Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps? • Hacker News Board

taneq wrote: post #46

ScottFree wrote: post #24

Anything 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). https://rogueamoeba.com 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 w…

> I'm not sure there's anything "clever" about the design they choose for their apps. That's a feature in itself, though. Being clever usually means you're being at least somewhat unpredictable, which is bad for UI. It's much harder to come up with a simple design than a 'clever' one.

^ Using the word "clever" in the submission was a poor choice on my part. I'm still within the edit window, so I've removed it.

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#54

Post by johnwalkr » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #11

The 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.

Omniplan is by far the best MS project clone I’ve used.

Omnigraffle is basically nice to use, the presentation mode is a great way lead a discussion and use of force touch for feedback is a nice touch. However it is a bit quirky and I wish they’d make the core functions act like a normal program. For example, making a table is totally unintuitive.

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#55

Post by johnwalkr » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

webwanderings wrote: post #27

You 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).

Amazing tool for language learners, too. Just enable for your languages and force-click or right click to translate individual words. For me, for Japanese words it brings up definitions in Japanese plus an English translation.

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#56

Post by LVB » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

GitUp is a fast, lean Git GUI that is suited to those who are already familiar with Git but want a visual layer.

https://gitup.co

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#57

Post by LVB » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #36

cschmidt wrote: post #10

I came across Dash last week - a very cool offline API documentation browser. Super useful and very well done. https://kapeli.com/dash

It used to work great on iOS until Apple crippled it.

What doesn’t work on iOS? I use it all the time.

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#58

Post by diimdeep » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

PopClip https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/

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 :)

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#59

Post by Zarel » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #41

caleblloyd wrote: post #28

Sequel 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.

Same here. I still use it even though it crashes when closing a tab on latest MacOS. I’ve tried TablePlus and always end up back at Sequel Pro.

What do you like about it that makes you prefer it to TablePlus?

Re: Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?

#60

Post by Farraige » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 3:21 PM UTC

ScottFree wrote: post #24

Anything 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). https://rogueamoeba.com 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 w…

Tried AppZapper, it asked for access to my contacts and crashed when I denied.