| The A-List of Mac Software Last Updated: November 4, 2009 |
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| Program | Maker | Cost | Description |
| Safari | Apple | Free | Web browser |
| Fastest loading and running browser with very simple interface. Weak bookmarks, but good link bar. | |||
| Firefox | Mozilla | Free | Web browser |
| Best secondary browser for websites that don't load properly in Safari. Loads Web pages quickly, but the program is slow to load the first time in an OS X session. | |||
| TweetDeck | Iain Dodsworth | free | Twitter UI utility |
| There's a lot of great Twitter apps out there, but the reason I use TweetDeck is that it lets me create groups of people I follow, which helps me stay current even when I can't check into Twitter every 30 minutes or so. TweetDeck also offers several other advantages, including support for multiple Twitter accouts, one-click Retweeting and @replying, and a long list of features. It makes Twitter habitable. When I started using TweetDeck, my enjoyment of the service increased several fold. To follow me on Twitter: My Computerworld account is @scotfinnie and my Scot's Newsletter account is @scotsnewsletter. |
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| Xmarks | Xmarks | free | bookmark synching and search enhancement |
| Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) works on Mac and Windows, and it can be used to synch all or part of your bookmarks across multiple machines and browsers. If you're the kind of person who wants your bookmarks to be the same no matter what machine or browser you happen to be using at any given hour on any given day, Xmarks is definitely for you. MobileMe does, among other things, the same bookmarks trick, but only supports Apple's Web browser and it costs $99. Xmarks supports Safari and Firefox on Windows and Mac. It supports Internet Explorer too, but less well (due to the way Microsoft creates Favorites). Xmarks also lets you create a master list of bookmarks on its servers. I've been using this product for a long time and just forgot to add it to the list. Very powerful and useful. Wishlist: Xmarks should get into calendar synching between Windows Calendar and iCal. | |||
| Fusion | VMware | $79.99 | desktop virtualization utility |
| Powerful tool for adding 32-bit or 64-bit Windows XP or Vista to your Mac. It's fast, reliable, and offers most of the features of Parallels. After several months of testing, Fusion knocked Parallels off the A-List. Reason: I've just run into too many issues with VM corruption and trouble-prone Parallels upgrades. Fusion just works. No stated Windows 7 support at this writing. | |||
| VirtualBox | Sun Microsystems | free for personal use | desktop virtualization utility |
| Well designed, full-featured virtualization tool. Installation of virtual drivers is a little quirky, but the user interface and feature set are surprisingly rich. Not quite as fast as Parallels Desktop or VMware's Fusion. Ideal for casual use. Includes a Windows 7 configuration, which I tested successfully with pre-release versions of Windows 7. If you're only a casual Windows user on the Mac, VirtualBox is the answer. | |||
| DiskWarrior | Alsoft | $99.95 | disk data and directory recovery tool |
| Best tool available for repairing disk problems and recovering data. IT pros trust this thing, and so do I. If you support multiple Macs, even as an end-user, get this one. It's worth the $100. | |||
| Drive Genius | Prosoft Engineering | $99 | non-destructive disk-partitioning and disk-repair utility |
| Best repartitioning tool for the Mac, and very good disk repair tool. Since Leopard, Apple's Disk Utility can do disk partitioning, but I still find Drive Genius indispensable. | |||
| Adium | Adium team | Free (donations accepted) | instant-messaging client |
| Best IM client with extra features like built-in logging and tabs. Supports the AIM, ICQ, MobileMe, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber and several other networks. iChat is nice, but once you try Adium, you won't go back. | |||
| iChat | Apple | Free as part of OS X | video instant-messaging client |
| Best secondary IM client, and excellent video IM client. Comes free with Mac OS X. | |||
| TextMate | Macromates | $51 (30-day trial) | text and html editor |
| Best everyday text editor, which through its Bundles feature can take on several different roles. The Bundles UI is powerful and cumbersome. Don't count on help on the UI from Macromates, either. They're not all that concerned about their non-developer user base -- and they have conviction in their own vision for the product. So it will probably stay geeky and cumbersome. Nevertheless, this is the tool I prefer and use day in, day out. | |||
| TextWrangler | Bare Bones Software | Free | text editor |
