Rixstep
	`About \| ACP \| Buy \| Industry Watch \| Learning Curve \| News \| Products \| Search \| Substack`

Home » Learning Curve

The Best Mac Apps I & II

For newcomers.

Get It

Try It

Digital Trends had an interesting piece yesterday on 'the best Mac apps' for newcomers to the platform. That's all well and good and definitely worth a look.

Please remember one thing if you're totally new to the platform: it's different. And on a deep level. Take it from those who've 'been there, done that' - if you come from most any other platform at all, only take it as far as you can for any one day, until your brain starts to feel like a wet rag, then just let it go. Close that lid, then go do something else for the rest of the day. It takes time. It really does.

Two things in particular are likely to stymie you.

1: The 'Replace' Paradigm

File management starting with Apple's own 'Finder' (known colloquially in the 'community' as 'TFF') may be a bit of a hassle. As you learn more how Unix systems work (if you've only been on - shudder - Windows) you'll see some impressive stuff, about file ownership and access control, but you also might notice something weird when you get around to copying and moving things.

Almost all other file systems - and even Apple's underlying FreeBSD offshoot - implement a 'merge' paradigm when copying or moving file system items. Apple's own technologies do not.

Put in simple programmatic terms: customary file ops don't worry about the existence of directories at the target location. If they can't copy or move files as intended, then they signal that something is wrong. But with Apple's way, the targets must never exist prior to the operations.

Or put another way: targets are obliterated (replaced) beforehand. If one massive hive is to be copied or moved to another directory that already has an item with the same name, that entire hive at the target location is first removed.

It's likely you won't think much about this as you go about your daily work and fun, but it's going on still the same. It can be good to keep in mind.

['Replace' is a lot easier to implement at file system level. That may be part of the reason for the divergence. Ed.]

Then too, if you're at all familiar with Unix file system fundamentals, you'll likely find Apple's 'TFF' hopelessly paraplegic.

Not to belabour a weak point, but Apple are rather infamous for not grasping what the industry as a whole would regard as the essentials of file system management. Currently there are no embarrassing scandals, but there have been in the past, several of which have been related to (or directly caused by) the above anomaly.

2: More Than 'Document-Oriented'

Here's a place where Apple can really shine, an area almost no other platform anywhere can come close to. How to explain this easily? For this is what can get newcomers 'fatigued' in the first month...

An application is not a window and a window is not an application.

You see the presence of an application on the 'menu bar'. This system descends from NeXTSTEP which had its menus cascading out of the left of the screen. But same diff.

An 'application' can have many 'document windows'. Closing a document window is not the same as exiting an application.

This has many benefits, not all of which are immediately apparent.

More intelligent use of system resources. A bit of technobabble here. Application binaries have a number of so-called sections. The 'data' section has data that changes over time. The 'code' section does not change over time. But when you run single-instance apps on Windows, or Linux, or any non-Apple flavour of FreeBSD, the entire binary has to be mapped again into memory for each additional document you want to see or edit.

This puts an unnecessary burden on your system.

It's known that beloved Bill Gates tricked Steve Jobs into giving him early prototypes of the original Macintosh, promising to deliver an electronic spreadsheet application to be known as Multiplan.

It's also known that Bill and his boys spent considerable time not building Multiplan but grokking those Macs.

It's therefore been concluded that the Microsofties were too dumb to understand the relevance of the menu bar.

[This isn't as far-fetched as it may seem: for years, Windows couldn't move things onscreen - Microsoft hadn't yet mastered the arcane art of 'bit-blitting' as Apple had. This can be seen in their later addition of the window style WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW which in the end was given a zero value once Microsoft got their GDI.EXE up to speed. Ed.]

And when the 'free Unix' 'distros' came about, it was decided to keep things as close to Windows as possible - not to make things as intelligent as possible.
Easier to use. ISVs such as Radsoft spent considerable time and effort developing what comes for free on a Mac: the ability to 'close all' document windows at once or to 'save all' documents at once. And your document controller, running for every application, intelligently goes through your list of unsaved documents for you, prompting you for each in turn, asking whether you want to save, once it's time to shut things down.

It doesn't get better.

[One thing they never got around to in the good old 'NeXT' days: the option to have individual document windows always return at the same screen coordinates, and with the same settings, rather than just cascading things as Microsoft did. But there are ways around everything. Ed.]

Microsoft and IBM shared the rights to Windows in the early days. At one point, IBM came out and declared that Windows had become 'object oriented'. Microsoft bit off IBM's head for that. The new term became 'document oriented' instead. But no version of Windows is document-oriented if every document is run by a separate instance of its editing application. Putting the document name ahead of the application name - essentially the only change Microsoft and IBM had made - doesn't help.

Again: this can take time to get used to. As many other things. 'What's that menu bar and what's it for?' 'You mean I have to close the window and then exit the application?' And so forth. Take your time - don't push it. You'll soon wonder how you ever survived on your old platform.

The Best Mac Apps - I

Back to the list of 'best Mac apps' - and it's a good list. But here again: take your time.

Your 'best' Mac apps for the first few weeks on your new platform are the ones you already have. Take time to get familiar with the apps you already have. (There's a lot there.) Don't go charging at a download site, getting things chaotic and confused before you know how to handle your system.

Then remember this: the best apps are often free. If you're going to spend even more money, now that you've acquired your precious Mac, make sure you know it's worth it. There are of course exceptions to this rule - especially for professionals - but make sure you know what you need and why you need it before you go out to get it.

You might be spending money you don't need to spend, but you might also be creating chaos on what used to be a pristine system. You'll hear about all the 'app cleaners' after a while, but they don't really do the job. Cleaning a system is a bit more sophisticated a task than that. So take your time.

