20 Mac Apps I Can't Live Without!

i've been a mac user since well my whole life i've used a lot of really good apps a lot of really bad apps but there's about 20 mac apps that i can't live without and i'm going to show them to you there are a lot of awesome settings in mac os hidden behind the command line you need to find these terminal commands online and then run them in the terminal in order to enable these settings and while sure you can get a lot of views on youtube by making these videos it's really not the best way tinker tool is a free app that takes all of these hidden settings and puts them inside of a gui you can toggle them on and off no command line required it's really awesome let me show you some of the features that i use that i honestly can't use a mac without anymore first up we have the dock the dock is great but the problem with the dock in my mind is that it takes up a lot of screen real estate so i leave it hidden but then it takes so long to summon the dock if we turn on these three options you're going to see three things that are game changers in mac os the first one is that now when i drag my mouse cursor over the dock instantly appears there's no longer a delay for the dock to show and then the animation it's non-existent so you drag your mouse over it's up you move it away it's gone this is awesome getting the dock in and out of your way really quickly secondly it does another thing where if i hide this application which i do often rather than minimize windows sometimes i do but it depends on my workflow i usually press command h to hide the application entirely this app now becomes translucent in the dock so i know that the dock is open because of the indicator dot but i also know that it's not in the foreground and there's not any windows floating around that have been minimized or are in full screen in another space so it's really great to be able to have that there there are a lot of other features a couple of the others that i really really like are okay look you should use time machine okay backups are good but if you don't have time machines set up every time you plug in an ssd or basically any storage device it's going to say hey do you want to use this volume as a time machine backup drive you can turn that notification off so that it stops bothering you about it that's a handy one appearance this is one i really really really love dark mode is great and i'm someone who uses light mode during the day and dark mode during the night but there are still a number of applications that i sometimes want in light mode all the time you can do that inside of the appearance setting here then this is my last favorite it's such a simple thing it's a backspace key can be used to navigate back in safari that used to be a thing now it's gone you can put it back you go into safari you hit the backspace key and you go back a page really really handy and well that's just a few of the many many many settings inside of tinker tool it's free it's easy to use it's easy to revert to check it out this video is sponsored by private internet access you have heard us talk about them before on this channel and you've no doubt heard from youtubers all over the reasons to use a vpn so today i'm going to talk about why you specifically want pia number one they support simultaneous connections for up to 10 devices which is far more than your average vpn number two i have personally had greater success on blocking disney plus and netflix hulu amazon prime et cetera overseas number three a kill switch cuts any unsecured traffic in and out of your machine in the rare occasion that your vpn connection drops number four they never log anything ever number five they support a number of payment options including cryptocurrency number six there is a 30-day money-back guarantee and number seven this is the best one snazzy labs viewers can sign up for three years at just two dollars and eight cents per month with two extra months free give pia a try today to support internet hygiene and of course snazzy labs cheat sheet is so simple but so amazing you know on the ipad when you hold down the command key and it shows you kind of like a list of the hotkeys that you can run that's mostly because well there's no menu bar and so you can't see the items and the corresponding hotkeys but cheat brings that same feature to the mac and it's amazing if you hold down the option key for long enough it brings up this big huge registry of every single hotkey that you can run inside of the app you're using furthermore if you see the command you want to run well you just tap it and it runs it's freaking awesome imageoptim is one of those free apps that i would almost pay unlimited money for and the way to best explain it is to just show it to you i'm going to take these files 21.4 megabytes 18.5 6 and 3.8 megabytes and i'm going to drag them into imageoptum basically what this app is doing is stripping out all of the unnecessary data from within that image file without compromising on picture quality so it's stripping out comments and thumbnails private exif data etc without touching the actual quality of the image sometimes it only saves you know five-ish percent but usually on pngs especially these larger ones it's going to save a ton of space it's really really cool it uses a surprising amount of horsepower inside your computer and the results are amazing now there are a lot of features you can for example reduce the quality if you want but i literally just leave