The MOST Unbelievably Useful Mac Apps Episode Yet!

today's video is sponsored by CleanMyMac ex your Mac as good as new hey it's Chris now over the years I produce some really great unbelievably useful madcap videos in fact one of them is creeping up on a million views right now but this episode has the best I would say collection of unbelievably useful Mac apps we've ever done I'm sure this is gonna be another long video so just so you know there's timestamps down in the description if you want to skip around to whatever interests you the most there's also a link down in the description if you want to buy me a copy as an extra thank you if you end up really liking this and finding it useful and also if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet the daily tech after party now is a great time I basically hate email apps except for the one I'm about to tell you about now picture an email app in your head and then picture how it might be different if you're gonna make a different kind of email out nope it still looks pretty similar to the first one right well picture it now tempo which is the one I'm gonna show you right now and it smashes your conception of what an email app looks like and does tempo kind of reminds me of like a really minimal iPad writing app like I a writer that suddenly sprouted some email features because it's so minimal and uncluttered that the second your brain sees it and makes contact it just feels super freeing the entire point of this email app is to keep email from taking over your life making you less productive and get rid of that email dread you know like sometimes you don't want to check your inbox because it's gonna take up so much of your time be such a time suck so aside from just visually looking really stunning and minimal and simple there's also some other things that it does to help you take control of your email number one is it only shows you your emails as specific times of the day like maybe in the morning or at 4:00 so that you're not constantly checking it all throughout the day also it can help you limit your replies to like 140 characters kind of like a tweet and on top of that it will help you kind of create a priority out of your inbox by marking things as - duze or something to snooze or something to just straight up archive now I typically hate email apps that try to make it into a like a to-do list but I'm serious this doesn't feel like that it really is awesome and then get this there's even a focus mode so when you're replying you can just like get rid of all the distractions just like a minimal writing app I just love it guys I really do not want to feature an email app ever on this series because that's too boring it's just not something that fits with all the other cool apps but this one deserves a place on this list and the top spot in this episode please check it out I mean it's that cool and by the way it's sort of an incomplete experience because it's so new in terms of not having a matching iOS app yet but it's something that they're working on and I got to tell you I can't wait for it to come out the second app that we're talking about today is a workhorse it's powerful it's called station and this is for everybody who's always like man I thought these apps are all gonna be free even though I never said that in the title this one is free so you're welcome and look I'm always looking for a way to use my screen real estate as efficiently as possible even with that 49 inch super ultra wide monitor and that is why this application is so awesome to me what it is in a nutshell is it's an alternative browser that puts all of your business apps together under one roof this app is so great that among all the awesome products that end up on product on all the time if you haven't checked out product and shout out product time go check them out it's where I discover a bunch of the cool things I discover but it made a product hunt product of the year so yeah this thing is major so the main gist here is that you get a smart doc that lives on the left side of the browser that organizes all your business apps so think Gmail Google Drive slash Trello Dropbox hangouts and literally hundreds more all inside one app instead of being in their own windows clogging up your whole workspace like Trello I'm a huge Trello user and so I always had that open but now I can just have it open inside of this and I like that better now there's actually over 600 different apps that are compatible to integrate with station but I want to be clear this is a lot more than just a fancy wrapper for those apps for instance you can turn on the Do Not Disturb mode and mute all the notifications from all the apps or there's multi account support so if you use more than one Google account for instance there's also unified search so you could search through all your documents from multiple Google Drive accounts so there's a lot right and then there's my favorite two features maybe which are the recent view or button which if you hover over that you'll be able to see all the pages and stuff that you just access really quickly and number two the ability to bookmark something within each app whether that's a specific file or page or folder it just saves a lot of time so just to give you an idea of how I'm using this some of the things I've got set up include Google Drive Trello Twitter pocket we transfer buffer unsplash FreshBooks stripe and the list goes on station I feel like it really could revolutionize how you interact with your business app landscape and help you feel like you're in more control like over notifications in particular let's talk about a note-taking app next that's super different than anything I've ever seen now I love Apple Notes you guys know that I made a whole video with Apple notes tips which is still very relevant you should definitely check it out I'll try to link it up but you know the reason that I