I’ve put together a list of apps that I tend to use. The ecology of apple apps is so rich at this point. In any case, here they are:

Password Management

1Password

    • Excellent password manager

Menu Bar

Alfred 3

    • Application launcher and more

Amphetamine

    • Keeps my mac awake

Display Menu

    • Quickly adjusts the display size

Little Snitch

    • Limits the traffic apps seem to think they have the privilege of using

Sound, Music, and Broadcasting

Audio Hijack

    • Useful for broadcasting music from Cubase

AudioTunes (no longer made)

    • really useful for making quick changes of audio format

Boom 3d

    • magically makes music sound better

Capo

    • Useful for reverse engineering music

Cubase 10

    • my standby Digital Audio Workstation

Gameshow

    • Useful for broadcasting live performances
    • about to be discontinued and taken over by Wirecast.

Grand 3

    • A solid piano VST

iTunes

    • Good stuff

Loopback

    • Very useful for routing music from one app to another

ScreenFlow

    • Standby screencasting. This with Keynote were the main apps for Being Productive

Soundsource

    • Simple menu bar app to direct sounds to different places

Syntorial

    • Super cool app for learning the useful workings of a synthesizer

VLC

    • Powerful, free media player

VOX

    • Another very useful media player

Wavelab 9

    • Sound wave editor. Great for anatomically dissecting sound

File Management

A Better Finder Rename

    • Quickly rename a bunch of stuff

Big Mean Folder Machine

    • Quickly separate or merge files in folders

Carbon Copy Cloner

    • I have an external hard drive regularly copied to another drive as backup

CrashPlan

    • Has been my a solid online backup service for years.

DEVONthink Pro Office

    • Useful for siloing different parts of my work and life. Deserves more than a couple of sentences of explanations.

Dropbox

    • A reliable cloud service for files

Dropzone

    • I’ll use this to send files from one computer to another via a Dropbox folder and a Hazel script

Finder

    • Main file navigation

Forklift

    • FTP client of choice

FreeSpace

    • Tells me how much space I have left on my hard drive

Gemini 2

    • Great for finding duplicate files and removing them

HoudahSpot

    • Powerful search

Hazel

    • An excellent file manager. Set some rules and Hazel keeps my files tidy. See my post on using Hazel to sort.

OmniPresence

    • Keeps my OmniOutliner files synced

Path Finder

    • Another approach to Finder files. I like its preview set up.

Space Gremlin Pro

    • Excellent visualizer for space used in my disk drives

Time Machine

    • Backup!

VisualDiffer

    • Another one of those apps that I don’t use often, but when I need it, it is excellent for what it does.

Productivity

Bartender 3

    • Hides or shows my menu bar items

BusyCal

    • My favorite calendar app – I particularly love the 2-week view

Due

    • My favorite timer. I love the nagging feature.

Flashcard Hero

    • When I need flashcards.

Freedom

    • I don’t really use it anymore, but it was useful to block websites

Hook

Howler Pro

    • a fun alert

Keyboard Maestro

Moom

    • window size and placement management

OmniFocus

    • my task manager of choice

OmniGraffle

    • great for designing concepts and spaces

OmniOutliner

    • an outliner that works well as a project house

Paste

    • copy and paste management

TextExpander

Workspaces

    • an app that can link to a number of files and documents

Figures, Billing

Banktivity

    • my financial tracking program of choice

Calca

    • a neat text-based program for quick doing calculations

Moon Invoice

    • for simple invoicing

Numbers

    • a solid spreadsheet tool

Interfaces

Firefox

    • internet browser

Google Chrome

    • internet browser

Epic Games

    • video games!

Firestorm

    • Second Life client

GOG Galaxy

    • video games!

Kindle

Mailplane

    • great for managing multiple Gmail accounts

Steam

    • video games!

TweetDeck

Origin

    • video games!

Plex Media

    • watch my movies on other devices

Writing, Drafting, and Text Editors

Audiobook Builder

    • helps me make audiobooks

BBEdit

    • for when I’m doing rudimentary php coding, trying to break my websites

Folding Text

    • a text editor to focus on individual sections

Hemingway Editor

    • great for helping me improvinate my sentences

iA Writer

    • a text editor for focus

Keynote

Pages

    • A solid word processor and text designer

MindNode

    • great for mind-mapping

Scrivener

    • the workhorse of all text programs. This is what I write books with

Ulysses

    • a nice all around text manager

Zettelkasten

    • a notetaking app I’ve been recently experimenting with and really excited by

Zotero

    • a free research assistant app

PDF Management

PDF Expert

    • a PDF editor

PDFpenPro

    • another PDF editor

Preview

    • an unsung hero of default PDF tools

Images

Capto

    • great for managing and marking up screenshots

Pixelmator

    • solid image editor

ScreenFloat

    • for when I need a screenshot to continue floating above other windows