There are two kinds of desktop applications: those that work and require you to pay attention to them, and those that work and you don’t even notice them.
I have many applications on my Mac, many of them for reviewing purposes, but I tend to keep a very few in the dock and some running in the menubar. Of all these applications I have most of them belong to the first category, they are apps that require me to look at them and perform actions basing on their user interface. 1Password needs me to input some letters in a text field to unlock its database, and Cyberduck wants me to select the proper folder to upload pictures. My action is needed, always and immediately. Without my action, these applications are lost like an empty car. I have to drive them to go somewhere (working with them), but I also had to learn driving them in the past to get used to their system.
Then there are applications that live quietly in the background, do their job without requiring my attention and are there when I need them. From a technology standpoint, they’re not that different. I use these “quiet” apps just like I use the other ones. But from a user point of view, there’s an immensely huge advantage when using the quiet apps: even if you actually use them, you don’t notice them. So I guess that their biggest feature is that of melting with the OS and become an invisible layer of your workflow.
Clipmenu is an application I’ve been using for many years now and, just like the Finder or Mail, is an application I’m highly dependent on, mainly because it’s become so well integrated with the OS that I don’t even notice using it anymore. Any Mac that doesn’t have Clipmenu installed doesn’t feel like a real Mac to me.
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