Transcription
Hey guys, welcome back to our video. And today I'm going to be showing you my favorite apps that I use every day on my Mac, so let's get right into it. Okay, so the first one is called Unsplash.
Once you install it, it will show up up here in your menu bar. So you click it, and now you can just cycle through all of these wallpapers that it gives you. It basically gives you a random selection of the wallpapers of the groups that you choose over here. You can all customize this on the Unsplash website to which groups actually show up here, but once you do, it will just cycle through. And if you like one, then you can just click on "Set as wallpaper." It will download it and set it as your wallpaper. If you're just clicking around the wallpapers and you accidentally missed one, you can head over here to the History tab, and now you will see all of the ones that showed up for you previously. So let's say that I, for example, really liked this one; I can click on it, it will set it as this little thumbnail here, and I can hit "Set as wallpaper." Or even if I like the picture itself, I can download it. You can also hit over to the Settings and hit this little "Update all screens and desktops" if you're using multiple monitors. Okay, so I just went back to my regular wallpaper.
The next app is called Topnotch. The only thing this app does is cover up the whole menu bar in black. So once I turn it on and it actually analyzes the wallpaper and stuff, it turns it black, and it looks super nice and all coherent. It even has the rounded edges over here; you can just change the little radius.
Okay, so now from the menu bar, we can move over to the other side of the screen, which is the Dock. And you can customize the the Dock in just your settings by right-clicking on it and hitting "Dock settings." But the really important things that you want to change aren't actually in here. So let's open up our next app, which is called Docky.
These are pretty much all the controls that you can have over the Dock, which is basically the side that you put it on, which are also present in the regular settings, if you hide it or not. And then these ones are the special ones: the animation delay and animation speed. Normally, if you would have wanted to change these settings, you need to open up the terminal, type in a command, and it's super annoying to just go into like Google and Google the exact commands that you need. But with Docky, it's super simple to do. So to actually enable these, you need to turn on "Hide." And now the animation delay is basically the delay that when you put your mouse around the area where your Dock is, it's the delay till it shows up. So when I put a lot over here, you can see that it really takes the Dock a lot of time on the preview to show up. So I basically keep it at "None," so I don't have any delay whatsoever. And the animation speed is just a speed that it just kind of moves up or from the side. So if I put it as "Instant," it just instantly shows up. And I can also save these settings. It's going to reset pretty much everything that I have over here. And when I put it down, you can see that my Dock just instantly appears. That might be useful for some people, but I really like the "Fast" setting, so I will just put it as "Fast." And when I scroll down over here, you can see that my Dock pretty much instantly appears. A really useful shortcut that I actually discovered recently is Command+Option+D, which will toggle the auto-hide feature of the Dock. And once you actually set this, you can just close Docky; you don't need to open it anymore. It will remember all of the settings even if you enable and disable auto-hide.
Now, one of the features that you might miss on macOS if you're switching from Windows is Windows snapping. So if I, for example, open up my Calendar over here and I want to make it full-screen, there is no freaking way in macOS to actually do this. Like you can hit the full-screen button, but that will full-screen it entirely, but you just want to like make it really big. This is where our next app comes in, and that's called Rectangle. There are several apps that can do this, but most of them are paid for some reason, and Rectangle just does it for free, and it does it the best. And now it's super simple to use; you just grab the top of your window and smash it against the top, and it full-screens. If you smash it against the side, it just goes half and so on. You can also bind some keyboard shortcuts to this, so it makes it a lot easier. For example, I have mine and as full-screen, and also this kind of wallpaper-showing screen—I don't know how to call it really—but I really like this look where I can see the rest of my wallpaper still. You can customize all of these in the Rectangle app, and as you can see, it has all of the smashing over here and all of the shortcuts right here, so you can customize a bunch of stuff. So that's Rectangle. And the developer has actually made Rectangle Pro, which is a paid version of Rectangle, but it adds this really cool feature that I just wanted to show you: when you hit a keyboard shortcut—which you set—I set it to Command+Control, this red little circle will appear around your mouse. Now you can basically do the same thing as smashing them against the side of your screen, but just doing it from one place. So let's say that I wanted to move my Calendar again, and I would just want to full-screen it, so I will hit my keyboard shortcut, just move my mouse up, and you can see that it full-screens. If I move my mouse down, it will do the wallpaper-showing thing again. I have been using Rectangle ever since I got my Mac, but recently I changed over to Wox. It's basically the same as Rectangle, but it has a few extra useful features. So, for example, it has floating windows, which means when I pick up my window, it will give me these options to select from, so I don't need to remember, like, for example, this is like quarter, this is half, and things like that. I really like the "Arrow Shake" feature that you have right here, that means when you shake your window, it will close all of the other windows in the background. I use this a lot, especially when I'm using it like in this consideration when I can see my wallpaper that I can actually see it through all of the windows that I have. You also have Dock preview, so that when you have multiple instances of an app open and you just hover over it, it will actually open up the app and show you which instance you're clicking on, and you can also close it, which is pretty cool. You can also set every single one of these as a shortcut and also use all these settings as a shortcut. So that's Wox; check it out if you want. I think for like 95% of people, Rectangle is just going to be fine.
