Top Mac Applications

Not another list of the top applications for the Mac! Hopefully this one is a little different. My aim is to provide a central point for the best Mac applications that is easy to navigate and displays only the information you need.

NOTE: All prices have now been updated to reflect the Mac App Store.

This list is a work in progress and feel free to suggest more applications in the comments below.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Acorn Photo/Image Editor / £29.99 Acorn is an image editor built for the Mac with simplicity in mind. It’s fast, easy to use and powerful, providing you with all the tools you need to alter and enhance your images. For the average consumer Acorn offers all the required features of Photoshop at a fraction of the price. More Info Purchase

Adium Instant Messenger / Free Adium is a highly customizable instant messaging application that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, GoogleTalk and many more. Adium automatically consolidates all of these services in to one simple user interface, allowing you to spend more time chatting and less time jumping between different clients. More Info Download

Alfred Launcher / Free Alfred is a quicklaunch application built specifically for Mac OS X. Whether it's on your Mac or from Gmail, Amazon, eBay or Wikipedia, Alfred is guaranteed to increase your productivity. More Info Download

Anxiety To-Do Management / Free Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice. More Info Download

Aperture Photo Editor / £44.99 Aperture from Apple gives you powerful yet easy-to-use tools to refine images, showcase your photography and manage massive libraries on your Mac. It’s pro performance with iPhoto simplicity. More Info Purchase

AppZapper Uninstaller / £8.50 Everybody loves the drag and drop nature of Mac OS X. Drag an app into your applications folder, and it's installed. You'd think it would be that easy to delete an app. Unfortunately Mac OS X often leaves support files on your computer. Thankfully AppZapper fixes this issue. Simply drag an application onto AppZapper and watch as it finds and deletes the unwanted files. More Info Purchase

BBEdit Text Editor / £59.99 BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac. It has been specifically designed to meet the needs of web designers and software developers providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulating text. BBEdit is considered by many as the best text editor in the world, on any platform. More Info Purchase

Bean Word Processor / Free Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor, designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean does not try to be a power house word processor like Microsoft Word, but instead provides you with just the tools you need to get writing and focus on your content. More Info Download

Bento Personal Database / £29.99 Bento is the wildly popular personal database for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Whether you’re selling, building or organising, Bento can help you do it better, faster and easier. Bento also has direct integration with all you favourite Mac applications, making transporting data quick and easy. More Info Purchase

BetterZip Archive Management / £5.99 Archive management in Mac OS X has always been very limited. BetterZip resolves this issue by providing support for just about every archive format (ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, CAB, ISO and many more). BetterZip also handles advance archive features such as splitting and encryption, with compatibility for the main Windows archiving applications such as WinZip and WinRAR. More Info Purchase

Bevy Utility / £5.99 Bevy is a simple application launcher that shows you all of your applications in a single window that can be opened with a global hot key, from the menu bar or by clicking its dock icon. More Info Purchase

Boxee Media Centre / Free Boxee is a free, cross-platform media centre application, based on XBMC. With it's slick user interface and social networking integration it is the perfect way to enjoy all of your media entertainment from the Internet and your Mac on your TV. More Info Download

Breeze Window Management / £4.99 Breeze gives you simple window management on Mac OS X that allows you to save a window state, including relative size and position of the focused window. At any point, you can re-apply the saved state (size and position) like a template to any other focused window. More Info Purchase

Caffeine Utility / Free With a lot of video now being streamed from your browser instead of a dedicated media player, it can be frustrating when Mac OS X tries to go to sleep. Caffeine is a tiny application designed specifically to fix this issue. Simply click the Caffeine icon in your menu bar to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting the screen saver. Click Caffeine again to go back to normal. More Info Download

Chill Pill Fever RSS Reader / Free Before you can understand the greatness of Chill Pill your need to know about Fever. Fever is a popular PHP and MySQL application that you run on your own server that is the next generation of RSS feeds. Chill Pill is a native Cocoa application that allows you to enjoy Fever's rich RSS experience directly from your desktop. More Info Download

