My Must-Have Mac Apps, 2018 Edition

Last year when I wrote about my must-have Mac apps, I was coming off a tumultuous year that started with a daily commute into Chicago for my old job and ended with me working from home. As the year came to a close, I was exploring what that meant for the way I work on the Mac.

That process continued into 2018. With the number of new things I took on in 2017 and the transition to indie life, I made the conscious decision to step back and settle into my new life. That wasn’t easy. There’s a natural tendency to take on everything that crosses your path when you go out on your own, but I’ve seen too many people fall into that trap in the past. Instead, I concluded that 2018 would be the year to improve the way I already work by refining existing workflows and reevaluating how I get things done, including on the Mac.

Three events led me to work on my Mac more in 2018. The first was the 27-inch LG 4K display I bought in January. It was a big step up from the 23-inch 1080p one I had before and, combined with a VESA arm, improved working at my Mac substantially.

The second factor was our MacStories coverage of the App Store’s tenth anniversary. For it, we produced seven extra episodes of AppStories that were released in the span of one week, which kept me in front of my Mac recording and editing for long periods of late May through June.

Third, just after WWDC, I destroyed the screen of my iPad Pro thanks to the trunk hinges that invade the interior of the 2016 Honda Accord.1 I decided to hold out for the new iPad Pros, but that meant writing for four of the busiest months at MacStories without a good iOS work solution. I used a current-generation 9.7-inch iPad some, but it couldn’t compete with my LG display.

As 2018 comes to a close, the changes I’ve made haven’t been dramatic despite the extra time I’ve spent in front of my Mac. Instead, I’ve fine-tuned existing workflows and added new apps for specific tasks.

Below, I’ve broken down the 49 apps I use roughly by activity and function. I’ll mention where Apple’s apps fit into my workflow as I go because without them there would be a few big holes in the landscape of apps I use, but the focus of this roundup is on third-party apps, not Apple’s.

[table_of_contents]

Writing

I spend more time typing into a text editor than any other task on my Mac or iPad. However, writing involves much more than typing. Research and editing are part of the process and involve their own specialized apps. Throughout 2018, much of my writing workflow has remained the same, but it’s been expanded with the addition of new apps that have made my writing life better overall.

Research

Every story involves some degree of research. A lot of that occurs in Safari, but that’s not the only source I use, nor is it how I manage the research I collect.

Reeder. RSS is where many of the news stories on MacStories originate. It’s also the source of many of the links in the MacStories Weekly newsletter that we create each week for Club members and ideas for AppStories episodes and other writing.

Reeder is my Apple news hub.

The RSS client landscape on the Mac has seen better days. While innovation and frequent updates are the norm on iOS, RSS readers on the Mac have barely changed in recent years. Reeder is no different. Except for a handful of new features and bug fixes, the app has remained largely the same for three years.

Still, of all the options available on the Mac, Reeder remains my favorite. I appreciate its simple, three-pane design and the reader-friendly customizations that are available. The app also features a long list of third-party app integrations that allow me to send links to Safari Reading List, Yoink, Keep It, Instapaper, Things, Ulysses, and more.

In August, the developer of Reeder announced that version 4.0 is in the works. It’s not clear if that includes both the iOS version2 and Mac version, but I hope it’s both because RSS readers on the Mac need more attention.

DEVONthink. DEVONthink played a major role in researching my history of App Store gaming and other App Store anniversary coverage. One of the first things I did to prepare for the project was a review of every post ever published on MacStories and tagged ‘App Store.’ Everything useful that I found was dumped into DEVONthink as an offline webloc file with a topic tag.

Next, I branched out to other sites, combing mobile gaming sites, major media outlets, and developers’ blogs. That too was dumped into DEVONthink. Once I was satisfied with the ground I’d covered, I began reading what I’d saved and chasing down other leads. As I went, I cleaned up and further categorized articles and highlighted passages with information I wanted to cite in my stories. When I was finished, I had several hundred highly-organized, annotated articles covering the App Store’s history, which I used as reference material while I wrote. I also used DEVONthink’s powerful search features to find materials in the collection and find new, related material on the web.

