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What is your top 10 of best apps for macOS?

Affinity Photo
Airy (audio/video downloader)
Audacity (audio editor)
Audio HiJack Pro
Affinity Design
mSecure (password keeper)
PDF Reader Pro
Walter Pro
 
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My productivity-focused top 10:
  1. BetterTouchTool: Swiss Army Knife of connecting input commands (keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, Siri, Apple Remote) to output actions (launching apps, arranging windows, hiding/showing menu bar icons, doing system actions, automating other applications).
  2. Soulver: a "notebook" style calculator (similar to the newly added calculation features in Apple Notes, but with a lot of additional niceties). Replaces a lot of the "what if" type calculations you might normally jump into a spreadsheet for, as well as being nicer for going back and seeing the results of prior calculations.
  3. Path Finder: Finder improved in 1000 small ways.
  4. BusyCal: more powerful, customizable version of Calendar.
  5. MindNode: mind-mapping for visually thinking through your ideas or creating reference notes. Includes well-thought-out keyboard shortcuts and matching iOS app.
  6. Bunch: launch "bunches" of apps/actions/focus-modes for different contexts (work, meetings, downtime, etc.), either manually or automatically.
  7. iTerm2 (or Warp): much-improved versions of the built-in Terminal app.
  8. aText (or TextExpander, as Lioness mentioned): build libraries of automatically expanded text templates for commonly typed text.
  9. Yoink (or Dropover): avoiding the frequent frustrations around drag-and-drop, along with ways of batching operations on multiple files.
  10. Sindre Sorhus's suite of mostly free mini-apps, which I'm counting as 1 app to beat the system. Day Progress for motivation, One Thing for focus, Supercharge for special-case OS improvements, etc.
 
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laptopllama said:
My productivity-focused top 10:
  1. BetterTouchTool: Swiss Army Knife of connecting input commands (keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, Siri, Apple Remote) to output actions (launching apps, arranging windows, hiding/showing menu bar icons, doing system actions, automating other applications).
  2. Soulver: a "notebook" style calculator (similar to the newly added calculation features in Apple Notes, but with a lot of additional niceties). Replaces a lot of the "what if" type calculations you might normally jump into a spreadsheet for, as well as being nicer for going back and seeing the results of prior calculations.
  3. Path Finder: Finder improved in 1000 small ways.
  4. BusyCal: more powerful, customizable version of Calendar.
  5. MindNode: mind-mapping for visually thinking through your ideas or creating reference notes. Includes well-thought-out keyboard shortcuts and matching iOS app.
  6. Bunch: launch "bunches" of apps/actions/focus-modes for different contexts (work, meetings, downtime, etc.), either manually or automatically.
  7. iTerm2 (or Warp): much-improved versions of the built-in Terminal app.
  8. aText (or TextExpander, as Lioness mentioned): build libraries of automatically expanded text templates for commonly typed text.
  9. Yoink (or Dropover): avoiding the frequent frustrations around drag-and-drop, along with ways of batching operations on multiple files.
  10. Sindre Sorhus's suite of mostly free mini-apps, which I'm counting as 1 app to beat the system. Day Progress for motivation, One Thing for focus, Supercharge for special-case OS improvements, etc.
Click to expand...
Yes, Soulver would be in my Top 10. Well summarised.
 
laptopllama said:
10. Sindre Sorhus's suite of mostly free mini-apps...
Click to expand...
Dude has some awesome little apps! I use Dato (which is not one of the free apps), but when I first bought it, I went to his site and found all those freebie utilities and couldn't believe how good (and useful) some of them were.

This is the kind of developer we should be dropping even just a dollar donation to – just to say thanks for all these great little apps and not charging for them.

As far as my most useful apps, any list I can come up with always starts and ends with Default Folder X.
 
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S.B.G said:
Curious, does this app allow the delete button to delete a file from Finder?
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I thought it would, because when testing it allowed me to assign the keyboard shortcut for doing that, but it doesn't actually delete the file in practice. Though it works if you add a modifier key.
 
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General:
Alfred*

Navigation:
BetterTouchTool

Writing:
Scrivener

Finder alternative:
ForkLift (I would have said Path Finder, but cocoatech have become a really unresponsive couldn't-care-less company)

YouTube downloads:
MacX YouTube Downloader*

Search:
Find Any File*

Audio:
Audacity* (creating/editing)
Audio Hijack Pro (audio capture)

better Text Edit:
Bean*

Video playback/simple edits:
VLC*
MPEG Streamclip*

* free .
 