it at optimize give me the exact same photo just a lot small look at that one 59 saved oh what a great app drop zone is an app that's relatively new to me but it's really powerful and i am a big fan basically what it does at the ground level is it acts as a zone where you can drop or hold files links documents whatever you want until you're ready to act upon them it doesn't move them it doesn't change their name it leaves them in exactly the same spot until you want to do something with those files now you can do something completely unrelated to drop zone with these files but i'm going to do something related to drop zone obviously so move them from where they are now no matter where they are on the disk to the downloads folder and if i go to the downloads folder there they are conversely you can act on them in other ways like i can open them in image optim and they're automatically opening and minimizing in size which is really cool but you can go even further with drop zone thanks to third-party actions i can take any file drag it onto the email thing it will compose a new email with that file as an attachment or no matter where i am i don't need to be in the finder i can drag something onto this airdrop icon and it will automatically airdrop it to someone that i select imgur i can upload full resolution files if i'm on youtube i can drag the url over into ytdl and it will download the youtube video it's really amazing but this is kind of the flashiest feature okay i'm going to download omnidisk sweeper this is an application that has long been used to clean your local disk your ssd of files that you don't want anymore okay so i'm going to take this disk image file and i am going to drag it over onto install now watch what happens it is going to mount the dmg and once i accept the terms and conditions of the app it's going to move the app into the application folder automatically open the app and it ejected the dmg file and deleted the app it's just it's done that's so freaking cool drop zone it's awesome this next one is a short one ina i have set it as my default media player for basically everything it's replaced quicktime for me and it's certainly replaced l media vlc and other third-party apps this app can basically just handle any file type you throw at it it looks and it acts like quicktime it uses similar commands it has this very very very nice playhead scrubber it has touch part and trackpad gestures native picture and picture online subtitles i mean the list goes on it is a really awesome media player that just it replaces everything for me and it's free and open source what more do you need okay so this next one's kind of cheating because it's not a mac app it is a swift ui ipad app that is running on my m1 mac and it is overcast it's my favorite podcast client of choice while not the most beautiful looking podcast client anymore it is the most functional in my opinion its smart speed feature is better than anything else the voice boost comes in handy when you're listening to a podcast with poorly recorded audio it is so much more feature rich than the stock mac app that it's kind of unbelievable if you like podcasts at all give overcast a shot on any ios device or m1 mac it is superb this next app is alfred and if you've watched my channel you know how much i care about alfred this is the one app that i truly cannot use a mac without it is the best mac app ever made and it is the first app that i install on every new mac in short it's just an app launcher but it's not because it's it's so much more powerful than that think spotlight but on crack you can see how quick it is for example i don't know let's say i want to um search amazon for uh 13 gallon there you go 30 gallon trash bags done um let's say i want to check my clipboard history well i could do that here it is and if i want to recopy something to the clipboard there you go boom it's done uh what if i want to define a word um bread there we go it's a food made of flour water and yeast or another leavening agent cool let's say i want to do some basic calculation like the square root of 144. oh there you go it's 12. uh what if i want to open up a mini music player to play my itunes library without having to actually you know open itunes and deal with that whole shenanigans or apple music or whatever you call it nowadays uh then there's a number of workflows that can make this app even more powerful again i barely scratched the surface there is so much crap you can do with alfred it would blow your mind uh let's say i want to see what the price of ethereum is there you go let's say i want to convert one gibby byte into gigabytes there you go let's say i want to say 120 plus i don't know 34 there you go let's say i want 12.4 percent of uh 34. there you go 4.21 it gets even more powerful let's say i want to add a calendar event to fantastical which is my calendar of choice so let's add a new personal event uh and let's call it uh walk dog i'm gonna walk the dog on thursday at uh 2pm remind me 20 minutes before and i'm going to do it at liberty park boom we're done i mean come on man it's it's freaking awesome uh you what else can i do i can run a speed test sure why not okay it's running a speed test now and uh it's using speedtest.net servers through the command line okay it's done 935 megabits per second down 890 up alfred is so incredibly powerful it would blow your mind i've talked about like maybe five things that alfred can do and it can do hundreds of things it is