love it is because number one it just works across all my devices for the most part and number two I feel like my stuff's probably gonna be a little bit more private and secure within the Apple ecosystem rather than just some third-party developer right having my data that said I don't love Apple notes because it's beautiful but side notes is a truly standout note-taking app that is worth mentioning here because it really does do something different mainly it puts your notes on the side of your monitor why is this awesome in one sentence here it is I love that I always have my notes accessible and in front of me no matter what I'm doing always while at the same time they never take up any extra space on my screen or clutter things up because while they do attach to the side of your monitor and you can choose what side you want them attached to kind of like the doc in Mac OS you can have it auto hide and then reappear whenever you put your mouse in the exact right spot which is brilliant I wish Apple nose did this the other thing that I really like is that I can easily see the contents of several notes all at once so that's very nice for like referencing one and typing in another whereas something like Apple notes maybe shows you a preview of other things in the menu there but you really only see the contents of one note at a time so aside from living on the side of your monitor which is the main feature for sure you also get some fairly typical but important note app features like folders to do's the ability to add pictures there's keyboard shortcuts and more one thing that's not typical though that I really like that I think a lot of you will too is that you can add a color stripe down the side of your notes and there's several colors to choose from sort of like when you add a color to a folder in finder on your Mac so it's really easy to make one of your notes visually stand out compared to the others one thing that's holding this bag just a little bit right now at the time of filming this is that it only has a matte gap version so there's no companion app for your iOS devices but it's coming it's in the works so once that hits I can see so many people jumping on board the other thing I really like is that it's not a subscription setup like so many other things I'm thinking about like bear for instance which is a great note-taking app but I don't like that subscription model so this is a one-time payment which is awesome so when Mac OS Catalina came out and it had sidecar which is an amazing feature which I love that lets you use your iPad as a second display wirelessly for your Mac I can't imagine that duet display or luma display we're super happy about that because they had already been giving you that ability through their apps and hardware for years but Luna display did something very interesting they kind of pivoted a little bit and I liked what they did Luna display 4.0 now lets you use one of your old Macs as a second display as a second monitor for another Mac so look I'm about to upgrade my 2016 MacBook Pro to the new 16 inch MacBook Pro that's in the works and I'm gonna end up having this extra old Mac sitting around and I'm guessing that other people are out there maybe doing exactly the same thing and it's like what are you gonna do with that old Mac I mean you can sell it get a little bit for it but maybe it's worth hanging on to and setting yourself up with a dual monitor setup or and this is what gets me really excited here you could use your old iMac if you have one laying around as a second display for your Mac oh bruh I've been waiting for so long to be able to do this when I upgraded from my iMac to my macbook pro back in 2016 I tried looking for ways that I could turn my iMac into a display for that MacBook Pro and I couldn't figure it out there was like no solutions until right now this is the first time I've seen it and so I'm so excited there's nothing wrong with even if the internals are sort of like outdated with your old iMac there's nothing wrong with an old IMAX screen right still like beautiful and big and why not put it to use now you can I've really come to appreciate having CleanMyMac X installed over the last year and you can bet that I'm gonna have it installed on the new 16 inch macbook pro I love how it tells me things like battery draining apps and unless we see at a glance how much memory is getting used on the system and it gives me the option to free up more with just one click I'm also really appreciating the anti-malware feature which is important as more and more max gets sold and the Mac market becomes a bigger and more attractive target to bad actors so whether it's malware adware or even ransomware the database is regularly updated so the protection module always has your back with a beautiful design and dozens of cleanup and tune-up tools in one convenient app CleanMyMac X can help you delete system junk and hidden clutter speed up your Mac now get this it removes about 31 gigs of junk from the average Mac so what are you waiting for give it a try using a link in the description the next app that I wanna talk to you about is called lazy and it's a simple app what do is very quickly control everything in your environment that is a smart device using some simple commands on your Mac so all your internet of things connected smart things whether it's your blinds or your lights or your smart locks whatever it is right from your Mac so check this out it's getting dirty and you want to start the vacuum keyboard shortcut and the vacuum starts going you don't even have to interact with Siri or anything or let's say you got an Internet connected coffee machine and you're ready to start brewing it up you've been up since 4:00 a.m. like me and it's five o'clock and you got a really amp it up and get the day going start the coffee keyboard shortcut do something with your so no speakers keyboard shortcut start the