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!)
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.
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 It's mostly been replaced by Alfred at this point, but there were things you could do with Quicksilver that you can't do with Alfred, such as chaining files, actions and apps together on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.
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.
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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.
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I use Reeder a lot (both on macOS and iOS), and love its beautiful simplicity!
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I recently started using Paw and am in love with it with its design and features! There are so many well-thought features, I wasn't even aware I nedeed.
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As a long time user of Folx GO, I recently discovered CloudMounter from the same developer that allows you to mount cloud services as a local drive. I enjoy using both of them, and would definitely recommend!
- Folx GO: https://mac.eltima.com/download-manager.html
- CloudMounter: https://mac.eltima.com/mount-cloud-drive.html
2Do is another. Can't live without this app (https://www.2doapp.com)
Among the rest, it shows how scrolling should work in all macOS apps (fast, smooth, and precise).
Edit: I'm no longer a Mac user, I remember Coda (by Panic) being ahead of time as a text editor for coding.
Scrivener
Setapp https://setapp.com/
It's a (yet another) subscription service ($10/mo) to some 100 apps, many mentioned here. It's how I learned about:
- Better Touch Tool - Paw - iStatMenus - Marked (I already owned this, but using it in setapp gives Brett a bit of cash per launch) - and a handful of others that I needed to use just once or twice
Spectacle https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
Alfred 4
Bartender 3
Fantastical
RunCat
ControlPlane
Mindful Mynah
Audio Hijack
SSH Proxy
VOX
Clearview
Skim
Dash
Hopper Disassembler
Pacifist
Suspicious Package
Vienna
XLD
Mactracker
IINA
iChm
Hocus Focus http://hocusfoc.us/
Entropy http://www.eigenlogik.com/entropy/
Clipy https://github.com/ian4hu/Clipy
https://github.com/the0neyouseek/MonitorControl/
http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/ sorry but Node included in this one :)
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.
Spectacle (Window moving): https://www.spectacleapp.com/
TextMate (Text Editor): https://macromates.com/
OpenEmu (Emulator Platform): https://openemu.org/
A sample of bad UX design but still a useful app in my opinion is:
Keka (Archiver): http://www.kekaosx.com/
Softorinos app WALTR 2 is in the same vein, looks nice and very useful.
DaisyDisk is amazing as well.
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From what I've noticed, they seems to have some overlap and they often do cross promotions. I actually think their advertisement verge on spam sometimes, but I still love their apps.
Something else I noticed is that all of these seem to be run by eastern European people. I am curious if there is some niche/stereotype to be found in making high quality apps from those countries.
Lulu https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html
Haven't used a block-first, prompt to allow firewall on windows or linux. Similar to noscript in the browser
For me without a doubt the best audio meta data editor on macOS and an essential part of managing my music collection.
https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/
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Retrobatch - Flexible, super charged, batch image processing for your Mac
Stay - restore your windows positions based on your current displays: https://cordlessdog.com/stay/