| The free and less full-featured version of venerable BBEdit is a great, all-around free text editor. The interface takes some getting used to. BBEdit is very powerful, but costs $125. | |||
| Coda | Panic | $99 | html editor |
| Closest Mac HTML editor to HomeSite for Windows, which I still consider to be the best HTML editor ever created (though it's effectively dead now). Coda has several amazing features, and is also flawed by what's missing, such as keyboard or toolbar functions for inserting HTML and many other commands! For example, you can highlight a word and press Command-B to add HTML strong on/off tags. Virtually every HTML editor, text editor, and word processor lets you do that. There are literally no formatting keyboard commands. The saving grace may be that Coda is able to import TextMate Bundles with the free Coda Plug-in Creator. (I couldn't get the TextMate Bundle command I imported to work properly, though.) Via an included plug-in, you'll find ways to highlight and change formatting or add Span and Div tags. Unfortunately, those commands are two levels down under the Plug-Ins menu and they don't offer a way to be invoked by keyboard -- so they're not worth the trouble. Some third-party plug-ins for Coda might also be useful. Coda can also handle AppleScripts, so one way or another there's a way to finish Coda's development work on your own. Search and replace is powerful, but its "banner" UI is quirky. For example, the Edit > Find drop-down of search and replace operations is bewildering. The options are obtuse. Most of all, though, the Find and Replace fields are way too small. Much of the bad UI around the search and replace feature set was done in the name of avoiding a large dialog that would obscure the open file window. But other products have gotten around that problem more adroitly. The best strategy gives lets you follow these steps: 1. select and copy the replace-with text to the clipboard; 2. select the text you want to find; 3. open the search and replace dialog, where you'll find the currently selected text has automatically populated the search-for field; 4. paste the text from the clipboard into the replace-with field; 5. click dialog option for Replace Once or Replace All. 6. Press OK. The dialog should be resizable and non-modal so that you can push it aside and go select, copy, and paste new text into either field. The assumption that the search and replace dialog size is the big problem that needs solving compromises Coda's functionality in this very important area. It's just an advantage that plainly does not outweigh the lack of true utility of Coda's search and replace facility. On the flip side, Coda offers excellent in-place preview, split-panes, and integrated FTP-connection to your website. I have not paid the $99 for Panic's product, and I use TextMate for much of my HTML editing. But Coda is the best HTML editor in training for the Mac. Panic has incorporated a couple of the features I've suggested in past, including a file-needs-to-be-saved indicator on each tab and multiple-file search and replace. But I'm not ready to fully embrace Coda until it has obvious HTML editor usability features like "Make Selected Text a Hyperlink" and a full set of keyboard commands. And, clearly, I yearn for a complete search-and-replace makeover. It's getting better, but it's still not ready. Once it's most of the way there, I'll pay the money and strongly recommend it to all. So, it's on the A-List with a caveat. And there's hope, Panic is actively developing Coda and has been releasing updates regularly. |
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| FileZilla | copyright by Tim Kosse | Free (donations accepted) | FTP and SFTP client |
| Extremely fast FTP client with excellent configuration for working with various SSH and Secure FTP protocols and specs. Program is under active development. Multi-platform (Windows and Linux too), so it doesn't have the best support for the Mac environment. But it has replaced all other FTP clients in my consideration. A solid app well deserving your consideration. | |||
| Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software | Free (donations accepted) | whole-disk backup utility |
| Best disk-cloning utility for the Mac. UI not quite as good as SuperDuper! but functionality and support is much better. The Bombich Software Forums has answers should you ever run into trouble. This is the one I use and the one I trust. So I'm deprecating SuperDuper!, even though it's a very good product. | |||
| RSSOwl | RSSOwl development team | Free (donations accepted) | RSS reader |
| Best RSS reader I've found for the Mac so far. There's a major new release in the offing. One downside, this multi-platform product may not suppor the Mac quite as well as it should. But it works the way I like to work with RSS. | |||
