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

Thanks for the tip on Fluid. I now have a MPU app in my dock. :smile:

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Here are some that I use frequently (or less frequently), some of which might be well known, but I haven’t seen much mention of:

Shortcut utilities:

KeyCue by Ergonis Software, allows you to overlay a display window (fully customisable) that shows you all available shortcut keys for the active Application, the System (macOS) and any Keyboard Maestro macro shortcuts… I have too many that I have allocated, but don’t use frequently enough to remember – and KeyCue helps. I wouldn’t say I use it constantly – but it’s useful when I do… A nice-to-have, rather than a must-have.

Hotkey-Eve is a little notification-based app, that ‘gently’ reminds you when you have used a menu to trigger something, when a shortcut for that same action exists.
I said ‘gently’, because it does – but since I get annoyed each time it reminds me I could’ve used a shortcut key, the problem is clearly in the chair, not in the computer… :sunglasses:

Grabbing/OCR’ing text from a screenshot:

Not sure why/how I have both of these, but since the first starts up at log-in, whereas the second was tucked away under utilities, I probably decided option 1 was better. But figured I would mention both regardless.

As in the heading, trigger the app to take a screenshot of anything on your Mac’s screen, OCR it, and send that text to clipboard etc etc etc.
Depending on what you do each day on your Mac, this could be life-changing. Or not.

Option 1 >> PicaText
Option 2 >> Condense

Miscellaneous:

Default Folder X

Seriously, this app should be part of the Hazel, TE/Alfred/Launchbar, Keyboard Maestro triumvirate. Maybe it doesn’t get that much attention because what it does is so seamless, that it kind of just drops away into the background.
But like Alfred/Launchbar, try and save stuff (and we all save stuff all the time, right?) on a Mac without DFX installed, and you will think something is broken.
If you value saving time, and how the little things in life can make all the difference, then just buy it already. :slightly_smiling_face:

Revisions
Do you write by means of saving things in Dropbox? Do you collaborate with others, using Dropbox?
Want to know who changed what, and uploaded what, when?
Then have a look at this app. Saved my bacon a few times!

Shortcatapp
Nothing I can say can really describe this applet. Rather just have a look at the gif on the website.
It is the glue that ties together some of my KM macros, when the latter cannot even get in there, to interact with what is on the screen [or the ‘click at found-image’ is a bit unreliable].

I don’t use this nearly as much as what I could, but in theory, this could see you getting 90% of your work done without ever(?) taking your fingers off the keyboard. Ok, maybe 70-80% of your work, on most days. And I don’t know if it will be quicker. Ok, it could be.

But still - if you are a heavy, heavy keyboard/shortcut user – who considers the trackpad or mouse to be a confirmation of defeat in the war of input devices [ :sunglasses: ], then have a look at Shortcat.

I plan on posting this Reply by hitting CMD+/, typing ‘reply’, and hitting Enter - and then chuckling ever so faintly at my fingers not leaving the keyboard…

(Note: It is not being actively developed any more. That said, I reached out to the developer on Twitter, who confirmed he has other projects on the go, but unless something radical changes in macOS, it will continue working for the foreseeable future. If you are interested, use the trial first, to give it a go, before deciding.

Hopefully, someone will find something useful in the above.
Thank you for this thread - some real gems to be found here!

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Curiota, from the maker of Curio, is a nice note taker that lives in the menubar. Multiple libraries of notes can be accessed – stored in Dropbox or elsewhere. Accepts text or images dragged onto the menubar icon. Free.

I’ve been collecting URLs from this thread for products I want to try, and dropping them into a Curiota note. Curio, the app mentioned above by @JohnAtl, index Curiota’s folders and notes created in Curiota can be dragged into Curio from its sidebar. But Curiota is also standalone – does not require Curio. Curiota includes a macOS Share extension for grabbing from other apps.

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  • EagleFiler (A favorite of mine for its balance of features and usability)
  • Voodoopad (A favorite of mine for taking notes and seeing connections)
  • Unclutter (A great temporary place to put stuff)
  • MacVim
  • Marp for presentations
  • Restic for backups (command line app written in Go)
  • Workflowy (desktop version on Mac)

Not a Mac desktop app, but invaluable: Pinboard.in

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Wow! After going through an embarrassing cumbersome process to accomplishing OCRing text on the screen, this does it instantly and (from a few tests) accurately. Never knew such programs existed!

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KeyCue is excellent! Thank you for posting it and your other picks.

I’m finding KeyCue helpful except for one problem that could be a deal-killer: I often hold down the Command key while Cmd-Tabbing through open applications to find the one I’m looking for. When I do that, KeyCue pops up and gets in the way. Is that a problem for you? Have you found a workaround?

