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Mac Apps We Use Every Day

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70 points by MrDrone 12 years ago · 60 comments

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jameskilton 12 years ago

For those looking for a replacement for Skitch (which is a far cry from what it used to be, thanks Evernote), go check out Monosnap @ https://www.monosnap.com/welcome.

x0054 12 years ago

I would recommend Better Touch Tool over SizeUp. It allows you to setup keyboard shortcuts as well as touchpad gestures to resize windows, and do a lot of other actions.

  • Raphmedia 12 years ago

    Yes! I love that software. I used it to make the gestures the same between my touchpad and my magic mouse. It's stupid how it's 3 fingers on one and 2 on the other.

  • ericHosick 12 years ago

    I was also surprised not seeing Better Touch Tool there. It is a great program.

    For example, I've mapped switching between tabs to TipTap left and TipTap right for any software that has tabs (Chrome, FireFox, Terminal, TextMate, etc.).

  • cseelus 12 years ago

    For window management i love Moom, as it integrates really well with OSX.

    To add more gestures for my touchpad (like TipTap-Left to switch tabs in every application that has them) I use Better Touch Tool.

  • acangiano 12 years ago

    I like the simplicity of Windows Magnet.

james33 12 years ago

This is a great list, but two of my favorites that are missing:

Divvy - http://mizage.com/divvy/

DragonDrop - http://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/

zmb_ 12 years ago

I find Little Snitch absolutely essential. I've been using it for years and can't recommend it enough. http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

legulere 12 years ago

Beginning with mountain lion, apple ships the handy console program caffeinate so you won't need Caffeine anymore

  • stock_toaster 12 years ago

    Yup. A bonus of the cli utility is that you can pass a program argument to it, so when another script is done the "constant wake" state is ended. The man page has more info.

jds375 12 years ago

I also recommend GeekTool. It allows for some cool customization effects. Available for free here: http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/ You can find some cool themes from devianart or other sites.

  • blacksmith_tb 12 years ago

    It's sort of abandonware now, isn't it? There's NerdTool, which works well enough for me, but also hasn't been updated in a long time...

patrickmay 12 years ago

compliment: an expression of esteem, respect, affection, or admiration

complement: add to (something) in a way that enhances or improves it; make perfect

I do not believe that F.lux is expressing admiration for its surroundings.

/pet-peeve

radio4fan 12 years ago

> Iterm2... One of the most awesome features is it’s ability to trigger a full screen, semi-transparent console at the push of a hotkey.

How did I not know about this? I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

bosie 12 years ago

slate.app is great opensource replacement for sizeup https://github.com/jigish/slate

  • sergiotapia 12 years ago

    Extremely user unfriendly though. Just installed it and it doesn't even sensible defaults for you to hit the ground running. Their answer: "Read the docs and write your own configs." Nobody has time for that!

    Edit: Another commenter suggests http://spectacleapp.com/ - works really well out of the box - in fact it does what I expected Slate to do.

grigory 12 years ago

Here are some of my absolute favourites:

- Spectacle, for easily tiling windows http://spectacleapp.com/

- TotalTerminal, for globally accessible, full-width, semitransparent, sliding out Terminal. http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

caycep 12 years ago

This is a nice list, but I tend to force myself not to use this, or to limit the amount of "modifications" I put in. Gives me bad memories of the days from OS 9 where half the programs I use one year get orphaned...

Plus the labor of maintaining 10-20 apps that modify default OS X behavior can get excessive.

Walkman 12 years ago

Documentation reader I can't live without: http://kapeli.com/dash File sharing app: https://droplr.com

oskarth 12 years ago

I would also recommend RescueTime, a YC company to track your time. You barely have to do anything, just let it run and see what it reports to you in terms of your productivity. Probably one of the best ROI that a app can have.

  • cseelus 12 years ago

    Yes really great app. You can also set goals like 'code at least 4hrs a day' and will be notified if you succeeded in, with your weekly summary.

saidajigumi 12 years ago

HyperDock looks interesting. I was hoping it would exactly replicate a feature I love from Flexiglass[1]: moving windows from any position by a (modifier, movement) combination. Unfortunately, HyperDock doesn't quite replace Flexiglass due to binding limitations.

Flexiglass allows (modifier key(s), two-finger move) to reposition a window. This is effortless and awesome. HyperDock requires (modifier key(s), left mouse click + movement). The click seems like a small thing but is more awkward, in my experience.

