OS X applications ranked by category

The list

This document will be updated frequently to show which OS X programs I find most useful as time passes. I was inspired to create this living document because the one-time reviews and wrap ups I have created for Mac Net Journal are pretty useless once each of the programs in the review is updated...
These programs are listed as I currently rank them, and as I update the document I will note why one program ranks above another. I also plan to note the date of the latest update and provide links to the applications and plug-ins or add-ons for the programs (as time permits)...

Web browsers

Chimera 0.5 (Updated 9/8/02) - The most recent mainstream build of Chimera adds more stability and many bug fixes, in addition to a more normalized downloading window that doesn't require control-clicking to properly download a file... Be sure to grab the nightly builds for the latest bug fixes.

OmniWeb 4.1.1 (Updated 10/1/02) - The folks at The Omni Group have rolled out another wide release version of OmniWeb in 4.1.1. It is still missing full support for Cascading Style Sheets and other Web standards, but for simple Web browsing, OmniWeb is stable, speedy, and a joy to view.

Mozilla X 1.2b (Updated 10/17/02)- Among the updated features in Mozilla X 1.2b are restored Java compatibility under Jaguar, the ability to launch the browser with a bookmark group as your start page (this opens several pages into tabs), and type ahead find now works on the Mac version of Mozilla.

For a look at the latest developments with Mozilla, remember that you can download one of the daily builds and see if that bug you reported has since been fixed. As this point, I download the latest daily build once a week or so, depending on how much time I have...

Internet Explorer 5.2.2 (Updated 9/26/02) - I wish I didn't have to use this at all, but it still handles a specific Javascript dialog box on the Lycos site that I have to use regularly. I used to put IE at the top of my list when it was the only Java implementation that would work with Lycos chat, but no current OS X browser works with Lycos' Java chat client now...

Netscape 7.0PR1 (Updated 5/21/02) - This new release of Netscape offers tabbed browsing like Mozilla, new instant messenging features and improvements throughout the entire program - from e-mail features to utilities for viewing and hearing multimedia content from the Web. I am downloading it today to take a look...(Release notes)

iCab X Preview 2.8.1 (Updated 6/26/02) - The HTML checking features of iCab are still here and this newest release adds Java support, a new cookie manager and other features, but iCab still chokes on some pages that I have to see. I can't fault it for not working with some of my work-critical Java pages, since no current OS X browser works with Java correctly after the last update for Java under OS X. It's great to see they are still working on this browser though!

Opera X 6.0b1 (Updated 9/26/02) - I am still taking a look at this latest release...

E-mail clients

Eudora 5.2b15 (Updated 10/29/02) - ($29.95 to upgrade, $39.95 to buy new) Eudora adds more stability and fixes a number of bugs in this latest release. Among the release notes is this interesting quip: "Disabled don't check on battery pref for OS X, since Apple doesn't give a damn." The new version fixes at least five crashing bugs.

PowerMail 4.0.1 (Updated 8/30/02) - ($49, or $29 for a license upgrade) PowerMail is a great text-only email client with rudimentary HTML rendering capabilities and tie-ins to external spell checkers. It is speedy and stable, which along with the appealing user interface and powerful filtering capabilities make it my email client of choice.
This new update, which carries a $29 fee for holders of current PowerMail licenses like me, adds better email address handling as well as improvements that make the program compatible with Mac OS X 10.2 or Jaguar.

Mailsmith 1.5.4 (Updated 9/26/02) - Mailsmith 1.5.4 is an update to the $100 e-mail client from the makers of BBEdit adds enhanced search capabilities based on content relevance and the capability of seeing that you have new messages through the Mailsmith icon in the Dock. Mailsmith 1.5.4 is a free upgrade for registered users.

Mail 1.2 (Updated in OS X 10.2) - (Bundled with Mac OS X) Mail has grown into a much more usable email client with the update to Jaguar. The Junk Mail features are innovative and Rules can now be set using nearly unlimited criteria. There are still no options for setting labels on messages - a feature I use a lot under PowerMail and that I relied on under Eudora - and keyboard navigation under Mail is woeful. The user interface also feels slow - it takes too long when selecting a new mailbox or message for its contents to appear. Still, the Spam killing features may make Mail a choice for more people.

