Ok folks, if there is a first prize I think I’m going to win with this entry: Scrivener
One should take a look at Ulysses too.
Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#22The whole Omni suite is a classic answer to this. I use OmniFocus daily, and in my opinion OmniGraffle is still by far the best choice for flowcharts and similar.
Is it easy to share flowcharts with non-Omni users? How does it compare to Visio?
The charts can be rendered to PDF. I believe you can export to other formats, but those are always lossy.
Visio feels like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s compared to OmniGraffle. Also, Visio has had an enterprise focus for a very long time while omnigraffle has very much focused on diagramming.
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#23I came across Dash last week - a very cool offline API documentation browser. Super useful and very well done. https://kapeli.com/dash
free alternative for Windows: https://www.documentalist.io/
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#24Anything by Rogue Amoeba. I'm not sure there's anything "clever" about the design they choose for their apps. They're nice to interact with, they do the obvious thing and they're well engineered (rarely crash, don't have memory leaks, etc).
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 It's mostly been replaced by Alfred at this point, but there were things you could do with Quicksilver that you can't do with Alfred, such as chaining files, actions and apps together on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.
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#25Spectacle?
first app i install.
wonder if osx has added these features natively since i started using this app.
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#26Ok folks, if there is a first prize I think I’m going to win with this entry: Scrivener
Scrivener is fantastic - used it throughout my doctoral studies
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#27You don't have to install this. I was not aware until fairly recently. The pre-installed Dictionary app is awesome and very handy for all types of research (not just word lookup).
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#28Sequel Pro is the best desktop app I have used to manage MySQL databases by far. I haven't had a Mac in years and haven't found anything near as good on Windows or Linux.
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#29Pixelmator! Wouldn't say it's not well known though.
Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
#30I'll add an answer of my own, to move things along a bit:
---
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/
---
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.