amazing it is the best app ever made and it will change the mac for you it is it is transformative get it please all right this next one is one that i admittedly don't use as much anymore now that i'm out of school but i do still use it a couple of times per month and it is indispensably handy which is why i still consider it a crucial app in my lineup and that is math picks basically what this is is it is an application that does ocr recognition of handwritten or typed text and turns it into actually kind of copy and pastable data that is actionable so this is pretty handy obviously you can see the ocr it lets you copy that data in a number of different formats for either web viewing for putting it inside of a word doc you can see the original and modify it if you need to you can search the web for that exact equation or solution that you're searching which is pretty freaking awesome and then it can solve it as well if you'd like which this one is it's not going to solve this because there's no solution but if we did i don't know basic uh algebra equation test uh okay and yeah sure i don't know here we go these are stupid oh here we go um yeah let's do this one so here we go we're gonna go multiply and boom it's taking a second computers are dumb silly computer there you go that's freaking awesome you get a hundred free snips per month if you're a student if you're not a student you get 53 snips per month and so even though it's not technically free it's effectively free unless you're doing hundreds or thousands of snips per month which even if you're a student you're probably not math picks it's freaking sweet all right so this next one's kind of a cop-out but i'm going to unashamedly admit that i use it it's called mock-up studio and it might be good for bad youtubers but it's it's mostly focused i think at web developers and app developers who want a bunch of you know mock-ups of their website or their product or whatever but but don't want to go and spend a bunch of time in photoshop or don't want to hire someone basically what happens is you take the photo that you'd like to be made into a mock-up and you can click it and there you go it visualizes that photo on all of these different devices and you can change whether or not you want it to be i don't know a macbook whether or not you want hands to be there female hands here you go uh it's pretty cool and uh these are high resolution it's free if you want lower resolution and you're not going to use it commercially if you are going to use it commercially i think it's like 15 bucks a month but i just get it through setup and so it's basically free and wow what a great way for lazy people to make thumbnails okay full disclosure this next app is from a podcaster and friend john syracusa but it's one that i paid for and i use frequently it's called front and center apple screwed everything up this year with mac os 11 but mac os 10 was around for 20 years and a behavior that mac os 10 adopted that a lot of people didn't like was the active window behavior so right now i'm in safari and i have a couple of finder windows behind who knows i might have more underneath this window in mac os 10 and 11 and 12 when you click this window just that window becomes the active window and the other finder windows stay behind the safari window now i can bring them to the front by pressing command and then tilde to make them the active window or conversely i can click here and then click the finder app and now they'll all unveil themselves but the classic behavior the behavior that was present prior to mac os 10 and the behavior that most old people like john still like is wherein the windows all unveil themselves at the same time i'm not old and so i don't like that but one thing i do appreciate about front and center is that you can toggle the opposite behavior by holding shift anytime you hit a window so right now if i press this window just one comes up as mac os 10 does but if i go back and now i hold shift down as i click this window all of those windows come to the front it's handy as a modifier and a toggle when you know you want to see all of the apps windows but don't want to go fully back to mac os classic but if you're a weirdo and you do the app does that too front center it's really simple but it's really handy for mac os's in my opinion quite poor window management in mac os mojave no manjaro what's a snow leopard what's it called in monterey and in ios 15 there's this new feature called live text and it's basically optical character recognition you can you know pull text out of a physical image rather than you know selectable text um but it only works in a couple of different applications and it's kind of spotty at best when it like the ai detects that it's there text sniper is in my opinion still a better solution and you invoke it by pressing shift command 2 which if you've ever taken a screenshot just pretty much the same way you take a screenshot you have the same tools that you have when you take a screenshot which is handy and if i want to copy jan's japan's racing game or grandpa i can select that but instead of taking a screenshot it copies that text to my clipboard and i can just paste it it's really really really great there are other modifier keys you can do for example so let's say if i do this command i'm not going to tell you because it doesn't matter the gasket no atom can pass now instead of you know retaining the line breaks like it did the original time you can just paste it in