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1. GoodTask. It takes Reminders to a whole new level. Adds things like start date, recurrence based on completion date, custom filters, Kanban boards and a lot more. And because it works on top of Reminders, you're not tied to a proprietary database.
2. Maccy. It's a clipboard manager like the one built into Windows. (Shame that there's no built-in clipboard manager in MacOS).
3. Onedrive. It is superior to iCloud in many ways, mainly because of (a) file versioning for all files, which also works as ransomware revcovery tool since it keeps up to 500 versions (b) it's cross platform so you can also get it on Android and Linux (and Windows of course).
4. Cryptomator. It's an encrypted file storage app. It's cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android), and super stable (I've used it for about a decade now with not a single hiccup). Also optimized for use with mobile devices.
5. Linear Mouse. Because the default mouse acceleration and scrolling in MacOS were designed by reptiloids.
6. MS Office. If you live in the US and your work has a MS Office subscription, you most likely qualify for Home Use program which comes to about $50/year and includes 1TB Onedrive space and all basic Office programs on all devices. I prefer Excel to Numbers, but also Office is far better for use in a cross-platform environment, and for long term document storage. There's a gazillion apps on all platforms that can work with Excel format, but none that I know of outside of Apple ecosystem that can open Numbers.
7. Affinity Photo. It's reasonably priced, one-time purchase for the current major version, very good photo processing tools, good RAW tools, and it is also available for iPadOS and Windows.
8. XNView MP. A freeware photo viewer with some organizing tools. If you keep your photos in places other than iCloud, it's the best free Photos replacement that I found (at least for viewing and classifying, editing is very basic).
9. Bitwarden. Passwords would be great if they allowed to exclude FaceID unlock from specific records or groups of records. I do not feel comfortable having all of my financial accounts protected with just FaceID. Bitwarden is also cross platform so your password database is available on any device.
10. Windows App for remote connection to PCs running Windows. So when I am working from home and don't feel like sitting in the study (or don't need large external monitors) I can use my MBA and not the stupid Surface.
 
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laptopllama said:
My productivity-focused top 10:
  1. BetterTouchTool: Swiss Army Knife of connecting input commands (keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, Siri, Apple Remote) to output actions (launching apps, arranging windows, hiding/showing menu bar icons, doing system actions, automating other applications).
  2. Soulver: a "notebook" style calculator (similar to the newly added calculation features in Apple Notes, but with a lot of additional niceties). Replaces a lot of the "what if" type calculations you might normally jump into a spreadsheet for, as well as being nicer for going back and seeing the results of prior calculations.
  3. Path Finder: Finder improved in 1000 small ways.
  4. BusyCal: more powerful, customizable version of Calendar.
  5. MindNode: mind-mapping for visually thinking through your ideas or creating reference notes. Includes well-thought-out keyboard shortcuts and matching iOS app.
  6. Bunch: launch "bunches" of apps/actions/focus-modes for different contexts (work, meetings, downtime, etc.), either manually or automatically.
  7. iTerm2 (or Warp): much-improved versions of the built-in Terminal app.
  8. aText (or TextExpander, as Lioness mentioned): build libraries of automatically expanded text templates for commonly typed text.
  9. Yoink (or Dropover): avoiding the frequent frustrations around drag-and-drop, along with ways of batching operations on multiple files.
  10. Sindre Sorhus's suite of mostly free mini-apps, which I'm counting as 1 app to beat the system. Day Progress for motivation, One Thing for focus, Supercharge for special-case OS improvements, etc.
Click to expand...
Is Pathfinder worth the monthly fee? What features makes it worth it?
 
mindquest said:
Is Pathfinder worth the monthly fee? What features makes it worth it?
Click to expand...
I'd say it might be, if you use a high % of its features, but the company behind it - cocoatech - used to be friendly and responsive. Now? Try getting in touch with them, but don't expect a reply.

Instead, you might want to look at ForkLift, whose company (Binary Nights) ARE both helpful and responsive. Not as many features as Path Finder, but it has some that PF doesn't. Best of all, you can buy a 1-year or 2-year licence which gives you updates; if you don't renew you can carry on using the app but without getting updates.

As for what they both offer: multiple windows and tabs, dual pane windows which are great for copy/move/comparisons etc, batch file renames, searches, quick look, favourites, etc etc.
 
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mindquest said:
Is Pathfinder worth the monthly fee? What features makes it worth it?
Click to expand...
It is for me, though partly just because it's part of SetApp that I already subscribe to. A few features other than the ones MacBiter already mentioned:
  1. Drop stack as a holding place for files that need to be moved/copied (though less necessary if you're using Yoink or Dropzone).
  2. Notifications on completion of long-running file-moves/uploads/zips (although I haven't been keeping up with Finder changes in recent releases, so maybe something like this already happens now?).
  3. Nice keyboard shortcut customization (I have shortcuts for things like delete-while-bypassing-trash for large files).
  4. Search bar can do nice little specialized searches (search with or without Spotlight, filter displayed files in a folder by a search, etc).
  5. Remote storage API access (S3 and such).
  6. Folder syncing, including to remote storage.
  7. Size browser for visual narrowing down of space usage. It's hard to explain why this is useful since you'd think it'd be just as easy to do it by looking at the space usage of each subfolder. I've uploaded a clip here to try and show how it's nice: basically me identifying the surprising amount of space used by Adobe's camera profiles by going down a "trail of large pie slices" to find the culprit.
 
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Some that are always on my Macs:

- Obsidian (as a PKM)
- Sublime Text (text/code editor). I've been recently using Zed too, but I always bounce back to Sublime.
- Fork (Git client)
- iTerm2 (a better Terminal app)
- CaptureOne (photo editor). Getting out of the grip of adobe felt great, and it's fantastic handling Fuji raw files.
- 1Password (happily subscribed, it works great)
- Hammerspoon (I basically use it for managing app screen sizes with keystrokes, but it can do a lot of things. Here's my config). Free and open source.
- Transmission (BT client)
- Alfred (raycast might be an alternative, but Alfred works fine for my uses)
- Lunar (to manage external monitor brightness and contrast)
- XLD (to convert to different audio formats)
 
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