My Favorite Paid Mac Apps

A little while ago, I updated and reposted my notes on my favorite Mac freeware, including a bunch of neat little doo-dads and betcha-didn't-knows. But, even with the wide variety of freeware available for Mac, sometimes you just gotta pay for the feature, functionality or performance that you are looking for. And, fortunately, most of the time, these tools are priced pretty reasonably. So, take a look through this list and see if maybe there aren't a few tools you should consider investing in. Oh, and I'm not including tools of the trade -- big-name items like Adobe CS -- since I'm assuming you know which tools of your trade you need. In all cases, see the linked URL for current and accurate features and pricing.

So, without further ado, and in no particular order....

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PathFinder 5 from CocoaTech

http://cocoatech.com/

PathFinder is, well, the Finder you didn't even know you needed. It's a really amazing tool. I stumbled upon it one night a couple of years ago, because I was searching for a way to do tabbed browsing in the Finder -- I couldn't believe that Apple made it easier to browse the web, than your own computer! So, I found PathFinder, which was (at least at the time) the only was I could find to use tabbed-browsing of your local computer. And once I started using it, I realized it did so much else, including a local bookmarks bar, saving panel sets, editing images, in-line terminal and SVN integration, drop-burn lists, viewing binary hex values -- and so much more! And since then, the feature set has only increased, adding items like dual-window browsing. The software is actively supported (with frequent updates) and it really is amazing how you just keep discovering more and new features all the time -- MacOS is a better platform because of PathFinder.

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Charles

http://www.charlesproxy.com/

I know I said I wouldn't include tools-of-the-trade, but to me that doesn't include utilities of the trade, since these little utilities can be so useful to so many people. And I'm still shocked at how few web devs on Mac know about Charles. Charles is a powerful, light-weight HTTP proxy that allows you to know everything there is to know about all HTTP activity on your computer -- requests that go out, responses that come back, packet size, timing, values -- *everything*. And, it has other features like bandwidth throttling. If you do any web-software testing, you need Charles.

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XScope from IconFactory

http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope

XScope is the best set of screen utilities I've found on Mac. It includes:

- screen guides

- screen frames

- screen cross-hairs

- screen rulers

- screen resolution indicators

- screen magnifier

- screen dimenions (pretty neat and hard to explain, but it auto-detects and measures regions of your screen)

Small, light-weight, cheap and useful.

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CrossOver from CodeWeavers

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

Want to run Windows apps without running Windows? (Yes, really). Then, CrossOver's for you! Now, not every Windows app will run under CrossOver, but a lot of them do, and then you can run them without running Windows (and launching Parallels or Fusion).

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iWork from Apple

http://www.apple.com/iwork/

Still using Office for Mac? Seriously? You are? Get over it. ~$80 for desktop publishing, slides and spreadsheets, and open/export all standard Office formats. Just do it.

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VoodooPad from Flying Meat

http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/

While I love Apple Pages, it doesn't do what Voodoo Pad does. I discovered Voodoo Pad a few years back when looking for a tool to author long project specifications. The key issue is that project specifications beg for a web-like format -- that is, hyper-linked pages of content. No desktop publishing tool -- Pages or Word -- does this particularly well. But, the tools that do accomplish this well -- wikis -- are too slow (because of web latency) to write long documents well or effectively, or at least without huge amounts of frustration. Enter Voodoo Pad. Write a website using a desktop publishing tool. In the middle of a page, decide the term 'Paid Mac Software' should link to a new page? Well, select that text, hit Command-L, and boom! you've made a new page named 'Paid Mac Software' and the text you selected links to it. Any time you write 'Paid Mac Software' from now on, a link to this new page will automatically be generated. Want an image in this page? Drop it on there from Finder! Want an external link? That's not a problem either. So, Voodoo Pad is Desktop Wiki Publishing. And, with Voodoo Pad, it's really easy to create your own export templates, so you can actually export your Voodoo Pad doc at any time to a complete website. The free version is used to open any documents and author documents up to 25 pages. Buy the paid version to unlock the page limit, and there is also a higher-end version with some fancier features that I do not use.