you know one unformatted go it's really handy it's so simple but really powerful the optical character recognition is best in class oh you can also read qr codes and barcodes i've done that before too where like a stupid website will be like here's a qr code you're like great i don't want to pull my phone out don't make me scan that just give me a link problem solved tech sniper it's awesome get it remember when we were talking about front and center and i said that i didn't like mac os's window management well that's true i think windows actually does a much better job and there have been apps that have come out over the last several years many of them that try and emulate basically windows style some of them are free some of them are paid i use one called magnet it's not free it is paid and i don't really know that it's necessarily better than spectacle which was a free one that's not discontinued or better touch tool and better snap tool which are free and or cheap and are currently still up to date but the thing i like about magnet is i learned how to use it and i bought it once in the mac app store for like five years ago and it still works amazingly so it works basically like windows where you can drag the window to the left or to the right or the the top and it will automatically resize accordingly but the other thing that i like about it is that there are a bunch of hotkeys where you can resize the window to your heart's content so i can make it narrow i can make it really wide i can put it in the top half i can put it in the left there's just a lot of options inside of magnet and again it's super easy to do it's not like better touch tool and better snap tool where you open the app and you feel like you need to like read nine pages on the github it's it's stupidly easy to use and and that's what i like about it it's eight bucks it's not free but it's it's good if you don't want it i don't care it's up yours man uh but if you do want it cool i also don't care it's just i'm just telling you that i like it okay get off my back magnet have you ever tried to email a pdf and you're like why is this thing like 20 megabytes i don't think it's going to send i think email's going to break it should be smaller yeah you need pdf squeezer this thing is great let me take an example here this is a textbook that i definitely paid for and did not download off the internet and it's 122 megabytes which as you can probably tell is pretty large i'm not even going to go maximum compression over here okay i'm just going to do medium and watch this shiz it's going to tell you how many pages there is how many images it's identified how many annotations there are the minimum image resolution 103 dpi come on and maximum image resolution and then it basically just smashes that down as best it can okay so it reduced it by 57 if i did strong compression and you get very very very minimal image loss it is existent but it's so little you're really not going to tell a difference on basically anything other than like really high resolution photos um so yeah pretty much mcgraw-hill i don't know what you're doing other than like selling students the same book year over year but you could make your 155 megabyte textbook 21.4 it's great get it not the textbook pdf squeezer smart home i have one i love it but the home app on the mac is i don't know why but it is like one of the worst apps ever made it's it's legitimately terrible and so there's this 10 app that's a little expensive for what it does but i think it's really great it's called home control and basically what it does is well it allows you to control all of the smart devices in your home without having to open the home app you just do it right from the menu bar and it's really handy you can change your heat your temperature you know your your window openness your whatever you want you can see your sensor data it's really handy it's really great i'm going to vacuum uh the house right now if you've ever wasted 50 gigabytes of data by clicking through to the verges home page you know that ads they kind of suck right because they have auto playing video a lot of times there's sound they move your content around and so it's just hard to like see where you're going ads suck and they've ruined the web but at the same time it makes me feel bad to use an ad blocker because like you know dieter writes good articles and he should be able to have food and clearly when i'm doing this i'm taking that opportunity away from them there's a solution and i also think that this prevents dieter from getting food but like the verge has allowed for this and so i don't feel bad at all it's called an rss reader and rss readers have been around forever but they're finally getting more mass-market appeal and they're not just for nerds anymore basically what it does is it's an aggregated news feed and so you can select you know you can create your own folders from your own news sources and most websites that run on blogging engines like wordpress or you know drupal or whatever you plug the website in and it will say hey do you want all articles from the verge or just reviews or just articles from the science section or whatever and you can curate your own news feed news articles come in when they're posted you can read the article without any ads without any distractions there's consistent text across the entire app from website to website it's it's very very quick if you do want to open the website well you can and you can view the full