fan keyboard shortcut need to adjust the temperature in the office or at your house keyboard shortcut so the best thing about this is just literally that it's really fast and that integrates with like everything works with zapier works with IFTTT and there's nothing crazy that you have to like remember you know there's this quick keyboard shortcut and type out what you want you could like type out that you want to send a specific text message to somebody or add a recurring to do thing in your to-do list like it goes beyond just your actual appliances smart appliances it it integrates with like everything so find your phone boom or send a message on slack boom or arm the security system boom it's like that it's super easy now I'm in kind of a funny spot like I wish that I could go out and just use Safari as my browser for everything or I could use something like brave I use brave sometimes because it's a more secure and less obtrusive version of Chrome than chrome itself but being in the YouTube Google ecosystem as a creator like I'm pretty tight in there and certain things on YouTube they just work better in Chrome and I don't know if you have any apps like that whether it's Google or whatever that just you need chrome like for your actual work well here's the thing I've been sort of on a mission to see what I could do to sort of Safari if I chrome and one of the things that really bugs me in chrome is that there's no reader view of course Google doesn't want to strip out all the ads and they want to show you that that's part of their business model but when I'm on Safari that's one of my favorite things to do is just hit the reader mode get rid of all the distractions and I missed that when I'm over in chrome so I was so excited when I found an amazing plugin for chrome that gives me that reader mode back and it's not just reader mode it's like reader mode on steroids so it's reader mode but you can design how it looks in the theme of the thing if you want to you can also control like what gets displayed and what doesn't as part of the reader mode and beyond that and here's the part that I really really really like even above just the more simplified reading interface is that you can highlight stuff and you can take notes next I just want to make sure that you guys are aware of this app called serene it's on the verge of becoming publicly available but maybe by the time you see this it will be available and it's kind of focused on Kings but I could see you using this individually as well what it is is basically a shield from all the distractions that could prevent you from getting some work done and so some things some solutions out there maybe they block certain websites or some maybe play like some ambient noise trying to get you in work mode this does everything all at once and beyond that it also will ask you for a goal at the start of the date and then help you work towards that goal by shielding you from all the distractions next let me tell you about something called Quick Links this is just a brilliant small simple little app that does one thing it gives you a direct shortcut into something that you use frequently so for me there are certain files and there are certain folders that I access very frequently so like for a long time I've been using a scratch disks like a 2 terabyte scratch disk to do all my video edits and stuff and I'll drag a folder in my finder up to my favorites and try to stick it there but because of the disk that I'm using that external drive it doesn't always stay sometimes that dumb thing ejects itself and I lose that favorite place and so something like this where I don't have to mess with that just with the quick press of a key I can get into my videos folder and or my Instagram folder or my design folder for the daily tech logo and assets to be able to do that with just a snap my finger basically is amazing and it's actually so cool you can go in and you can drag and drop your stuff to create your shortcuts so it's very very very user friendly now kind of along the same lines and it's really just gonna come down to preference for people there's another app called quick access and what it does is kind of give you a folder that opens up a little space where you can put different files or folders or apps whatever you need up there it's almost like an extra dock so again a quick and easy way to access things that you need right away without having to dig around time-saver now if that seems too simple for you and you're like no I could go hardcore and really dive in and dig in and really do a lot more to automate and make like cooler more powerful shortcuts then what you need is something that you may have heard before it's been out for a while but it's new to me recently it's an app called keyboard maestro and basically it's kind of like Siri shortcuts for your Mac but way more powerful and also a little bit less user friendly as well basically in a nutshell any tasks that you do or can do you can automate whether that's just opening up Gmail or pages or whether that's duplicating a line of text or even something like typing your email address so you can launch commonly use applications or specific documents or rearrange windows or play music or handle email anything in keyboard maestro you can do it faster easier and more reliably this is like next-level stuff here and by the way I said it's a little bit less user friendly than like Siri shortcuts Apple's official thing that's probably true but it also shouldn't scare you off if you get in here there's plenty of tutorials if there's something that you've always wished that the Mac could do that's very likely that this is the way that you can do it and that there's a tutorial that can show you how here's another simple app for you it's called theeen and it's caffeine for your Mac why is this awesome so for somebody like me the settings to prevent my screensaver or the