I’ve seen a few people post lists of their favourite/essential apps, so here’s mine 🙂
When I’m setting up a new Mac, or reinstalling macOS on my Mac mini or MacBook Pro, I have a list of the apps that I install first:
- Chrome – I could use Safari for the first few downloads, but I move to Chrome as soon as I can
- password manager (e.g. 1Password, LastPass), because everything needs a strong password
- cloud storage (e.g. BackBlaze, Dropbox, GoogleDrive), as it takes a while to restore all my data; I restore my ~/bin folder first because has a ton of useful scripts
- Bartender for keeping my menu bar neat and tidy
- Downcast podcast player, from the App Store – it syncs with iOS
- Moom, also from the App Store, for resizing apps
- VLC – doesn’t everyone use this?
- Next Meeting, from the App Store, shows upcoming calendar entries in the menu bar
- Adobe Lightroom
- homebrew then install lolcat & cowsay because I like my terminal sessions to be amusing!
Of course there’s also the stuff I use for work, but this is enough for me 🙂
This list used to be a lot longer but macOS has come a long way and I’m using the default apps more and more.