Chrome Web Browser / Free Although Safari and Chrome are both built on the same WebKit platform, Chrome offers a slightly different experience. With the option for personal themes and thousands of extensions it allows you to create a browser that works the way you want it to. Chrome is also open source which means you also have access to Beta and even Developer builds for a sneak peak at the latest features. More Info Download

Cinch Window Management / £3.99 Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as "hot zones". Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side. More Info Purchase

Coda Web Design / £59.99 Coda is arguably the greatest web design application ever created. Not only does it provide a single application to complete all tasks (text editor, file transfer, SVN, CSS, Terminal and more), it also helps ensure your workflow from development to production is as efficient as it can be. Simply put, it you are a web designer you owe it to yourself to buy Coda. More Info Purchase

Concept Draw Office Workflow Management / £339 ConceptDraw Office is a set of tools (Mindmap, Project and ConcetDraw Pro) designed to be used for resourcing and tasks management. It provides the tools needed to create an end-to-end visual representation of the data and task status information in a visual manner that is the most optimal for each workflow participant. Personally, I use Concept Draw Pro as a Microsoft Visio replacement. More Info Purchase

Courier File Sharing Utility / £2.99 Courier allows you to share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services - including Amazon S3, Flickr, Facebook, FTP / SFTP and many more. More Info Purchase

Creative Suite Design Tools / £1150 to £1800 Creative Suite from Adobe is the ultimate set of professional design tools. Including the critically acclaimed and award winning Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Fireworks and much more. Each application is also available individually if the full Creative Suite asking price is a little hard to swallow. More Info Purchase

CSSEdit Web Design / £25.84 CSSEdit is an application designed specifically for creating style sheets. It offers powerful previewing features that makes creating awesome looking, standards-based web sites a breeze. More Info Purchase

DEVONthink Information Assistant / £29.99 DEVONthink has been designed to manage and keep in order all those disparate pieces of information so important to your work or studies. As you become more experienced with DEVONthink and its easy, intuitive interface you will quickly find more exciting ways of using your data. More Info Purchase

Disco CD/DVD Burning / £12.71 Mac OS X has the ability to burn disc's directly from Finder, however it is far from perfect and lacks many advance features that many have come to expect from modern disc burning software. Disco fills this gap in a way the that feels right at home on the Mac. A truly beautiful piece of software that balances power, simplicity and cost perfectly. More Info Purchase

DivX Video Codec / Free (£13.99) The Mac is a fantastic media player and many people use the Mac Mini (due to its stylish design, power efficient and versatility) as a media hub connected to their HDTV. However any media device is only as good as the codec’s it supports. DivX is one of the worlds most popular video codec’s and is a must have application for everyone. More Info Download

DoubleTwist Media Player (Hub) / Free DoubleTwist is the perfect companion for anyone with a Google Android, Palm webOS or BlackBerry phone. It allows you to automatically sync any media with the device, just like the iPhone and iTunes. More Info Download

Dragoman Utility / Free Dragoman batch converts image, photo, music, sound and archive files. It supports the popular image file formats JPEG, PDF, TIFF and PNG, as well as all the most popular digital camera formats. This a great utility that can save you a lot of time. More Info Download

Dropbox File Synchronisation / Free Dropbox is a cross-platform cloud-based storage that can be used to synchronise your data across multiple devices or for backup. I personally use Dropbox to guarantee that the documents on my Mac, Windows PC and even iPhone are always up to date and available anywhere I have an Internet connection. More Info Download

Espresso Web Design / £51.71 Espresso is the perfect application for any web developer. It offers fast and powerful editing, sleek projects, live preview, awesome publishing and extensive synchronization tools. More Info Purchase

Evernote Note Taking / Free Evernote is one of thr worlds most popular note taking applications. Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe. More Info Download

Evom Video Encoding / Free Evom is the most simple and effective video encoding application I have ever used on the Mac. Once installed you are presented with a minimal user interface with a simple drop zone for your video files. Just drag a video file on to the drop zone at let Evom do the rest. More Info Download

EyeTV TV Tuner / £70 EyeTV allows you to watch, pause, and rewind live TV on your Mac. The software is compatible with most modern TV Tuners and has advance features that allow you to search and record any show or season. More Info Purchase

