Mac Apps I Use Apr 2014

April 20, 2014

8 min. read

This’s a good list for good apps.

Contents

Often

  • MacTeX I love LaTeX more than any other markup languages. I use package amsmath for beautiful equations, booktabs for professional tables, beamer for presentation slides, and pgfplots and tikz for figures that have same rendering as the body texts of LaTeX. LaTeX also have overlapping features like TextExpander (use \newcommand and \renewcommand to expand texts and commands instead of TextExpander can increase readability), and Scrivener (you can use \input{chapter.tex} to divide your dissertation into several files and load them in Sublime Text’s tabs). Besides, you can download elegant templates for your essays and cover pages.

  • 1Password I cannot image the life without 1Password!

  • Alfred 2 with Powerpack Workflows saves me time. Examples and the full list. Besides, I use it as a calculator and dictinary (it can help me spell - I’m not a native speaker), which makes me look like not smart and lazy, but I don’t care…

  • EuDic Spotlight-like dictionary, quite handy

  • Evernote A power app in workflows

  • Chrome Love its GUI, love its simplicity, no need to tweak, already fast. Extensions I installed includes Adblock Plus, Better History, Copy as Markdown, Don’t track me Google, Evernote Web Clipper, musiXmatch(just for fun, actually never use it), Tampermonkey(some userscripts not working well, long time disabled and I use bookmarklets instead), ToggleLink: Select Text From Link, Vanilla Cookie Manager, Vimium(Vimperator/Pentadactyl on Chrome; can be turned off for individual websites)

  • Keyboard Maestro Powerhouse of my Mac automation, my favourite app! A practical example that uses KM to switch iTunes/Mac App Store accounts

  • iTerm Popular alternative to stock Terminal

  • Skim Popular PDF viewer alternative to stock Preview

  • SnappyApp Take a screenshot and pin it to the top of screen, my second favourite app

  • Sublime Text 3 I paid it and use it most often among all Mac apps I installed. A great tool to increase text editing productivity. Still learning it

  • TextExpander My third favourite app

Sometimes

  • Clear for temporary lists

  • DEVONthink Pro document manager

  • Divvy A cool window manager that let you dictate what location and size you want windows to be

  • GitHub There are massive Git documents and for some people like me they are too complex and not clear (poorly documented?)

  • LaunchBar as an app launcher seems to be replaced by hyper key, see the guide

  • MailMate Still in trial, a seemingly fully customisable IMAP mail client that uses less CPU, memory resources

  • MindNode Pro A clean mindmap app

  • Movist VLC needs time investment which I don’t like.

  • PDFNut Tabbed PDF viewer, looks pretty

  • PopClip Love its extensions. Set a shortcut for it, see the guide

  • Tweetbot Popular Mac Twitter client

Occasionally

Need to explore

For basic computer use

For fun

  • 4K Stogram Batch download Instagram

  • Carousel Instagram viewer

  • Deckset Markdown presentation slide maker

  • MenuMate Menu items at your… context menu, what?!

  • NetNewsWire RSS reader

  • Pocket Video bookmarking

  • Reeder 2 RSS reader

  • Shiori Add and search bookmarks of Pinboard easily

  • Shortcat What?! System-wide Vimperator!

  • YoruFukurou Tabbed browsering is more efficient. However, just blame Tweetbot for being too visual pleasing

For study

Background Apps

  • Bartender Hide menu bar icons

  • BetterSnapTool Window management

  • Dropshelf A file placeholder at side of the screen

  • iStat Menus Show me the temperature and network speed

  • KeyRemap4MacBook Create hyper key

  • Little Snitch ‘firewall’, sniff dangers

  • PCKeyboardHack Remap the caps lock key and some other keys!

  • picatext Instant OCR. Yes, I’m lazy!

  • Timing I started to logging everything when I’m on OS X or iOS, so the app is a must.

  • XMenu A windows ‘file’ start-menu-like on the menu bar, very useful; sometimes, it’s too tired to type

Seldom

  • Better Rename 9

  • BookReader

  • Byword Markdown editor

  • Calca so-called ‘symbolic calculator’ that uses Markdown

  • CheatSheet Note: choose the webiste version

  • Day One Maybe it’s too popular and I don’t use it? Or its GUI is too ‘Impact-font-like’? Dropbox and plain texts are good for me and ST3’s manipulation.

  • ExpanDrive A good app but still waiting for chances to use it…

  • Hourly News No good source recommendation so not use it much

  • iBooks

  • Scapple Still waiting for chances to use it…

  • Scrivener Again… Not easy to use or maybe learn (why should I learn software? Instead, knowledge is the focus, right?), and hard to guess what it is for

  • Ulysses ST3 is so efficient and lure me to use it and drop others, for example Ulysses.

  • XtraFinder I have tried TotalFinder and bought the most expensive Path Finder. And for me, XtraFinder is the fastest of the three, simplicity fits functionality.

For Windows

Old Apps

  • iBooks Author to create hundreds of pages of product catalogues

Never

  • Microsoft Office 2011 I have to say the fonts is all I what, it will save time when you open Office files using iWork. Office cannot render equations but iWork can. So my default apps to open Office files are iWork.

  • ScreenFlow Just got it from MacHeist

← Clickable URLs in Sublime Text

Published 29 Apr 2014

Set Up Jekyll on Mac →

Published 20 Apr 2014