best FTP client ever) and Coda (a pretty awesome website editor).

Omnigraffle!

Ah, thanks for all the great suggestions. I'm quite excited about omnigraffle :)

LaunchBar,Adium, CoverSutra, Linkinius, NetNewsWire, Things, Versions, Yojimbo

TextMate!

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