| AppZapper | Austin Sarner and Brian Ball | $12.95 | application-uninstall utility |
| Sure, you can just delete the program file on the Mac, but a lot of stuff gets left behind when you do that. If you're uninstalling a beta or you're about to install a newer version of a program, removing it fully (even on the Mac) is a better plan. AppZapper makes this easy. It's also great when you want to remove multiple apps quickly. And it handles Preference Panes, Widgets, and Plugins too. Snow Leopard update: The "Genie" feature that let's you create a list of all possible apps to uninstall and then offers checkboxes so you can uninstall multiple apps is broken again. The same thing happened after Leopard was released, and it wasn't until one of the Leopard incremental releases that the problem went away. The symptom is that the full app list never appears. You get the "Processing" busy wheel endlessly. But you can still drag and drop individual or multiple apps to the AppZapper window to set them up for uninstallation. | |||
| BetterZip | MacItBetter/Robert Rezabek | $19.95 (30-day trial) | file-compression utility |
| Great zip file utility that also handles a long list of other compression formats and archive types, including TAR, GZip, BZip2, RAR, 7-ZIP, JAR, ARJ, LHA, CAB, ISO, Stuffit, BinHex, MacBinary, and DiskDoubler. Solid UI for managing existing compressed files, but a little unintuitive for compression origination. (You can't create a zip file first and then just drag and drop files onto that file icon.) Still, it's easy once you get the hang of it. | |||
| SnapNDrag and SnapNDrag Pro | Yellow Mug Software | Free or $4.95 Pro version with a few extra features | screen-capture program |
| Yellow Mug Software designs applications with a fairly rich feature set and very simple interfaces. You'll be surprised by how much SnapNDrag does (it's deeper than it looks). There are screen-capture programs for the Mac that cost a lot and do a little, but this one does a lot for very little. Yellow Mug does superb UI design. I've paid for both SnapNDrag Pro and Yellow Mug's EasyCrop too, and I use both regularly. EasyCrop is great too. | |||
| DoubleCommand | Michael Baltaks | Free (donations accepted) | keyboard-customizing utility |
| DoubleCommand is a kernel extension that creates a new Preference Pane. It lets you change how the operating system interprets several aspects of the Mac keyboard. It was clearly designed to help Windows users adapt to the Mac. For example, it can add Windows-like Delete key (forward delete or delete to the right) functionality that's missing from Mac notebook keyboards. I use the DoubleCommand option that transforms the backslash (\) key to operate as forward delete. (To produce a backslash, you can press the Fn+\ key combination.) The backslash key is positioned above the Return key and below the Delete key (which works like the Windows Backspace key). The backslash key is in a good touch-typist location for your right pinky. DoubleCommand offers several other options too, such as a way to make CapsLock acts as a Command key (many people accidentally press the CapsLock key and find that frustrating). Snow Leopard update: I've found DoubleCommand to be less stable with Snow Leopard than the later builds were under Leopard. It has stopped functioning on me a few times, although it works most of the time. | |||
| Keyboard Maestro | Stairways Software | Free to try, $36 | macro program |
| Keyboard Maestro is a powerful keyboard macro program designed to automate a wide variety of functions. It can change what the keys do on your Mac, launch multiple applications, insert any custom text you'd like, or paste from its multiple clipboard history. The utility offers the potential of a significant personal productivity boost in the hands of more advanced users who learn how to take advantage of it. And it's pretty easy to use. Definitely worth a look. I have used it in past to transform the backslash key into a Delete-Forward button. (Control + \ inserts a backslash.) It's a lot harder to set up for keyboard modification than DoubleCommand, but has the advantage that it's not a kernel extension. Keyboard Maestro can be configured to launch automatically and invisibly at boot time. It can also place a status icon on the title bar at your option. | |||
| iStat menus | iSlayer | Free (donations accepted) | Mac-hardware-monitoring utility |