Okay, this next app is really cool, and the moment I saw it, I had to have it. So it's called MediaMate, and you have all of these settings. Basically, when it opens up, it will give you kind of like a demo version, but I will show you what it does. So basically, when you go up and down with your volume, instead of doing the whole big thing that you have in the middle of your screen, it will instead just go from the notch and adjust your volume like this. You can also adjust your brightness; it will show that, and also your keyboard brightness; it will show all of those. If you start playing any kind of music or media on your Mac, it will do the same thing. So when I turn it on, it will show me the song that is currently playing, and I can actually click on it to open up Spotify itself. This looks really cool in my opinion, especially incorporating the notch into this whole thing. And when you hover over the notch, it will show you the currently playing song, too. The really awesome thing about this is that even if you don't have a MacBook with a notch or you're just using it on an external display, you can still go into Style and just choose the Classic font if you prefer, and this will open up your song like this. And if I click on it, it will give me all of the other settings. I think this is a really cool solution, especially for like if you do the system hues, and you can choose from various different styles. Like when I put it up and down, you can do a ton of like customization with this.
Now you might have noticed throughout this video that I have all of these apps in the menu bar, and there are way more apps that I have currently open. But luckily, I have Hidden Bar, which is this little app that basically stashes all of the apps that you don't need currently into just this holder. The alternative to this is the paid app Bartender, but I'm not really going to pay 25 bucks or whatever to just keep my apps sorted like this. So Hidden Bar is just this great little app that you open up; hold down Command, and now you can move apps around. It will close also by itself, or you can just close it down to have a way more aesthetic menu bar.
Okay, now these two little apps are going to be super useful for you, especially if you've been using macOS for quite a long time and you get annoyed by the small little things. So if you don't have any video or music playing in the background and you just hit the play and pause button, Mac will automatically open up Apple Music for some reason. So the app Music Decoy will just get rid of that; that's all it does. The second app that I wanted to show you is called Yellow Dot, and it's exactly what the title says: you know that little yellow dot that basically shows up up here when your microphone is active? Yeah, it gets rid of that. And I know there are some security reasons for it, but most of the time I'm just recording something for a video or for voiceover or for something like that, and it just shows up up there and it stays there for some reason, especially when I'm watching video; it's pretty annoying to have that little yellow dot in the corner. So this basically replaces it, and you can do other options like, for example, white and stuff, but I would just leave it off.
Okay, so those were pretty much all based on some visual stuff that you can do on your Mac, but let's now move on to some of the more productive stuff, and let's start off with browsers. So the first browser that I would like to recommend to you, if you're still using Safari, you can head over and try Orion. This is basically Safari but with Google Chrome and Firefox extensions. You just go into Orion and now go to "Popular extensions"; it will give you some of the ones that it recommends, and you can also head over to your Google Chrome Store and just install extensions. That's pretty much the only difference between Orion and Safari, but if you really like using Safari like I do, then Orion is going to be the perfect fit; it's basically just an upgrade.
The next one that I'm going to show you, which I'm currently using actually, is the Arc browser. And I know you probably heard about this a million times already, but for those who don't—Chrome was Windows, then this is macOS, basically just a bit better, just a bit nicer, more user-friendly. So your tabs, instead of being up here, are to the side. You can create groups of tabs, which are called Spaces, and when I scroll to the side, it will open up all of my free Spaces. Now, when I scroll back, it will basically just be in my main Space, and then when I scroll to the side, it will switch Spaces. You can make some tabs in here; like let's say I want to go to my Gmail, and then I would just switch around to the other tab because I wanted to do something else. You can customize a bunch of stuff here, like, for example, the Spaces itself, by just right-clicking and going to "Edit theme," and now you can just click around, find a theme that you really like. I, for example, really like the black one, and I would just set it to that. Now this browser gets updated pretty much like every second day, and they have automatic updates. They, for example, added some really useful AI stuff. I know that AI is like in pretty much every app nowadays, but this AI is kind of useful and really just blends in in the background. So, for example, if I wanted to Google the Eiffel Tower, and now when I hover over a link, it will give me a quick summary of all of the things that are included in it, so I don't even have to open it. And another cool feature is that when you hit Command+F, which is basically search, you can basically ask the AI to find anything that's on the page and also summarize some things for you. For example, if you're searching in a big PDF, then this can do it for you without having to open it up and Chat GPT then asking it; you can do it all in your browser.