article there but it's really great and all of these websites allow for this like they create rss feeds they this is allowed it's it's not bad you can do this without feeling morally bankrupt uh even though i'm still not technically looking at the verge's ad sorry dieter bartender is simple but great the mac os menu bar is ugly as crap and there are like there's no consistency in design like what the heck is this synology it's ginormous and like very ugly i don't like it and when you have a lot of applets they just get really crowded up here bartender allows you to streamline stuff down so there's kind of three levels that you can organize stuff in if you hold down the options key it allows you to configure them so you can have certain apps that are always outside of bartender they're always visible then you have the ones that are hidden inside of this menu when you click it and then you have certain apps that are always hidden sorry creative cloud i never want to see you get out of my site a lot of these apps you literally can't make them go away and so bartender is a way to make them hide when they refuse to hide on their own and the end result is we'll check it out i have this app now outside of bartender these apps are inside bartender and then on the rare occasion that i need to get access to stupid creative cloud i can just click through it here it's really great bartender it's kind of expensive but it's worth it password managers they're a thing we've been telling you for years to get a freaking password manager why do you still not have one no you probably do most people do nowadays but i use one password and there is a reason why i use it i've used lastpass before i've used dashlane before both of those services have gotten really poopy and one of the things i really appreciate about 1password is agile bits the developer they don't seem to be chasing vc money or like rapid expansion they're just happy making a good app now there are other options out there that are less money bit warden is relatively new and really popular it's open source it's crazy cheap or free if you kind of self-host and have some limitations one password is legitimately expensive by comparison but there's a reason i still pay for it and it's beyond the app looking really pretty which it does and bill warden looks like butt on the mac sorry it's the truth um a couple things number one the emergency kit is provided which basically gives a kind of legacy protection so if you die no one wants to die but everyone's gonna die if i die inside of my safe that my wife can access there's a bunch of information and details on how she can get access to my 1password account how to get in touch with one password for assistance etc etc it's it's really handy for kind of legacy purposes number two family sharing again my wife and i we share a lot of logins and her asking me hey what's the netflix password again it gets tiring and you don't want to have to you know shoot you know text the password and whatever we just have stuff that we're gonna both need in the same vault whenever i update the password it updates in her app that's really handy next this is a big one there's one password integration so excuse me alfred integration so i can type one p ltt this is going to navigate to linus tech tips automatically log me in and it does two-factor authentication i mean come on man and then the last thing that i really really appreciate it's got privacy.com integration um if you they've been a past sponsor but i legitimate they're not anymore they don't give me money so up them uh that doesn't it's not an insult doesn't make sense but yeah up them privacy but i still use their service basically it generates churnable credit cards that you can use to sign up for services that you don't actually want to pay for and you don't want to have to worry about canceling a free trial when you're ordering stuff kind of you know from sketchy websites like it's great to just be able to generate a one-time use or a limited credit card number and one password allows you to generate privacy cards inside of the app and inside of the browser which is really handy and then you can store just freaking like everything social security numbers bank accounts medical records it's really great for just having everything important without having to be like oh yeah you know my text documents are here and whatever you can store files um it's it's great one password is awesome and if you are even remotely interested in password manager which you should be because again we've been telling you for years i think one password's the one to get i hate calendars and i hate planning and i've never liked it but i need to be an adult and be better so i've been using fantastic health for the last uh six months to a year and i really like it it's made me hate calendars less don't get me wrong i still hate them but less um this is an odd like unquestionably expensive app um and there's a lot of people that are super pissed because they used to be you know version based and now they're subscription based like pretty much everyone um so if you can't stomach the price i can totally understand that and for my uses i'm probably not even remotely using part if not most of the value that this app offers it offers like scheduling and you can attach files and a bunch of crazy stuff to calendar events that a lot of other apps can't do but i like it for a couple reasons it has this ticker view which is really handy for me to not only see