A lot has been said and done about the iPhone, but there’s much more to Cocoa and Objective-C than our beloved pocket device.
During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no particular order) is nothing short of impressive; check it out:
- Zattoo, a really great TV player (cross-platform, actually, but the Mac version works really well);
- Cornerstone, one of the best Subversion clients for the Mac OS X operating system (the other being Versions);
- TimeLog and GrandTotal, the two applications used by independent contractors (like me) to keep track of the time spent in projects, and then to generate invoices out of that data – and which I personally prefer and strongly recommend over Billings;
- Distribute by Seven Lakes Software, dubbed the best ERP software available in the Mac, with an impressive feature list and lots of positive reviews;
- Snowtape, an application I’ve become addicted to lately, which allows you not only to listen to internet radio stations… but also to record them as MP3 or AAC files, which are automatically imported into iTunes!
- Waveboard, a Google Wave client for Mac (and iPhone soon, too!);
- Mailplane, a native Gmail clients with awesome capabilities;
- Posterino, Proxymind and Snippet Mind from Zykloid;
- Background Music by infoAtelier, currently in a promising beta test phase;
- iBackup;
- GraphClick, iLocalize, ProVoc, XS and AudioXplorer by Arizona Software (even if they aren’t in Switzerland anymore I think, they are definitely worth including in this list);
- PowerMail and FoxTrot by CTM Development;
- LiquidCD by Maconnect
- Several Mac products by Stephan Burlot’s Coriolis Technologies;
- Don’t forget that most Cocoa apps are unit-tested with Sen:te‘s original OCUnit unit testing framework bundled with Xcode since 2005!
- And last but not least, the diverse suite of Logitech drivers and control panels written by Men in Silicium in Geneva!
It really looks like the Swiss enjoy writing Mac apps (I certainly do and will publish mine soon!). Have I forgotten anyone? Please don’t be upset, and feel free to leave your links in the comments below. I’d love to know who else is creating killer apps for the Mac in a radius of 300 km around Zürich!
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies (I’m just a friend of Stefan). And if you’re more into “enterprisey” stuff, here’s the “Swiss-Made Software” label site that you migth find more interesting ;)
Update, 2009-10-23: Some more applications added after the publication of this post:
- Luscious SMS, the SMS client for the Mac;
- Special mention for Cyberduck, an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X, or “the poor man’s version of Transmit” :)
Update, 2009-10-24: Sophie Teuschler tells me not to forget the multiple Apple Design Award winners SubEthaEdit and BoinxTV by The Coding Monkeys, not far from Switzerland, in Bavaria…!
Update, 2009-10-25: I’ve just received an e-mail from Cyril Pavillard about his company Mnemis and their product Uniboard which looks absolutely awesome by any standards. Be sure to check out this cool Swiss project!
Update, 2009-11-12: Just found out about noidentity and their MoneyBook iPhone application. It seems that this application is just a copy from another one called “pennies”. Shame on you noidentity.
