“The first difficulty in creating such a list is knowing what doesn’t belong and why,” McElfresh writes. “The second difficulty in creating an all Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe list is prioritizing—which apps had or have the greatest impact. Frankly, prioritizing was the most difficult of the two tasks.”
The top 14 apps from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe:
14 – Final Cut Pro
13 – Fireworks and Dreamweaver
12 – Filemaker Pro
11 – Terminal
10 – iPhoto
9 – Illustrator
8 – QuickTime
7 – Safari
6 – Flash
5 – PageMaker
4 – Microsoft Word
3 – Microsoft Excel
2 – Photoshop
1 – iTunes
Explanations here.
The top 14 apps not from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe:
14 – Transmission
13 – 1Password
12 – NetNewsWire
11 – Stuffit
10 – Handbrake
9 – Transmit
8 – Skype
7 – BBEdit
6 – Firefox
5 – SuperDuper! & Carbon Copy Cloner
4 – Quicken
3 – WebKit
2 – Flip4Mac
1 – Parallels, VMware Fusion, & Boot Camp
Explanations here.
MacDailyNews Take: Eudora, Netscape Navigator, GraphicConverter… It’s tough to make a list like this, but Flip4Mac at #2? Wha?
Where’s Vuze? Hands down, it’s the best portal, converter, and streamer for Mac.
Umm, I would have to argue that these lists only mention current apps – and that there are tons of apps before OSX that need consideration. I would grant that some of these are the most important apps of the decade, or past 5 years, or of OSX since Tiger, but not of all time.
This guy is way off.
#10 – Handbrake. A wonderful app to be sure, but if you really want to get the most out of your Netflix DVD queue, you’re also going to need Ripit. Converting with Handbrake only can cause some protected DVDs to mis-order chapters.
Final Cut Pro should be much higher on the list as it played a big part in bringing the multimedia industry back to the Mac platform after Adobe blew it off.
Of all time:
FinderPop….remember that one little contextual menu app, that was free for a pint!!!!
DefaultFolder (still waiting for Apple to roll those functionalities into OS X)
ResEdit
GraphicsConverter
Interarchy
MacWrite, MacPaint
ClarisWorks (AppleWorks)
WordPerfect, in its early versions absolutely blew MS Word out of the water.
Almost forgot
AppleScript (now ScriptEditor)
BBEdit (would open just about anything)
even SimpleText.
Depends on your needs – this guy is into Torrent, burning disks, etc. Here are my favourites:
Song Sergeant (find dupes in iTunes)
SuperSync – awesome for merging libraries across multiple macs
MacThe Ripper
AquaMacs (Mac port of Emacs)
Skim – pdf reader
1Password
Safari Extensions – falling in love !
Stanza
Captain FTP
Gimp – image manipulator
Duplicate Annihilator – for iPhoto
PandoraJam !
Without Pagemaker desktop publishing would have died. Without Desktop publishing, the Mac would have died. Print Houses and Designers kept the platform alive during the dark years.
Bootcamp shouldn’t be on the list of apps not from Apple.
I concur, WTFrank!
Firefox? Seriously?
That thing crashes on me regularly. In about a third of launches it goes unresponsive just after I typed in the URL. Sure, it recovers after some time, but it’s annoying as hell. Plus, Flash with Firefox is memory leaky, and sloooowww, and crash prone. Flash is not great by itself, but with Safari or Opera it’s actually usable. If it weren’t for some extensions for which there are no usable alternatives in other browsers, I would kick Firefox out.
What about MacPaint, MacWrite and MacDraw, even if they were put on the list as 1 item?
How about Pixelmator? I have Photoshop on my machine, but for well over 90% of my image manipulation needs Pixelmator is the much better choice. Lean, mean, clean image machine.
No Acrobat?
Hell yeah Flip4Mac, banished Windows Media Player from my machine forever!!!
What about Hypercard?
“Over 25 years later Word remains one of the Mac’s most popular apps.”
Define “popular”. If he means installed and used, then yes.
If he means “wanted to use”, no. The current version 2008 is crap, the 2003 version is extremely outdated. Both are buggy and crash prone. It’s only installed and used because Word is the de-facto standard, not because Word is actually an application one loves to use.
Pixelmator should be there. Quicken should not be there, there are plenty of mac-only apps that are much better (though I haven’t tried the newest version, so maybe I’m wrong now).
Or Chooser
Hypercard for sure
Quicksilver deserves a spot too. And along with it you could have Butler, LaunchBar, etc (just group them into one).
In no particular order.
Quicktime
Photoshop
Illustrator
PageMaker
Safari
iTunes
Word
Boot Camp
iPhoto
Final Cut Pro
MacPaint
Acrobat
@ChrissyOne – little trick I learned for Handbrake to get around this problem: just play the movie in VLC (which you have to have anyway to decode with HB), then look up which title it’s playing in the menu (Playback | Title). Choose that track in HB to decode! Works great.
Postscript. If you can consider Quicktime a program, which is more of a base technology actually, then Postscript made ALL desktop printing possible and is the core of publishing, PDF, etc. Without it the Mac would never never gotten past the 128 model.