Today we'll be looking at my personal top 15 Mac apps.
I'm actually quite a minimalist in installing and keeping apps, so these 15 are the only "extra" apps I'm using on my device.
My profile:
- Developer
- Multi-device user
- Blogger
Let's get started with the list.
1. 1Password
I literally can't live without 1Password. As developers we tend to make the most awful and bad passwords ourselves. So 1Password to the rescue for generating and managing this for us.
2. Google Chrome
Jeez, Chrome should really be pre-installed. It's the first app I install on my brand new machine!
I Can't do my job the same without it.
3. Spotify
As a developer and writer, it's essential to get in the zone.
What best to do so than Spotify.
Listen to a cool podcast or epic playlist.
4. Spark
I use Gmail for most of my email addresses, and Spark is just amazing in keeping track of all these in one maintainable inbox.
It's a big advocate for inbox zero, just like me.
5. Visual Studio Code
I went from Dreamweaver to Atom to JetBrains to Visual Studio Code, and I have zero regrets! It's just fantastic software!
Visual Studio Code, for me, is the only good product for Mac Microsoft made.
6. iTerm2
The default terminal for Mac is not bad, but once you go iTerm2 you can't go back. It's just packed with all those little extra's you'll ever need!
7. Cyberduck
FTP might be a bit old-school, but every now and then we need it. Cyberduck is fantastic and clean, way better than a FileZilla, for instance.
8. Postman
I switch between Postman and Insomnia, but Postman is cool because it collaborates well for teams. You can test your API's and keep track of them. I love their environment setups.
9. RunJs
Ever needed to run just a small JavaScript snippet and too lazy to open a project or Codepen. This little app does just that for you.
10. Notion
When it comes to writing and keeping track of my projects, Notion helps me a lot. It's by far the best note keeping and project management tool I've ever seen.
11. Grammarly
English is not my native tongue, so Grammarly helps me a lot, making sense of my writing. And it's good at picking up nuances in my texts.
12. iA Writer
My blog is written in Markdown, and I use iA Writer to track my blog articles' cross-device. I start items on my Mac and will swap to my iPad or Phone sometimes to finish them.
13. Sketch
Sketch is not my golden go to, but it's what I paid for and use for all my design stuff. Making banners, designs, and cropping images.
14. Loom
Did you ever need to do a quick review or feedback visually?
Loom is your guy! It's amazingly quick and fast to record a session.
15. OBS
If Loom is not sufficient enough, you can always go to OBS, an amazing tool to capture all kinds of screen recordings.
It works super well and has so many options that it scares me sometimes.
What are you favourites?
Let me know on Twitter what your favourite apps for Mac are?
Thank you for reading, and let's connect!
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Top comments (59)
Please, don't.
I sort of agree as well especially when watching a video on YouTube usually my fans start running. When I use Safari that does not happen. Chrome is still my daily driver though unless I am running on battery then Safari is better optimised on a Mac.
Haha, why not? Tracking?
It's quite the energy hog - it looks nice, but my laptops runs about ~15-30ºF hotter when I use Chrome.
Wow! I don't note any spike when running chrome these days.
But let me actually do some testing on it
We couldn't live without Alfred. and we really like Divvy / we also use ScreenFlow for video / but we're excited to try out runjs and loom! Thanks for this list. : )
Oh! We also love Tower for git / and Transmit for file transfer. Sip is nice for color picking... TextExpander... I guess we'll have to write our own list ! hahaha.
That sounds awesome!
I did try Tower and Transmit for a while but personally like the alternatives out there more.
As for Alfred, I've seen it around often, never got around to installing it myself, does it make a huge impact?
For the most part - we use it like spotlight - but it's just much better. Not sure why... spotlight just has crappy search like macOS. It has a ton of cool stuff - but we use it for 2 main things:
command+shift+aopens a little terminal-like field that lets us find anything really fast / like the command pallet in a text editor - so, we use the mouse a lot less. and - we have some power-pack license that comes with a clipboard history. So, we have a list of everything we've copied withcommand+shift+c- and that saves us soooo much time and frustration.Awesome will give it a go!
So glad I read this! RunJS is what i've been looking for all this time as a JS dev. For terminal I prefer Hyper and ohmyzsh... but now I just use my own bash script for committing to github, haha.
RunJS might make me finally stop opening Chrome dev tools to use the console tab as a JS sandbox. Though that's usually for silly things like "Is fjfnjdfnjfdjndfjifijfijf too long?" "Idk" open console, "fjfnjdfnjfdjndfjifijfijf".length, "Nah, it's good"
lol, yeah - I used jsconsole.com a lot too in the early days 😂
Awesome, I use OMZ inside iTerm ;)
RunJS is amazing for exactly what's described under this post.