Now let's go through a few rapid-fire apps that are going to be useful occasionally. So the first one is called Disk Inventory X. And now once you start it up, you can select a hard drive that you have or an SSD, and you can do "Open Volume." It will ask for permission and stuff, and it will scan your entire computer and just tell you what takes up the most space in your PC. So it will take quite a while; just leave this running in the background to go through all of your files and really just pinpoint everything.
Let's show you another app that I found; this is called MonitorControl Light. And there's the big app called MonitorControl; I found that MonitorControl Light is pretty much everything that I need, especially when I have another display connected. So when you open it up, it will basically look something like this, and now you can control the brightness of your monitor. You're probably not seeing the changes on the screen recording, but it's just dimming my display, and it's super simple; it's just one slider. And when you add another display to it, like I will do, I will just plug in my HDMI cable, and now that I connected my second monitor, you can see that it just showed up here; it's just one slider for the entire brightness, and that's everything that it does.
Okay, so this Disk Inventory X has already finished, and as you can see, it will just give you a basic rundown of everything that you have on your computer. You can also see it visually over here, and once you click on one of these files, it's basically going to open it, and you can either delete it right away from this spot to move to trash, or you can open it and reveal it in your Finder, and it will reveal the move or whatever you have, and you will see it directly in your folder.
Okay, the next one is going to be super useful for you if you're dealing with Apple Notes a lot. If you're using it—if you normally type in Apple Notes, you know that if you want to change something, you have to go up here and just change it to the heading, the subheading, the body, and things like this. The app ProNodes basically fixes all of this stuff and gives you kind of like Word settings in your Apple Notes. So I will just hit "/", and it will give me all of these options. So let's say that I wanted to type in "Body," I would just hit Enter on "Body," and now I'm typing in "Body." If I wanted to change this to a title, for example, "/title," hit Enter, and it basically converts it. It also adds the functionality of just highlighting it, and it will give you all of these options. It's totally free; the Pro version is going to give you some access to AI, but most of us don't really need that.
Now the app DropOver does this little simple thing, which is when you take an item and you shake it up a bit, it will open a drop-over shelf, and you can just position this on your actual—drop some more things in it, like, for example, all of this stuff. And now I want to move it, for example, to the desktop; I can just take all of these and move them to the desktop, simple like that. And that's the main functionality of it, but it has some cool features that you could use also. For example, when grabbing an item and you just shake it about to open up a window, this little lightning bolt up here will open up, and it will give you these quick little actions that you can customize. Also, if you don't want the whole shaky bit because sometimes it just appears out of nowhere, you can also set it up so that when you take any item up to the notch, it will open up in a new drop-over. So as you can see in the settings, you have a ton of options to customize the whole thing and really just make it your own. It has a bunch of cool features, and I would highly recommend just giving this a shot.
Now, with all of these apps, if you wanted to set up some shortcuts for most of them, you would probably just get confused and don't use shortcuts at all. But this next app, which is called Hyperkey, fixes that totally. You can replace Caps Lock with Control, Option, Command, Shift at the same time, which pretty much no app uses, so you can do custom things on the entire system.
Okay, now this next app, which you've seen throughout this whole video, is called Raycast. It's basically an Alfred or Spotlight replacement that you open up with Command+Space, and you can open up pretty much anything with this. I have it set up so it mainly opens up just apps. So, for example, when I type in "Chrome," I can open up Google Chrome just by pressing Enter. The main difference between Raycast and all the other ones is that Raycast actually has extensions. So when I head over to the settings right over here, I hit "Extensions," now we can see all of the extra things that it actually does. And the cool thing here is that pretty much all of these extensions are for free, and most of them are super powerful and replace entire apps that are usually just paid for. So to check out some of the extensions that are available, you can just head it up here into the plus and go to "Install from Store." Now this will open up the entire store of all of the extensions that you can think of. You can also search for them, or—or the other way to find them is just to go to Raycast.com, and once you open up their website, you can simply head over to the Store, and here you have some of the more popular extensions that you can just browse through. You can, for example, open this one up; it will show you what it actually does and all of the commands that it has. This is probably an app that I could do a whole video about, about all of the extensions. So if you want to see that, just let me know in the comments.
