Our Favourite Mac Tools
LiveReload
This has its ups and downs. There are times when you make a back end change and don’t want a reload, but especially for fast loading sites, it is a boon to have the page reloaded in the background before you switch into your browser preview.
SublimeText
TextMate was long my text editor of choice, but at some point it became clear that it was abandonware and so I switched to Sublime. It’s been wonderful. I still prefer TextMate’s bundle system over Sublime’s packages. But Sublime has been great in many ways. Performance for one thing – TextMate could be brutally slow at times, and crashed frequently. Sublime is not without its downsides though: the file column is a joke and a constant frustration. TextMate was far superior in this regard. I can’t believe they haven’t sorted this out yet. But despite some issues, it is still a very good text editor.
iTerm 2
An alternative to Terminal. From what I’ve read this has some great features over Mac’s default Terminal app. I have yet to actually learn or appreciate most of them. But I have switched, and will hopefully get around to taking better advantage of iTerm. At the moment the biggest plus has been themes.
Cinch
I’ve subsequently read of other window-related tools that sound like they may be superior or have more bells and whistles, but Cinch was the tool I opted for initially and it has served me well. I generally use it for splitting two windows to half of the screen size. Simple and useful.
http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/
SimpleNote
In principle, Evernote is great. In practice I found it barely usable for a long time and that kind of consistent pain eventually beget a search for alternative solutions. Enter SimpleNote. It’s fast, simple and straightforward. Evernote seems to be everything under the sun, but I really wanted something for easy to access text-based notes – snippets, things I want to remember, links to sites, articles, etc. I still use Evernote for grabbing recipes, but that’s about it. During the workday, and for any kind of text-based, non-browser use, SimpleNote is way better for my needs.
Alfred
This is huge. Even without the paid power pack add-on, this is just a phenomenally useful tool for getting around the Mac. I use it for opening applications, as well as shortcuts to open specific sites that I want quick access to. I also use it as a calculator. It can do a lot, and with the power pack, it can do a lot more. Brilliant software.
Transmit
A killer FTP program that has been getting consistently better. Works beautifully with S3 as well, which is a huge boon.
ColorSnapper
Screen colour grabber. Macs ship with DigitalColor Meter. I used this for years and found it infinitely frustrating. ColorSnapper has alleviated all that pain and works beautifully. Preferences allow you to choose your preferred format, magnification, etc and quickly copy a screen colour value to the clipboard.
Unibox
I found Mac mail to be a completely bizarre and possibly broken way of managing my gmail accounts. Unibox embraces the idea of email as conversation, and I find it a good fit for my freelance workflow, which is based around various clients and projects. When I’m ready to switch to another client I can go through all correspondences from that client. One thing that I have not looked into is that items not directly from a client are not grouped into the same conversation. So for example I end up with all Trello emails in a single conversation, but it would make much more sense for these to be grouped in with the client that they pertain to.
Text Expander
Still getting into the habit of using this, and it can be hard to break all of the old habits. But this is a pretty beautiful piece of software. Create little triggers such “breg” that yields “Best regards,”, for coding I use things like “gitb” for git branch, “cape” for cap deploy, “mds” for mina deploy staging, etc. I’m sure I’m underusing this amazing tool, but what I am getting out of it is still awesome. https://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html
Tower
Git GUI. I started out with command line Git, then stared using GitBox; I may switch back at some point, and will certainly re-evaluate, because GitBox had a lot to recommend it. But Tower is a pretty sweet Git guy. I do still find myself dropping back into command line on a regular basis, though. And it sometimes feels a bit sluggish, and does crash on a fairly regular basis. But still, a pretty nice Git GUI.
Things
A wonderful to do list / GTD app. Took them an obscenely long time to get cloud sync but when they finally released, they nailed it. And it’s been steadily improving since then.
https://culturedcode.com/things/
ReadKit
A great RSS reader. Because Reeder has unfortunately taken way too long to get a new release out since the pointless death of Google Reader. I was devoted to Reeder, but after almost a year with nothing, I finally switched to ReadKit. It was similar enough to Reeder, and who knows maybe even better than Reeder. Basically same story here as with TextMate.
1Password
Not entirely sold on this as it has had some problems with bugs, and I find it to be a royal pain in the ass in a lot of ways (constantly typing in my master password, managing of passwords for various accounts for same site (e.g. client sites using same service), etc. Also not entirely convinced that it’s that much better than Apple Keychain, but still I am using it, and it does have some good points. I find the iPhone/iPad versions most frustrating as you have to first switch from an app to 1Password, then type in your master password, then manually copy that to the clipboard, and then go back to the app, then paste that in, and also type in your username. This is far from ideal.
https://agilebits.com/onepassword
Flux
Designed to reduce eye-strain, Flux alters your screen display throughout the day to provide light that makes sense for the room, the time of day and the type of lighting in use. It can be configured to understand your typical lighting situation, and overridden. Features helpful shortcuts like movie mode. Nice!
Skitch
Good for screenshots that I need to annotate and share with a client.
iA Writer
Great simple writing tool. Write in Markdown, copy or export to HTML. Lovely simple UI, fast and easy to use. This serves most of my non-text editor writing needs very nicely.
HyperDock
Adds some super powers to your Mac finder dock. Eg a quick preview of open windows within an app on hover. I find this most useful for iTunes – I’m in the habit of lining up long playlists of new albums in iTunes and when I hear something that I like, I can get a quick display of the song and artist with artwork. Really nice.
Image Optim
A slick image size minimizer. Great tool for web development.
PixelMator
I don’t really do much graphic art work these days, and I found the Creative Suite becoming less and less appealing, not to mention crazy expensive once they introduced that ridiculous cloud version, so PixelMator does a great job of working with images, at a very reasonable price.
Easy Rename
A simple, straightforward bulk image renaming tool that does what it says very well.
http://7bit.co/easy-rename-for-macosx/
DaisyDisk
Hard drives are never big enough. Now that Mac is switching to SSD the problem is that much worse. Daisy Disk does a great job of isolating areas of your drive where you might be able to move/reduce/delete etc.
Paparazzi
Great tool for getting screenshots of a website. Wonderful tool for web designer portfolios.
http://derailer.org/paparazzi/
Balsamiq Mockups
A killer tool for building website mockups. Helps clients know what they are getting, and helps the planning/design/development process. Good way to reduce confusion and get product delivered on time.
http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/
Kaleidoscope
Great diff GUI tool. Plays nicely with git on the command line, as well as Tower, etc.
http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
Clean
Killer tool for keeping the desktop clean. In the process of web development I tend to get lots of files on my desktop that I need only in the process of working on something – screenshots, translation files, image assets, etc. Once I’m finished, they just become clutter. Clean moves these files daily off of the desktop into a folder sorted by day. I then periodically review and remove things, if I’m in the mood. Also I know that I can review back through various days if there’s something I do need to take a look at again. It would be even better if it could sort of day, month and year, but still a great tool.
ProCSSor
I don’t get to use this all that often because it doesn’t support SASS, as far as I know. But in the odd case when I have a CSS file that needs to be cleaned up, ProCSSor does a great job. Would be far better if it supported SASS, for my needs, but still a nice tool.