Top 20 Mac faves

Inspired by Lou Plummer creating a Top 20 Apps list, and Bakari Chavanu working on one as well, I decided to do one of my own.

And if you’re not already following both of those guys, I’m reporting you to the mayor.

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My #1 app is the free One Thing by Sindre Sorhus, someone whose apps I recommend so much that you’d think I’ve been bribed, were they not mostly free.

One Thing lets you put a big, bold, always-visible message to yourself in the menu bar:

I use it for “the monobrow technique“, slapping the task I’m committing to “right up between my eyes” where it’s harder to ignore.

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Every time I drag-and-drop without Yoink, it feels like I’m operating the computer with a catcher’s mitt. Especially if the drag is to an app I have to switch over to.

I even realized I unconsciously hold my breath while dragging because of all the times I’ve dragged a file onto a part of a window that doesn’t accept files, making me HAVE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN AND NOW I’M GOING TO THROW THIS COMPUTER IN A GULLY.

Yoink is my favorite solution to this. I now just make every drag-and-drop a two-step operation: drag the item onto Yoink, then drag it out when I have a target ready. That sounds like it would take longer than the old-fashioned way, but in practice (due to Fitts’s Law), it’s really fast. I just slam my mouse into the corner with a flick of the wrist, and Yoink is lying in wait to catch the file:

And since a failed “drag out of Yoink” operation just leaves the file in Yoink ready for another attempt, I no longer need to throw the computer in a gully even if I completely miss the drag target, saving even more time.

Yoink does other cool things too:

• Store multiple items on its shelf
• Drag items out to multiple destinations
• Quick-transfer items to other devices
• Lowers my blood pressure

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Day Progress is another free Sindre Sorhus app. I’ll be writing about Sindre so much that I should just start compressing “Sindre SorhuS” down to “S³” to save wear and tear on the typing fingers.

Day Progress is another app that lives in the menu bar. First, you define the length of your “day” (whether that’s your entire day or a slice of it like your workday):

And then you get a pie chart in your menu bar showing that time disappearing as you go through your day, often significantly faster than you feel like it should:

That’s particularly useful to me to give me a more intuitive sense of how far through the day I am. Especially compared to digital clocks where you’re unconsciously having to translate the numeric time into a fraction of the day.

I’ve written a little bit more about how Day Progress is more useful than you might think at first glance.

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Power-calendar app BusyCal might seem like it has too many features for its own good. The calendar event context menu alone is longer than any book I’ve ever read:

But as someone who has used it for 14 years, I’ve never come up short when asking myself, “I wonder if BusyCal can [do calendar task that would be really nice right now]?”

I could go through the dozens of tiny niceties is has, but I am fundamentally lazy. I’ll just mention its premiere feature for me, the ability to set “filters”. Filters make it so that I can have views like:

1. A timeblocking view that filters me down to only seeing my current day with my “hard landscape” calendar, ready to drag out timeblocks around the hard landscape events to map out my day.
   
2. “Person-to-person/company” views that let me pair up my calendar with someone else’s to check for conflicts, or to copy events to/from their calendars.

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I often wake up out of a procrastination-coma partway through the day, somehow having not quite managed to do even the basic tasks of getting set up for a work session.

Doing that kind of session-setup for you is where Bunch shines. It can automatically set up your apps, documents, and system settings, either through manual activation/hotkeys, or automatically on a schedule.

And perhaps more importantly, having your computer “auto-configure” for a particular kind of session can be subconsciously powerful for staying on-task. Especially because Bunch can activate focus modes, change light/dark mode, and close applications, giving you cues as to what your intention is for this session.

Configuring Bunch can feel too techie at first glance, requiring text scripts to tell it what to do. But in practice, all you have to know is how to word each command you want Bunch to perform. For example, to open an app or a website, you just enter the name of the app or the URL of the website.