Final Cut Pro Non-linear Video Editing / £179 Final Cut Pro from Apple is a professional non-linear (can perform random access on the source material) video editing software, exclusively for the Mac. Final Cut Pro is used to edit major motion pictures, such 300, X-Men Origins Wolverine and many more. More Info Purchase

Fusion Virtual Machine / £30 VMware Fusion allows you to run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side without rebooting. VMWare have years of experience with virtual machines and have created a fantastic product, it has never been easier to run Windows on your Mac. More Info Purchase

GeekTool Utility / Free GeekTool is a Mac preference pane application that allows you to display information about your Mac on your desktop. Its possible to monitor shell script output, images, weather, iTunes library and even entire files all automatically (and in a way that any Mac/Linux geek will love). More Info Download

Growl Notification System / Free Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X. It allows applications that support Growl to display on screen notification when certain predefined events occur. This can be incredibly helpful when you have multiple applications running on a single system. More Info Download

Handbrake Video Encoder / Free If I had to pick just one video encoding application it would be Handbrake. Handbrake allows you to re-encode just about any video file and has pre-defined profiles for all the popular devices (iPod, iPhone, PSP, PS3, etc), as well as a host of advance features for power users. More Info Download

Hype HTML5 Web Effects / £34.99 Hype is a powerful keyframe-based animation system that brings web content to life using HTML5. Being standards based it delivers 100% fidelity across all browsers, with no requirements for third part plugins such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. More Info Purchase

Hyperspaces Utility / £7.49 Hyperspaces works with Mac OS X's Spaces to let you customize each Space so that it’s recognisably different from the others. Anyone that uses Spaces will definitely appreciate the advance features, customizations and smooth integration that Hyperspaces brings to Mac OS X. More Info Purchase

iA Writer Writing Tool / £10.99 iA Writer is a digital writing tool that makes sure that all your thoughts go into the text instead of the program. It's a truly unique application that delivers a beautiful writing experience without any settings (essentially it’s the anti-Word). It also has full iCloud integration and a fantastic iPad companion app (sold separately). More Info Purchase

iLife Software Bundle / £8.99 (Per Application) iLife is included with all new Mac's. However Apple traditionally upgrade the software bundle each year, adding new advance features which help you get the most out of your photos, movies, and music. In my opinion iPhoto and iMovie are the standout applications in the bundle. More Info Purchase

iWork Office Suite / £11.99 (Per Application) iWork is Apple’s productivity suite, that allows you to create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Unlike iLife, iWork is not included when you buy a new Mac, but with compatibility with Microsoft Office and arguably the best presentation application on the market with Keynote, iWork is definitely worth a look. More Info Purchase

iPhone Explorer iDevice Utility / Free iPhone Explorer lets you use an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad as if it were in disk mode or a flash drive. You can use the easy drag-and-drop methods to add or remove files and folders from your iDevice. Compatible with all iPhones and iPod Touches and iPads. More Info Download

JDownloader Download Manager / Free JDownloader is an open source JAVA application that simplifies downloading files from One-Click-Hosters like Rapidshare.com or Megaupload.com. JDownloader has been designed to for both free and premium account holders allowing multiple parallel streams, captcha recognition, automatic file extraction and much more. More Info Download

KFC - Kill Flash Cookies Flash Cookie Cleaner / Free The Flash Player allows web sites to set cookies called Local Shared Objects (LSO). LSO’s are capable of storing information for an indefinite amount of time, and unlike normal cookies they are not erased when you clear your browsing data. All the information in those cookies will remain accessible until they’re removed by the issuing website. KFC gives you a simple one button option to kill this information and keep your personal data safe. More Info Download

Leech Download Manager / £9 Leech is a lightweight download manager that integrates with Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, and Firefox. It allows your to download multiple files by intercepting the URLs or simple dragging the URLs to the Leech drop zone. More Info Purchase

Lightroom Photo Editor / £232.65 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a competitor to Apple's Aperture. It helps you bring out the best in your photographs, whether you're perfecting one image, searching for ten, processing hundreds, or organizing thousands. More Info Purchase

