The My Applications App Might Be the Best 99 Cents I Ever Spent

For the avid app collector there are a few tools available to help catalog and curate the assortment of programs that accumulate over time. You can use Apple's built in system report to get comprehensive information but it's rather dense and not illustrated. You can use an app like Apparency, but then you are limited to a single app at the time. My Applications, available in the app store for 99 cents, serves as both a database and a launcher for your computer.

One feature I love is a snapshot of my app usage for the past 24 hours. Typically, for me it averages around 85 or so, depending on what I am working on. When I write app reviews, I try to mention alternatives, which leads to me opening a half dozen browsers or terminal emulators at a time to look at their features. I am also not shy about running a lot of startup items, so that's always going to jack up my daily total by 30 or so apps. 

The My Applications general interface includes a count of the number of apps you have installed, 653 in my case. It breaks the apps down into publishers, for example I have 98 apps from Apple itself and 16 from the wonderful developer Sindre Sorhus. Apparently, many apps don't provide publisher information because I have a lot that are not listed. It also breaks the apps into categories such as utilities, productivity, developer tools, graphics and design etc. The categories, while helpful, are a little too broad for my taste, for example I have 227 labeled as utilities and it seems that could have been further narrowed into categories like disk utilities, archive utilities, etc.

The app interface lets you choose sorting by name or last launched. It tells you how many apps you currently have running and how may you have launched in the past day. If you click on individual apps, you have the option to launch them or to get more information regarding size on disk, location, language localizations, download date and date of last update. A complete permissions report is included. The package contents are listed as is a complete description, apparently from the App store or developer's web site if provided. There are even screen shots provided. 

(This is an update from an earlier post)