Essential Mac Tools

🍸✨ Streamline Your Mac Experience: Discover Essential Apps for Productivity & Organization! 🖥️🔧

As a long-time Mac user, I have accumulated a collection of apps that I use every day and that make my life easier, more productive, and more enjoyable. These are my reliable and robust tools that work seamlessly with the Mac operating system and enhance its functionality.

In this article, I want to share with you some of these apps that I depend on, and why they are worth trying out. Whether you are a new Mac user or a seasoned one, you might find something here that suits your needs and preferences.

Hardware

Current Mac Hardware setup

• Portable: MacBook Pro M3

• Desktop: MacStudio with Apple XDR Display

• Home: iMac Pro 27”

Current Rotation

These apps have all stood the test of time, meaning I have been using for a few months or more (or years). At the end I have some apps I’m experimenting with.

Not included in the list below are the basics such as productivity apps (The entire Microsoft Office Suite), browsers, and other common products.

Adobe Lightroom: I’ve been using Lightroom since v1 and I have about 2TB of all my RAW photos stored in the Adobe cloud. this gives me access to my photos from my Mac, iPad, iPhone and the web. Lightroom is my digital darkroom.

Bartender 5: A menu bar organizer that lets you hide, rearrange, and search for your menu bar items. If you have a Mac with a notch, you'll quickly find it gets unwieldy, so this helps create some simple rules to hide unnecessary menu bar items.

Here are my top apps and utilities.

BBEdit: A powerful text editor that offers advanced features for coding, scripting, and web development. I started using BBEdit so long ago, I'm guessing it's my oldest app that I use. This is "notepad" for the Mac

Bear: A beautiful note-taking app that syncs across your devices and supports Markdown, tags, and attachments.

Calca: A symbolic calculator app that lets you perform complex calculations and manipulate variables and units. Calca lets you write out formulas like this:

Cardhop: A smart contacts app that lets you quickly access, edit, and interact with your contacts.

Choosy: A browser selector app that lets you choose which browser to open a link with, based on your rules and preferences.

This application is critical to me because I use different browsers for different tasks. Edge is what I use for all my "Work" browsing and so I can set up rules such as any links opened and clicked in apps like Outlook or Teams always use Edge. Also I can define rules based on URL patterns for internal websites.

CleanShot X: A screenshot and screen recording app that offers powerful editing and annotation tools.

I use this app dozens of times a day. The most used feature is the ability to capture text from anything on the screen. Think of this as OCR for your screen. It's amazingly useful to be able to do this. The app has other awesome features like capturing a scrolling web page, record a GIF or Video. You can also upload captures to their cloud and just share a URL with anyone.

This app is very handy for capturing bug reports, which I do frequently.

Cloudflare WARP: A VPN app that encrypts and optimizes your internet traffic for speed and security. I use this when I travel to encrypt my DNS traffic.

Consent-O-Matic: A browser extension that automatically accepts or rejects cookie consent requests on websites. Very useful especially if visiting the EU where the cookie warnings are out of control.

Dato: A menu bar clock app that lets you view and convert time zones, calendars, and dates.

This menu bar app is filled with cool features. I use it to see my current appointment and the minutes remaining, timezone info and have quick access to the current date and a mini calendar.

Default Folder X: A file dialog enhancer app that lets you access your favorite folders, recent files, and tags from any open or save dialog.

One of my most loved features since I can easily access all open Finder windows from any open / save dialog.

Dropover: A drag and drop utility app that lets you create a floating shelf to temporarily store files, images, and text.

This is a very clever app for storing stuff you are trying to drag and drop into other apps. Hugely useful as many apps won't accept Photos from the Photos app using drag and drop so this acts as an intermediate. Also, if dragging items that you want to attach to an email, you can access these from the finder.

Horo: A menu bar timer app that lets you set and manage timers with natural language input.

Image2Icon: An icon creation app that lets you convert any image into an icon for your files, folders, and apps.

Every once in a while I need to make a nice icon and this app does the job!

Kompressor: A compression app that lets you reduce the size of your images and videos without losing quality.

LanScan: A network scanner app that lets you discover and analyze the devices on your local network.

MacGPT: Super quick access to ChatGPT from the meny bar. I use many times a day!

Magic Lasso: A browser extension that blocks ads and trackers, speeds up your browsing.

Magnet: A window manager app that lets you snap and organize your windows into different layouts.

If you are coming from Windows, this gives you "snap" features that you have come to rely on. By pressing Option and hovering over the green traffic light on Windows you can position windows without usign the stupid Tile feature on the Mac.

Raycast: A productivity app that lets you control your Mac with keyboard shortcuts and commands.

This is my top power user app for the Mac. This app replaces the spotlight command with a bevy of awesome features. I use this to navigate folders, search for emoji, use AI and so many things. There are tons of extensions as well that are very hand.

I have written and contributed to a few extensions myself.

Things: My trusted app for managing projects and tasks with due dates. Rock solid and been a customer for many years.

Tot: A minimalist note-taking app from the iconfactory that lets you jot down and access your notes from the menu bar. Works on iOS too.

Experimentation

These are apps I’m trying right now.

Finalist: A todo / task list that is so simple it works. I really like the simplicity here. The macOS version is in beta.

Reflect Notes: A new Personal Knowledge Management tool that I’m trying out. Note taking tools must have some key features for me:

• No organizational thought needed

• Easy to create and remember later

• No formatting to get in the way

Superwhisper: Incredible AI Powered Dictation for writing messages, emails, notes and more. Custom models and wicked fast.