LittleSnapper Screenshot / £17.99 LittleSnapper is built for people who love to capture web pages or their desktop. It allows you to easily edit, organise, comment and export your screenshots so they can be used in blogs or e-mails. More Info Purchase

Little Snitch Utility / £20 Think of Little Snitch as a reverse firewall. Little Snitch is a lightweight and easy to use application that guarantees no application installed on your Mac will attempt to send any data out over the Internet unless you have approved it, therefore giving you complete confidence that your private data is staying private. More Info Purchase

MacFUSE + NTFS-3G Utility / Free MacFUSE is a free application that allows you to extend Mac OS X's native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. When combined with NTFS-3G it allows Mac OS X to read and write to NTFS filesystems (used in modern Windows operating systems). More Info Download MacFUSE Download NTFS-3G

MacJournal Journal (Blogging) / £10 MacJournal allows you to create a personal journal with a simple to use interface and two-level security (password protection and AES-256 encryption). You can also import almost any type of content (PDFs, QuickTime movies, images, and text) to enrich your work. More Info Purchase

MacPilot Mac Maintenance / £11.99 MacPilot is a powerful Mac maintenance and customisation application. It allows you to easily enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X, optimize and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button! More Info Purchase

MagicPrefs Utility / Free MagicPrefs is the System Preference Apple forgot. It allows a huge number of custom multi-touch gestures to be enabled on the Magic Mouse, instantly increasing the functionality and ultimately the value of the device. More Info Download

MainMenu Mac Maintenance / £8.99 MainMenu is a powerful maintenance tool to keep your Mac running like new, packed in a slick and simple interface. Improve application performance, make searching faster and speed up your disk access. More Info Purchase

MoneyWell Personal Finance / £34.99 MoneyWell brings personal finance to the Mac and iPhone. It enables event-based budgeting, intelligent bucket fill and interactive reports allowing you to build your spending plan faster and more accurately. More Info Purchase

Moom Utility / £2.99 Moom expands the capabilities of the Mac OS X green zoom button, by allowing you moving and zoom windows, so you can better see and work with all the content on your Mac. In my opinion this is a must have application for any Mac user, as it integrates seamlessly with OS X. I hope Apple are taking notes! More Info Purchase

MacFamilyTree Genealogy / £29.99 MacFamily Tree allows you to easily enter and then visualize your family history. Be it creating reports, diagrams or browsing your data in the innovative 3D view called Virtual Tree - MacFamilyTree offers a solution for every task. More Info Purchase

MyFourWalls Property Floor Planning / £19 MyFourWalls allows you to accurately map your property (to the millimeter) and begin designing new layouts, extensions, etc. It includes thousands of predefined objects, as well as a powerful 3D view, allowing you to virtually walk through your new home. More Info Purchase

MyThoughts Mind Mapping / £29.99 Introducing MyThoughts, a new level of freedom in the use of Mind Mapping Software, allowing you to create Unique, Meaningful, Brain Friendly Mind Maps. MyThoughts allows you to make the most of your thinking processes, without applying the restrictions of rigid templates and inflexible layouts. More Info Purchase

NameChanger Utility / Free NameChanger does exactly what it says in the name. It is one of those handy Mac application that has been designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files. This is incredibly useful if you have hundreds of images that you would like to quickly and simply give meaningful names to. More Info Download

Netspot Networking / Free Netspot is a new wireless survey software for Mac OS X. All you need to run your wireless site survey is your Mac with native Wi-Fi / AirPort adapter. Exceptional simplicity, only two steps to get your site survey report. More Info Download

Notational Velocity Note Taking / Free Notational Velocity is an easy to use, elegant application with functionality that gets straight to the point. In my opinion it is the ultimate note taking application. More Info Download

Office Office Suite / £100 Office from Microsoft is the worlds most popular office suite. With Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, Messenger and Remote Destop. A must have for anyone that uses a Mac and Windows PC. More Info Purchase