Nisus Email 1.6.1 (Updated 5/29/02) - ($29.95) A new Carbonized version of Nisus Email offers features similar to the Classic version, including better conversion of HTML to plain text, SMTP support, and foreign character encoding.

SweetMail - This looks great and lots of people love it, but I haven't spent enough time to give it full consideration.

Entourage X - OK...Adam Curry noticed that I didn't list Entourage for OS X in this ranking. That was an oversight on my part, made because Entourage is not a stand-alone e-mail program. The cost to get Entourage is at least $300 to buy an upgrade to the entire Microsoft Office vX software suite. I live a simpler life by keeping as much MS code off my Mac as possible, and so I don't use Entourage. I would try it out if MS offered it as a separate program though...

Mulberry 3.0b8 (Updated 10/30/02) - ($35.95) Cyrusoft International has unveiled a new version of its email client, offering a new optional 3-pane mail browser layout, support for processing read receipt requests and a host of other user interface enhancements and bug fixes. Complete release notes for this update are not yet available. Mulberry is widely considered one of the best IMAP email clients, but its strengths and customizability come at the cost of a learning curve.

Others I need to check out:

QuickMail Pro 3.1.1 (Updated 9/3/02) - The new update includes new HTML email support...

Musashi X 3.4.1 (Updated 6/14/02)

Zoe 0.2.2 (Updated 8/2/02) - (free for personal use) I haven't spent much time with this Java-based e-mail application. It offers some intrigue, but it is a complete departure from more standard email clients in the way that you can access and search your mail by date and other criteria. This holds promise for the time when the application hits a 1.0 release level...
New in the latest update is the ability to track your email through an RSS feed, which will bring your email information together with news info in the RSS reader of your choice...

GyazMail 0.9.2 (Updated 10/28/02) - (Free) GyazMail is a freeware email client under development in Japan. The program offers POP3 and SMTP support, SSL, MIME, message threading and more. This is yet another program in early development, so use at your own risk. I have not taken a look at the program beyond reviewing the information on the author's Web site.

Chat clients

Multi-protocol

Proteus X 2.2a10 (Updated 10/11/02) - ($10 shareware, but can be used for free) A great user interface and the ability to customize are among the highlights of this freeware chat client. Proteus needs buddy chat to work for me and my occasional need to do group chats in a work situation though. Proteus handles AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo, and it allows users to connect to a service with multiple identities at once - a must-have if you need to be on AIM with two usernames.

Fire 0.31.e (Updated 10/17/02) - (Free) This ranks at the top of my multi-protocol chat client list for one reason - it handles buddy chat and the current version of Proteus doesn't. Fire works with AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber and IRC.
New features in 0.31a include a redesigned buddy list, a new buddy info window, and the ability to work with more than one account for each given chat service. There are also tons of bug fixes, detailed on the Fire features page.

Single protocol

iChat - (Free, sort of. Bundled with Jaguar) The chat client that is bundled with Jaguar or Mac OS X 10.2 beats the rest of the clients for the AOL Instant Messenger protocol with unique features that the other programs, including AOL's own chat client, have yet to get right under OS X. File transfers work, you can see each buddy's away messenger right on the screen without any extra effort on your part, and though the default behavior of the program takes up too much screen space, you can adjust the settings to make iChat behave like something other than the cartoon chat program it looks like in Apple's marketing.

Adium 1.6.2 (Updated 9/8/02) - Light on processor time, highly customizable and it offers great logging capabilities. Far and away the best AIM chat client under OS X.

AIM X 4.5.863 (Updated 10/1/02) - (Free) The only way to do buddy icons with AIM under OS X, but beware - the official AOL Instant Messenger client is clunky, taking up a lot of screen real estate and offering very few customization options. The newest version adds scroll wheel support along with smileys and new Away options.

MSN - (Free) It works. I am not a fan, but if you need a stand-alone MSN Messenger client, this is it.