Alfred 3. A kind of Spotlight, and we don't use Spotlight. Never have. We'll pass.
Bartender 3. Costs $15. Helps organise your running apps. That's what the Dock is for. We'll pass.
Caffeine & Amphetamine. Regulate sleep mode, starting the screen saver, kicking in auto-dim. And we thought one used System Preferences. We'll pass.
Dropzone. Costs $10. Runs shortcuts, helps copying/moving files, launching applications. We can do that already. We'll pass.
f.lux. Adapts your screen light to better match outside light. We'll pass.
Google Chrome. Absolutely not. Chrome is the antithesis of Safari. Google used the Safari engine? If true: what a mess they made of things. This is one of the most invasive, most destructive, apps ever. Watch out for all that 'phoning home' to the mothership! Avoid like the plague - avoid even more than you would the plague!
Magnet. $1 so it can help you better organise your onscreen windows? Please.
Unclutter. $10? For what? How come none of these apps actually do anything?
Evernote. It takes notes. It's free.
Day One. Supposedly has a price. A way to organise and store notes, photos, etc.
Fantastical 2. $50? What does it do? Described as 'the only calendar app you'll ever need'. Wow. And there was nothing in /Applications that would have done the trick?
Pixelmator. Another hefty price tag. $30. It's a photo editor. It's fast, they say. And it uses Apple's Touch Bar (which everyone finally understood is a waste of space.)
Pocket. Here's how you 'pocket' text, media, etc for later viewing. You can kick into high gear with it for only $45 per year.
PDF Expert. $60. $60. Yet described as 'minimalist software'.
Reeder 3. $10. It reads RSS. Like Safari used to do excellently. (There are freebies out there.)
Text Wrangler. No. That's Bare Bones. No. Just no. Are they making real Cocoa apps yet? Crash counts, anyone?
Wunderlist. Microsoft just devoured it. Use it to create TODO lists. Oh joy.
Spotify. Yes. Definitely. Yes. Not because it's Swedish, but because it cleverly finds the niche between local machine and server-side that you need for this. Earlier versions for the Mac were written by some kind of wizard group. Only possible drawback is you can't see your music. Try it!
HandBrake. Video converter. Can be interesting if you have a need for it.
Parcel. Used to track parcels. And here one thought the companies themselves provided those services online. Oh well.
Transmission. BitTorrent client. Anyone use BitTorrent anymore?
VLC. YES. DEFINITELY. There are a few drawbacks when compared to QuickTime Player, but it's an open source mainstay. You more or less need this one.
Adium. To talk to Edward Snowden. Use XMPP. Good luck trying to find him. But an XMPP client has it all over all the other chat losers out there in terms of security. Too much to be mentioned here.
Slack. Messaging app and more. Well...
Tweetbot. $10. Uh - the name!
1Password. Getting interesting. $3 per month. Per month. You already have Keychain Access on your system.
Little Snitch. $47. But yes, if you know what this is, you might need it, so get it. Mostly one of a kind. It's an egress watchdog. It's had a few issues, but this is a class act.
Google Drive. No. Avoid Google like the plague. Just do it - then, if you need to ask questions, do it. But first get rid of Google.
Dropbox. No. Just no.
The Unarchiver. The what? OK, to handle old formats. Still got Stuffit around? You do? Can handle ARC, RAR, TAR. Check first if your own builtin unarchiver can handle them.

There are some good apps in the above list, which most everyone will want sooner or later, but once again, for the umpteenth time: don't confuse your system with fluff. Keep things simple. Keep a clean machine. You already have most of what you need. So enjoy it.

The Best Mac Apps - II

OK, so that was a list someone else made. Here's our list.

This list is very short. We don't use much third party. Mostly our own. Which we write ourselves. But still and all. Here we go.

Or just about. A few comments first.

Don't 'install' in /Applications. 'Install' in ~/Applications. If you need to ask why, search this site.
If the installer or resulting app asks for your admin password, back off. Find out why your password is needed, and find out if the app is trustworthy. Just this week a number of apps downloaded off MacUpdate were found to be contaminated. They had a trojan. Be careful. If such an app were to get your password, it'd be 'lights out'.
And it doesn't always take malice to ruin your system. Good old stupidity works well too.
Learn to use find from Terminal.app, or download Tracker from the Test Drive located here (it's free) and make sure you know what's going on in your system. Save Tracker results ('playbacks') to disk so you (or someone more skilled than you) can do a postmortem if something goes south.

Here we go.

Transmit. Yes it's wonky, and the latest version is seriously wonky, but it remains the only FTP client for the platform that's designed right. (That this says something about the platform is another matter.)
Hex Fiend (HexFiend). You don't need a hex editor? OK. The earlier versions (HexFiend) are better than the new one (Hex Fiend). Some amazing software in there.
Vienna. If it's still available? An open source RSS reader. (We made our own bespoke version.)
Tor. For surfing anonymously and for accessing 'hidden services' - something you can't do with Unvisit. But watch out: recent versions leave some 30 MB of pure unadulterated junk on disk. (Check 'Application Support'.)
AppKiDo. At least for developers, the most important app out there, most educational too. Replaces expensive hot-air courses. Shows you the consistency and the brilliance of the Cocoa (NeXTSTEP) design. (This applies to GNOME and KDE, but especially if you've developed for Windows: you'll fly to Redwood City to kiss the ground.) Such a shame it's not being updated anymore, and that it leaks like a sieve. For this app and this app alone, it's wise to keep a legacy system so you can study how things really work. Apple's online docs are pathetic in comparison.
Kindle. No comment.
Xcode. But would that Project Builder and Interface Builder had survived - they were so much more intelligent...