[roller]

Just curious your take on the topic. Friends and I were discussing which apps over the years have been the most valuable to the Mac. We seemed to agree on the following:

Word - if only because it kept us in the game when times were bleak
SoundJam/iTunes - because music is great and then what all it led to
iPhoto - because it and iTunes provided basic functionality for the "digital hub"

Your thoughts?

[turtle777]

Tough one. I'd say in terms of use, it'd probably be

[ Safari ]
[ Mail ]
1Password
iTunes
Evernote

-t

[andi*pandi]

MacPaint
MacDraw
Hypercard

[BLAZE_MkIV]

+1 HyperCard
also FileMaker

[reader50]

AppleWorks - no Macs today if people had not found them useful to start with.

PageMaker - Macs needed professional niches to survive the 90s.

iLife (suite) - makes people buy Macs today.

[roller]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

MacPaint
MacDraw
Hypercard

Nice...

I remember a colleague who used to teach Hypercard in the early 90's, but it was a little before I got my first computer (a Mac, of course -- I've never owned and have only infrequently used a Window box).

[imitchellg5]

Chrome

Photoshop

Quicksilver

[Shades of Gray]

HyperCard
Tinderbox (innovative before its time, and still ahead of the power curve)
Scrivener

[Curiosity]

Firefox
Xee - a graphics viewer
iTunes

[Big Mac]

Interesting question and interesting responses so far. I think it's highly variable based on the history and usage patterns each person has with his or her Mac.

I'd say historically the top three most important pieces of software to the Mac as a platform were 1) Photoshop, 2) QuarkXPress and 3) Microsoft Office. But on a personal level I never owned any of those packages historically and relied instead on lower-end alternatives.

In more recent Mac history, as in the mid-1990s, Netscape was the killer app because it opened our eyes to the power of the web.

In modern terms it's more difficult to answer the question because the web browser has so fundamentally reshaped not just the Mac but personal computing across the board; it's also hard because there are so many different wonderful software options today that are often just as good or better than their high priced, industry standard counterparts. Free and Open Source Software may be credited as the star of the desktop over the last decade.

Edit: Doc HM, turtle and Curiosity are right about iTunes. I should have included it too. The iEmpire is based on the cornerstone of iTunes, and it is the biggest software success Apple has ever had by far. I think I may not have included it as a response to this thread's question because I think I tend to look at iTunes as an auxiliary aspect of the Mac platform at this point and associate it more with the iEmpire - iTunes-iPod-iPhone-iPad.

[Doc HM]

Pagemaker
Photoshop
iTunes

Pagemaker meant that the Mac got up and running in design studios the world over.
Photoshop, so ubiquitous it's now a verb.
iTunes Locked in the iPod generation and made the Mac platform what it is now.

[Big Mac]

A minor point. but wasn't Quark always ahead of Pagemaker in marketshare?

[P]

The most valuable OVER THE YEARS is fairly easy: Pagemaker - there wouldn't have been a Mac without it. It has been dead since forever, though.

After that... Photoshop, because it is what drove hardware development on the Mac over the years, and iTunes, because it gave the Mac a consumer focus.

A minor point. but wasn't Quark always ahead of Pagemaker in marketshare?

No. Pagemaker was a very early Mac program, released in 1985. Quark wasn't even around until 1987, and the first competitive version was 3.0 in 1990. It took some serious mismanagement from Aldus to lose that early lead.

[Big Mac]

Thank you, good to know. I didn't know Pagemaker was the original leader in the Mac desktop publishing field. I guess when Quark took over it was hard for Aldus and then Adobe to regain the momentum.

[Spheric Harlot]

Hard to narrow it down to three seminal apps for the platform.

Mark of the Unicorn's Performer (later replaced by ProTools as Mac-based cornerstone of the audio industry).

Aldus PageMaker

Illustrator

Photoshop

MS Word

MS Excel

iTunes

And, erm - ResEdit, baby.

[besson3c]

- Pagemaker
- NCSA Mosaic/Netscape (if you'll allow me to list these as a single thing
- iTunes
- Photoshop

I can't decide how to put these in order. I'm not completely sure that MS Office was important for more than just optics and political reasons. It was assurance and helped keep people on the Mac, but I don't think it brought people *to* the Mac like these other apps did. To that end, since there was a Windows version of iTunes before too long, I might put iTunes at the bottom of the list, but I'm waffling.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I'm not completely sure that MS Office was important for more than just optics and political reasons. It was assurance and helped keep people on the Mac, but I don't think it brought people *to* the Mac like these other apps did.