DEVONthink is perfect for this sort of big, unwieldy project. Still, my use of the app barely scratches the surface of what DEVONthink can do, especially on the Mac where it can effectively replace the entire file system. Unfortunately, not all of the functionality available on the Mac works on iOS in DEVONthink To Go, including the highlighting functionality, which left me tied to my Mac more than I wanted to be for this project. That said, if you need to organize and search a lot of data, you can’t go wrong with DEVONthink.

Keep It. Although I found DEVONthink indispensable for a project the scale of our tenth-anniversary coverage, it’s more than I need most days. That’s why I began using Keep It on Federico’s recommendation. Research materials for most writing projects consist of a mix of links, text, documents, and screenshots. All of that gets stored in Keep It with a ‘research’ tag and a tag that identifies the project. It’s a fast, low-friction way to file information that’s easy to find later. Periodically, I go through and delete old materials that I don’t think are worth keeping and archive the rest.

Organizing MacStories research and other reference materials in Keep It.

Keep It has also become a place for reference materials, manuals, notes on long-term projects, recipes, and links to gear I may buy. These are all things that Notes could handle, but I like the addition of tagging and saved searches that Keep It offers. I still use Notes for its sharing feature and as temporary storage for links and other information as I come across it, but if I have several disparate bits of information about a topic, it usually ends up tagged in Keep It where I can find it all again easily.

First Drafts

Ulysses. I started using Ulysses in early 2016 and haven’t looked back. Its display of Markdown isn’t for everyone, but the app has exactly the tools I need for my writing and little more. About the only part of the app I never use is the panel on the right-hand side where you can add tags, notes, images, and writing goals.

I organize stories into three groups: MacStories, Club MacStories, and AppStories. As I work on something it lives in these groups, but after publication, it gets moved into an archive group. I also like that I can tweak the UI to look how I want with themes and publish straight to MacStories using the WordPress integration, but all of that power stays out of sight where it doesn’t compete for my attention until I need it.

Ulysses is where everything published on MacStories lives.

That’s not to say there aren’t places that could stand improving. For example, I’d like an option to view linked images on our CMS directly in Ulysses. Placeholder boxes for images don’t convey information that distinguishes one from another and previewing the HTML of a document requires too many steps. Still, Ulysses is a comfortable writing environment that I’ve made my own with a theme I like and the fonts I prefer. Best of all, the features that are most important to me are all available in the iOS version and sync is fast and reliable.

Drafts for Mac (beta). I’ve used Drafts on iOS for a long time but was always held back from using it as much as I wanted by the lack of a Mac app. Now, a Mac version is on its way and in a beta that anyone who is a pro subscriber to Drafts 5 on iOS can try. The app isn’t finished, but the early going is very promising. Sync is fast, and even without feature parity with the iOS app, merely having my documents available on both platforms has taken me from being an occasional user of the app to using it multiple times a day across both platforms.

I’m not writing most of what gets published on MacStories in Drafts. Instead, Drafts has become the home of everything else. One big category is templates I modify each week to prepare the metadata for AppStories, along with its show notes, the AppStories link post that will go on MacStories, and promotional materials for the show and its sponsors. Longer email messages often start in Drafts too. Other times, I use it as a scratchpad for temporarily storing ideas, lists, and tasks. There’s no one way I use Drafts, but by tagging notes and using workspaces, I keep a collection of templates and other text organized by each of the major areas of work I do.

Links

Blink for Mac. When Apple discontinued its affiliate program for apps, it eliminated 90% of the affiliate revenue I earned.3 What’s left is barely a blip on the radar, but it’s so easy to create the links, I haven’t abandoned affiliate linking entirely.

Some readers may recall that I used to sell an iOS app called Blink that generated Apple affiliate links. I pulled that from the App Store when Apple discontinued affiliate linking.

Blink for Mac never shipped.

Less well-known is that I was less than 24 hours away from launching a Mac version of Blink when Apple ended app affiliate linking. Without app affiliate linking, it didn’t make sense to release the Mac app either, which was a big disappointment. Even so, the app is one I still use every day. Apps are no longer available in iTunes and Blink for Mac serves as a quick way to find them, copy URLs, and research things like pricing and release notes. I realize it’s a little odd to include an unreleased app in a round-up of ‘must-have’ apps, but when I’m on my Mac, it has become an app I rely on heavily, which is why it’s on my must-have list.