Yahoo! 2.5 (Updated 9/30/02) - (Free) New in this latest version is support for video chat at 20 frames per second as well as more smileys and other improvements.

ICQ X 3.2b5 (Updated 10/31/02) - (Free) Again, a bit clunky. But this is the official OS X ICQ chat client. The new alpha version adds file transfers between PCs and Mac versions as well as a typing indicator that lets you know when your buddy is typing back at you.

Charla 1.6.2 (Updated 8/14/02) - (Free) A light-weight, third-party chat client for Yahoo! The new version fixes bugs, adds filters for room enter and room leave messages and animated smileys.

Others I need to check out

Snak 4.8.5 (IRC client) (Updated 9/10/02)

Outliners

OmniOutliner 2.1.1b1 (Updated 10/23/02) - ($29.95) The latest version of The OmniGroup's excellent outliner adds a "Save All" menu item, adds Hoist, Unhoist and Unhoist all toolbar items, loads comments from MORE documents into the comments field in OO, and includes several bug fixes and enhancements. Also new in this version is much improved typing speed and the ability to import and export OPML files. Amen.

Radio 8.0.8 - ($40) Although many people just think of Radio 8 as a Weblog publishing tool, it is actually built around a sophisticated outliner, created from the ground up by the creator of the popular outliner More. And with its new Instant Outline tools that let you use outlines as communication tools saved across the Internet in OPML format, it is positioned as a unique outlining tool. It needs spell checking capabilities...

BrainForest Professional - The distinguishing thing with BrainForest Pro is that is it a desktop application under OS X as well as Palm application on your PDA. Sahring outlines between the desktop and the PDA is a great thing.

AppleWorks - ($79) AppleWorks includes a basic outliner in its word processing module. It works well - I have used it to create outlines for book proposals in the past. It just doesn't offer the higher-end outlining functions that OmniOutliner or Radio offer.

Inspiration 7.0 - ($69) A Mac OS X compatible outliner and diagram creation program that offers easy toggling between outline and diagram mode, this program is marketed mostly to educators.

Office suites

Office vX - (Pricing varies from $299 for an upgrade to $499 for the full version) My first caveat: I don't own Office vX, so I don't know the intricacies of the program. I do own an older Classic version of Office, and I do have the need to use Word now and then in my writing work, since its document change-tracking features are not matched by other Mac word processors. I still rank Office as the top suite, even though I have resisted buying it, just because it is the behemoth application that everyone in business expects you to have and use. I try to keep my exposure to MS bugs and bloated software to a minimum, but it works great for many folks...

AppleWorks 6.2.4 - ($79) This is the Swiss Army Knife of Apple applications. It isn't a heavyweight by any means, and it doesn't offer all of the bells and whistles of Office vX, but it has solid word processing, a lightweight database tool set, a decent spreadsheet application and everything blends together fairly seemlessly. I use AppleWorks extensively when working on book projects...it can take the work.

ThinkFree Office X 2.1 (Updated 10/25/02) - ($50) This suite includes ThinkFree Write, Calc and Show - all Java applications that can run under OS X and open and save files using the standard file formats from Microsoft Office. I haven't used ThinkFree yet...but it is on my to-do list

O'Reilly Networks took a look at ThinkFree Office today (4/30/02), and the author liked a lot of what he saw...

Word processors and text editors

BBEdit 6.5 - ($119, $39 version upgrade) - This is the top-of-the-line text editor for the Mac, and the OS X version kicks butt just as much as the Classic versions did. Now that BBEdit includes a spell checking feature along with the unbeatable abilities in HTML editing, coding, and searching capababilities, it is even more useful. I do much of my writing in BBEdit, with the only exception being magazine article and book writing, which I still do in either AppleWorks or Word 98 under Classic...

TextEdit - (Free, bundled with OS X) - TextEdit really is a decent simple text editor. In fact, with its changeable fonts and styles, it borders more on being a full word processor than a text editor. It also can be used to write and edit HTML code, but there are no utilities to ease markup. And unlike the higher-end text editors like BBEdit, there are not sophisticated search-and-replace tools in TextEdit. But hey, it's free...

