There are tons of applications out there on the internet, and everyone has his own set of applications that improve their digital life. Below are mine.
Ex-Windows users that (justly) turned over to the Mac OS X side will most certainly miss the feature of positioning their applications within the screen using the WIN-BUTTON + ARROW-BUTTON
combinations (for example to move the application to the left half of the screen). Spectacle is the OS X tool for the job! Trust me, this app will change your life.
ProTip™: Run it as a daemon (setting in preferences of the app) to get rid of the icon in the menu bar, once you know the shortkeys.
Have you ever caught yourself surfing on the internet during the late hours? Yeah.. Me neither.
Just kidding. If you, just like me, have forgotten what sleep is and often end up on your computer late into the night.. You definitely need f.lux
. What this app does, is surpress the blue colors of your screen a bit during the night. That doesn't sound impressive at all, but it is! Your eyes will love the warm and cosy glow of you screen. Hard to explain, but you just need to try this one out.
If you have never heard of the clipboard
, often just called "the Ctrl+C
thing". Then how on earth have you landed on this geeky Github page?
CopyClip 2
keeps track of your clips, meaning that you can easily copy one of your previous Ctrl+C's
! Epic.
Are you, just like me, someone that always desperately tries to keep your computer minimalistic and clean? And are you also failing to do so?
Well, Bartender 2
will help you a lot! This application provides you an extra menu in your menu-bar to keep the active application icons that you don't care about out of your sight. Result: That right top corner of your screen does not look like a garbage collection anymore. Bartender
will even be able to show these "hidden applications you don't care about" in your menu bar again for a short amount of time when they become active (for example: because of a notification).
ProTip™: When using Bartender
, you can reorder your items in the menu bar by holding the CMD
button and drag them with your mouse.
I admit it, there is 1 neat feature that Windows has over Mac. And that's the the tiny calendar in the bottom right. Itsycal
brings this calendar to your Mac OS X, and guess what.. This one is even beautiful!
Memory. It's one of these hate-love things. It's the key thing that makes everything work so we have to love it. But we have too damn few of it! And in the digital world that's exactly the same.
Luckily there is this awesome application called Disk Map
that will help you out the next time your Mac is complaining that you ran out of disk space! This app will scan your directories and show (yes, visually) you which directories and files are giving your hard drive a hard time.
This app is epic. It brings screenshotting to the next level! You can configure shortkeys to take a screenshot and it allows you to save it right away to a variety of image hosting websites (and for nerds like me: to an FTP server!!). And if that wasn't enough already, it synergizes extremely well with the notes app Evernote
(Skitch
was made by Evernote
actually). This app helped me out a lot.
Admit it! You have a huge list of interesting websites you'd love to follow-up closely. Everyone has. However, the follow-up part is pretty hard. Luckily a lot of websites have RSS
, making it possible to use RSS readers to never miss an article again. Yeah well.. If we weren't lazy and did check our RSS reader application every day. That's where RSS Bot
comes to the rescue! It will let you know of new articles with some nice notifications in the right top corner of your screen. I love it!
Are you a developer and do you therefore often need to install some tools to develop a specific application? Think about a MySQL database for application X, a MongoDb for application Y, an Apache server to host a web page you are developing and so on? Dockerize that shit! Stop installing them natively on your Mac, leave that up to the Windows users. With Docker you can run them easily within a container with only minimal configuration required, and you can easily dispose them when your project is finished! Your Mac won't be polluted anymore by all of these different development tools after a few months of programming.
Are you tired of all these different IDE's and editors for every different programming language? Create your own custom editor using atom. Atom is the open-source editor of GitHub, and the open-source community loves it! When you install it, it's minimalistic and clean. Just install the packages, written and provided by the community, you need. Gotta love this one!