Editing

iA Writer. One of the drawbacks of Ulysses is that once I’ve exported it to traditional Markdown and shared it using GitHub where changes might be made by one or more people, Ulysses’ special flavor of Markdown makes getting the document back into Ulysses for editing troublesome. The easier route is to make final tweaks in a separate text editor that handles traditional Markdown directly. Switching apps is also an excellent way to look at a story with fresh eyes, which is how I use iA Writer.

Editing a story by Stephen Hackett in iA Writer.

iA Writer has some of the best typography of any text editor I’ve used. The overall design is clean and legible, which makes it great for editing. Moreover, the app integrates well with iCloud Drive, allowing me fast access not only to my documents on both iOS and the Mac, but other team members’ work through the Working Copy file provider on iOS and GitHub Desktop and the Finder on the Mac. Although I miss the customization possible with Ulysses, iA Writer is a close second when it comes to apps I enjoy writing in.

Grammarly. I started using Grammarly in late 2017, and it’s stuck ever since. The app is a grammar checker that works surprisingly well. It’s not a replacement for careful proofreading and editing, but it has caught enough typos I might have missed that I consider it an essential part of my writing process for longer stories.

The downside is that the Mac app is a slow, non-native Electron app and the only app available on iOS is a grammar-checking keyboard extension that is a poor substitute for the full Mac app. Fortunately, Grammarly also offers a web app that works reasonably well in Safari on iOS if you load the desktop version of the site.

GitHub Desktop. We use GitHub as a collaborative editing tool at MacStories. It allows us to track changes that any of us make to someone else’s story and either accept or reject them. It’s a fantastic system on iOS thanks to Working Copy. On the Mac I use GitHub Desktop, which isn’t nearly the pleasure to use that Working Copy is. GitHub Desktop doesn’t have all the features that developers often need, but it works well for plain text, and because it’s the glue that keeps me in sync with the repos I share with the rest of the MacStories team, it gets a spot on my must-have list.

Podcasting

My podcasting toolchain has barely changed from last year. There are several steps in the production process and a couple of complex apps involved, so there needs to be a very good reason to change the setup before I’ll tinker. That said, of course, I tinkered with it a little.

Recording

Skype. Unless you’re recording by yourself or with others in the same room, you need a way to communicate with the others on your podcast. For me, that’s Skype. One theme that’s common to many of the tools I use for podcasting is that they do far more than I need for the job. If there were better, simpler alternatives, I’d use them, but often there aren’t.

Skype is no different. The app does far more than I need and Microsoft still seems intent on transforming it into a social network, but I keep using it because the sound quality is better than any alternative I’ve tried. With a fast wired Internet connection and Skype going, it’s rare that the nearly 5,000 miles separating Federico and me causes lag or poor sound, which is remarkable, and why we still use it.

Audio Hijack. Rogue Amoeba’s audio apps are all rock-solid. I’ve used Audio Hijack since the very first podcast I recorded. I have different sessions set up for each show I do that drop the final recording into Dropbox where it’s shared with my co-hosts. What’s especially nice about Audio Hijack is the simple, customizable, node-based system for setting up sessions. I’m also fond of the fact that I can record the Skype call as a backup simultaneously with my end of the call, which I then combine with other tracks when editing. When I’m not using it to record podcasts, I occasionally use Audio Hijack to record live shows of my favorite bands that are streamed on the web.

Getting ready to record AppStories using Audio Hijack.

Audio Processing

Adobe Audition. The first step in putting together AppStories each week is to loudness match the tracks. Adobe Audition is a full audio editor, but I like Logic better for that task. Although there are other ways to loudness match tracks, Audition’s matching is superior to everything else I’ve tried so in my workflow, that is the single task delegated to Audition.

iZotope RX 6 Standard. Once they’ve been loudness matched, I run both Federico and I’s AppStories tracks through iZotope. I spent a lot of time in 2017 setting up two sets of filters that are customized for each of our voices and recording environments to improve the quality of our tracks. I’ve set the filters up as a batch process so I can open our tracks, click process, and come back later when iZotope is finished. It takes 15-20 minutes to process a 30-minute episode, but with batch processing, I can prepare the show notes or do other work until the tracks are finished and ready for me to start editing in Logic.

iZotope got upgraded to version 7.0 in 2018, but I haven’t updated yet. There are a couple of new features that might be useful to me, but I’m happy with how the app currently works, so for now, I’m not upgrading.