There is also Quokka if your using Visual Studio Code.
Postman became way too cluttered for me in the last few months. I prefer Paw now. Worth every euro.
If you prefer an open source free web alternative, we're building hoppscotch.io
github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch
Heyy Liyas!
I wonder why u got rid of the name "Postwoman"
I thought it was well chosen as it benefits from the popularity of postman.
Postwoman is changing name 🛸
Liyas Thomas ・ Aug 8 ・ 1 min read
Never heard of Paw before on their website they say "The most advanced API tool for Mac" so they must be the best then? 😁 I have been using Postman and Insomnia is Paw really that good compared to those two?
Insomnia also looks great, I'm using it and it's been great for developing in multiple environments (currently 5)
Oeh and it looks nice!
Awesome, I did hear Postman is working on re-introducing the chrome app again, which would be really great.
What's your opinion on Insomnia?
Yeah Paw is beautiful indeed.
I use Insomnia as well but more for short, independent requests where I don't need any project structure. But maybe I'll take a closer look, it has really evolved in the last few months.
These "top whatever mac app" articles are a guilty pleasure of mine. There's always something neat you've never heard about before.
Definitely checking out RunJS!
Haha yeah they are kind of an addiction almost
I didn't even now iA Writer is still in business... I felt so in love with the font ("Input") which I also used for many years with my coding setup.
My favorite API Tool for the Mac is PAW. At the time Postman came out, it couldn't parse response objects and hand over the results to other requests, is this now solved with Postman?
Heiko, yeah iA I think where indeed stopped for a little while, but all back on dev now.
It's amazing.
PAW I keep hearing people mention, so going to try it out.
As for Postman, the new native app does solve that yes, you can set vars to send trough to another request.
Good list I use a few of those. Would have used iA Writer maybe but you have to pay for it multiple times I think right? I have been using Typora for my blog posts on here and 1Writer on iOS because Typora has no mobile app yet.
Yes true, IAwriter is paid, not sure what their current plan is, back in the days a once-off was pretty affordable.
Mac Books are great for web developers but a nightmare for data scientists who work with loads of data :))
Haha yes depending on what you need to do with Data they can be very slow in parsing lots of data.
What do Data scientist use?
Simplest work is building MACHINE LEARNING models, but due to the RAM, GPU and CPU of MacBooks you should wait days to have your work done! but actually, you can use Google Colab or any other online machines, but they have their disadvantages!
Interesting! Seems like quite a cool area to be in.
If you would switch Chrome to Firefox you'd get a heart more ;)
Hi Jonas, darn missed a heart.
I started my dev career on Firefox, but seeing how good Chrome syncs everything and not keeps changing their dev layout I just like it more.
Still have FF installed, but only for browser testing 👀
Fair point. Personally, I like the layout and functionality of the dev tools for Firefox more then the one for Chrome. But I can understand why a lot more devs use chrome because even for me its sometimes nerve-wracking to get used to the many layout changes...
For me its mainly the privacy aspect which binds me to firefox. :)
I totally get the privacy point, honestly just gave up caring about my online privacy haha.
And yeah it's cool we have so many options actually, flavors for everyone.
I use almost all the apps. Just couple of different apps like
Hyper in place of iTerm2
Insomnia in place of Postman. 😛
Awesome, Yeah those 2 are very replaceable, I do like Insomnia as well, swap around with whatever my teams use.
Hyper I haven't use in a while actually might check if out on a next re-install.
For sure. Hyper is a little resource consumer 😛 if you compare with other terminals bt works fine in my system so I am pretty okay with it. Not the best but looks good and easily configurable.
If you prefer an open source free web alternative for Insomnia, we're building hoppscotch.io
github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch
Nice Post! Definitely going to install RunJS because I code a lot of small javascript snippets and usually try them on a temporary folder :)
RunJS is lovely for that yes!
I was doing Codepens or making actual index files locally, but this is some much quicker.
Thanks for posting this :)
My absolute pleasure, love seeing these lists so it's cool to show people what I'm using :D
I use Quokka js VS Code extension (instead of Run JS) which is very handy when I wanted to try quickly right in VS Code while developing something.
I've heard Quokka so often, going to give that a try!
Didn't know runjs existed. Thanks for sharing
RunJS simple, but does exactly what you expect
since I work heavily in Unix based systems I dropped the use of ftp for scp it's right in the terminal and no extra app or setup
That's awesome, I wish I could rsync everything, so much faster 👀
Apart from the above,
I use spectacle for window management.
Copyclip for clipboard
And amphetamine for keeping the mac on with going to sleep when needed.
Awesome, I'm going to have to check out Copyclip, sucks the default only stores 1 clipping haha.
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