Thanks to the iPhone and Android, it seems like the application market has reawakened, but PC Magazine et al don’t seem that good at doing reviews. Lifehacker actually has a pretty good list of top utility applications.
Mac
Here is my list culled from them and what I use:
- VLC. The best all around video player.
- Handbrake. To encode your DVDs to MP4s
- Skype. Does work decently well now
- Burn. To burn DVDs if you still do that stuff.
- uTorrent. Although I actually use Vuze.
iPhone
The main thing here is avoiding buying voice minutes and text messaging from carriers, use Skype and Google Voice respectively
- Camera+. The best replacement for the core Camera application mainly because it image stablizes
- Goodplayer. Plays AVIs and so forth as the builtin player only likes MP4s
- Skype. This works amazingly well and over 3G as well for those of you with big data plans and wanting to use small minutes
- Google Voice. Don’t be confused the main thing is free SMS. So try that
- Orchestra. I used to use ToDo, but stopped got tired of it.
- QuickOffice Pro. I use a bunch of these
- Waze. Actually fantastic and free turn-by-turn navigation
- Oregon Settler. Completely addicting
- Harbor Master. Actually better on the iPad
- DVR Remote. Use your iPhone for Tivo
- Airplay. This is built in, but so useful to play to any Airport Express
- iCloud Music. Wow this works pretty wel
