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Which Mac apps do you recommend?
Hey WIP fam! I'm on the lookout for mac apps to feature on my newly launched site. I'm interested in those you can't live without or ones you think are just cool, even if you don't use them yourself. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thanks!
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Latest, fully maxed spec. Always.
I've got an M1 32 GPU cores 64 GB RAM and 4TB memory.
The M1 32 GPU cores is an M1 Max. If you look at benchmarks, the M1 Max beats normal M3s and M3 Pros, only losing out to M3 Max.
Generally, I find in hardware, the mid layer priced options are always worst "pound-for-pound" over a cycle as you end up having to replace your device sooner. I paid £7k for my M1 in 2021 but I can use it for another 1-2 years. I ran LLMs on it without any problems.
Meanwhile, had I bought an M1 Pro with 32GB RAM and 4TB memory for £5k, I would have had to replace it by now...
I agree, but this is a post about the best apps not hardware specs haha
@ben 🤭
Yeah, my bad. Sorry.
@siavoshzarrasvand okayyy but my question is about Mac apps. 😅
Lol, my bad!
On that note:
vscode
warp
beekeeper studio (db tool)
vlc
frostwire
expressvpn
insomnia
proxyman
Haha no worries, I was just a bit confused about whether I'd written something unclear. Thanks for your list!
I was drunk mate, literally, I was a bit wasted. But I answered in all seriousness. You can see I didn't even have typos in my response, just in my reading ;-)
LMAO 😂
Focus is a good one to avoid time wasting apps
WIP Menubar for obvious reasons
Cleanshot X seems to be used by a bunch of people taking nice looking screenshots for twitter
I’ll post more if I think of any additional
Thanks! Any time you spot something cool, feel free to send it over to me haha. I will never have enough! ;)
Love Cleanshot X
Love Cleanshot X
My standard setup for new Macs:
• Lulu
• Chrome
• VSCode
• Transmit
• Framer
• LM Studio
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Premiere
• Logic
• Rhino
• Spotify
Many thanks! I didn't know Lulu, LM Studio.
my favourites
- Arc Browser
- Cron Calendar
- Raycast
- Rewind
- FridayGPT (my app😅)
- LookAway
- Things 3
- Muse
- Screen Studio
- Itsycal
- Warp Terminal
Big thanks! Great to have you here! Upcoming part of my project are interviews with developers. Are you interested?
That's a great initiative. I would love to participate.
What's the best way to contact you? BTW you should update your Twitter links. WIP and FridayGPT points to wrong username.
mail: [email protected]
Thanks for pointing out. Recently updated the twitter handle😅
@screenfluent Just happened to see this and I'm not sure what kind of interviews you're looking to book, but I'm a developer (both of my own apps and 10 years professionally working for other companies) and would be open to a chat if you're looking for more interviews! Let me know.
Definitely interested to feature more people! Do you have Telegram?
@screenfluent yep! It's
@ben_makes_stuff(no backticks)My standard dock setup is Screen Studio, Raycast , TablePlus , iTerm2
Thanks! I think I will have to try TablePlus myself when I will have to dig into mysql to follow some advice to create separate tables in WordPress but for now it is too much with the code alone haha.
Al Dente (charging management)
Rectangle (window management)
TablePlus
1Focus (looking for alternative)
Thank you! I use Al Dente on my Mid 2015 MBP with 350 cycles of battery. :)
Pro! Appreciate your effort! Thank you! There are few I see for the first time.
@marc Loved this, thank you - so much I haven't seen that I think I will need!
So it seems you’ve validated my idea that featuring such round-ups of apps on my site would be valuable to people, right? 🙂
I've since simplified work and computer life a lot more so don't need them, but I used to use Duet Display (double screen with my laptop and ipad was great), Bartender, Raindrop, Alfred and Shift which were all great.
Also I'm a hardcore Firefox Dev edition gal, but some friends shifted to Arc and love it - not sure if that counts.
Code and design life: Linear, Protopie, Visual Studio Code, Figma, Adobe suite, Framer, Filezilla (on the design side for something for Indie a couple of my friends have shifted from the Adobe ecosystem to Affinity).
Awesome answer, big thanks! 🙏 BTW I love Arc 😊
Cool: Rectangle and shortcat.app
Thank you!
texts.com - All messages in one inbox, reducing the need to open social media.
#blockit - Hides social media distractions on Mac and iOS safari and blocks websites.
SizeUp - Allows you to quickly resize windows using keyboard shortcuts.
MonitorControl - Allows you to control external display brightness and volume using keyboard.
Many thanks!
So many good recommendations here. One of my favourites from SetApp that I've since bought a standalone licence is Clop - it will auto-compress media files in a specified directory.
Oh wow! It is great! Especially for my site haha. Thanks!!
Already added to
#niftymacapps :)
I wrote about mine last month: jefftriplett.com/2023/default…
Some that stuck out that I immediately miss when I'm without:
Thank you for apps and mentioning your blog post. I am aware of this series of default apps posts and actually want to reach out to people who posted them. :) So you are first who replied for a message from the future hahaha.
Raycast is a must have. I use item and vscode daily as well.
Another one I haven't seen mentioned here is Monitor Control, to adjust brightness of external monitors with fn keys.
And if I can plug my own shameless promotion, Recadio, one of my projects. It prevents the default auto switch to a Bluetooth mic, which usually leads to crap sound quality. Read more at www.recadio.com
Thanks a lot!
F.lux, Fantastical, Magnet, Bear
Thanks!
• Cleanshot X
• CapCut
• Blender
• Figma
• Transmit
• Arc Browser
• Google Drive
Thank you!
😹 I saw this and almost tagged you and gave Nifty Mac Apps a shout-out til I saw you asked the question.
PS Have you tried asking on Twitter and Threads? I bet you'd get thousands of replies!