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TextMate from Macromates

http://macromates.com/

I came across TextMate when searching for an alternative tool to author ActionScript files. While TextMate does not support ActionScript out of the box, it does support these things called Bundles, and it turns out that lots of people write bundles for TextMate. One of which supports AS3 color coding. But there are bundles for so much else out there -- including important features like XML-validation. It also supports projects (groups of multiple files in multiple locations) out of the box. It launches almost instantly and is largely customizable (you could even hook TextMate into a Flash compiler to execute single keystroke SWF compilation from your TextMate projects). Given how annoying TextEdit can be (I JUST WANT SOME RAW TEXT, APPLE! Is that too much to ask?), I use TextMate as my default text editor of choice.

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MailTags from InDev

http://indev.ca/MailTags.html

MailTags is a neat little utility that helps make Mail a more valuable tool, with tighter integration into iCal. When reading an email, you can quickly apply any custom flags (which you can pre-define) and tags (which you can write on the fly) to that individual message. So, whereas Mail comes with 'flagged' and 'unflagged' as the two flag statuses, with MailTags, you can create dozens of custom flags (such as, perhaps, 'to reply to', 'to document', 'to call', etc) and then assign a specific flag to any message. And you can tag a message in the same way that you can tag a blog post or a YouTube video. Once tagged, it's of course quite easy to search through all your mail using the tags you've used. The feature I use the most is the one-click iCal event/to-do creation -- with one click from any email, create a new iCal entry with a deadline, linked back to this message. There are plenty of other features, and I am certainly not a power-user of this nifty utility, but even being able to apply notes to a message and create iCal events linked to a message, is great for my workflow.

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Clips from Conceited Software

http://conceitedsoftware.com/products/clips

There are several pasteboard utilities out there for Mac (and Butler, which I covered as a great piece of Mac freeware, includes a multi-pasteboard as just one of its features), but no pasteboard utility seemed to match the power and elegance of Clips, which is why I ponied up the dough to pay for this app. Clips records each time you copy or cut to the pasteboard, and sorts those clippings:

<ul>

- in chronological order

- from which application the data originated

- from which space the data originated (if you run with Spaces enabled)

</ul>

So, for example, it's not only easy to view a reverse-chronological list of all clipboard items, but it's also quite easy to view the clippings that you copied from Safari alone, or only those you copied from space #2. To paste, simply find the clipping you want (Clips is accessible via keyboard short-cut and menubar icon) and select it to paste.

You can also create custom pasteboards (if there's a WordPress code-snippet, for example, that you find you frequently need when authoring blog posts) and you can even share clipboards over the LAN (though, no idea why on earth you'd want to!, but maybe that's just me).

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Things from Cultured Code

http://culturedcode.com/things/

I've been a fan of 'getting-things-done' (GTD) tools for some time. (If you don't know what GTD is I started out with iGTD, which is a great piece of freeware if you're looking to get started with GTD. But, when the author of iGTD took a while to create version 2 (isn't it great how I feel entitled to complain about free software?), I started searching for alternatives in the maturing space of GTD tools. At the time, there were a few, including OmniFocus. As you can see below, I'm a huge fan of the OmniGroup, but just didn't like how they handled GTD. After trying these tools, I realized that the big thing they were lacking was a 'today' feature that worked right for me. I'm a busy guy and maintain a huge backlog and have a pretty crazy and unpredictable schedule. So, I'd like to be able to sit down and quickly drag items onto a list that I hope to tackle today. And Things let's you do just that. Don't feel like working on something today? Drag it onto a specific day (so that item will automatically re-appear under today on that date), or set it to 'someday' (for future reference, so you can get to it when you can get to it). Things supports a tags-based workflow, that they consider to be very flexible and key to working with the tool -- and maybe they are right -- but I've found myself able to get a lot of value out of this tool without having to use the tags features even once. Again, there are a lot of features I'm not even discussing here, but if you're looking for a GTD tool, I'd really recommend this one.

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Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software

http://www.barebones.com/products/Yojimbo/

I think one reason people who try GTD and fail, is because they confuse information storage with task management (and the fact that some people use Journler and Yojimbo for GTD I think proves out this point). One important part of personal information management is learning how to separate information from tasks. While I use Things for task management, Yojimbo is the tool I use to handle information storage. In many ways, you can think of it as replacing/supplementing the Finder. Create folders (such as 'personal' or 'work' or 'family' or whatever you want) and then store whatever you want in them. You can create 'notes' that can contain RTF formatting, PDFs, images and any other files, or you can archive webpages, or you can create passwords (so you can easily store, for example, your Gmail password), or you can create serial numbers (so you can easily store/reference software serial information). Any entry (a note, a password, an image, a serial, etc) can be tagged, and stored in a folder, for easy and rapid filtering. And (vital given some of the information, such as passwords, that might be stored in the Yojimbo database) you can encrypt any entry using your OS password. I've used Yojimbo for years, and it really is powerful and simple.