OnLive Gaming / Free OnLive is a unique games platform that allows you to stream the latest high specification games directly to your Mac. This means you can play the lastest triple-A games on your MacBook Air, even if they are not available for the Mac. Onlive is also compatible with the iPad, so you can even take your gaming on the road! More Info Download

PadSync iPad Utility / £7 The iPad is a great device, unfortunately due to the tight integration with iTunes it can sometimes be slow and painful to synchronise your data. PadSync is a simple application that allows you to streamline the sync experience, without having to open iTunes. It is compatible with all the major applications such as Pages, Numbers, AirVideo, GoodReader, etc. More Info Purchase

Path Analyzer Pro Network Analysis / £20 Path Analyzer Pro delivers advanced network route-tracing with performance tests, DNS, whois, and network resolution to investigate network issues. By integrating all these powerful features into one simple graphical interface, Path Analyzer Pro is a must-have tool for any network, systems, or security professional. More Info Purchase

Path Finder File Browser / £25 Path Finder is an award-winning file browser and management application for the Mac. It's a standalone application that takes the Finder's familiar interface and adds numerous powerful features and interface innovations to help you be more productive. More Info Purchase

Perian Video Codec / Free QuickTime X which is included in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is a beautiful media player. Unfortunately out of the box it only supports a very small number of video formats. Perian is the ultimate add-on for QuickTime enabling it to support just about every video format available. More Info Download

Photoshop Elements Photo/Image Editor / £54.99 Photoshop Elements combines power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos. This is the perfect stepping-stone into the world of Photoshop for those who don’t want to pay the premium for the full product. More Info Purchase

Picasa Photo Editor / Free Picasa is an application from Google for organizing and editing digital photos. It offers a compelling alternative to iPhoto and can be downloaded for free. More Info Download

Pixelmator Photo/Image Editor / £17.99 Pixelmator is a beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for the Mac. It has many powerful tools that rival premium products, such as Photoshop, that allow you to create, edit and enhance your images. More Info Purchase

Quick Search Box Quick Launcher / Free Quick Search Box from Google is the unofficial successor to Quicksilver. It allows you can search for information from just about anywhere and perform actions on the search results, such as launching applications, emailing friends, or playing a song. More Info Download

RapidWeaver Web Design / £34.99 RapidWeaver is a Mac exclusive that is perfect for anyone looking to create a beautiful "Web 2.0 enabled" website. Whether it's your first or five-hundredth website, RapidWeaver has all the tools you need to quickly create pages you'll be proud of. Think of it like Adobe Dreamweaver done right. More Info Purchase

RipIt DVD Ripper / £12.72 RipIt allows you to quickly and easily rip your DVD's onto your Mac, allowing you to play them directly from your hard drive. RipIt is claimed to have a 99.9999% success rate and the developers are so confident in their application that they promise to provide personal assistance if a DVD fails to rip. More Info Purchase

Rucksack (Archiver) Archive Management / £8.99 Rucksack (now known as Archiver) is an elegant archive management application that will open all popular archive formats including RAR, StuffIt, 7zip, and of course Zip. Rucksack will also safely backup your files with built-in encryption support and convert between different archive formats. More Info Purchase

SecureFiles Encryption / Free SecureFiles is a simple application which allows you to create encrypted Disk Images to store your sensitive documents. Just enter the disk image's name, its maximum size and type the password when requested. A new volume will appear on your desktop, in which you can drag and drop the files you want to protect. SecureFiles uses the 128 bits AES encryption algorithm to keep your files safe. More Info Download

ScreenFlow Screencasting / £59.99 ScreenFlow is an award-winning application for creating screen recordings on your Mac. ScreenFlow is powerful enough to capture the contents of your entire desktop at the same time as your video camera, microphone and computer's audio, resulting in the ultimate screencasting application. More Info Purchase

Shimo VPN Client / £14 Shimo by ChungwaSoft is a native Mac OS X VPN client that supports almost every VPN protocol available today. This includes Cisco VPN, OpenVPN, PPTP and L2TP, Hamachi and even Cisco's next generation AnyConnect protocol. It also has the ability to automatically detect changes in your network configuration and react accordingly, like initiating a VPN connection or reconnection. More Info Purchase

