100 Great Apps for Mac OS X

ByMike Moffit

You probably use your computer every day. Chances are, you may be on your computer more hours of the day than you sleep. For people who consider their computers to be extensions of themselves (a phenomenon Allen mentioned recently; see the human connection with the machine reference here.), I’ve come across a fantastic list of applications that you may want to try.

Chris Pirillo has listed 100 applications, from A-Z (and even ones that start with a number) that deserve a look. He stayed away from the most popular ones, though, and focused on the applications that fly under the mainstream radar. Some popular ones couldn’t be omitted just for that reason if they truly are worth using, but it’s likely you haven’t heard of most of the ones on his list.

Check out the full list here.

A couple that popped up on the first part of the list are ones that I use every day and love. First on the list is Adium. It is a free instant messaging application that you can use with a .mac, AIM, MSN, Google Talk (still a beta version at the time of this article, but it works very well; it’s just not as feature-packed as some of the other options), Yahoo, or Jabber account, among others (side note: your .mac account also works as an AIM login). Adium is extremely customizable (yay), and easy to use. It’s a little like one-stop shopping. All of your contacts are in one place, no matter what IM account they may use on their end. I am usually logged into 2 or 3 accounts at a time. Now, there’s just that issue of juggling several conversations at one time…

The second one on the list I use is Bean. It is a word processor that’s more simplified (not to mention faster, thanks to the Universal architecture) than Microsoft Word, but a little beefier than TextEdit. For most of the things I do during the day, I don’t need all of the power that Word offers, and since I have upwards of a thousand fonts on my system, I also need an application without the bells and whistles that slow it down. TextEdit used to fit the bill, but it’s a little too basic. Hence, my favorite feature of Bean is the word count. It will give you the total number of characters and/or words, as well as just a highlighted section.

Skipping down a bit, I noticed other applications such as Skitch and VMware Fusion that have been reviewed before here at Small Dog (both by Jimmy). Roxio Toast made the list as one of the more popular—but justified—picks. Many of the rest, though, I’m interested to try. Check the list out and see what you think!

Chris Pirillo’s Top 100 Mac Apps

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