Okay, now these two next ones are going to be super useful for you, especially if you're like a content creator, because most of us content creators use Photoshop. And even if you're not a content creator, you probably use Photoshop before. But the thing is, Photoshop at its minimum costs $10 a month, which isn't that much for what you're getting, especially with the new generation features. But then again, it's $10 a month, so $120 a year, and over a couple of years, it really stacks up. So why not use another solution that's just a one-time purchase? And Pixelmator Pro is a Mac-specific app that basically does everything that Photoshop does, just in a user-friendly way. But before we move on, I just have to add, it doesn't have all of the new generation features which Photoshop added, so yeah, you're using on that one. But then again, it's much more user-friendly. So let's open up a new document; it has a bunch of presets that you can actually use, like, for example, for some social media stuff. And then I mostly use just the regular ones, like a template. And let's, for example, open this one up; let's do "Create." And as you can see, it's pretty much the same thing as Photoshop, but it's just a bit—bit nicer; it's basically the Apple way of doing Photoshop. You have all of your layers; you can also customize this whole layout in the settings throughout many different styles, add your own one through "Customized layout," and it's just really cool to use, really user-friendly. I like it a bunch, and I will probably never switch back to Photoshop again. By the way, this company that makes Pixelmator actually has another app which is called Photomator, and it's basically a replacement to Lightroom, but I haven't needed it yet since I just shoot some photos for thumbnails and stuff, so I just edit one photo at a time. But if you're a photographer and you like to edit a bunch of photos at once, then Photomator is going to be the app for you. And by the way, if you've been wondering how I do the screen recording with all the smooth motion, this app does it for me; it's called Screen Studio. It's pretty much the best screen recording app that I found because it does all of these animations for you. This would have taken me probably hours to animate in my editing software, so this is a super great replacement if you just want to do some quick videos or really professional-looking stuff. Many companies use this, and it's pretty expensive at like—like 90 bucks. But if you do kind of like this tutorial stuff that I'm doing or some commercial work, then it's definitely worth it for all of the hassle that it saves.
Okay, the next one is an absolute classic, and it's called f.lux. That shows up up here, and if I go into the Preferences—when it comes to nighttime, your eyes don't want blue light because it's going to be way harder for you to actually fall asleep. And this is where f.lux comes in because it removes the blue light from your display; that means your entire display is going to be kind of like this orange or really red color at the evening, so it saves your eyes, and you will notice that your sleep will get much better once you set this up. You will just need to set up your location, and then when you hit one of these—I don't know if it's going to show you on the screen recording—but my screen is like absolutely orange right now. I'm just going to show you like this; you probably can see because I have a polarizer filter on. It's going to be super weird for a few days, but after you get used to it, you will never go back.
Okay, and the last three apps that I wanted to show you today are all about focus. So if you're getting distracted by websites or you don't even know what you spent your time on, StayFree is going to be the application for you. Because when I open up, it will basically show me everything that I've done on my computer today. So you can see that I played around with Numbers for 20 minutes, and it's going to log everything. Don't worry; none of this is public; it's just going to store on your computer. But the cool thing here is that you can pair up devices, and I have paired up basically everything that I own to this application, so it tracks every single minute of my movement on a digital thing. So I can then use this to analyze my day, see where my time is going, and then modify it in some way by my own. Or even I can set some usage limits or use a Focus mode where it will basically block out all of the distractions, like, for example, YouTube, Instagram, and things like this when I'm working, and I just can set it for like an hour, two hours, and things like that. But if this doesn't work and you're not kind of like mentally strong enough to actually block yourself from looking at apps like this, there is a second alternative to this, which is called SelfControl. And this is a really hardcore application; you give a few websites to this app—let's say that YouTube, Instagram, X, or Twitter—you place it on a block list, and now you cannot get to them. I have had YouTube blocked for like two days because I was just getting addicted to it, watching useless videos. And now when I try to open up YouTube on my actual browser, you can see that it opens the website, but it will actually disconnect it from the internet, and you cannot get rid of this block until the timer finishes. That means if you uninstall the app, nothing's going to happen; if you delete every single browser and reinstall it, nothing's going to happen; if you restart your computer, nothing's going to happen; it's still going to be blocked until that timer finishes. So this is a really great way to get kind of rid of your social media addiction if you're also in that camp.
And last but not least is really one of my favorites that I found over the last week, and it's called Flow. It's a simple Pomodoro timer; that means you work for 25 minutes, and after it's up, it will just notify you and set an alarm for 5 minutes, then you can work again; that's basically how a Pomodoro timer works. You also get the stats, like how hard you worked; like, for example, yesterday I really had a great day with five sessions. As you can see, most of the time I don't even use it because I forget about it. But if you really want to use this and track your stats, Flow is one of the simplest and better-designed Pomodoro timers that I found out there. And when you start it up, it will just move up here into your menu bar and start counting down; you can just click on it to open up the main menu again.
So those were all of the apps that I use on a daily basis. If you have any other ones that you use, please let me know in the comments; I would love to try them out. And I will see you in the next one. Bye-bye.