power saving mode from turning on from shutting off my screen or my computer putting it to sleep are not long enough in certain situations sometimes when I upload a 26 minute video over a slow connection it can take so long like half a day or something depending where I'm at that if my computer goes asleep it'll pause that upload to YouTube and then you guys are waiting forever for the next video but something like thene which is it really is like caffeine for your Mac because it's almost like when you drink a cup of coffee it's not a permanent effect right so when you turn féin on also it's not permanent you can just say don't sleep or whatever for four hours or something and then once that's done you go back to normal it's just like coffee because they say you never buy a drink you just rent it right you know what I mean so you can say activate for one minute you can say activate for 45 minutes or you can say activate on startup it's just really really really simple it just does this one thing and has a few options stays out of the way I really like it so when to use this you can caffeinate win watching or recording videos listening to podcasts doing a presentation at work or school waiting for large files to download talking to your friends rendering sophisticated media files observing live stats or long running tasks on your screen as a coffee lover all this talk about caffeine is making me want to go out and buy like twelve nitros but that would be very dangerous so I shouldn't but yeah I mean this is a cool app here's a cool app that I know you're gonna like it's called batteries widget and look so much of the Apple ecosystem is wireless these days your keyboard your trackpad your mouse your air pods whatever it is and so this actually gives you one quick look to see what the battery status is for all of your wireless stuff on top of that it actually saw something that's really annoying for me which is it'll give me a low battery alert for some of my devices so like if my mouse is gonna run out of battery it'll tell me that I can get it charged before I get into a heavy video edit or something and it dies on me how many times does something like that happen to you well this will help to prevent it so it's actually very very useful another super simple app here that I think a lot of people are gonna like is called Mission Control plus by the same people from the last app that I just mentioned and it will actually let you show all your windows like you do with Mission Control but then it will let you close them right from Mission Control I don't know why this isn't built in Mac OS in the first place but this is just super handy cuz sometimes just to do something I gotta open up finder and there's like an old folder open from when I installed something and that produced a preferences window and there's just all this clutter that can build up in no time flat so to be able to pop open Mission Control and just like selectively delete some stuff not delete it but close it really quickly I like it time bars is the next app that we're gonna be talking about one thing that everybody could use a little bit more of especially when it comes to productivity is just a little bit of perspective and I've covered similar apps to this in the past but this one has its own unique spin it's take on showing you how much time left you have to do something so whether it's showing you as a progress bar you have this much time left in the day to do whatever you need to or week or month or a year or quarter whatever it is this app just gives you a progress bar to let you know where you're at and how much time you have left and what it basically is is motivation in your max menu bar now I mentioned Safari earlier and being stuck in the chrome thing because a YouTube but if I was using Safari purely all the time I would absolutely be using tab space and what it is is a way to organize all your different tabs very easily so it works like this you have five or six or twenty tabs open and you really like them and they're all geared around something specific like for me it might be YouTube YouTube stats and a few different views like and so what you can do is save all your open tabs with one click and then restore them anytime that you want so you can really build like a tab workspace around different tasks or projects that you might be working on at any given time throughout your week and on top of that it also works as a Web Clipper for Safari so if you highlight like a paragraph or something you want to save it export it to your favorite note-taking app may be bare you can do that too now if you stuck around till the very end of this video congratulations to you my friend because I saved something really good here so that everybody that dropped off early was gonna miss out and that you would be rewarded here is your reward it's called Mackay I believe that's how you pronounce it and all it is is a super lightweight clipboard manager does one thing it saves all the stuff on your clipboard lets you easily access it and it looks really good I've seen clipboard managers before there's a lot and I'll have them were just ugly or they don't work well or look right or something this just hits everything right on the head so to summarize it's fast it looks good you don't get overloaded with crazy features that you don't need and it's secure and private boom what else do you need hey thanks for watching this video guys check out the links in the description do consider checking out our podcast at daily tech afterparty if you find our main videos here useful I know you're gonna get more out of that the links down below you should hit us up on Twitter and Instagram where at daily tech spell daily Tek k in both of those places and I'll catch you in the next video later

Channel: DailyTekk

Views: 408,206

Keywords:

Id: QEaYiDn9oEs

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019