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Mac Apps We Use Every Day

70 points| MrDrone | 12 years ago |brickftp.com

59 comments

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x0054|12 years ago

I would recommend Better Touch Tool over SizeUp. It allows you to setup keyboard shortcuts as well as touchpad gestures to resize windows, and do a lot of other actions.

Raphmedia|12 years ago

Yes! I love that software. I used it to make the gestures the same between my touchpad and my magic mouse. It's stupid how it's 3 fingers on one and 2 on the other.

ericHosick|12 years ago

I was also surprised not seeing Better Touch Tool there. It is a great program.

For example, I've mapped switching between tabs to TipTap left and TipTap right for any software that has tabs (Chrome, FireFox, Terminal, TextMate, etc.).

cseelus|12 years ago

For window management i love Moom, as it integrates really well with OSX.

To add more gestures for my touchpad (like TipTap-Left to switch tabs in every application that has them) I use Better Touch Tool.

acangiano|12 years ago

I like the simplicity of Windows Magnet.

james33|12 years ago

This is a great list, but two of my favorites that are missing:

Divvy - http://mizage.com/divvy/

DragonDrop - http://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/

edanm|12 years ago

Thanks!

Tried out DragonDrop - it's pretty awesome and instantly solves a problem I never realised I had!

prezjordan|12 years ago

Each time I use DragonDrop I'm met with "Wait, what did you just do!?" It solves such an interesting problem - it's a must have.

Rubyfoo|12 years ago

Does Divvy let you tile windows with margins between windows or the edge of the screen?

legulere|12 years ago

Beginning with mountain lion, apple ships the handy console program caffeinate so you won't need Caffeine anymore

stock_toaster|12 years ago

Yup. A bonus of the cli utility is that you can pass a program argument to it, so when another script is done the "constant wake" state is ended. The man page has more info.

jds375|12 years ago

I also recommend GeekTool. It allows for some cool customization effects. Available for free here: http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/ You can find some cool themes from devianart or other sites.

blacksmith_tb|12 years ago

It's sort of abandonware now, isn't it? There's NerdTool, which works well enough for me, but also hasn't been updated in a long time...

patrickmay|12 years ago

compliment: an expression of esteem, respect, affection, or admiration

complement: add to (something) in a way that enhances or improves it; make perfect

I do not believe that F.lux is expressing admiration for its surroundings.

/pet-peeve

radio4fan|12 years ago

> Iterm2... One of the most awesome features is it’s ability to trigger a full screen, semi-transparent console at the push of a hotkey.

How did I not know about this? I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

publicfig|12 years ago

If you want it to stay in the same space, you might need to open up preferences and turn off lion style fullscreen mode.

grigory|12 years ago

Check out TotalTerminal as well. For me its global, full width visor + tabs became THE way to use the Terminal.

bosie|12 years ago

slate.app is great opensource replacement for sizeup https://github.com/jigish/slate

sergiotapia|12 years ago

Extremely user unfriendly though. Just installed it and it doesn't even sensible defaults for you to hit the ground running. Their answer: "Read the docs and write your own configs." Nobody has time for that!

Edit: Another commenter suggests http://spectacleapp.com/ - works really well out of the box - in fact it does what I expected Slate to do.

caycep|12 years ago

This is a nice list, but I tend to force myself not to use this, or to limit the amount of "modifications" I put in. Gives me bad memories of the days from OS 9 where half the programs I use one year get orphaned...

Plus the labor of maintaining 10-20 apps that modify default OS X behavior can get excessive.

oskarth|12 years ago

I would also recommend RescueTime, a YC company to track your time. You barely have to do anything, just let it run and see what it reports to you in terms of your productivity. Probably one of the best ROI that a app can have.

cseelus|12 years ago

Yes really great app. You can also set goals like 'code at least 4hrs a day' and will be notified if you succeeded in, with your weekly summary.

saidajigumi|12 years ago

HyperDock looks interesting. I was hoping it would exactly replicate a feature I love from Flexiglass[1]: moving windows from any position by a (modifier, movement) combination. Unfortunately, HyperDock doesn't quite replace Flexiglass due to binding limitations.