the weather which is handy but also see apps in kind of a to-do list type style rather than a more traditional calendar style if you are one of those people that has like tons of stuff um their week and day views have been very very popular for people i don't have meetings i don't have like big adult things to do my calendar events are like mostly one thing a day but it's really great it uses natural language i did that demo earlier if you didn't see that go back and watch it it's just it's a cool app and i really like it and i know that you know basically most people will laugh and say bye you're dumb because you don't do calendars well is this video over yet don't look at my notes man as you might have surmised from my previous fantastical section i'm not very organized i've never been organized and it's just not really how my brain works there are a lot of people that are crazy organized and waste excuse me invest a lot of time spending all of their day planning out what they want to do i'm not mocking those people it really does work for them it just doesn't work for me there are apps like rome research and obsidian that are like these massive conglomerative databases where you can organize data if you've ever looked at notion and been like yeah that's overwhelming it's like notion times 50. okay notion is easy this is actually pretty close to notion um i used to use a writing app called ulysses and that's where i would write all my scripts and i liked ulysses because it was a good writing app but it was a bad everything else app craft is well i'm kind of using it as a writing app but i'm also using it as a notes app and mind mapping app so let me explain to you i came in here i made this video i've tested out some little thoughts and ideas and then i just kind of splurted it out all in the paper right then when i actually wanted to make an organized list that i could work through to actually explain this video to you i made this what's cool about all of this is that this is completely searchable from a like from a database level and i can even go into further detail so let's say like tinker tool because i'm working on a big project so tinker tool i want to go specifically under tinker tool and say i love tinker tool because blah blah that's all associated with this parent note but it's also searchable from the entire database so if i search love there you go it shows all of the areas where love shows up inside of my database so there we go tinker tool free it sorts by highest you can add a bunch of very pretty formatting so you can like look at this i'm going to put this in a focus block and then we're going to make it you know green and isn't that pretty it's really really really good for note taking and organization i wish i had this in college and i'm actually using it to put together research for specific videos i used to just throw urls into a text document i would lose them i would not pay attention and now it's really good because i can extract specific stuff i want from safari like a a quote like a line and then i run a hotkey and it makes a new note and it links it to the parent note it's a really powerful app and i'm barely scraping the surface i still don't really know what i'm doing and i'm certainly not using it to its entire capabilities but it's very very cool another feature that i really like in theory i haven't really used it but i know a lot of people that do they create daily notes and this is cool because well you can just i am going to use this to brain dump so when i plan in the morning i kind of just need to let my brain run for a second and i'm going to just type out like all of the things that are on my mind and then once i've typed out a big huge blurb of crap i'm gonna say okay what if this is actually actionable what can i do today and then i'm gonna try and actually do that stuff in a more organized to-do list but what i know a lot of people do is legitimately make like calendar events so they'll say like oh um on july 17th uh i don't remember how to do this date yeah so you say like tomorrow uh i'm gonna go eat beans with jan and then it'll create a note in tomorrow so when i go to tomorrow which is tuesday the 13th it's going to say hey there's a link to this page and i can show it and it's from today and it's gooey beans with jan so this thing is like almost like a to-do list and a calendar app and everything is it's real powerful but i'm mostly just using it as a way to organize my research and write videos if that's at all remotely interesting to you you should definitely check it out it is crazy powerful i can't even really lick the surface but yeah it's craft well folks if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't i suppose that other button seems to work okay too get subscribed for more awesome videos like this one but most importantly and as always stay snazzy see you later folks

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 493,040

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, Mac apps, Mac, best apps, top 10, iMac, iMac Pro, power user, utilities, List, apps, Mac OS, macOS, Big Sur, Catalina, Mac utilities, best Mac apps, Setapp, PDF, Edit PDF, tech, Apple, windows, Mac vs pc, monterey, macos monterey, macos 11, macos 12, mac tips, bartender, dropzone, imgoptim, iina, overcast, alfred, textsniper, magnet, pdf decrease size, make pdf smaller, fantastical, craft, craft docs

Id: h2xoRkzjQoc

Length: 32min 7sec (1927 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021