What's your favorite app that even Apple power users don't know about, but should?

CoconutBattery is a free app (donations suggested) that you can run as needed to check your Mac laptop battery life and iOS devise(s). So at a glance I know my MBAir battery is at 86% of design capacity. Also use it for iPad and iPhone. Not sure how many iOS devices it will check.
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Thanks for saving me from trying to remember find . -name ‘*.m’ ... uhh...

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fd is another awesome one. Specifically as an alternative to find. Honors gitignores too!

I have not had problems with Witch on High Sierra; it was one of the apps I was going to recommend. But I will give a look at Contexts, since from what is said here it works more quickly than Witch.

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I have several apps I use a lot that have not been mentioned:
Application Wizard: puts up a tiny menu on the right edge of my screen with four colored dots, each with a different popup menu: Open more apps; Quitting apps; Active apps (for switching); System actions (directory of disks, recent folders, contacts, iPhoto library, memory activity, uptime, relaunch Dock or Finder, Sleep, Restart, Shutdown). The Quit menu lets me create lists of apps. I have one list of apps I almost always have open every day, and I can select in the menu to “quit all” when it’s time for bed.
CopyPaste is my favorite clipboard manager. Copied also remembers clipboards but has an iOS app it syncs with so I can easily transfer text blocks from Mac to iPad or iPhone, or reverse. I use both.
Default Folder: Can’t live without it!
KeyCue: Hold down Cmd key and after brief delay, shows a table of all available keyboard shortcuts for the system and the current app. Hold Ctrl key and it shows all keystrokes from Keyboard Maestro and/or iKey.

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Forgot a key app: Tap Forms: An amazingly robust database app for designing your own databases. Comes with several templates. Great for keeping track of software registration codes; we have a database of camp sites we’ve visited or want to, with photos, maps, etc. A photos database of pictures of ancestors (collected over generations and scanned in).

Thanks for the mention of Application Wizard - it looks interesting. I had created a Keyboard Maestro action to quit everything, something I do when changing projects through the day, or just to declutter.

Also, Key Cue - I’m trying to keep my hands off the mouse and on the keyboard as much as possible due to RSI issues. This looks like it will be helpful too. Similar to CheatSheet, so I’ll have to look at them both.

+1 for Default Folder X! So annoying using a Windows machine and having to navigate to the same folder I’ve navigated to 12 times before.

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Now I’m trying Witch on High Sierra again and finding the lag livable. And I do like the way it navigates through apps, then windows, then tabs.

This is made by Apptorium, the same dev who makes Expressions (the regex app I suggested earlier). Thanks for sharing this. I saw TeaCode but had not taken it for a spin yet; I was wondering if it was something useful.

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Copy’em Paste - clipboard manager.
Feature list here

I lose count how many times I use this every day.

For a long time my favorite launcher app has been Butler from Many Tricks. Apart from updates to keep up with the OS, it hasn’t seen much development love in years, although when asked the developers will say they are still planning a new version one of these days. But I stick with it mainly because of one feature that AFAIK none of the other launchers has, the ability to configure custom pop-up menus that can be triggered by a hotkey combo. For example, the screenshot shows a popup menu of all my available system preference panes that I have set to appear when I hit ⇧⌃, (shift-control-comma). Several of the menubar items visible in the screenshot were also created in Butler.
ButlerPopup

My Keycue is set for double tapping the command key.

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SCREENFLOAT - float images on all screens
BETTER TOUCH TOOL - customise your mouse, trackpad gestures and way more
CLARIFY - create quick user reference guides

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Can you select the color profile to use? Otherwise you may end up picking an “inaccurate” color.

Please note:

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@nrobertson I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “color profile”. I am not an expert on color, but I believe “color profiles” are how you control the way colors are displayed within a monitor, and they are managed through Systems > Monitor > Color. (I think some graphics apps can manage them within their preferences.)

I suspect you are asking about exact color values. MacOS comes with four built-in color pickers. Of these four, only the Slider (second from left) allows you type in exact values.

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In Skala Color, you can type in your exact color value (see bottom arrow). You can also pick from over 2 dozen formats for color values (see top arrow). The image below is set for HTML Hex RGB.

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It is awkward to get your color value to display within Skala. Type in your color value and press enter. Your color value is displayed in the sample in lower left. Using the eye dropper to select that color updates everything above.

If you do any coding, Skala Color will automatically convert between many formats, like CSS RGB = rgb(0, 99, 252) or CSS HSL = hsl(216, 100%, 49%), plus Objective-C and Swift formats.

See Help with Skala Color for more details.

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Bookends - a bibliographic reference manager. Very actively developed; e.g., just come out with a killer feature: double-tap the ⇧-key in your word processor (Word or Scrivener, in my case) and you get a mini-search-bar to search for an article/book, select from the best matches, and paste the citation in-line in what you’re writing. Great for keeping the flow going. I keep all my PDFs in an iCloud folder that is linked to Bookends, so I don’t have to pay for storage (beyond what I pay for iCloud). Syncs fast, also with the iPad, where it has its own (pretty good) iOS app.

HoudahSpot - for turbo-charged searching, and especially for the creation/export of saved searches as “Smart Folders” (for more on this see my discussion with David & Katie on MPU #245

FoxTrot Professional Search - for industrial-strength search. It’s expensive, but it finds everything, even in packages.

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Tap Forms is actually looking like a pretty good solution to me for student records. Too bad there’s not really an iOS URL scheme yet.

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Definitely want to make sure A Better Finder Rename gets more exposure. Although I am happy to see Finder (and, before it, Path Finder) receive some batch rename capabilities, ABFR runs circles around anything you can do in a GUI on the Mac.

I’ve had to rename thousands of files with gobbledygook names and this application is a champion. Tons of built in filters, multi-step macro building so you can tweak for several different workflows, drop icon creation, and more. I loved it so much after my first purchase that upon upgrade I bought the “forever” upgrade along with their other two utilities (which, admittedly, I use far less).

I am not a tech by trade but on the side this program’s abilities has brought me more than enough work to pay for itself and some other software upgrades. Give it a shot!

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For instance, using Digital Color Meter built into macOS, I have to pick with the correct color value selected (on my old laptop, I think it was Adobe sRGB, on my new machine Native Values), or else picking colors from web pages doesn’t match the color specified in the CSS.

An older app similar to Skala, Hues, has no color profile choices and will pick the wrong color from a web page.