Editing

BetterTouchTool. I’m including BetterTouchTool as part of the podcasting section because that’s how I use it more often than not. I need to explore other ways to work the app into my daily routine, but for 2018, BetterTouchTool has been a big help when I edit in Logic Pro X.

The trouble with editing podcasts in Logic is that it’s designed for musicians. So, although Logic has the best tools for editing podcasts that I’ve found, it’s got lots more that I don’t need. That doesn’t matter most of the time because I know the parts of Logic that I use and leave everything else alone, but occasionally it becomes a problem.

For instance, Logic has many, many shortcuts that are easy to accidentally press because many are single letter shortcuts that don’t require using a modifier key. To reduce the amount my hands are on the keyboard where I might inadvertently invoke a shortcut that I don’t know how to undo, I use BetterTouchTool. Now, trimming a track is a two-finger tap on my trackpad instead of ⌘T and selecting all following parts of all tracks is a three-finger tap instead of ⇧F. I’ve also got gestures for deselecting all tracks (three-finger double tap) and a gesture to back up two seconds to replay a segment (four-finger double tap). As a result, I rarely use the keyboard for anything other than starting and stopping playback and deleting segments of audio. At this point, the gestures are so well memorized that it’s hard to imagine editing another way.

Post-Processing

Forecast. The final step in producing AppStories is to take the WAV file exported from Logic and open it in Marco Arment’s Forecast to apply metadata and encode it as an MP3. Forecast’s encoder is so fast that it’s often finished encoding an episode before I copy its title and paste it into Forecast. The app also grabs markers to auto-generate chapters, remembers the AppStories show art, auto-fills URLs for returning sponsors, and gives me the total time and file size information I need for the AppStories WordPress site. More than just an MP3 encoder, Forecast take a bunch of little steps in the production process and makes them effortless.

Post-processing a Club MacStories exclusive episode of AppStories in Forecast.

Planning

Fantastical. I don’t have much need for a calendar. Calls and meetings are mostly a thing of the past. I’ve gone back to Apple’s built-in Calendar from time to time, but in the end, I keep coming back to Fantastical for its natural language event entry. I’ve started experimenting with GoodTask on the Mac and iOS, which builds task management on top of Apple’s Reminders, and I’m revisiting Agenda as a way of combining notes and tasks that have a due date, which may also require a rethinking of my calendar setup in 2019.

Things. I switched to Things early in 2018 and spent the entire year using it to manage all aspects of my work and personal life. Like a lot of people, I’ve never been entirely happy with my task management system. As a result, I’ve tried all the major apps over several years.

Recurring Club MacStories tasks in Things.

What I like most about Things is its design and flexibility. I can drag tasks around into the order I prefer and add sections to projects to separate related groups of tasks from each other without creating a separate project. I can also nest subtasks within a single complex task, which work well as a checklist for more involved tasks.

As with any task manager I’ve used, I still have gripes though. I find the way Things divides times into start dates, reminders, and deadlines confusing, repeating tasks are clunky to set up, and I’d like to be able to complete future recurring events before their start date.

Overall, however, Things has worked well for me this year and is one of the best examples of cross-platform feature parity between the Mac and iOS that I’ve used, which is critical for a task manager. I’m sure I will experiment with alternatives in 2019, but for now, I don’t have a compelling reason to switch away from Things.

Due. Most of my Due timers get set on my iPhone, but having the app nag me on my Mac too is a plus. The app hasn’t seen much more than bug fixes on the Mac for the past few years, and its pinstripe background looks tired at this point, but it syncs with the iOS version and works reliably.

I don’t use a lot of Due timers, but I have a few recurring ones for weekly tasks that are easy to forget to do, like taking out the garbage and posting a link to AppStories on MacStories. When an alarm goes off, I’ll usually dismiss it on my Mac when the notification pops up or push it forward to a later time on my Apple Watch.

Trello. Trello has two primary uses. First, we use it every week for planning MacStories Weekly, our newsletter for Club MacStories members. Each week there’s a list of cards for the current issue we are working on, and lists to collect material for specific sections like the Interesting Links and App Debuts sections. Other lists are automated and populate with questions from readers and workflow requests that we can review and pick to address in a particular issue. Everything is assigned to a person, so everyone knows who is responsible for which sections of the newsletter.