[1] http://nulana.com/flexiglass/

davidcollantes 12 years ago

Excellent apps. Can't stand the distorted screenshots on that page.

  • teleclimber 12 years ago

    Seriously! Feels like 1999.

    I thought it was lazy resizing in an image editor, but it turns out it's just bad CSS.

    They have a "max-width" on "BODY IMG", but then some script or some deployment process added "width:" and "height:" on each image individually.

    The max-width alone would resize the image nicely, but the presence of the "height:" causes the vertical stretch.

    (Sorry, the web-debugger in me kicks in without being asked.)

    • TallboyOne 12 years ago

      Yea... that was a typo that got cached. sorry, that was more painful for me than it was for you

  • TallboyOne 12 years ago

    Yes I know that was god awful panic typo.

derefr 12 years ago

> One of the nicest features of The Unarchiver is it’s ability to delete zip files after they’ve been opened, so you you only need to click the file once, rather than unzipping it, and going back and deleting all the original zip files off your desktop.

This reminds me... why isn't there a Windows archive-extractor program with this behavior? I tried to search for it a while ago, but it seemed like every app developer who had the suggestion presented to them hated it.

warmfuzzykitten 12 years ago

Sure, I'd love to have a terminal replacement that shows eight-colored letters on a black background just like Windows! I have no idea why Mac users love this kind of crapware utility. It's been so since 1984 - the big difference being the scores of semi-useful utilities no longer crash your machine every few hours - and I've never gotten the appeal.

pedalpete 12 years ago

A question for those using sizeup, how do you make sure the hotkeys you create don't conflict with hotkeys in your apps?

  • bradleyland 12 years ago

    I don't use SizeUp, so this solution won't apply to that particular utility, but I do use a window manager. Moom, which I use, is activated by a single keyboard shortcut. Once activated, Moom captures shortcuts that might otherwise be handled by other applications. This makes all window resize actions a two step process, but I find that's a worthwhile trade-off for avoiding shortcut collisions.

  • bosie 12 years ago

    you might want to look into Keycue http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/ or CheatSheet http://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/ (only works in the current application)

jakobe 12 years ago

I recently got a bug report where using the unarchiver to unzip an app corrupted it. https://github.com/PostgresApp/PostgresApp/issues/166#issuec...

kmfrk 12 years ago

I ran into a weird bug with Visits where one of my sites is not visible in the drop-down list. I think it's because I exceeded some kind of domain limit. Has anyone experienced the same?

navs 12 years ago

One of my favorites is Shortcat: http://shortcatapp.com/

Maybe it's because I hate having to move my mouse cursor.

xbryanx 12 years ago

http://livejs.com/ does the same thing as Live Reload but without the OS X dependency.

tujv 12 years ago

Versions is easily my favourite Subversion client for Mac. http://versionsapp.com

aytekin 12 years ago

Writer Pro @ http://writer.pro for distraction free writing and note taking.

seanalltogether 12 years ago

I would love to somehow add "Restart in Bootcamp" to the global apple menu and not need a standalone app.

  • aroch 12 years ago

    If you find yourself with a Terminal window open:

         alias win7="bless -mount /Volumes/win7/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
         alias debian="bless -mount /Volumes/wheezy/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
         alias arch="bless -mount /Volumes/arch/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
    
    Obviously change the volume paths as needed. Typing "win7" into terminal will restart into my Windows 7 install, likewise for "debian" and "arch". Any subsequent reboot will automatically reboot back into OSX
  • saidajigumi 12 years ago

    Not quite your wish, but I recently hacked up another solution using an Applescript-based approach. Unlike other versions I'd found, this approach can be made passwordless. See the gist below and the first comment that describes passwordless operation:

      https://gist.github.com/jwhitley/8377268
    
    This can be invoked effortlessly from tools like LaunchBar or FastScripts.

    Credit to @robjwells, whose original gist I forked and modified to be passwordless.

  • stock_toaster 12 years ago

    You could probably write a simple automator "service" that calls a bash script or something, and have it show up in the global services menu. You could define a key shortcut for it too.

nasalgoat 12 years ago

iTerm2 would be a lot better if they brought back the side dock. The system they replaced it with requires you to type out domain names to find them in the list. Way too difficult to use.

TallboyOne 12 years ago

<3 Bitcoin Monitor and Electrum

gte910h 12 years ago

Sip, Xscope, Alfred 2, Sketch,

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