Bunch can:

• Open/close apps
• Open documents and websites
• Turn on/off DND, or switch to specific focus modes
• Turn on/off dark mode
• Change your audio devices, or their volume
• Show/hide the dock

I find setting up as many of those as possible to be an excellent cue that it’s Time To Focus, or equally as important, Time To Wind-Down.

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MindNode is my favorite “mind mapping” tool for visually thinking through my ideas or jotting down reference notes:

I particularly like that the keyboard shortcuts are well-thought-out, making it feel natural and creative to start mapping out ideas.

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Path Finder is what would happen if Finder got dozens of Inspector Gadget style utility attachments.

There’s pane-splitting, drop-stacks, panels, special toolbars, plugins, folder-synchronization, batch file-processing, file-filters, and even handy space-usage-visualization-pie-charts you can drill down through:

All those features can sound like overkill until you need them. And after 16 years of use (can that be right?! I’m turning to dust), I’ve needed every last one of those seemingly obscure things at some point.

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Soulver is a “notebook” style calculator, similar to the new calculation features in Apple Notes, but with tons of additional niceties.

It handles a lot of the “what if” type calculations you might normally jump into a spreadsheet for, where changing prior values in your calculation session updates all the other dependent values:

And its excellent natural language understanding and Wolfram Alpha style real-world calculations (units of measure, differences in time spans, etc.) make it so much nicer than a standard calculator even for simple one-off calculations.

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Another app by olllll’ S³ from earlier. I’ve realized S³ is an especially good nickname for Sindre because it sounds like a model number for a cybernetic superintelligence. Which Sindre’s never proven he’s not.

Supercharge is no exception to S³‘s hot streak, letting you tweak dozens of aspects of macOS and access special purpose tools quickly:

My favorite feature is the ability to copy links to Mail messages and Notes entries, which is handy if you need to reference them in other notes/to-do apps.

I also like turning on the “Fill window when clicking green traffic light button” and “Hide app when clicking yellow traffic light button” options because my brain still lets out an internal scream any time those behave the way they do in stock macOS.

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CleanShot is the happiest I’ve ever been with a screenshot/screen-recording app. It does all kinds of things that are missing (or subpar) in other apps:

• Scrolling captures for when you need to stitch together screenshots (I used it to grab the Supercharge options screenshots above as I scrolled through the options panes).
• Screenshot annotations for when you need to call attention to something, redact private info, or even do basic multiple-image-layouts for things like flowcharts or collages. All of the annotation tools are nicer than fiddling around in Preview.
• Excellent screen recording functionality for when you need to include system audio, trim your recordings, downscale resolution/encoding-quality, or include mouse-click-highlights and keystrokes. I recorded and edited all of the videos on this page with it.

And as a free bonus, every time you use CleanShot, you get to whisper, “you just got CleanShotted” like a shadowy assassin.

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Alternative terminals are popping up all over the place, and Warp shares a lot of their same improvements over the stock terminal. But where Warp shines for me is in how it treats each command and its output as a unit that you can focus on:

Once you’re able to focus on a command and its output, you realize the surprising convenience of operating on those blocks:

• Copying the command or its output.
• Finding particular text within the output of only that block.
• Filtering text/lines within the output of only that block.

None of that sounds like that big of a deal, but in practice I’ve found myself using those tiny enhancements far more than any of the other, fancier features in the current crop of terminals.

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Raycast is Spotlight if Spotlight were better at performing a wide range of tasks quickly. You wiggle your fingers at Raycast, and before you know it, it’s switching apps, searching emojis, “macro’ing” out text from short snippets you type, and my new favorite trick, “focus sessions”:

And because Raycast has a ridiculously huge ecosystem of extensions, it can integrate with just about anything. At this point I wouldn’t be shocked to hear there’s an extension that lowers your cholesterol.

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VSCode can be described in terms that strike fear in the hearts of us Mac users: it’s a Microsoft(!)…Electron(!!) app. But despite its marketing as a code editor, it’s actually a strong all-around text editor, and has an amazingly rich ecosystem. Even its Electron foundation is almost invisible: it’s surprisingly fast, though perhaps not very Mac-like.