Second, during the times each year that we get extra busy such as the periods surrounding Apple events and the release of updated OSes, we have an editorial calendar board that keeps track of who is covering what and each story’s status. The board is an excellent way to visualize who is responsible for what and when it’s expected to be published.

I like the Trello service more than its Mac app. The app is a bit of a resource drain, but fortunately, it’s something I only have to open periodically through the week, which makes it tolerable.

MindNode. This story began in MindNode. The first version was organized around ‘work’ and ‘personal,’ which morphed into types of work, activities, and utilities that touch every aspect of my Mac use. As I went, I added apps off the top of my head. Next, I subdivided activities into their components and looked through the Finder to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important. Finally, I went through and took a few apps off the list, eliminated the Apple apps, which aren’t the focus of the story, and reorganized everything between work on the left and personal/other on the right. It’s an organic process that works well for this sort of lengthy, sprawling story.

Planning this story in MindNode.

MindNode is unique in that it’s the only text-based brainstorming app I use other than when I take notes for an article in my text editor. Typically I turn to the iPad and Apple Pencil to sketch out my ideas in GoodNotes, Linea Sketch, or Concepts, but that’s not an option on the Mac. Moreover, this is a story about Mac apps, so it made the most sense to write it sitting at my Mac where I could open the apps I’m writing about and the Mac App Store as needed.

Looking at the quick mind map I created for this story, I’m tempted to tweak the colors of some of the branches, but I keep the formatting panel of MindNode closed because the goal is to write this story, not to create a beautifully balanced, colorful mind map. Therefore, I use the default MindNode templates and treat my mind maps as the scrap paper I want them to be. They’re my back of the napkin sketch, roadmap, and checklist all rolled into one, and judging from the branches I’ve completed so far, I’ve got a lot of writing to go.

Communication and Social

Chatology. A lot of my conversations with Federico about MacStories and AppStories happen over Messages. I’m usually good about pulling tasks and other information out of those conversations as we chat, but sometimes things get buried in the thread when I’m out and responding from my iPhone, for example. That’s when I turn to Chatology by Flexibits.

I don’t use Chatology a lot, but when I need to find an old Messages thread, it’s a lifesaver. The app provides the search functionality that I wish was built into Messages in the first place. By enabling the app’s Messages integration, the app opens automatically and quickly when I type ⌘F. Typing a query returns any archived Messages logs that match your search. Queries can also be restricted to specific preset timeframes, and you can browse matching links and images as well as conversations. That’s usually enough to help me find what I’m looking for, but I wish there were a way to expand the context around matched queries so I could view more of the surrounding conversation than is provided.

Slack. Slack is where Club MacStories newsletters get planned, we discuss the upcoming editorial calendar, and plan special projects. With a small team, the volume of messages in the MacStories Slack is manageable, so I leave notifications on for most of the channels we maintain.

Why yes, we do have a Club MacStories butler.

I don’t have much positive to say about Slack on the Mac other than it lets me use Slack on my Mac. The app is a must-have only because it’s where the MacStories team gathers to discuss what we’re doing. The trouble is, the app is incredibly slow to load, a resource hog, and doesn’t act like you’d expect a Mac app to behave. It’s bad enough that I usually try to keep it closed unless there’s an active conversation happening and I’m at my Mac. Often, I use my iPhone as needed and leave Slack closed on my Mac instead.

Spark. Spark has one feature that has made a substantial difference in how we use email on the MacStories team. The app’s in-line chat feature streamlines sharing information among team members. Before Spark’s 2018 update, if one of us got a message from a developer or someone else that we wanted to share with someone else on the team, we had to forward it and add some commentary. That multiplied the messages in our inboxes and made responding difficult if you weren’t the original recipient of the message.

With sharing and in-line chat, I can now share a message I receive with Federico and other members of the team and add my commentary in the chat below the email thread. It doesn’t sound like a big difference from forwarding messages at first, but it is. Our chats surrounding an email thread are brief, but useful because they happen in the context of the information we are discussing and not somewhere else like Slack.