ShoveBox Utility / £16 ShoveBox is a tiny application that catches all those little scraps of information that you can't act on now but would rather not forget. It sits up in your menubar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more. More Info Purchase

SizeUp Windows Management / £8 SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems. More Info Purchase

Sketch Vector Image Editor / £23.99 Sketch is an amazingly powerful vector drawing application. Like all great Mac applications Sketch's minimal user interface allows you to focus on your content, while still offering enough power features to compete with anything on the market (including Adobe Illustrator). More Info Purchase

SmartBackup Backup Utility / £8.99 SmartBackup is an easy to use alternative backup application for Mac OS X. SmartBackup can create fast and efficient backups of your data, or a full bootable clone of your system. It can backup to anything that is mountable on your Desktop, to external harddisks, flashdrives, iPods and any kind of network shares. More Info Purchase

Snapheal Image Editor / £3.99 Snapheal is a unique photo editing application that allows you enhance your photos in a few simple clicks. Although Snapheal has a number of powerful features, the real magic is its ability to erase unwanted objects from a photo with a few simple clicks. I have never seen another application do this so well, so painlessly. More Info Purchase

Socialite Social Networking / £5.99 Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with your favourite web sites and social networks by keeping all the information in one convenient place. More Info Purchase

Speed Download Lite Download Manager / £9 Speed Download Lite is an award winning download manager for Mac OS X. It has been designed from the ground up for the Mac and sets the standard for unsurpassed performance and reliability. More Info Purchase

Spotify Streaming Music / Free Spotify is a free peer-to-peer music streaming application that looks similar to iTunes. It allows for instant listening of over 6 million tracks with almost no buffering delay. To make Spotify free there are a couple of limitation, firstly it is not possible to save the songs or play them outside the Spotify application. Also Spotify has both audio and visual advertisements, however these ads are generally non-intrusive. More Info Download

Steam Gaming / Free Steam is a digital distribution system for games. It allows users to purchase and download games from all the major developers and then play them straight from the Steam Client. Steam also provides consistent digital rights management, auto-updates and community features for all games installed. Due to the simplicity of use for the user and piracy protection for developers, Steam has grown increasingly popular. More Info Download

SuperDuper Backup/Image Utility / £18.52 SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. It's the perfect complement to Time Machine, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume. More Info Purchase

TextMate Text Editor / £40 TextMate is the perfect companion for any programmer or a designer. It aims to make the production of code and mark-up as simple as possible through the use of advance features, such as snippets, macros, and unique scoping system. You will find TextMate offers features that even a language specific IDE lacks. More Info Purchase

TextWrangler Text Editor / Free TextWrangler is the free alternative from the team that bought us the award winning BBEdit. It is the perfect tool for making notes, analysing files, scripting and with the built in FTP server is also great for building websites. More Info Download

The Hit List Getting Things Done (GTD) / £29.99 The Hit List is a simple, but powerful application designed to help efficiently manage the tasks in your life. It is based on the simple concept of making lists, The Hit List lets you plan, forget, then act when the time is right. More Info Purchase

Things Task Management / £29.99 Things is all about task management and simply getting things done. It is critically acclaimed and highly popular application, which perfectly balances simplicity with powerful features. It even has an excellent iPhone application to go with it. More Info Purchase

Transmit FTP Client / £20.49 Transmit is a powerful FTP client for Mac OS X. Simply put, Transmit is the only FTP client you will ever need and anyone that has ever used popular client on Windows, like Filezilla will immediately be at home. More Info Download

unison Usenet / £17.49 Simpy put, unison is the ultimate Usenet browser for the Mac. From the team that brought us the amazing Transmit and Coda. unison makes it easy to find, read, look, listen, and download from any Usenet server. More Info Purchase

µTorrent BitTorrent / Free µTorrent is the world's most popular BitTorrent client. Like µTorrent on Windows it includes bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT. Additionally, µTorrent supports advance protocol optimisation and encryption techniques to help improve the BitTorrent experience. More Info Download

VLC Media Player / Free VLC media player is the worlds most popular multimedia player capable of reading almost all audio and video formats as well as DVDs and Audio CDs. VLC can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream content over your network. More Info Download

