I have a few, all mentioned here by somebody or other. The top three though. Have to be Keyboard Maestro, DEVONthink 3 and Ulysses. Covers nearly everything I do. I think Keyboard Maestro is my number one really. I don’t even have a lot of macros, some expansions on it but the ones I have are essential and well in muscle memory.
I have Alfred and love it. Bookends and Mellel. Houdah Spot is great too. I dropped Drafts in fact because Houdah Spot wouldn’t search it. I would like best if Mail become liberated again for Houdah Spot.
Thanks so much. I had that checked but as far as I can see it isn’t showing on spotlight. I hadn’t realized there was a tickbox though so thanks again.
I put Alfred instead of LaunchBar which I felt was getting glitchy and neglected by the developers. How do I ‘up my Alfred game’ though. I don’t seem to have the same skill with it, for moving files for example which I don’t do a lot of but was ok doing on Launchbar. I am still not ‘used to’ Alfred’s way, I know it, but have to rethink every time. I have a few snippets on there I use. But I don’t seem to get much use.
I could not agree with you more. I am (was) a keen amateur and Aperture just made everything a joy. Nothing has come close since (and I have tried most things). I still can’t believe they stopped it.
Lightroom does everything Aperture did, and more, and with better results, but Aperture’s integrated design was certainly better constructed. Adobe grafted separate modules together, (Adobe Camera RAW, the database/manager, editor, slideshow, Print) and it took them well over a decade to merge them to work if not seamlessly then better. But the seams still show, and you still can’t edit an image from the Library as you could in Aperture.
Still, given the advances in Lightroom, the huge plugin market (I depend on a number of Nik plugins, especially Silver Efex Pro for b&w conversions) and the easy sharing to Photoshop when needed, there’s nothing as powerful overall. If I were shooting tethered with Canon or Nikon I’d probably use Capture One, and if I were using Fujifilm or Olympus/Panasonic I’d probably use a 3rd-party Raw converter for best results, but I’d still do all my editing and DAM in Lightroom.
Meta-discussion speculation: One of the reasons for this may be that for the most part, the major life-changing-get-the-big-stuff-done kinds of applications exist on every platform (not always the same app, but there’s little you can’t do on any (either?) of the platforms these days). The big differentiator may be in how one gets the little things done and in how one creates workflows that depend on platform specific features/utilities/culture.
Hm. As others have hinted at, play with Alfred’s Workflows feature.
The most basic thing I love about Alfred is that it provides a sorta-fuzzy text-based way of reaching a variety of actions. You can specify a variety of words that get at certain actions, like opening certain URLs. I have a set of Workflows to that end. I’m not sure what keyword I’ll think of to launch, say, MyNoise. So I specify a bunch of possible keywords and then I spend less time guessing what the “right” one is when I go to use it.
Alfred’s also my Emoji inserter. I use Joel Califa’s Emoji Pack. This provides you with a searchable emoji snippet provider from the same cmd+space launcher I use for files and actions.
I don’t use Alfred for moving folders the way you describe. My workflow for file manipulation, though, usually goes something like:
cmd+space
Type ’space to start searching files or type fspace to start searching folders.
Type the name of the thing I’m looking for (I’m generally able to remember this, as it’s usually something recent.)
Hit cmd+enter to reveal the file in Finder and manipulate it from there.
If desired, you can also tap → to access some other functions from here.
All that said, Alfred is only one of the utilities that make macOS what it is for me—I mentioned it in this thread, though, because it “changed my life” in that it totally expanded my conception of what interacting with the Mac could look like.
I totally forgot about that and you are so right. Preview is a bliss for a fast Finder-Work In my opinion. Coming from windows I super liked Preview back 10 years ago. I hope that Preview-fuctions will grow more in the future, like it has in the last OSX updates. Its super fast and super boring.
What I also like a lot is: “Show Preview in the Sidebar” in the finder. I just discovered this function back 2 years a go, whereas it was inside Finder for many years. This function helps me to se all the details to the file and a little thumbnail, giving me the chance of not opening the normal preview-window at all anymore.
Also I wanted to thank the community for participating in the discussion. It is highly effective for me and I would like to come back to this forum in the future, to get inspired more by others!
There is no question which Macintosh program changed my life the most. It was CodeWarrior. I was a professional Fortran77 programmer, but had almost always used Apple (//e, //gs Woz edition, Macintosh SE/30) and had toyed around with writing programs (aka Apps) on my Macintosh SE/30, but the Apple MPW/TML Pascal tool-chain was too hard to use for me to get up to speed. CodeWarrior allowed me to get over the hump and, after a couple of years of writing small programs, get a job as a Macintosh Software Engineer. That was 23 years ago and was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
I have another one, and it is Renamer. I had never thought about the possibility of bulk renaming files, and I’m sure there’s some code and other stuff to get it done, but it saves me so much time for little things. For example, I export my slides as images to my Blackboard Collaborate session. When I export slides from Power point it labels them as Slide1, Slide2, etc. and when I go to import, the slide are sorted as Slide 1, Slide 10, Slide 11 or something weird like that. With renamer I just add that extra 0 in there (Slide01) (LIKE KEYNOTE DOES AUTOMATICALLY).
And that saves me enough time to comment in this forum.
FYI we recently talked about batch-renaming apps here. I’ve used A Better Finder Rename for many years, but I tried the built-in functionality in macOS and it was fast and dead-easy too. If you aren’t doing really sophisticated renaming I’m just recommending using the built-in tool now.
My recent favorite utility: Dark Mode for Safari, a macOS Safari extension that forces all websites to adopt dark mode. It’s a $1.99 one-time purchase and ticks all the boxes for me. I recommend checking out the detailed list of features on its website.
I’d say the dark mode it enforces on most websites look very natural and polished to me, rather than constantly screaming “I’m a color-inverted dark theme”. I especially enjoy the Softer Dark Mode theme because I find the low saturation color palette pleasant to look at.
Just getting into Keyboard Maestro and it seems to be the app that really changes my life on Mac (thanks to the great Field Guide, thank you, David!!!).
Keynote is a close second, since it showed me the merits of having a computer (I’m a converted uber-luddite); I was doing so many different things in keynote (graphics, movies and of course presentations and page layouts among others).
I know that there are many, many productivity apps out there, and I’ve tried them all, but they all fizzled out for various reasons—adding new items is too cumbersome, app is too cluttered, sync doesn’t work well, etc.
That is, until I tried Things. Things really resonates with me and how I work/live.
It’s simple yet powerful, and I spend my time completing tasks rather than “building my system”.
Things has helped me be known as someone with great follow-through because I capture everything. I have some of my best thoughts in the shower (#ShowerThoughts) and I love how easy it is to use the Apple Watch app to quickly capture something. I’m one of those people who can be consumed thinking about something, so getting it recorded in Things allows me to mentally move on to something else.
I recently began using Mail to Things to replace my workflow for tracking my finances. Receipt e-mails from common stores (Amazon, Target, etc.) get automatically forwarded to receipts@, which then gets forwarded to my unique Things address. It makes is so easy to make sure I record all of our purchases, and is way better than our previous process (if you could even call it that!).
