A Few of My Favorite Mac Developers.
This is a non-exhaustive of list some of my favorite Mac Developers and their apps:
Panic
Makers of the best FTP program for the Mac, Transmit and the only American distributor of Katamari Damacy t-shirts. The rest of their apps are equally great. If it wasn’t for my existing habits, I would be using Coda as well.
Macromates
TextMate combined with Transmit are my secret sauce for daily coding. A strong flexible text editor that remains light. I use it every day.
Blacktree
Quicksilver has become so engrained into my computing life that I am confused when I sit down in front of a computer without it. While it acts as an App Launcher, it is so much more.
The Coding Monkeys
SubEthaEdit was my first love as a text editor. If not for a few features of TextMate that I have grown to require, I would still be using it. Collaborative editing is an amazing concept. It is so great that Panic licensed the engine for Coda.
Delicious Monster
While Delicious Library is not work related app, it does manage my books, movies, CDs, and console games is ease and elegance. “Scan” the barcode of the item with your iSight and DL pulls all of the pertinent info from Amazon including the cover. It even includes a lending management tool.
Ambrosia Software
Many of us remember Ambrosia for their excellent shareware games like Mailstrom and Aperion (sadly not Intel Mac compatible) as well as the seminal Escape Velocity (while EV is not Intel compatible, EV Nova is.). However, Ambrosia makes several very useful apps that I use on a constant basis. Snapz Pro is the best screen grab program and WireTap allows you to record audio from any source, including other apps.
Alsoft
DiskWarrior has saved so many of my client’s bacon it is not even funny. What was once the panacea of Norton Utilities for Mac, now is the time for the magic bullet of Disk Warrior. A co-worker once made the comparison that “Norton was like the road crew who patched all of the hole in the road, where DiskWarrior is the crew that tears the whole damn thing up and puts down a brand new one.”
Disco
Along with the other “Delicious Generation” developers the “Style Over Substance” argument can definitely be used against Disco. It sure is pretty, all the way down to the smoke effect while burning discs. But it is one of the cleanest burning apps available. With nearly the drag and drop ease of burning straight from the Finder, but with the power to duplicate and image discs as well, Disco is my first choice, supplanting the long time champion, Toast.
Unsanity
Makers of the APE Application Enhancer framework system and some of the greatest haxies such as; ShapeShifter, a Mac OS X skinning tool and WindowShade X, a tool that enables Mac OS 9-like window shade minimizing. Unfortunately, APE and therefore its haxies are not Leopard compatible. Incidentally, Jason Harris of Unsanity has also worked on the venerable Chicken of the VNC
Trust me, there are plenty of other small Mac developers out there who could be on this list. In the past few years, projects My Dream App, MacHeist and the Mac Update Promo (granted there is a lot of nepotism going on in that list) have help expose users to some of these great developers.
Overall, the quality of Mac developers and their apps are outstanding, and as someone who is invested in both worlds there are very few developers on the PC side who compare.