Wallet Utility / £11.99 Wallet is your own flexible, personal database. It allows you to store web passwords, serial numbers, credit cards, domain names, grocery items, locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and much more. Best of all, your Mac can automatically access the data when required, saving you having to remember and fill out the information manually. Wallet is also super secure with the military grade 256-bit AES encryption. More Info Purchase

XBMC Media Centre / Free XBMC (formally Xbox Media Centre) is an open source product that is designed to make your Mac a true entertainment hub. XBMC supports almost all audio, video and image formats and is fully network-capable for both local area networks and the Internet meaning you have access to wide range of Internet media such as Hulu, YouTube, QuickTime etc. More Info Download

Xbench System Benchmarking / Free Xbench provides you with a comprehensive benchmarking solution for the Mac. Allowing you to compare the relative speed of your Mac against thousands of submitted benchmarks online, proving very useful for system optimisation and troubleshooting. More Info Download

Xmarks Bookmarks Synchronisation / Free Xmarks allows you to backup and sync your bookmarks across multiple machines and browsers. Using Xmarks in conjunction with Dropbox and you never have to worry about losing data again. More Info Download

Comments

[Claire]

Great list. Thanks for posting. I'll make sure I check back.

[Jon]

Nice Mac app list. Still a few good ones missing tho: TextMate, Quicksilver etc.

[Snake202]

Great list of applications. I am a big fan of the app's from Panic like Transmit. You should also add Coda to your list.

[Clive J]

Thanks for posting. Just found the link on Twitter. I am new to the Mac so we definitely come in handy.

[MacGeek]

Missing GeekTool and Quicksilver!

[Gem]

Nice list. Keep them coming.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

Thanks for the comments. Good call on Coda and TextMate, I will get them added. I have thought about adding Quicksilver, however since Snow Leopard it has not been as well supported.

[Tim2002]

I'm a huge fan of LittleSnapper and ScreenFlow. Use them all the time as part of my work.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

I have just added Coda, GeekTool and TextMate. We are now up to 51 applications. Keep them coming.

[Danny]

Great list. Thanks for posting.

[Ed1999]

Bookmarked! Thanks for posting. Makes re-building my Mac nice and easy.

[Lewis]

Nice list. I like the layout to. I notice you have Fusion on your list, but not Parallels or VirtualBox? I have tried them all and personally I prefer Parallels.

[Harry]

How about Adobe applications? It may be expensive but Photoshop is still the best.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

Thanks for posting everyone.

@Lewis, I have always been a Fusion user, however agree that Parallels and VirtualBox should be on the list.

@Harry, Good point about Adobe. I will add the creative suite (even if it does cost the earth). I would suggest casual Photoshop users check out Acorn.

[Jeff]

A very useful list, thanks.

[MGS200]

Love applications like Coda and ShoveBox, I use them everyday. Any plans to highlight when MacHeist or other bundles include some of these applications?

[JD]

Great list. Thanks for posting.

[Trav]

Loads of great Mac applications. Wish there was a cheap way to download them all.

[Tammy101]

Hi, nice list. Any way I can get automatically notified about updates?

[TheMacGuy]

Nice list and great blog. Definitely one for the bookmarks.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

Thanks for the comments everyone.

@MGS200, at the moment I only highlight "special deals" via the main LifeinTECH blog. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter for updates.

@Tammy101, unfortunately I don't have a good way for you to be updated when new applications are added. Thanks for the idea though and i'll keep it in mind next time I'm adding new features.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

We now have 76 top Mac applications. Drop a comment below if you can think of any I have missed.

[Matt (LifeinTECH)]

Mac.AppStorm (one of my favourite Mac blogs) have just posted a great article "80 Of The Most Useful Mac Tools and Utilities". I suggest you go and check it out.

[AlT122]

Nice List. What about 1Password and SuperDuper? Both great apps that are always on my must have list.

[Steve]

If you like Breeze, you should check out SizeUp and Cinch by Irradiated Software (http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/) both are great window managers for Mac OS X.