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Today I'm going to run through five must-have productivity apps for Mac
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Number one, brings back the window snapping features from Windows. If you've ever spent a lot of time on Windows, then you know that you can just grab a window by the title bar and throw it to the side to fill half of the screen or throw it to the top to fill the whole thing
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And you don't have those features on the Mac. Unless you download rectangle
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It's free and open source, so anybody can get it. and not only does it have the same gestures with the mouse
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but it also has completely customizable keyboard shortcuts. So here you'll see I can just grab this window
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throw it to this side, and fill half of the screen instantly. I can grab a window and throw it to the corner
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and it'll fill just a quarter of the screen, or, you know, take it and fill half again
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Or I can just grab any window and throw it to the top, and it'll maximize and fill the whole screen
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This is really useful if you have a laptop, like maybe the 13-inch MacBook Air, where your screen can get kind of crowded
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and you just want a clean way to show two windows side-by-side. Number two is a great way to take screenshots and screen recordings on your Mac
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It's called Clean Shot X. Now the Mac already has a built screenshot feature where you can capture the whole screen or capture a specific window or like record a specific portion of the screen But Clean Shot X takes this to a whole other level After you set up
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a screenshot, you can instantly recapture another screenshot with the same parameters. You can go through
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your setup history so you can quickly retake the same shot in the same spot with the same settings
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You can record any screen recording as a GIF if you want to post it on a website. There's a self-timer
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feature, so you can hit the button and then you have a few seconds to get something set up just the
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way you want. And the real kicker is that you can temporarily hide all of your desktop icons
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so you don't have to clean up your desktop between every shot. Clean Shot X costs $29
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and that comes with a year of software updates. Number three is Macie, a really minimal
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clipboard manager. It's so great, you'll completely forget it's not built into the Mac. Now you can
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just copy and paste as you normally would. You don't have to do anything special. But if you want to paste
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like the second or third thing back, you hit command shift C, and then you can see a full list
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of your history. You have keyboard shortcuts, one through nine, for the first nine items on the list
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or you can just, you know, click with the mouse. It's so fast. So here, you can see I'm copying a bunch
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of things one after another in Safari and then I switch over to pages and I can just paste them one after another all in a row I don have to bounce back and forth between them I can copy them all at once and paste them all at once
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Mackey is $999 in the App Store, but it's open source, so if you want to build it yourself
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in Xcode, you can do that for free. Number four is a feature that comes built in, and that's called Spotlight
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So if you want to, say, open Google Chrome, you can use the gesture to open launch pad and
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swipe over and click on the icon. Or if you have a pendant to your dock, you can go down there and
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click on it, but by far, the fastest way to open apps on the Mac is with Spotlight
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You just do Command space and type the first few letters and it's open. It's that fast
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Command space, first few letters, enter. There you go. Spotlight, of course, is built into every Mac, so you don't have to do anything
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Number five is for time tracking with toggle. If you've never used time tracking before, it's really easy
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You just type in what you're working on, give it a category, and start a clock
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So if you're writing or coding or studying, and you hit a snag and you just get that impulse
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to just switch to something easy like reading Twitter or Mastodon. Just knowing that there's a running clock
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and that you're supposed to be working is really effective, at least for me
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on keeping me on task. Let me put it to you this way. I'm the sort of person where I turned off
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all the activity tracking features on my Apple Watch They just weren effective at actually convincing me to exercise And I can tell you the last time I even opened the fitness app But despite that I wear my watch close to 24
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just because I want it to have all the data anyways. I never look at the data
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I never use the data. I never act on the data. But I just want it to be there and I want it to be accurate
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If you find that relatable at all, then you and I are of a kind
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that will find time tracking very useful. Because sure, I can switch to my RSS feed
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and read up on the news, and technically that's working for me. But if toggle says that I should be writing
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then I have to be writing for that data to be accurate. So as you can see, there's a list view of all the things you've been working on today
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and how long you've been working on them. You can instantly restart any of these timers with just one click
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You have a calendar view where you can see a history of your day, and you can add in old data if you maybe forgot to start the timer earlier
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Toggle is free for basic personal use, and it has a lot of advanced features like automated reminders
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in case you forget to start the clock, a Pomodoro timer, to remind you to take breaks every once in a while
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For some of the more advanced features, you just pay $9 a month. So those are my productivity tips for the Mac
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You can find links to everything I talked about, and an article version of this in the video description
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I'm De Griffin-Jones with Cult of Mac