@MitchWagner Same - so I switched its trigger to CTRL, that needs to be held down! Works well!
:sunglasses:

Here be a screengrab of my settings, in case it helps:

KeyCue%20settings_2Y

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Alternately: I think the problem may be with Contexts, a Cmd-Tab replacement I’ve been using a couple of months. I switched the shortcut for that to Option-Tab, which seems to solve the problem. It’s only been a few minutes I’ve been trying that out, so I’m not sure yet.

Paparazzi It lets you take a screenshot of an entire web page, even the bit that’s below where you’ve scrolled to.

Vitamin-R 2 It helps you start and focus on the project at hand.

Boom 3D: I wouldn’t think of listening to music on my Mac without Boom 3D.

SiteSucker: Why bookmark a website when you can take the entire site?

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I had forgotten about Vitamin-R. Thanks for posting.

BitBar is a free app that lets you put the output from any script or program in your menu bar. There are many plugins created for the app, and you can create your own.

UI Browser is a paid app that makes it easier to do GUI scripting in AppleScript.

Expressions is a gorgeous, minimalist paid regex app. My review of Expressions explains why I love this app. The developer has a sale happening; the sale ends today.

youtube-dl is a free command-line utility that makes it easy to download videos from YouTube and a plethora of other sites. (Also works on Windows and Unix.)

Plain Clip is a free utility app which converts text on the clipboard to plain text. The MacWorld’s Plain Clip review does a great job of explaining the app’s features.

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While not an “app”, I want to throw the shell into the discussion.

Many apps that are recommended on podcasts do things the shell (a.k.a. “Terminal”) can do out of the box.

Of course I customized my shell (iTerm2+macports+zsh+a lot of stuff) to allow it to do even more. But sometimes I cringe at complicated workflows that can easily be done with the shell. Yes, there’s a learning curve and it’s not as intuitive as a GUI app, but, at least for me, it’s more than worth it. macOS is built on “UNIX” (BSD, correctly), so why not use all it’s power?

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Could you give some examples of simplifying workflows with the terminal.

See this discussion re: the advantages of calling a shell script vs. using AppleScript

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040513173003941

or

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I would be inclined to agree, with Lars the terminal is incredible powerful and not something that should be feared. Can you ruin your computer, yes. Is that hard to do, yes.

Using tools like homebrew are remarkably easy, copy paste a Script in to set it up, type brew install and you are off.

It’s a lot of little things that add up to being big things.

Over time, I’ve found it faster to find files in the shell than in finder. This is especially true with z.

Abbreviated Man Page

  z

  Tracks the most used directories and enables quickly navigating to them using string or regex patterns.

  - Go to a directory that contains "foo" in the name:
    z foo

  - Go to a directory that contains "foo" and then "bar":
    z foo bar

  - Go to the highest-ranked directory matching "foo":
    z -r foo

  - Go to the most recently accessed directory matching "foo":
    z -t foo

  - List all directories in z's database matching "foo":
    z -l foo

  - Remove the current directory from z's database:
    z -x .

Also, searching in files and through entire folders (nested or otherwise) is easy and insanely fast with ripgrep:

Abbreviated Man Page

  ripgrep

  A fast command-line search tool.

  - Recursively search the current directory for a regex pattern:
    rg pattern

  - Search for pattern including all .gitignored and hidden files:
    rg -uu pattern

  - Search for a pattern only in a certain filetype (e.g., html, css, etc.):
    rg -t filetype pattern

  - Search for a pattern only in a subset of directories:
    rg pattern set_of_subdirs

  - Search for a pattern in files matching a glob (e.g., README.*):
    rg pattern -g glob

Can be installed with brew install ripgrep.

There’s also simple tools for file/directory comparison, duplicate finding, backups, video downloading, video conversion, downloading and updating Mac apps, and much more.

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I love using:

  1. aText: A robust, snippet-expanding application that is a much more affordable alternative to TextExpander on the Mac. I use this application daily in both professional and personal capacities. You can sync and backup with iCloud but there is no iOS option unfortunately. However, the export option does make it relatively easy to copy over your snippets to the Keyboard shortcuts in the settings, so you can expand on iOS.
  2. tyke: A menubar app that allows you to click and write plain-text. An incredibly useful notepad snippet that resides in your Mac menubar!
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TeaCode is an awesome, language specific code expander for Mac. It’s interesting because it only works in editors and when the file extension matches what the expander was set for.

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Typinator - TextExpander alternative
Soundflower - open source, redirects audio to onboard sound input or other sources. Works great with Audacity.
Graphic Converter - great shareware, converts any graphic format and is a decent image viewer for folder level browsing without importing to a database, i.e. Photos and the like. It’s like what Adobe Bridge used to be before the bloat.

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Arrows are display selected text in large type—useful for those of us who are aged souls.

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