Some extensions I love:

• Rainbow CSV for nice color-coded, tooltipped, filterable CSV viewing/editing.
• Markdown All in One for fancy Markdown editing features.
• Foam for creating Obsidian / Roam style text-based projects with interlinking and “graph” views. You don’t necessarily have to live inside VSCode/Foam to have it be useful alongside other text-based PKM’s like Obsidian: you can just use it to do more advanced text-editing operations.
• HTMLHint for chiding you on your HTML mistakes.

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I’ve gone through several color picker apps over the years before realizing Triple-S had one, and of course it’s the best of them. It’s simply called Color Picker, and it’s free.

I enable “Copy color in preferred format after picking” and “Show color sampler when opening window”, getting me a one-click-color-pick.

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If Batman were an app, he’d be BetterTouchTool. It’s a complete utility belt for connecting Triggers (keyboard shortcuts, touchpad gestures, Magic Mouse gestures, custom menu popup clicks, and more) to just about any Action you can think of (launching apps, changing what’s in the menu bar, showing custom HUDs, interacting with windows, automating keystrokes, and much much much much much more).

BetterTouchTool is hard to describe because of how powerful and general-purpose it is. If you wanted, you could assign a button press on a Stream Deck to activate a Space, show a color picker, have ChatGPT offer its opinion on what emotions the selected color is associated with, and then play a triumphant musical sequence on a connected MIDI musical device.

Or on a slightly more practical front, you can use it to make mini apps like a basic Bartender replacement that Andreas (the author) whipped up. His forum also a great place to get ideas and tips for all kinds of ways of using BTT.

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Workflowy isn’t Mac-specific, and looks like the least interesting app in the world, letting you…type out bulleted lists:

But it turns out that typing bulleted lists is shockingly powerful when you’re able to infinitely nest them, filter them, and zoom in on subsections of them. See my Werewolf Workdays post for more on why wear an imaginary “I ❤️ Workflowy” shirt wherever I go.

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DockDoor somehow made a brick wall icon cute, and is currently my favorite of the “show window previews on hovering over an app’s icon in the Dock” genre of app. It gives you a quick way of selecting which window you’d like to activate or close. And it’s free and open source.

I particularly like that it intelligently handles oddly shaped windows, unlike similar apps that lay things out on a grid regardless of aspect ratio:

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Pixelmator is a ridiculous steal at $49, replacing almost all of what most people need from Photoshop, which is currently priced at $276 per year!

Pixelmator’s future is unclear, having just been acquired by Apple, but I still wouldn’t hesitate to snap it up again.

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Among all the alternative browsers popping up lately, I still keep coming back to Firefox for Tree Style Tab. If you just look at screenshots or compare it to the vertical tabs in other browsers, the value may not be obvious. But as we all get buried in piles of tabs, having them visually convey “how you got there” along with allowing you to do bulk operations (“ok, I’m done getting info on Tree Style Tab, I can now close the whole group that led me here”) is tremendously powerful for the type of actions us turbo-dweebs do hundreds of times a day.

And unlike some implementations of tab groups, you don’t have to do any of the organization yourself, it just happens naturally as you open new tabs from existing ones.

Combine it with another one of Firefox’s distinguishing features, Multi-Account Container Tabs, and it’s easy to have branches of your tree that are running under different roles, eliminating a lot of the switching to Private/Incognito windows that you have to do in other browsers when you want to log in under different accounts.

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As someone who grows frustrated with the limitations of Quicktime Player and the Java-esque interface of VLC, IINA is a godsend of a media player. It can play just about any type of video or audio, grab snapshots with CMD+S, connect to in-browser media, track down subtitle files, rotate/flip/crop video, and more.

And it’s free and open source. I haven’t opened Quicktime Player in years.

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