Tweetbot. Tweetbot has been my Twitter client on Mac and iOS for a very long time now. I miss the statistics Tweetbot used to display before Twitter shut down third-party developer access to some of its APIs this past summer, but a long list of mute filters and familiarity keep me coming back despite periodic experimentation with Twitterrific.

My use of Tweetbot has changed a lot over the years, which has coincided in no small measure with how the service has changed for the worse. Nonetheless, it’s still a meaningful way we publicize what’s going on with MacStories and AppStories and for readers and listeners to provide feedback. Twitter also informs a lot of my work, surfacing ideas, links, and apps.

Rocket. Rocket is a must-have for anyone who uses emoji. The app sits in your menu bar and allows you to summon emoji much as you would in Slack by typing a colon and a search term. A contextual menu pops up with any matching glyphs. Pick one, and it’s pasted into your document. That’s all there is to it, but it’s light years ahead of Apple’s Character Viewer mini app that’s built into macOS.

Photography

I go through seasons with photography, taking lots of pictures for a period and then hardly any at all for long periods. One of the most extended droughts was in 2018. Walking to and from the train station each weekday and around Chicago when I commuted downtown in 2017 was a catalyst for photography. Sitting at a desk in my home office just isn’t quite as inspiring.

That’s meant having to be more conscious about setting aside time to get out and take photos, which is something I’ve started to do more as 2018 comes to an end. I’ve also begun to explore product photography, which is more technical and challenging than I expected. I’ve done a little here and there for MacStories, but I’d like to do more.

Lightroom CC. To that end, I recently bought a new camera and have been trying out new apps for editing the pictures I take. On the Mac, that’s been Lightroom CC.

Editing in Lightroom CC.

I’ve resisted Adobe’s subscription model for a long time primarily because the only options were expensive bundles that make sense for designers and pro photographers, but not someone who dipped in and out of photography periodically. That’s begun to change with more affordable pricing tiers. Also, my wife works at a high school now, which means we can get an even better deal with her educational discount.

Lightroom’s set of photo management and editing tools is robust without being overwhelming. I’m by no means an expert with Lightroom’s tools, but I’ve found it to be a good playground to edit my best iPhone and DSLR shots. I also like that my photos aren’t ingested automatically by Lightroom. I prefer to import them so that only my best shots are stored in Lightroom and Adobe’s Creative Cloud online service.

Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro has gotten significant updates since its launch right before my last roundup of must-have Mac apps. It became one of my favorite image editors almost immediately. Often, I use Pixelmator Pro for simple tasks like combining multiple screenshots for a story I’m writing, but I also use it for photo editing and more complex layouts. For instance, I found it was the perfect tool for lining up and evenly spacing dozens of app icons for our Club MacStories anniversary member perks in September.

Laying out must-have icons in Pixelmator Pro.

During 2018, probably no bigger change has been made to Pixelmator Pro than the addition of machine learning-based auto-enhancement of photos. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s a fantastic start that can be tweaked manually once applied. Pixelmator Pro is also a paid-up-front app, which makes it an excellent choice if you don’t want to commit to a subscription from Adobe.

Retrobatch. Retrobatch is a photo utility from Flying Meat, the maker of image editor Acorn. Retrobatch, as the name suggests, can batch-process photos. The app works a little like Audio Hijack does with audio. You connect nodes of functionality that can run sequentially or in parallel on folders of images. It’s a powerful approach that abstracts away a lot of the complexity. Each node is customizable with different properties that can be adjusted to fit your needs too.

I don’t batch process images often, but Retrobatch was a big time-saver when I was working with those icons for Club MacStories that I mention in the Pixelmator Pro section above. The icons were all different sizes, but with Retrobatch, I created a uniformly-sized set in a matter of seconds.

xScope. xScope from The Iconfactory is another tool that I don’t use every day but is necessary several times per year. The app is a suite of tools for measuring screen distances and inspecting layouts. Every now and then, I find myself doing some sort of layout where the tools in whatever app I’m using aren’t capable of measuring some aspect that I want to get just right. For those times, I always turn to xScope.

Mac mini Server

I almost bought a new Mac mini when they were announced in October. My MacBook Pro made more sense when I was commuting every day, and with the right specs, I could get a mini that would approach the power of an iMac Pro, but for a lot less money. That purchase might happen eventually, but for now, I’m going to stick with the MacBook Pro.

