Weird that Sketch gets the "I'm not a fan of subscription pricing" warning when it's not a subscription. Buying it only gives you a year of updates instead of until the next major feature/version bump, sure, but you're free to stop paying and keep using the version you have.
The actual forced subscriptions like Ulysses and You Need A Budget somehow get a free pass though?
These days, I no longer have a long list of apps. In fact, I don't even have any language or compiler installed on my Mac.
My apps for development are: NeoVim, Docker, Source Control and Paw.
For Communication and other: Skype, Chrome, Dropbox, Banktivity, Tor, Google Earth and VLC.
In fact, I'm upset that I have more apps than I should.
Why should I have Skype when Messenger can make video calls from the browser. Banktivity could have an online version. Tor should be builtin in Chrome. Or why use Chrome instead of Safari? Apple should release a functioning browser. And Google Earth should run on the browser sometime in the future as JavaScript improves. And why have VLC? QuickTime should be able to run the videos I watch.
That means my list becomes: Dropbox. Maybe I don't even need that! Make Dropbox like an external HardDrive or something. Some integration in macOS. And my list is 0.
The last thing I want is more cluttering. A dashboard? What the hell do you use that for? A photobooth? I'm not 15 years old.
Having lots of apps remind me of how I was 5 years ago. You just want more apps to "feel" good and productive. Sometimes it makes you feel important, busy and technical. It's all B.S. folks and it's bad for you.
I'm surprised this list doesn't cover Spectacle[0]. This free app definitely surpasses Windows 10's adequate window management, and completely supersedes the embarrassingly poor built-in functionality.
He's recommending Clean My Mac. I am a bit out of my medium on Mac, even though I use it 8hrs a day, but I was under the impression Clean My Mac is little more than bullshit, albeit with very effective and somewhat shady marketing practices.
You are almost certainly mistaking it for MacKeeper, which is what pretty much everyone does when I recommend it. It's really sad because CleanMyMac (CMM) is one of the only cleaning tools I've ever used and can recommended, particularly on a mac. It's surprisingly high quality for a clean up utility.
The uninstaller is very convenient for me and I use it often, as it tries to detect configuration files and asks to remove them as well.
For uninstalling applications it is quite useful. By default macOS applications still do not have a good way of defining which files belong to which application and when you simply remove the .app file a lot of crap stays on your computer. It has also handy tools to remove developer cruft one accumulates.
MacPaw is actually quite respected as a developer. Enough so other developers trust them to steward the "Netflix for apps" Setapp.
When you upgrade from one Mac to another, you can use "Migration Assistant" to get all your apps, docs, and settings on the new Mac. This _also_ brings across all the leftover cruft from apps you no longer use, but whose data is still in your ~/Library folder (hidden, contains the working data for most apps)
Repeat a couple of times, and your current Mac will have large amounts of files that are leftover from your current mac, your previous Mac, _and_ even from your earlier Mac!
"Clean My Mac" will help remove this accumulated cruft.
Source: Mac developer whose product is guilty of using ~/Library to store a large database.
They have rather aggressive marketing tactics for sure, but I've installed it the other day, ran it, and it freed up almost 70GB on 512GB driven to 90% capacity. App looks and works professionally.
I use Clean My Mac, mostly for the privacy aspect of removing usage history/etc. It's not strictly necessary (just like CCleaner on Windows is not - your PC won't explode if you don't CClean for years) but could help giving you back a few gigabytes of cache/temp files.
On the repo owner's Pixelmator line:
> probably the best image editor out there on Mac, is packed with very powerful features and is very simple in its UI
I feel like that's quickly being overtaken by Affinity Photo[0]. One time fee, though you have to pay twice if you want a license on Windows and MacOS, but it's a closer approximation of Photoshop so you won't have to change too much muscle memory. It has better non-destructive layer editing as well. I found it crazy hard to do a layer style like desaturating a layer without "baking" it in.
Been using Photoshop and Pixelmator, Affinity Photo definitely is the in my books the best image editor currently. Love that most of the things in Affinity a real time, so you see changes immediately for all the effects etc.
It's still under work of course, and hasn't reached the kind of UI maturity that Photoshop has, but it's getting there, and you can't beat their price either.
On the topic of macOS power usage: I made a free open source app that lets you use the side buttons on your third-party mice for system-wide navigation[1], just like in Windows. Other apps can do this too, but practically all of them bind the buttons to annoying keyboard shortcuts and frequently exhibit unexpected behavior. Mine is (sort of) event based and works a lot better, including in Xcode!
Not to toot my own horn (I mean the app is pretty simple) but it's a splinter that's been bothering me about macOS for years and years.
