NOTE: install any of the apps here at your own risk.

Key

⭐️
Essential app
😴
Install only if needed
💀
Obsolete or discontinued
Adium 😴
Not as important as it used to be; these days Slack is the default standard for work, and other apps for personal communication are on my phone. Install if needed
Alfred ⭐️
Command launcher. Even though very often it's nothing more than a proxy around Spotlight, I feel naked when working on a machine that doesn't have it. I sync the settings with Dropbox
Android Studio
Useful for flutter and when I was learning Kotlin
App Cleaner
When I need to download apps like this to remove standard OS X apps I don't want (looking at you, "News") is when I realise I shuld really move to Linux...
Anki ⭐️
I am a big fan of Flashcards both for keeping my tech know-how up to date and to practice languages and other things. Sadly the latest desktop upgrade screws up all my custom cards, haven't upgraded for a while
Apache ⭐️
Gone are the days when you had to spend hours fine tuning the default OS X installation... these days all I need when installing a new maching is to copy over my virtual hosts back-up to /opt/local/apache2/ conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
Audacity
Audio editor. Now that the MP3 licence has expired you don't need to install LAME separately
Boostnote
Notable
Two of the apps I am trying to migrate away from Evernote to. Not quite there yet
Brave ⭐️
Chrome with privacy. My main browser these days
Broomstick 😴
Allows you to switch off items from the OS X menu bar which normally you can't (like Dropbox). Useful on the tiny Mac laptops, where space is at a premium
Caffeine 😴
An app to stop your machine going to sleep. Useful for presentations. I don't always install it as the CLI command caffeinate does exactly the same thing
Calibre ⭐️
calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager. Users say it’s outstanding and a must-have. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s also completely free and open source and great for both casual users and computer experts
CharlesProxy
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information)
Comic Life
A semi-pro drawing app for making comics
Cyberduck 😴
One of those apps that has been around forever. Originally created for FTP and SCP (remember them?) it now also handles Amazon S3 and Google Drive Bookmarks are saved in ~/Library/Application Support/Cyberduck
DB Browser for SQLite
DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) is a high quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite.
Disk Inventory X 💀
Creates a color map of your hard disk, which makes it easy to clean up. Hasn't been updated in ages
Divvy 💀
I used to be a big fan of this app for resizing app windows, but these days I am using this Div Alfred workflow which does the same without the need for an extra app
Docker
Package Software into Standardized Units for Development, Shipment and Deployment
draw.io
draw.io is an open source technology stack for building diagramming applications, and the world’s most widely used browser-based end-user diagramming application.
Dropbox ⭐️
Essential, if nothing else because I share Alfred settings with it
Evernote
I love and hate this app. It snoops around your machine and browser habits a bit too much for my tastes, and search is quite poor. Started migrating to more homebaked solutions, but I have soo much stuff saved in it I am not quite ready to escape it, yet.
Firefox
It's no longer my main browser since they messed up the signing certificate expiry some time ago, but it still has some useful tools
Flux
f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you're in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again
Gimp ⭐️
These days Gimp got simpler. Even my mum uses it for image processing
Google Drive ⭐️
Useful to share all sort of stuff you don't mind Google to read
Gyazmail ⭐️
Every time I try using Apple Mail I alwasy get frustrated by some assumption Apple makes about my usage habits. GyazMail is an old mail app that saves mail as text files, which for some reason appeals to me, as I can then search through them with normal CLI tools
Handbrake
The best for video transcoder for Macs, comes with a CLI version as well
Homebrew ⭐️
If you use a Mac and you do something even remotely technical you need Homebrew, simple as that
ImageAlpha
ImageOptim
JPEGmini
Various image optimisation pacakges
LastPass ⭐️
Password manager
Licecap
LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF (a proprietary format)
Kaleidoscope 💀
Costs way to much for what it does, but as I have a licence I still occasional use this diffing app
Little Snitch
Still the best network monitor out there, I have stopped using simply because my virus checker already comes with one, even though it's not as good
MacX DVD Ripper Pro
DVD cost more money than they are worth and if they get scratched they become useless. I use this app to make backups
MalwareBytes ⭐️
Malware protection app
Menubar Countdown 💀
It's been discontinued but I still have the .dmg and it works fine. A timer utility I use when working, when sometimes I use the Pomodoro Techique
MPEG Streamclip 💀
Ancient video conversion util that still comes useful, sometimes
MySQL Workbench
See 'Sequel Pro' 👇
NameChanger
Batch file-renaming app. I know there are CLI utils for achieving the same, but I haven't got around researching them, and I am used to this
Notion
A mix between an ouliner and a DB management app. I don't get the hype - the UX is great, and it's promising, but it's still a MVP. Use Workflowy instead
OmniDiskSweeper ⭐️
A utility to quickly find large files and get rid of them. You'd think it should be easy to do from Finder, but this is much more convenient
OmniGraffle
See 'draw.io' 👆
OnyX ⭐️
An all-in-one system maintenance tool and optimizer. Another essential app
OpenOffice
It's OS and does a great job, although it has probably the worst UI ever which frustrates the f*** out of me
mySql
Can be installed via Homebrew, but I prefer the standard installer from their website (when you eventually find it...). After installing, restore my backups to /usr/local/mysql/data/
pgAdmin
This is one of those akwkard to use apps that get the job done, but...
Postman
A dev tool for http requests
Robot 3T
Another DB management app, this one for Mongo
Sequel Pro
If only all DB management applications were as good as this MySQL-only one...
Skim 😴
Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file
Skype
"skyping" has become the standard English word to refer to making VOIP video calls
Sublime Text
See 'Visual Studio Code' 👇
Thyme
A simple stopwatch, when for whatever reason you don't want the use the one in your phone
TinkerTool ⭐️
An application that gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X. This allows to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system.
VirtualBox
I used to use Parallels, but this is just as good, and free, although it bothers me it's from Oracle. I mostly use it to test sites on various old versions of IE
Vuze 💀
I haven't downloaded torrents for aaages, but that's the client I used to use. Not sure whether it's even still functional
The Unarchiver ⭐️
The Unarchiver is a proprietary freeware data decompression utility, which supports more formats than Archive Utility, the built-in archive unpacker program in macOS. It can also handle filenames in various character encodings, created using operating system versions that use those character encodings
Tunnelblick ⭐️
The best OS VPN client so far
Valentina Studio
There doesn't seem to be a pg app as sleek as Sequel Pro is for mySql - this is the best I have found so far. But I am still looking
Visual Studio Code ⭐️
The best free code editor out there
Vivaldi
Yet another Chrome knock-off, like Brave; this one wants to bring back some legacy Opera functionality. Some of which was very good; see tiled tabs, which I use all the time. This is my #1 choice for development, despite the shotcuts being all wrong
Virus Barrier ⭐️
My Virus barrier of choice, from Intego
VLC ⭐️
THE Open Source video player
Wireshark
Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the volunteer contributions of networking experts around the globe and is the continuation of a project started by Gerald Combs in 1998
Workflowy
This is a simple outliner that works well. And 95% of the times that's all you need
X Lossless Decoder
X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. The supported audio files can be split into some tracks with cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.4 and later