Tex-Edit Plus X 4.3.1b1 (Updated 9/12/02) - ($15 shareware) Improvements in the new version include grep searches, Quartz text anti-aliasing and bug fixes. The new update also deals with several AppleScript issues.

Pepper 4.0.5 (No longer being developed)

Mariner Write 3.0.1 (Updated 8/17/02) - ($69.95) An update to Mariner Write adds help indexing and more documentation as well as bug fixes. The recent update to version 3.0 brought support for reading Microsoft Word documents as well as on-the-fly spell checking and the ability to export to PDF. The upgrade for OS X users costs $25.

Mariner Software also unveiled a free utility for converting Word documents to Rich Text Format documents, called DocDrop. DocDrop also has a Classic version.

Blaze 1.5.4 (Updated 9/11/02) - ($15) A shareware replacement for the SimpleText text editor.

Databases

FileMaker Pro 6 - ($299, $149 upgrade) This is the venerable standard database solution for Mac OS X and one of the most popular database applications under Windows as well. Work with digital images, support for XML, Excel spreadsheet conversion, and dynamic ODBC exchange are a few of the features of the newest version.

iDataPro 1.0.4 (Updated 10/29/02) - ($39.95, $19.95 upgrade from InfoGenie 1.x-2.x; $29.95 competitive upgrade from FileMaker Pro, Now Contact, or iOrganizer) iData Pro has positioned itself as a poor-person's FileMaker Pro. It offers versions for Mac OS X, OS 9.x and Windows for transportable data, and it claims to be lightning fast at searching databases. The new version offers support for synching with Palm PDAs and interaction with Apple's Mail.app.

Diagraming tools

OmniGraffle 2.1b1 (Updated 10/29/02) - ($59.95) OmniGraffle is a great tool for creating diagrams and flow charts, and it can be used with Web connectivity and AppleScript to create custom information kiosks or customized bookmark pages. The new version offers support for transparency in printing and PDF creation, as well as ColorSync support under Jaguar.

HTML editors

PageSpinner 4.1 (Updated 8/12/02) - ($29.95) An update to the shareware HTML editor adds support for Quartz text smoothing and tool tips, a new command line tool, a replace in Select command, and compatibility with Mac OS X 10.2.

Web Design 1.7 (Updated 8/19/02) - ($29.95) Billed as an all-in-one Web authoring program, the latest version adds line numbers, an improved preview feature, a Replace and Find Next menu item, and a number of fixes for previous versions.

FTP clients

RBrowser 3.0.9.2 (Updated 9/10/02) - ($29 for basic, $49 for professional) RBrowser is a multi-purpose UNIX-style FTP tool with support for FTP, SFTP and SSH. The basic license allows FTP and SFTP transfers, while the professional license adds UNIX and SSH support.

RBrowser Lite - (Free) This is the freeware cousin of RBrowser, with basic FTP capabilities.

Interarchy 6.0 (Updated 10/31/02) - ($45) A full-featured FTP client, Interarchy offers the ability to mirror a local disk to a remote FTP server, which can be a godsend for using a program like TinderBox or even Radio to upstream to a remote server. The program is also fully AppleScriptable for easy automation.

Transmit X 2.0 (Updated 10/23/02) - ($24.95) This is a complete rewrite of the FTP app in Cocoa with support for SFTP, file synchronization and much more, all with a simple user interface.

Fetch 4.0.2 (Updated 4/29/02) - ($25) One of the old-time Mac FTP clients, Fetch offers ease of use and a great history dating back to its creation at Dartmouth College in 1989. If you check the site, be sure to read the interesting backstory link.

RsyncX 1.7c (Updated 11/1/02) - (Free) This is an implementation of rsync with a graphical user interface front end and support for HFS+ disks. Like rsync, it can be used to mirror a file, folder, or entire disk to another machine, either on a local network or across the Internet.

Still need to check out for myself:

Captain FTP 1.4 (Updated 9/26/02) - ($25) Free for private or educational use. Built for OS X from the ground up.

Graphics applications

I include photo editing and photo management applications in this category.