Starting to go off topic but have you checked out BetterTouchTool[1]? It's not _just_ another window tiling app for the Mac. It also lets you conveniently remap trackpad gestures and taps, 3rd party mice (yes you can remap your side buttons if you want), keyboard shortcuts, etc. The coolest thing is that if you really want, you can also restrict your remaps to work only in certain applications. I've been using it for years and just wanted to share.
Although BlockBlock is in "beta," it works well, preventing installation of persistent items unless given a user okay but running silently in the background. It's fun to see what causes the warning window to pop up, like whenever Adobe Flash gets auto-updated. It's saved me from at least one very sketchy install.
Useful as many of these utilities may be, I'm worried about the fact that I have to fully trust each and every one of them. There are 63 entries on that list. How am I ever going to be sure that _all_ of them are safe?
This concern is starting to really affect my use of software more generally. I have found many useful browser extensions but I rarely install any of them because of what they have access to.
Open source or not doesn't make a whole lot of difference either, because I'm never going to be able to review and compile all of it myself after every single update.
The somewhat surprising consequence is that the built-in features of operating systems and browsers have become much more important to me than they have ever been.
Essentially, the software I use is
(a) Built into the OS or browser
(b) Coming from one of a handful of organisations I trust
(c) Purely Web based
This is on the desktop. And on mobile the "solution" is to severely restrict what software can do and give disproportionate power to some gatekeeper who will then predictably abuse that position by extracting a 30% cut from everybody and impose content restrictions way beyond what can be justified by computer security.
For me, a massive advantage of Alfred is the clipboard history. I know there are plenty of other clipboard managers, but I've tried them all, and Alfred's works the best for me.
Features I like:
* Ability to set upper-bound on individual size
* Ability to ignore clipboard CF_ types
* Ability to retain variable amounts of data by time
* Ignore certain apps' clipboards
* Filterable history search
* Short and long content previews
I also use iTerm, but that's mainly for the performance benefits and customizability - I could live without it vs Terminal.app.
I felt the same about iTerm until I started using it, and still feel the same about Alfred (have it installed but reverted to using Spotlight instead).
iTerm's great for the features it has that the regular terminal doesn't. Fullscreen borderless, universal hotkey to reveal, more configurations for workspaces, and I much prefer the paneling/tabs setup with iTerm too.
I assume the same argument is used for why Alfred is good, but I've never really gotten into it. Anyone mind trying to sell me?
The extensibility of Alfred makes it a whole order of magnitude better than Spotlight. Check out the Alfred ecosystem over at packal.org. The Spotify and Github workflows are my most used shortcuts.
What Spotlight makes up for by being the out-of-the-box default option, it lacks in versatility due to Apple's walled-garden policy.
Aside from the awesome feature that lets you point to any folder for the config file (I keep it symlinked to my dotfiles), iTerm2 can go borderless, which I absolutely love (iterm2-nightly needed)! http://i.imgur.com/GENVtUJ.png
I think people switch over from Terminal to iTerm too quickly, without giving it a good shot. After using iTerm for a few years I switched back, since I realized it wasn't bringing me any value.
It's fun because directly above the Textexpander comment is Day One, and directly below it are 1Password and Ulysses (all 4 apps have almost same subscription model).
I can't live without it ever since I first tried it. I really hope Apple either buys them or sherlocks them (preferably the former). Either way, I want the functionality integrated into MacOS.
I can't figure out if it's just poor implementation or just terrible UX design, but every time I scroll on that site a sign-up dialog pops up. I can click out of it, but when I scroll again, it immediately pops up. I'm unable to scroll without this stupid dialog showing. (Chrome 60, MacOS)
I closed the tab after about five attempts to remove the dialog. I still don't know what the product does.
There are a few points I repeat while they're still true. I like Signal for its reputation and standing on security, but it's highly deficient when compared to Telegram.
Telegram provides a much richer UI/UX than Signal or even Wire. [1] It has multi-device sync and multi-OS support. Signal lacks multi-device sync. Signal does not even have a proper desktop app. Signal explicitly prohibits backing up the data and restoring it if you move to a new phone/device (at least on iOS). The backup cannot be done to iCloud or even a local iTunes backup. So don't buy a new device ever if you like your chat logs. Or take screenshots of the chats for reference whenever you do. To me, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. People want usability a lot more, and if a "super secure" app is not really being very useful, it won't get very popular. I'm still waiting for Signal to get ahead so I can switch to it, but every time I think of it, Telegram looks a few years ahead of Signal.
I believe Telegram owes its popularity to its rich feature set and first class treatment of its desktop clients (Qt5 + Cocoa).
It doesn't help that not everybody uses Chrome as their primary browser (I don't), making it somewhat silly to keep open for a single thing. Spinning Signal Desktop out into an Electron wrapper would be preferable but is still far beyond ideal...