Microsoft Word was absolutely VITAL for bringing people to the Mac in 1985.

And the Microsoft deal in 1997 - the purchase of $150 million in non-voting stock options against a public commitment to keep up development ofMS Office for Mac for at least the next five years - was quite possible the signal that bought Apple enough time to sketch out the promise of OS X, and of course to release the iPod…

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Microsoft Word was absolutely VITAL for bringing people to the Mac in 1985.

And the Microsoft deal in 1997 - the purchase of $150 million in non-voting stock options against a public commitment to keep up development ofMS Office for Mac for at least the next five years - was quite possible the signal that bought Apple enough time to sketch out the promise of OS X, and of course to release the iPod…

Wasn't WordPerfect about as big as Word in 85?

I guess you can make the argument that Office bought Apple time, this was sort of what I meant by the whole political thing. The impact on actual end users would have been indirect though...

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Wasn't WordPerfect about as big as Word in 85?

WordPerfect didn't even EXIST for Macintosh in 1985.

I didn't get started on Mac until 1989, but I don't remember WordPerfect being of any interest to anybody at that time (it was fairly widespread on DOS, though). Word 4 (IIRC) was the de facto standard.

The wiki entry for WordPerfect pegs initial release at 1988, and an actually useful Mac version (3.0) at around 1995 - far too late to make any difference at all, any longer.

[besson3c]

Thanks for the info!

[P]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

WordPerfect didn't even EXIST for Macintosh in 1985.

I didn't get started on Mac until 1989, but I don't remember WordPerfect being of any interest to anybody at that time (it was fairly widespread on DOS, though). Word 4 (IIRC) was the de facto standard.

The wiki entry for WordPerfect pegs initial release at 1988, and an actually useful Mac version (3.0) at around 1995 - far too late to make any difference at all, any longer.

If I remember correctly, it went like this: Word 3.0 was, to quote an actual review from that time, "buggier than a New York apartment with peanut butter smeared all over its walls", and Excel 2.2 was incompatible with certain new Macs (the LC and the IIsi) released after MS stopped patching it. This, and the brand new System 7 showing just how far ahead Apple remained in the UX department, was seen as an opportunity for other manufacturers to start aggressively courting Mac users. WordPerfect and Wingz and probably a few others were the result. MS responded by bundling Word 4.0 and Excel 3.0 - much better programs - with the absolutely useless Powerpoint and a mail program that I can barely remember (Quickmail?) into the new Office for less than what Word and Excel cost before. This meant that the newcomers could never gain a foothold, and the big office software wars were over almost before they began.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by P 

If I remember correctly, it went like this: Word 3.0 was, to quote an actual review from that time, "buggier than a New York apartment with peanut butter smeared all over its walls", and Excel 2.2 was incompatible with certain new Macs (the LC and the IIsi) released after MS stopped patching it. This, and the brand new System 7 showing just how far ahead Apple remained in the UX department, was seen as an opportunity for other manufacturers to start aggressively courting Mac users. WordPerfect and Wingz and probably a few others were the result. MS responded by bundling Word 4.0 and Excel 3.0 - much better programs - with the absolutely useless Powerpoint and a mail program that I can barely remember (Quickmail?) into the new Office for less than what Word and Excel cost before. This meant that the newcomers could never gain a foothold, and the big office software wars were over almost before they began.

System 7 was in 1990, though, as were the LC and IIsi.

In the 80s, the options were rather more limited. And Word 4, which I started out on, didn't impress me as particularly awful.

And Microsoft really hit a homer with Word 5 in 1991 - the only really good version (well, 5.1, actually) of Word they've *ever* made, on ANY platform, as far as not few people are concerned.

[olePigeon]

System 7
Microsoft Word 5
The Grouch 2.5b3
"I love it because it's trash!"

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

The Grouch 2.5b3

I still have that on a CD somewhere... Loaded it on the SheepShaver instance I have.

[roller]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

System 7
Microsoft Word 5
The Grouch 2.5b3
"I love it because it's trash!"

Loved The Grouch!

Need it back.

[OreoCookie]

iTunes
Aperture
TextMate