Flexiglass allows (modifier key(s), two-finger move) to reposition a window. This is effortless and awesome. HyperDock requires (modifier key(s), left mouse click + movement). The click seems like a small thing but is more awkward, in my experience.

[1] http://nulana.com/flexiglass/

davidcollantes|12 years ago

Excellent apps. Can't stand the distorted screenshots on that page.

teleclimber|12 years ago

Seriously! Feels like 1999.

I thought it was lazy resizing in an image editor, but it turns out it's just bad CSS.

They have a "max-width" on "BODY IMG", but then some script or some deployment process added "width:" and "height:" on each image individually.

The max-width alone would resize the image nicely, but the presence of the "height:" causes the vertical stretch.

(Sorry, the web-debugger in me kicks in without being asked.)

TallboyOne|12 years ago

Yes I know that was god awful panic typo.

derefr|12 years ago

> One of the nicest features of The Unarchiver is it’s ability to delete zip files after they’ve been opened, so you you only need to click the file once, rather than unzipping it, and going back and deleting all the original zip files off your desktop.

This reminds me... why isn't there a Windows archive-extractor program with this behavior? I tried to search for it a while ago, but it seemed like every app developer who had the suggestion presented to them hated it.

warmfuzzykitten|12 years ago

Sure, I'd love to have a terminal replacement that shows eight-colored letters on a black background just like Windows! I have no idea why Mac users love this kind of crapware utility. It's been so since 1984 - the big difference being the scores of semi-useful utilities no longer crash your machine every few hours - and I've never gotten the appeal.

pedalpete|12 years ago

A question for those using sizeup, how do you make sure the hotkeys you create don't conflict with hotkeys in your apps?

bradleyland|12 years ago

I don't use SizeUp, so this solution won't apply to that particular utility, but I do use a window manager. Moom, which I use, is activated by a single keyboard shortcut. Once activated, Moom captures shortcuts that might otherwise be handled by other applications. This makes all window resize actions a two step process, but I find that's a worthwhile trade-off for avoiding shortcut collisions.

kmfrk|12 years ago

I ran into a weird bug with Visits where one of my sites is not visible in the drop-down list. I think it's because I exceeded some kind of domain limit. Has anyone experienced the same?

seanalltogether|12 years ago

I would love to somehow add "Restart in Bootcamp" to the global apple menu and not need a standalone app.

aroch|12 years ago

If you find yourself with a Terminal window open:

     alias win7="bless -mount /Volumes/win7/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
     alias debian="bless -mount /Volumes/wheezy/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
     alias arch="bless -mount /Volumes/arch/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; shutdown -r now"
Obviously change the volume paths as needed. Typing "win7" into terminal will restart into my Windows 7 install, likewise for "debian" and "arch". Any subsequent reboot will automatically reboot back into OSX

saidajigumi|12 years ago

Not quite your wish, but I recently hacked up another solution using an Applescript-based approach. Unlike other versions I'd found, this approach can be made passwordless. See the gist below and the first comment that describes passwordless operation:

  https://gist.github.com/jwhitley/8377268
This can be invoked effortlessly from tools like LaunchBar or FastScripts.

Credit to @robjwells, whose original gist I forked and modified to be passwordless.

stock_toaster|12 years ago

You could probably write a simple automator "service" that calls a bash script or something, and have it show up in the global services menu. You could define a key shortcut for it too.

nasalgoat|12 years ago

iTerm2 would be a lot better if they brought back the side dock. The system they replaced it with requires you to type out domain names to find them in the list. Way too difficult to use.

TallboyOne|12 years ago

<3 Bitcoin Monitor and Electrum

gte910h|12 years ago

Sip, Xscope, Alfred 2, Sketch,

ineov|12 years ago

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