> The same hacker who previously sold data dumps from MySpace, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Fling.com, is now selling more than 100 Million VK.com records for just 1 Bitcoin (approx. US$580).
Ah, those were the days, when bitcoin was worth <$1,000.
Nobody mentioned Stow[1]. Simple and straight forward.
"GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place."
I'm curious about one thing. I recently discovered the wonderful world of a physical notebook for keeping track of everything with my life. One of the things that I love the most about it is that I can leave the computer, zoom out from the technical nature of my problems and solve them in a more conceptual manner (while taking a break from screens).
For me personally one big advantage that mind maps have is that they are digital. So I can access any single mind map in few keystrokes by searching for the file in Alfred. I am also pretty fast with my keyboard so prototyping ideas and new concepts is really fast for me.
I still use notebooks for sketching things but digital mind maps have too many advantages to dismiss. I also recently made an Alfred workflow that allows me to essentially query any of the digital mind maps I made and present all of the contents of these maps in Alfred. Here is the workflow :
Great collection. My favourite editor for notes/code is Quiver. It does Markdown, WYSIWIG, code (via ACE editor), MathJax and even markup for diagrams. It has a cell based approach so you can mix and match different sections if you don't want everything as one big Markdown block. The only downside is that there is no iOS editor, only viewer.
I like Quiver but I wish it would store regular Markdown files instead of JSON. Equally important an Android app that can add notes or alternatively Simplenote syncing would make me consider switching from nvAlt.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|8 years ago|reply
The actual forced subscriptions like Ulysses and You Need A Budget somehow get a free pass though?
[+] [-] csomar|8 years ago|reply
My apps for development are: NeoVim, Docker, Source Control and Paw.
For Communication and other: Skype, Chrome, Dropbox, Banktivity, Tor, Google Earth and VLC.
In fact, I'm upset that I have more apps than I should.
Why should I have Skype when Messenger can make video calls from the browser. Banktivity could have an online version. Tor should be builtin in Chrome. Or why use Chrome instead of Safari? Apple should release a functioning browser. And Google Earth should run on the browser sometime in the future as JavaScript improves. And why have VLC? QuickTime should be able to run the videos I watch.
That means my list becomes: Dropbox. Maybe I don't even need that! Make Dropbox like an external HardDrive or something. Some integration in macOS. And my list is 0.
The last thing I want is more cluttering. A dashboard? What the hell do you use that for? A photobooth? I'm not 15 years old.
Having lots of apps remind me of how I was 5 years ago. You just want more apps to "feel" good and productive. Sometimes it makes you feel important, busy and technical. It's all B.S. folks and it's bad for you.
[+] [-] gervase|8 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.spectacleapp.com/
[+] [-] ikurei|8 years ago|reply
Do the more expert Mac users in HN recommend it?
[+] [-] porsager|8 years ago|reply
MacKeeper is indeed shady, but I think Clean My Mac is a great piece of software.
[+] [-] romanovcode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarlac|8 years ago|reply
The uninstaller is very convenient for me and I use it often, as it tries to detect configuration files and asks to remove them as well.
[+] [-] yoz-y|8 years ago|reply
MacPaw is actually quite respected as a developer. Enough so other developers trust them to steward the "Netflix for apps" Setapp.
[+] [-] stevoski|8 years ago|reply
When you upgrade from one Mac to another, you can use "Migration Assistant" to get all your apps, docs, and settings on the new Mac. This _also_ brings across all the leftover cruft from apps you no longer use, but whose data is still in your ~/Library folder (hidden, contains the working data for most apps)
Repeat a couple of times, and your current Mac will have large amounts of files that are leftover from your current mac, your previous Mac, _and_ even from your earlier Mac!
"Clean My Mac" will help remove this accumulated cruft.
Source: Mac developer whose product is guilty of using ~/Library to store a large database.
[+] [-] synthmeat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rjevski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/blob/master/awesome....
[1] https://github.com/phmullins/awesome-macos
[2] https://github.com/phmullins/awesome-macos-commandline
[3] https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac
[+] [-] wishinghand|8 years ago|reply
I feel like that's quickly being overtaken by Affinity Photo[0]. One time fee, though you have to pay twice if you want a license on Windows and MacOS, but it's a closer approximation of Photoshop so you won't have to change too much muscle memory. It has better non-destructive layer editing as well. I found it crazy hard to do a layer style like desaturating a layer without "baking" it in.
[0] - https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
[+] [-] inDigiNeous|8 years ago|reply
It's still under work of course, and hasn't reached the kind of UI maturity that Photoshop has, but it's getting there, and you can't beat their price either.
