My Top 10 Mac Apps

A month and a half after getting my first Mac – the MacBook Pro with Retina display – here’s my list of best and most used Mac apps:

• Chrome – After trying to use Safari for some time, I reverted back to good ol’ Chrome. I like using the Beta channel – for me it’s the perfect sweet spot between stability and new features. One I really wanted and just got: Retina-compatible favicons for tabs and bookmarks bar items.
• Sublime Text 2 – By far the best text editor for mac. I use it for all my coding. You obviously lose some functionality in comparison to full-fledged IDEs (like IntelliJ), but the core functionality + the wide range of plugins make up for it. Also, I just love how much more productive I am in this minimalistic and bare-bones environment.
• 1Password – I don’t know how I lived without it. My use of KeePass on Windows seems like a nightmare in retrospect.
• Soulver – Hands-down the most brilliant app I use. This is such a great tool, which saves me SO MUCH time. Heard about it on Build & Analyze. As Marco Arment put it: if you open Calculator more than once a day then this app is for you.
• Transmit – Beautiful FTP/SFTP/S3 client.
• Pixelmator – THE image editor for developers who don’t know/like Photoshop (or don’t want to pay for it).
• Reeder – Finally RSS doesn’t feel like work, but actually fun. I can never go back to Google Reader. The only thing missing is Notification Center support. Hope that’s coming.
• Carousel – The best Mac Instagram client.
• Tweetbot – The beta is over, final version has been submitted for review. Review times for the Mac App Store are crazy these days (26-days crazy), but once it’s approved it’s going to make Twitter a lot more fun for me.
• Parallels – For when you really have to open that word document, especially if dealing with RTL languages.

As I tweeted earlier, it’s baffling and fascinates me how switching to Mac has made me want to pay for the software I use. I never remember having this feeling as a Windows user. The fact that I payed for these apps makes me enjoy them a lot more. I feel great satisfaction by owning these great apps. I guess this is the geeky-developer equivalent of a woman’s feel-good shopping spree at the mall, as a means of comforting :).