OSX apps that keep you hooked to your Mac? | Hacker News Reader

OSX apps that keep you hooked to your Mac?

5 pointsfactorialboy22 comments

Sure Apple's hardware is great. Very stylish, very sexy and sleek.

But at the end of the day, its the software that makes you productive. Or keeps you entertained.

Which are the OSX apps that keep you hooked to your Mac / Macbook / MBP?

Thanks!

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iTerm2 running tmux. That's where I run vim and irssi.

As for GUI stuff.

* Alfred - Alfred will make you 100 times more productive moving around your system.

* Spotlight - Even if you don't use Alfred, spotlight will make you more productive

* AppZapper - Uninstalls apps and removes all the little things that get left behind when dragging apps to the trash.

* Automator - A lot of people don't ever learn automator, but I think it's the best thing ever. It comes with OS X and it's awesome. I write little tasks all the time for example, I have an automator task that zips my project directory with a timestamp in the name and moves it to dropbox every day at 4:55pm for backup.

* Billings - If you do contract work Billings is amazing

* Github.app - Amazing tool

* Growl - Amazing nofitications

* LittleSnapper - Fantastic tool for keeping track of screenshots of designs and such

* Mou - Great little markdown editor

* Propane - Fantastic campfire client

* Skala Preview - Allows you to connect to photoshop and see your iOS psd's realtime on your iOS device

* Textmate - Amazing text editor

* Transmit - Best ftp client hands down

* Wakeup Time - Turns your Macbook into an alarm clock

BBEdit, terminal. Also, not an app, but not having to screw around to make things work. This alone gives me a huge productivity boost, over Linux or Windows.

I believe that "not having to screw around to make things work" doesn't apply to windows, or at least, not anymore. Do you recall specific situations where something worked out-of-the-box on Mac but required "screwing around" on a windows machine?

Getting new devices to work (though thats probably just in the olden days as well). Also; Cygwin.

Terminal. Git. Wifi. App store & re-downloading purchases. Imovie with direct YouTube upload. These all often require screwing around or installing addons in windows. All worm flawlessly out of the box (OK I movie takes 3 or 4 clicks to buy/install) on my mac. These are just the firs few things that came to mind.

It's only loosely an app, but having a real unix terminal (without having to run a VM) is the biggest reason I'm hooked.

Almost every Linux distro gives you a terminal. :-/

And an arguably much better terminal at that. That being said this is still a huge advantage over Windows.

I use Linux (and Solaris, and BSD ...) on a regular basis.

But whenever I use linux on the desktop, the provided terminal feels rinky-dink compared to iTerm2.

Of course! I probably should have clarified and said something like "being able to run a real terminal alongside programs like Photoshop without having to us a VM has me hooked." I love linux, but there's a lot of software I use every day that only exists for mac/windows.

Omnifocus (Omni products in general), Keynote, Alfred, Papers2, Scrivener (although there is a Windows version now), All the text editor options (Notational Velocity, Nottingham, etc)

DevonThink: I put everything in it. Great for my MSc research into concurrency.

Notational Velocity. I know about ResophNotes, etc, but they don't cut it.

iTerm2.

It's humble. But every time I use linux I find myself missing the little features that iTerm2 provides.

Inspector and Omnifocus

MarsEdit & Coda

Alfred

Pathfinder

Finder

XCode

Same here. I only have a Mac so I can develop for iOS with it.

There is no other reason to have it, in this house - everything else I do with my Mac, I can do equally well if not better with my Linux workstation.

Its just that its almost impossible to work on iOS without XCode, and so far the XCode VM I set up for the purpose isn't as performant as my MBP.

I'd love to ditch the MBP, though, and just have a plain ol' Linux workstation. I don't see anything terribly unique about OSX in comparison.

OSX itself keeps me hooked to my Mac. I can find anything I need for this platform. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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