[+] [-] archagon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legulere|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|8 years ago|reply
Not to toot my own horn (I mean the app is pretty simple) but it's a splinter that's been bothering me about macOS for years and years.
[1]: http://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net
[+] [-] michaelwu|8 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.boastr.net
[+] [-] kgabis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beautifulfreak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|8 years ago|reply
This concern is starting to really affect my use of software more generally. I have found many useful browser extensions but I rarely install any of them because of what they have access to.
Open source or not doesn't make a whole lot of difference either, because I'm never going to be able to review and compile all of it myself after every single update.
The somewhat surprising consequence is that the built-in features of operating systems and browsers have become much more important to me than they have ever been.
Essentially, the software I use is
This is on the desktop. And on mobile the "solution" is to severely restrict what software can do and give disproportionate power to some gatekeeper who will then predictably abuse that position by extracting a 30% cut from everybody and impose content restrictions way beyond what can be justified by computer security.[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gervase|8 years ago|reply
Features I like:
* Ability to set upper-bound on individual size
* Ability to ignore clipboard CF_ types
* Ability to retain variable amounts of data by time
* Ignore certain apps' clipboards
* Filterable history search
* Short and long content previews
I also use iTerm, but that's mainly for the performance benefits and customizability - I could live without it vs Terminal.app.
[+] [-] acoard|8 years ago|reply
iTerm's great for the features it has that the regular terminal doesn't. Fullscreen borderless, universal hotkey to reveal, more configurations for workspaces, and I much prefer the paneling/tabs setup with iTerm too.
I assume the same argument is used for why Alfred is good, but I've never really gotten into it. Anyone mind trying to sell me?
[+] [-] altern8tif|8 years ago|reply
What Spotlight makes up for by being the out-of-the-box default option, it lacks in versatility due to Apple's walled-garden policy.
[+] [-] smnscu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomble|8 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual
[+] [-] yborg|8 years ago|reply
http://colloquy.info/
Pretty much abandonware now, but still completely functional.
[+] [-] Etheryte|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
I have bad news for you...
(Switching over to something else myself)
[+] [-] mkasu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freetonik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vgammieri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baronseng|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|8 years ago|reply
http://snappy-app.com/
I can't live without it ever since I first tried it. I really hope Apple either buys them or sherlocks them (preferably the former). Either way, I want the functionality integrated into MacOS.
[+] [-] passivepinetree|8 years ago|reply
I closed the tab after about five attempts to remove the dialog. I still don't know what the product does.
[+] [-] amai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|8 years ago|reply
Telegram provides a much richer UI/UX than Signal or even Wire. [1] It has multi-device sync and multi-OS support. Signal lacks multi-device sync. Signal does not even have a proper desktop app. Signal explicitly prohibits backing up the data and restoring it if you move to a new phone/device (at least on iOS). The backup cannot be done to iCloud or even a local iTunes backup. So don't buy a new device ever if you like your chat logs. Or take screenshots of the chats for reference whenever you do. To me, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. People want usability a lot more, and if a "super secure" app is not really being very useful, it won't get very popular. I'm still waiting for Signal to get ahead so I can switch to it, but every time I think of it, Telegram looks a few years ahead of Signal.
[1]: https://wire.com
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|8 years ago|reply
It doesn't help that not everybody uses Chrome as their primary browser (I don't), making it somewhat silly to keep open for a single thing. Spinning Signal Desktop out into an Electron wrapper would be preferable but is still far beyond ideal...
[+] [-] fwdslash|8 years ago|reply
> The same hacker who previously sold data dumps from MySpace, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Fling.com, is now selling more than 100 Million VK.com records for just 1 Bitcoin (approx. US$580).
Ah, those were the days, when bitcoin was worth <$1,000.
[+] [-] SKYRHO_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|8 years ago|reply
"GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place."
1. https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
[+] [-] msl09|8 years ago|reply
What kind of improvements do mindmaps give?
[+] [-] nikivi|8 years ago|reply
For me personally one big advantage that mind maps have is that they are digital. So I can access any single mind map in few keystrokes by searching for the file in Alfred. I am also pretty fast with my keyboard so prototyping ideas and new concepts is really fast for me.
I still use notebooks for sketching things but digital mind maps have too many advantages to dismiss. I also recently made an Alfred workflow that allows me to essentially query any of the digital mind maps I made and present all of the contents of these maps in Alfred. Here is the workflow :
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind
The cool thing with that is that it lets anyone use my 'setup' of bookmarks, links and notes in the most transparent way possible.
[+] [-] jamesw72|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mamp|8 years ago|reply
http://happenapps.com
[+] [-] kossmoboleat|8 years ago|reply