What are you top Mac Apps and how did they change your "life"

Cool Workflows
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We see …

Followed by …

But in history we also see …

Is this as a case tending toward Pot, Kettle, Black?

Also, the rather cluttered, run-on grammar phrasing of the post makes parsing its meaning difficult. When the intent is to insist that all cases but those concerning spreadsheets or presentation apps are FOMO-related and therefore are not worth discussing seriously, I (and apparently others who have replied) strongly disagree, and even you have contracted yourself based on your previous reply.

–
JJW

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Thanks.

This thread is giving me a Derrida-esque headache.
:face_with_head_bandage:
Going to mute it out.

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44

Keyboard Maestro
Total game changer in how I use any app, wish I had tried it earlier.

Edit: Things, a great to-do app and my second brain.

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There are top apps and life-changing apps that I still used until today. From 1Password, Hazel, Yoink, Screenfloat, to Affinity Designer. But Ulysses is the one app that really changed my life.

I encountered Ulysses app version 2 when I was desperately looking for a replacement for an independently made app called Journler. Ulysses changed the way I approach writing. As a designer, many things distract me; UI, font choices, placement of buttons, and the overall feel of an app. I relied on Textedit to write stuff because it allows me to just write.

When I discovered Ulysses, I fell in love with its approach in distraction-free writing and still have advanced tools such as markdown, typewriter mode, goals, and consolidated file browser. I also liked the fact that it has an iOS counterpart called Daedalus Touch that allows me to write on my iPad. I went through multiple writing apps—from iA Writer, Editorial, nvALT, Mou, Ommwriter, and countless others. Only Ulysses kept me writing even when I’m uninspired, it provided me the push I need.

Now, my project Stories from the Barrio lives in Ulysses. I write folk stories and produced them as a podcast. I partner it with essay and research about the cultural impact of the folk stories that I write. It also helped me deal with past trauma and my depression. In a decade, I have never thought that I am fulfilling my lifelong dream of being a storyteller and a writer. I can’t say that I am a successful writer, but I can say that I have enough stories that some people enjoy. And that’s enough for me.

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46

Very similar to Ulysses, I was very nicely surprised by Typora recently !

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47

Top, life-changing apps for me have been the powerful apps that let me, theoretically at least, produce professional-ish results without too much hassle. These include GarageBand, Logic Pro, Studio One with RX7, Graphic, SketchUp perhaps, and a shout out to Procreate on my wife’s behalf as that has been an amazing game-changer for her.

But I want to focus on two only, which have had the biggest impact on my life.

Case 1: Final Cut Pro
FCP has changed my life quite recently.
I’m a school level Physics teacher who’s been thinking about and toying with a ‘flipped classroom’ idea for a while.

With Covid, I found myself unable to explain concepts clearly to my students, and I was at home a lot where my computer setup is significantly better than at school.

So, I started making Lesson Videos. I tried many methods, but the one that stuck for me was videoing my bits to camera on my Olympus camera, recording my voice with Quicktime, and recording my notes in Explain Everything. Final Cut Pro allowed me to bring these together in a timely manner, with neat titles and transitions, speedy editing and simple export to YouTube. As a total amateur, I’m blown away by what is possible here.
And with an education discount, the price was a steal for what you get.

Case 2: Xcode
I’ve been programming since I had a 48k Spectrum and later a Commodore 64 (with Assembly Language cartridge). I wrote ‘real’ programs when I was a kid; nothing complex with my most ambitious project being a simple sprite drawing program. Since then it has always been small scripts though, with my useful things being done in VBA as macros in Excel. Now I do a lot in Javascript in Google Sheets (yes, top app for me would be a spreadsheet, but that’s been lifelong, nothing changed!).

However, Xcode and Swift made high quality programming accessible again. Being able to lean on Apple’s APIs etc and create pretty complex apps has really brought me a massive amount of joy in the last few years. And being able to publish them with relatively little complexity has been a significant enabler.

In other threads people are piling on Apple for being anti-developer, but to my eyes Apple has been a massive driving force enabling people to move into development when otherwise coding is a mysterious black box. No, not everyone benefits from this and there are real problems still, but I’m just writing about me :wink:

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48

Ok this is a super boring answer, but, Preview.

There are lots of other apps that come to mind, but I started to think about how often I use Preview, and just how easy it makes so many tasks that were way more complicated in the Windows world, and I realized this boring answer may qualify as a life-changer within the world of apps, even though is hasn’t literally changed my life.

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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.

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My guess is that enabling Spotlight indexing in the Drafts preferences should resolve this. (General—>Index drafts in Spotlight)

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This video mentions a ton of good Mac apps.

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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.

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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.

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The Alfred forum and online help are both very good.

Also, did you catch this post:

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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.

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56

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.

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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.

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Things by Cultured Code.
Pixelmator Pro
Drafts
Deliveries
Due
Carrot Weather Tier 3 subscription. I live in Hurricane central Louisiana.

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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 f space 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.

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60

Thanks so much for that.

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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!

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