| I began running iStat menus when my MacBook Air starting running hot. (It eventually had to be sent to Apple to have the cooling fan replaced.) This utility gives you a read out of current temperature of several internal areas of your Mac, including CPU, hard drive, enclosure bottom, heat sink, and power supply. It also tells you how fast your fan or fans are turning. IStat also watches other health aspects of your CPU, memory, drive, and network. And it lets you customize the date display, showing today's date, not just day of the week. The read-outs appear on the right side of the Mac menu bar, and they can be turned on and off selectively using the iStat menus Preference Pane. It's a nifty little program that I recommend highly. Program maker iSlayer also offers several other programs, including iStat Pro, a similar program with more advanced read-outs in widget form. Snow Leopard update: The latest version for Snow Leopard works great. | |||
| OnyX | Titanium Software | Free (donations accepted) | OS X system-tweaking utility |
| OnyX is a useful system maintenance and user-interface tweaking utility. The product gives you a useful control center for a variety of standard disk maintenance tasks, log and cache dumping, and myriad UI adjustments. A good utility to have. Not the last word in user-interface tweaking, but probably the best first word. | |||
| Mac Pilot | Koingo Software | $19.95, 15-day trial | OS X system-tweaking utility |
| Warning: This is the most powerful OS X system-tweaking utility, but if you're using the trial version, changes you make are not reversible (unless you know how to use Terminal) after 15 days. I used to recommend against Mac Pilot because it seemed to me Koingo tried to ensnare you. The trial period wasn't stated obviously. So after 15 days, the unsuspecting might have to pay up or become a lot more educated on *nix commands, the Mac Terminal utility, and how to directly tweak the OS X interface in order to reverse tweaks you were just trying out. Now the 15-day trial period is clearly labeled on the product page. So, I'm placing the product on the A-List. It really does do more than any other OS X UI-adjustment utility I've tried, including OnyX. I think a better approach for Koingo might have been to offer a freeware version and charge the $19.95 to unlock the extra features. Caveats aside, exploring this one is fun because it really does offer more arcane tweaks and settings. Check it out, but I recommend going slowly with any changes you make -- and keep a record of them. | |||
| Flip4Mac | Telestream | Free with limitations (see product page) | Enables WMV playback in QuickTime |
| Does the job of letting WMV movie files playback in QuickTime (which must be installed on your Mac). To export WMV movies, you must upgrade to the $29 WMV Player Pro version. | |||
| Perian | Perian Project | Free (donations accepted) | QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats |
| Adds support for AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW and many other video and audio formats. | |||
| Unison | Panic | 15-day trial, $25 thereafter | checks whether bookmarks link to a live site |
| Although a little quirky here and there, Unison is a very powerful and efficienit usenet reader. Since leaving Outlook Express behind under Windows in 2006, I've tried many Mac usenet newsreaders and Unison is the only one I can actually use. Downsides: The product needs an up-level button on the toolbar and other functions are buried in menus. I've also seen some instability issues under both Leopard and Snow Leopard, especially when opening attachments. Unison hasn't been updated since February 2008. | |||
| SafariBookmarkChecker | Coriolis Technologies | Free | checks whether bookmarks link to a live site |
| According to Coriolis, SafariBookmarkChecker lets you check the validity of your Safari Bookmarks fast. It can check 1,000 bookmarks in less than 2 minutes. | |||
| Office 2008 for Mac | Microsoft | List: $399 full/$239 upgrade | office software suite |
| There was good news and bad news at my company this year. The good news was that our business unit decided to abandon Lotus Domino and Notes in favor of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for Windows or Entourage for Mac. But there was a catch: We were spring for the newest version of Exchange, and that made it a necessity to go with Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac. I made the switch, expecting to hate it. But to my surprise, I prefer it (on the Mac). While still a strange product, Entourage 2008 is vastly improved over the 2004 edition. With the addition of several AppleScripts, which can be invoked by mail filters, I was able to make it usable. And unlike Word 2007 for Windows, Word 2008 for Mac is a more rationale change that doesn't require you to retrain all your muscle memory. All in all, despite my earlier reluctance -- and the negative assessment I made after beta and first-shipping tests of Office 2008 for Mac, I'm reversing course and putting it on the A-List, and removing Office 2004 for the Mac entirely. I do look forward to the next version of Entourage (which may be called Outlook for the Mac.) I find Entourage to be more powerful in certain areas, such as mail-filtering rules, than Outlook. I hope the power is preserved. On the other hand, Entourage is weak on configurability. There are some things there are just no options to change. Outlook does not have that shortcoming. | |||
