One thing that a new mac owner will normally post on the internet is “what app’s do you recommend”. Tried and tested these are some of the favourites that we use on a daily basis.
If you have a list suggestion feel free to get in touch.
Productivity
Image Bucket – ilia Software – App Store – £2.49
Crop, convert, text overlay, image watermarking and a whole lot more. This became a god send for us here with the 100′s of images we have to deal with. With simplistic steps but without sacraficing and power features this is an Essential Mac Application for anyone who’s shared the pain of resizing images. Our Image Bucket Review can be found here.
Posts for iPad – The blogging App for the iPad
WordPress is a might bit clunky, blogsy is good but a touch overwhelming if you aren’t prepared to put in a bit of learning time but Posts is a iOS themed blog creator / editor that looks smart and works well. Even at it’s 1.01 stage (at the time of writing) everything is polished making for an enjoyable app to blog with.
Poster – A wordpress blog editor
2 blog editors might seem like a strange thing to have in our productivity list but Poster really shines out. It’s use of typography, minimalist interface with plain old common sense really makes this app stand out. For those wanting to focus on writing with a clean, interferance free interface, Poster is for you
Hounourable Mentions.
CSS Edit – MacRabbit – Free To Try – 25.43 To Buy
How to describe this one? It’s a real time previewing / editing CSS editor. In laymans terms you can open up almost any webpage that uses CSS and edit it in real time and see how things change. I love this because it’s simple and instead of having to remember the myriad of css commands you can tinker to your hearts content.
Email.
Mailtab : App Store – £1.49
is a nice small application for the Macintosh which is almost essential for any Gmail user. Sitting quietly on the menu bar this application lets you check reply to your Gmail e-mails in your account in our discrete almost copy for copy of the iPhone interface. Small and light weight is a must for Mac Gmail users. In the absence of any future updates to the Sparrow app, Mailtab could well fill a mail shaped void.
Hop : App Store : Free
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It automagically turns your email messages into a natural chat conversation with the people you know. Use it to connect in real time with friends, family and colleagues to share life’s most important moments as they happen
For everyday
Alarm Clock Pro (Under Review but we like it already)
Rocking in as our preferred alarm clock, Alarm Clock Pro does more than just wake you. It’s got a whole host of built in scripts ready to do your bidding. Want to your mac to wake you up, start checking email, send an alert, run a script, launch apps or something else then Alarm Clock Pro is for you.
News
Your Zite is as unique as you are. Zite learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it. Zite analyzes millions of articles each day and brings you the best of your favorite magazines, newspapers, authors, blogs, and videos.
Awaken For Mac : Embrace Software $2.99
It’s a simple and light weight application for resurrecting you from your slumber with a choice of music from your iTunes library. Although the interface feels slightly sluggish on our 2009 MacBook Pro I still use it every day to wake up to my Internet radio and launching my browser for me in the morning.
Xslimmer : $14.95
Most applications for the Apple come with a universal set of binaries. Whilst this means that you can pretty much guarantee an application to work on all Macs it does increase the size of an application install somewhat. Xslimmer Reduces the package size of almost any application and tailor them to your system. For example you can reduce many applications to only have the 64-bit executable. It also removes any different languages that may come with the application. It’s a simple drag and drop interface that’s quake, easy-to-use and most importantly frees up space on your hard drive.
MultiMedia
VideoLan VLC The Free Open Source Media Player
Plays pretty much anything you care to throw at it, which is a good job considering that Perian is now done and dusted. You can even chuck .FLV files at it without needing to put flash on your Mac
Get iPlayer Automator (our review)
Starting out as life as a way to download shows from the popular BBC iPlayer website it does that and so much more. Schedule series to be grabbed, grab in HD and also now supporting 40D and iTV.
Business
WorldCard Mobile iPhone App! – iTunes Store – $4.99
Business cards can be a right pain in the backside to have around and entering that information into your iPhone contacts is just plain tedious. WorldCard mobile scans that information on the card and neatly formats it into a contact for you. oh and you can take email signatures and easily turn them into a contact as well. Take a look at our Ditch Your Business Cards review on essentialMac
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