PhotoShop 7.0.1 (Updated 8/22/02) - ($609) The premier image editing program on any platform, Photoshop is the program that the pros use, and as such it carries a professional price. If you need the muscle to work with your images, this is the standard. (Release notes for Photoshop 7.0.1)

PhotoShop Elements 2.0 (Updated 9-17-02) - ($99) Don't need all the high-end capabilities of PhotoShop? Then Elements may be just what you need. It offers a powerful subset of the tools in PhotoShop - all that you need to tweak digital photos or scans.

GraphicConverter 4.5 (Updated 10/31/02) - ($30 shareware, $15 to upgrade) The Swiss Army Knife of graphics programs adds PDF support under OS X, importing of ORF images as well as ota import and export, easier handling of PSD PhotoShop images and much more. If you can't afford Photoshop, get this program. I use it extensively with my digital photos, and since I stopped using iPhoto three or four months ago, it is also my photo storage and organization tool of choice. I simply cannot say enough nice things about this program.

iView Media Pro 1.5.5 (Updated 8/23/02) - ($65) More of a multimedia organizer than a simple photo management program, iView MediaPro lets you work with photos, movies, MP3s, graphics, and other files. Like iPhoto, it offers easy ways to create custom slide shows or to export to the Web, but it also offers archiving capabilities. The new version offers compatibility with Mac OS X 10.2.

iPhoto 1.1.1 - (Free from Apple) One of the most popular iApps under OS X, iPhoto is a simple shoebox application for storing and organizing photos that can then be used to create Web pages, customized books, etc. This is a great option for photo hobbyists, and many photo professionals use it as well. Beware though that iPhoto likes lots of hard disk space and RAM.

TIFFany3 (Updated 10/30/02) - ($222 for basic commercial use or $444 for professional commercial use, with discounts for educational/government and student use)

Sound recording applications

These are programs I still need to check out

Sound Studio 2.0.2 (Updated 5/2/02) - ($49.99)

Amadeus II v 3.5.1 (Updated 4/25/02) - ($25, and available in English, French, German and Spanish versions)

AudioX (Freeware)

Audiocorder OSX 3.3.1 (Updated 4/30/02) - ($19.99)

Utilities

General purpose

CopyPaste X 1.5b2 (Updated 11/1/02) - ($20) One of the best all-time Mac utilities, this program expands the clipboard capabilities of your Mac with a recording feature, and it adds other text handling features like clip editing and conversion from Mac to Windows text. New in this beta is a Paragraph Maker Tool, a Number Paragraphs Tool, and a new English manual that opens inside CopyPaste.

LaunchBar 3.2.5 (Updated 10/27/02) - ($39) Objective Development's keyboard launcher tool has won a lot of fans who want to access Web sites, files, and applications simply by typing key combinations on their keyboards. The new version makes dragged files from LaunchBar work properly with Terminal and Mail.

Snapz Pro X 1.0.6 (Updated 8/6/02) - ($29 for screen capture only, $49 for a version with QuickTime recording) Updated to support QuickTime 6 and the upcoming release of Jaguar (OS X 10.2), this industrial-strength screen capture utility is much more flexible than the Grab utility that is part of OS X. Save screen shots as .bmp, .png, .tiff, .pdf, Photoshop files and more, or even save a recording in QuickTime. This is a must-have if you need to create documentation for a program and grab screen shots not possible otherwise under OS X.

Drop Drawers X 1.6 (Updated 10/23/02) - ($20) The highly customizable file and application launcher is upgraded with better OS X integration.

Backup and synchronization

Tri-BACKUP 3.12 - ($49) This backup and synchronization tool does automatic and manual backups under OS X. There is a 30-day trial version available.

Rob McNair-Huff is a longtime Mac user and writer from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing about the Mac, and running this Web site, Mac Net Journal, he is the author of two books - Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula and Mountain Bike America: Washington - and he is working with his wife Natalie to write a third book this year called Birding Washington. If you have a need for Mac consulting, writing, Web design or photography help, check out Rob's business site: White Rabbit Publishing.
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