| Apple | Free as part of OS X | email program | |
| Apple Mail is a very good Internet email client. It's not what I use or will ever be likely to use unless Apple makes significant changes, but for many people it would be ideal. | |||
| iCal | Apple | Free as part of OS X | calendaring tool |
| This simple but effective calendar can be shared via MobileMe and other means among family members or small workgroups. It doesn't have power group calendaring features, and no scheduling. But it's a useful personal calendaring tool that is integrated with many aspects of the Mac environment. | |||
| iPhoto | Apple | Free as part of OS X | photo-library and management tool |
| Easy to use photo library that works with most digital cameras and has sound basic features. | |||
| iTunes | Apple | Free as part of OS X | music-library tool |
| Apple's iTunes is a full-featured music library and iPod-management application that has evolved significantly over the last few years. The iTunes online store is less useful to me, since I would prefer to buy CDs and rip them into my library than to purchase them purely electronically. Still, I've been an iTunes user since before I was a Mac user. It's an excellent program with a rich feature set. | |||
| Preview | Apple | Free as part of OS X | PDF and image viewer |
| Apple's built-in PDF and image viewer isn't quite as powerful for PDFs as Adobe's Reader or Acrobat, but it's light-weight and handles 90% of what most people need from a PDF viewer. I don't even have an Adobe PDF-reader installed. | |||
| Time Machine | Apple | Free as part of OS X | automatic whole drive back-up utility |
| Time Machine is Apple's built-in software for making whole-drive backups of your Mac to an external drive or Apple's Time Capsule hardware. The backups run in background and automatically take backups on a preset schedule, running every hour. While it is possible to change this schedule using Terminal, it would be better if Apple expose some UI for changing the schedule. Hourly incremental backups are overkill in my opinion. One great advantage of Time Machine is that you can navigate into any specific backup and grab files from it by navigating Finder for that backup. Very powerful and easy to use. Time Machine is a little less intuitive when you have to recover your entire drive from it, but it's serviceable. All in all, it's the best automatic backup product I've ever used. There is room for improvement, but if you own a Mac, you should use it. Now. When you own Time Capsule as I do, Time Machine works extremely well with it. But one thing I haven't had time to figure out is why Time Machine stores its backups in a different, and less navigable, format on Time Capsule than it does on a USB or FireWire drive. |
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| MobileMe | Apple | Individual: $99 a year / Family: $149 a year | Mac-to-Mac synching service with online storage |
| The only serious drawback of MobileMe (and predecessor .Mac) is their price. But for anyone who has multiple Macs or a family of Mac users, the ability to share calendars, bookmarks, contacts, email and other data with multiple Macs and iPhones. Also works with some Windows applications. MobileMe offers extremely useful functionality, but it's expensive. I am a subscriber. | |||
The A-List Explained
The A-List of Mac Software is a hand-picked list of the best Mac apps chosen by an experienced software reviewer who switched from Windows to the Mac in 2006. The author, a long-time Windows reviewer, used Macs extensively from 1987-91 and from 1994-1996. He began his re-entry into the Mac world by buying a Mac mini in early 2005.
The A-List of Mac Software is a work in progress and is by no means complete. New programs are added as they're identified and others may fall off the list as a result. Applications are evaluated primarily on their efficacy for typical usage on end-user Macs in business settings or for mixed business/personal applications. Consumer-oriented products — while they may appear on the list — are not the current focus of A-List research.
Following the A-List is a list of products currently scheduled for evaluation and possible induction to the A-List. Products may be submitted by anyone for A-List consideration via email. Please describe what you like about software you submit.
The A-List of Mac Software is an original work of Scot's Newsletter. It has also appeared in other forms at Computerworld, and was used by permission there. Copies of this document are not permitted without the written permission of Scot Finnie.