Ten and a half years ago I was asked by Zach Hale to jot down my 10 favorite Mac apps and then ask a few others to do the same. Wow, ten and a half years ago. Pre iPhone.
Now, with the Mac seemingly a second-class citizen both in hardware upgrades and app popularity, now may be the perfect time to bring this post back to light and see what my favorite Mac apps are today.
In no particular order:
- Simplenote
- Slack for Mac (beta)
- Atom
- Apple’s Calendar
- Rocket
- Fluid (for Trello and Asana)
- Google Chrome
- Spotify
- Tweetbot
- Apple’s Reminders
A few things I take away from this. First, is that none of the apps listed from 10 years ago are still my favorite apps. Though I do miss many of them and would happily still use them if they were still being maintained. Second, is that a few of Apple’s own apps have made their way onto my list that weren’t there before; Calendar and Reminders.
This means that less of the apps on the list are indie apps – or, apps made by independent developers. Rocket, Fluid, and Tweetbot are the only indie apps on my list. I wish there were a ton more. I miss the days of the majority of the software I was running being built by small teams or one person.
Some of the tasks that I used to do a decade ago I still do today just with different apps. As an example I still subscribe to a lot of blogs but I use Feedly instead of NetNewswire. I also listen to music but I use Spotify instead of iTunes. And I edit code in a text editor but I use Atom instead of Textmate.
While the apps have changed, and some are orders of magnitude better than the apps I used then, the tasks really haven’t. The reasons why and how I use a Mac today are exactly the same today as they were then.
I’m going to tag three people that would be totally awesome if they took the time to do this exercise as I’m sure it would help to shed light on a number of Mac apps; Jim Dalrymple, John Gruber and Brent Simmons.