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OmniGraffle from OmniGroup

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

I'm really not sure to which broad class of tools OmniGraffle belongs, but I suppose it's like Visio for Mac -- so it's what I'd call a 'rapid drawing tool', which we adopted for wireframing at Almer/Blank back when it was in version 4. The metaphors changed pretty dramatically with version 5, but the tools still fills the same basic region of our firm's workflow now as it did then. In OmniGraffle, you draw with shapes on canvases. You can assemble the shapes into stencils of shapes and complex shapes. You can use the stencils that come with it, or download a wide number of additional stencils available for free, and OmniGraffle makes it mad easy to create your own (just right-click on any stencil and select 'New Stencil'!). Once you have an instance of something (say, a rectangle) on your canvas, OmniGraffle makes it very easy to work with with intelligent resizing and repositioning with the mouse, and a properties inspector (think Keynote). And with Master Canvases (OG4) and Shared Layers (OG5), it's possible to create shared elements (say, the frame of a website) that are maintained in a single location. So, in short, OmniGraffle makes it incredibly easy and fast to create sophisticated and accurate wires and prototype designs.

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OmniOutliner from OmniGroup

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/

Well, there's not much too OmniOutliner beyond it's name -- outline anything. It's a tool to create multi-tier lists, or outlines. Want to write a new book? Start with an outline! Want to write a new talk? Start with an outline! Need to have a serious talk with your girlfriend? Start with an outline! Outlining is how we should start any number of processes (such as the ones noted above), but somehow we think that the outlining functionality of Pages or Word is enough. But it really isn't. OmniOutliner is a small, light-weight tool to handle outlines. Create new items, move items and groups of items around, collapse items, shift the tiers to which the items belong, and check items as complete. That's about it, but man is it helpful!

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OmniPlan from OmniGroup

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/

OmniPlan is the OmniGroup's stab at project management software. I like to see it as the perfect example of the 80/20 rule. It contains the 20% of the features of MS Project, that constitute 80% of what you use MS Project for -- and, at something like 20% of the cost, too. It's much simpler than MS Project, but the simplicity doesn't come with a trade-off -- in fact, the simplicity makes it possible to get more done, sooner, and much easier to get new talent up to speed with the tool (and, because of it's similarity to MS Project, someone skilled in Project could also pick it up in under a day).

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Cornerstone from ZenAware

http://www.zennaware.com/

Man it took a LONG TIME before we got a decent graphical SVN client on Mac, but when you see something like Cornerstone, you understand why it's been worth the wait. All of a sudden you've gone from envying to ridiculing your PC friends running Tortoise! Easy click interface, all the SVN functionality you need/expect, nice diffing, change tracking -- everything neatly tied up in a sexy bow. But, for performance reasons: just remember to disable automatic refresh on all repositories and working copies (View > Refresh Automatically).

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ScreenFlow from Telestream

http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm

My final entry on this list is also something I use for work -- ScreenFlow is the tool that I (and the entire Rich Media Institute) use to create all of our training. For years, we've been told that tools like 'SnapzPro', 'Camtasia' and 'iShowU' are great examples of screen capture tools. But, my friends, it turns out that for years, you and I have been cruelly deceived! What does ScreenFlow do that these others don't? I'll try to explain simply:

1) Record your screen, your mouse, your webcam, your computer audio, and your microphone audio, all as SEPARATELY EDITABLE TRACKS

2) Then edit those tracks in an interface simpler than iMovie

It's really that simple. And, unlike with tools like Camatasia, there is no rendering time during or after capture (so creating and saving captures takes no time, which makes it practical to screen capture live workshops). And, with version 2 (just released at the time of writing this post), we have a massive upgrade, enabling some really useful features (not worth getting into in this post, but as a power-user, I can say that many of these new features are quite valuable).