In Search Of The Perfect Mac Application.

I’ve been a Mac user for a long, long time, going back to the Mac OS 7.x days, through Mac OS Classic, and the early days of OS X.

I’ve seen some good Mac apps and utilities—and some really, really, bad ones. Is there a perfect Mac app?

Of course, the answer to that question may depend more on what you want the application or utility to do and how well it performs.

But, yes, I think there are a few that we could consider perfect, perhaps near perfect. That’s not to say we can’t find a way to improve an application.

In some cases, our suggested improvement may be more a reflection of taste than a real issue or problem with a Mac application we use.

My case in point is AudioFinder, though there are others you may have on your list of the perfect Mac utility.

I have a list, too, and on it are such Mac Wonder Apps as DragThing, MAMP, ChronoSync, CSSEdit, and Apple’s Logic Pro.

See the problem? The first and last application on my list are for personal use, while those in the middle are for professional use. In other words, they’re great tools, but your mileage may vary, as I suspect your needs and requirements vary.

The perfect application or utility for a Mac user probably has a short list of considerations.

First, it does the job we expect it to, and it does a little more, but it doesn’t try to do everything.

Second, it doesn’t cause us to think “boy, I wish it could do this… or that… or whatever.”

Finally, it’s dependable, stable, always there, always works as expected.

If I wanted, and you can do the same thing for any Mac application or utility, I could examine it closely and analyze what it does and how it does it, and come up with ways that it might be improved to match my needs or tastes.

That kind of critical thinking isn’t difficult and it also removes any Mac application or utility from the list of “perfect”, right? Right.

Now, you may have noticed Apple’s Logic Pro on my list of most favored Mac apps. I like music and create some of my own via keyboard and guitar. Logic is expensive but I bought mine many years ago and simply continue to upgrade.

Logic Pro is used to produce Grammy award winning songs, and it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s a complicated tool used to produce music. What it’s not quite so good at is managing audio assets; lopps, audio clips, etc. It’s good at producing them.

I didn’t even know it wasn’t good at doing that until I tried AudioFinder, which is superb at managing audio.

If you’ve played with GarageBand’s loops, or dipped your toe into Logic Express or Pro, you’ll understand why there’s a need to manage and edit all those pieces of audio.

So, back to the future—the search for the perfect Mac application or utility. What’s on your list of tools that just do what they do perfectly? Is it SuperDuper! for backups?

By “perfect”, I mean you don’t start using and then immediately think, “Wow, it’d be good if it could do this… or that...” You understand, right?

Which Mac application is not only a favorite but one that just seems to do exactly what you expect to that point where you don’t expect or want anything else?

Share your experience and list with other Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.