Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
I'm familiar—as I'm sure many are—with the big names: BBEdit, Fantastical, Transmission, etc. I want to hear about great, lesser-known Mac apps, and about the design elements that made them so great.
It's fine if the app is no longer actively supported. At a time when the Mac platform seems to be shifting direction, I'm as interested in old apps as new ones.
(I suspect someone will ask what "Mac-Native" means, and I'm not particularly eager to weigh into that discussion. The apps do not need to be Mac exclusive, but they should feel highly tuned to the platform. No electron!)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadwonder if osx has added these features natively since i started using this app.
2Do is another. Can't live without this app (https://www.2doapp.com)
I'm sure this largely depends on what you're doing, though. I really just need a pleasant UI for uploading and downloading files.
To save others the bit of Googling I did:
Scapple: Mind mapping software, looks almost like a modern version of Inspiration. Drag notes together to connect them. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview
Inshort: Flowcharts, and Gantt charts. Says it integrates with Calendar, which could be very useful. Wonder how it compares with Omnigraffle, though. http://www.shortki.com/inShort.html
“inShort allows breaking a complex task into simpler ones and displaying their relationship on a diagram. From the resulting map of tasks, you can compose a detailed plan and start its execution, marking the progress in the application. Thus, the application provides everything you need for working with projects.”
Edit: I guess they came out with a diagramming tool to accompany the app earlier this year. https://apps.apple.com/us/app-bundle/inset-handy-diagramming...
It even has an .edu license for $14.40.
I've come to accept it. I would have missed out on a lot of really great software otherwise, that ultimately proved worth their price.
(I don't think $18 is bad either, I was a little more miffed that e.g. Fission cost $30 for a pretty basic audio editor. But, again, it paid off.)
Also worth considering: these prices are one-time, unless a new version includes massive changes, and even then you can keep using your old release. I greatly prefer this to subscription models!
Edit: I'm no longer a Mac user, I remember Coda (by Panic) being ahead of time as a text editor for coding.
Scrivener
https://kapeli.com/dash
One great bit of UI on that web site: When you hover over the "Buy" button, it shows you the price. Too many web sites hide the price of software.
Very often I want to know how much something costs before I look at its features, so as I'm learning what it does I can better understand if it's a good value.
Visio feels like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s compared to OmniGraffle. Also, Visio has had an enterprise focus for a very long time while omnigraffle has very much focused on diagramming.
Omnigraffle is basically nice to use, the presentation mode is a great way lead a discussion and use of force touch for feedback is a nice touch. However it is a bit quirky and I wish they’d make the core functions act like a normal program. For example, making a table is totally unintuitive.
Link to OmniGraffle: https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle
It’s useful and delightful
https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Link to GitX: http://gitx.frim.nl/index.html
Still a much, much, much better interface than postman/insomnia.
My only real gripe with Paw is that the default save mechanic produces a binary file. If you're providing paw files as documentation in a repo, this makes concurrent branches a pain because there's no ability to merge changes.
Unless I'm missing something? It's been a while since I've used it in anger.
It's got a nice interface for throwing some HTTP requests around, but compared to the likes of Paw it's a pain in the ass to set up an API spec. Regardless, the ability to merge these files is too essential to use anything else.
Thoughts?
Note that Paw has this type of cloud sync too, though I'm not sure how it handles merges.
https://rogueamoeba.com
Reeder 2. The one thing it had that other RSS apps didn't have is collapsable columns. Accounts was the leftmost column. When you selected an account, it would collapse to the width of a small icon. The next column is the RSS feeds, which would do the same after you selected a feed. This left only the list of news items and the viewer taking up most of the space. Screen real estate is less of an issue in this day and age of 4k screens, so they removed this particular feature, but I always appreciated it.
DaisyDisk. Again, nothing clever, just a beautiful interface that always works and always does what you expect it to. I wish it was a little faster, like WizTree, but that might have more to do with HFS+ than the app itself.
https://daisydiskapp.com
Quicksilver. It's mostly been replaced by Alfred at this point, but there were things you could do with Quicksilver that you can't do with Alfred, such as chaining files, actions and apps together on the fly. I think you can do something similar in Alfred with Workflows, but you have to set it up ahead of time. Quicksilver had a set of built in actions that would let you do a surprising number of things on the fly, like open an application in AppZapper.
https://qsapp.com
AppZapper. I don't know if this one qualifies as a "big name" or not, but it's always the first app I install on a new Mac.
https://www.appzapper.com
That's a feature in itself, though. Being clever usually means you're being at least somewhat unpredictable, which is bad for UI. It's much harder to come up with a simple design than a 'clever' one.
https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/
- the bling in TP is too much for me. I don’t want or need an overly shiny DBA tool.
- I’ve memorized the keyboard shortcuts in Sequel Pro.
- Sequel Pro seems to handle large imports/exports of .sql files better. I think it’s because Sequel chunks dumps into multiple insert statements while TP does not.
Overall, I’m just lazy and don’t want to learn a new tool that offers the same features.
I've switched to TablePlus, which is also Mac native and seems better in every way: https://tableplus.com/
(It even has a dark mode!)
(But on the other hand, Sequel Pro is open-source and TablePlus isn't, which might also affect your decision.)
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If you have an offline collection of Music and Movies, Meta is a wonderful way to edit the metadata on your collection. You can edit cover art, change the artist/composer/genre/etc information, and use all that metadata to generate new file names. They also make it really easy to batch process a ton of files, with a text pattern-matching system that's more normal-person-friendly than regex (although regex is also available).
Because I'm very picky about these things, I prefer a slightly older release, 1.8.3, which you can download by playing around with URLs. The newest version isn't bad, but they've succumbed a bit to feature creep.
https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/
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Fission is a fairly simple program for editing audio files: split them, join them, etc. Critically, it performs these operations losslessly, even for lossy formats like MP3's. (As an aside, I wish I had something like this video; I currently rely on ffmpeg with -codec copy.)
My one nitpicky complaint with this one is it kind of takes over your default media file associations. I had to edit the app's info.plist to fix it. I suspect a lot of this is due to Apple bugs.
https://rogueamoeba.com/fission/
http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/index.html
TablePlus — elegant database app
Antetype — my all-time favorite app. The only UI design app I’ve ever encountered that is built from the ground up for UI design rather than being a torturously adapted drawing app.
Link to TablePlus: https://tableplus.com/
Link to Antetype: https://www.antetype.com/ (can't confirm this software is _not_ built using Electron, et el. as their website states "Antetype is built on web technology")
https://eggerapps.at/postico/
https://postgresapp.com/