In the meantime, I still have a late 2014 Mac mini that works perfectly well. I use it for a couple of things. First, it’s my macOS beta testing machine. Over the summer as I worked on my Mojave review, I relocated the mini, which usually sits in the corner of the room, to my desk, installed Mojave and most of the apps I use every day, and made it my primary computer, switching back to the MacBook primarily for recording and editing AppStories.

When the mini isn’t being used for testing though, it runs Time Machine backups, some automation, but most importantly, my Plex server and video library. I have an HDHomeRun Extend that sits in a room on the second floor of my house connected to a TV antenna. The HDHomeRun transcodes the TV signal it receives and transports it across my network to the mini, which serves live TV and recorded shows through Plex.

Screens and Luna Display. My mini runs headless, so I use Screens and a Luna Display dongle and app to access it. When I’m using my MacBook Pro, I access the mini with Screens. My network connection to the mini is usually wired, which helps make the experience incredibly smooth. I also occasionally use Screens to access my Mac when I’m away from home and need to access files on it, but most of the time, I use it to interact with a handful of apps.

The Luna Display helper app that runs on my mini along with its Mini DisplayPort dongle allows me to access the mini from my iPad. I could do that with Screens’ iOS app too, and I do when I’m away from home, but the Luna Display turns my iPad into a second display for my Mac with virtually no lag and the addition of touch controls. It feels like absolute magic and renders the fact that the mini is sitting in the corner of my basement inconsequential.

MakeMKV. I’m tired of having physical disks and the hardware to play them. A couple of months ago I bought a Blu-ray and DVD drive for my mini to copy the remaining movies and TV shows we have on disks to an external hard drive that’s attached to the mini. MakeMKV is one of the homeliest apps I’ve ever used on the Mac, but it does an amazing job decrypting Blu-ray disks.

Handbrake. Handbrake can handle DVDs or MKV files fed to it after decrypting them with MakeMKV. The 2014 mini struggles with transcoding big movie files, but I’m not in a rush. I just pop in a movie when I think of it as I work and am slowly working through our entire collection.

Encoding AppStories promos in Handbrake.

The next step will be to automate the process. I haven’t had time to investigate this yet, but other than inserting a disk, I’d like Handbrake and MakeMKV to do their thing without my intervention.

Plex. Plex runs all of the live TV I’m capturing through the HDHomeRun and movies ripped from disks. Plex can be a little tedious to fiddle with, but it works well with the HDHomeRun and plays nice with apps like Channels and Infuse on the Apple TV, which I prefer as alternatives or front ends to Plex. One feature of Plex I like a lot is the ability to watch live TV when I’m not on my home network. Hulu and other services limit how long you can do this, so an antenna is a nice alternative to those services for some shows.

Utilities

When I went through the apps on my Mac to decide which are must-haves, I realized that I use more utilities than I thought. I guess that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I use lots of utilities on iOS too, but the difference is in the kind of utilities I use. While iOS utilities are usually self-contained bits of functionality with limited effect on the system and other apps, many of my Mac utilities fundamentally change the way I use my computer on a system level.

System Customization

Alfred. At this point, I am virtually lost on a Mac without Alfred. For a long time, I used Alfred almost exclusively as an app launcher. Things really began to click with Alfred this year as I spent more and more time on my Mac. At first, I put together simple workflows to do things like search MacStories. Next, I began using Alfred’s snippet feature and clipboard history. Text snippets in Alfred are not as powerful as an app like TextExpander, but I don’t use many snippets, which makes Alfred a worthy alternative.

Custom Alfred workflows.

More recently, I’ve begun to use Alfred to kick off Automator workflows like one I made to automate several steps required to create a contract from a template, populate a couple of fields in it, and move the file to a specific folder. Another action I use all the time works with Yoink, another of my must-have apps. With a few keystrokes, I can find a file I send to people almost every week and send it to Yoink where it’s ready to be dragged into an email message. Alfred also takes me directly to certain Club MacStories documents in Google Docs and to the archive of back issues of the MacStories Weekly and Monthly Log newsletters, removing a little bit of friction from my workflow every day.

Yoink. Yoink is a temporary parking spot for files, text, and images. I’ve got the app set up to display its drop zone close to the pointer as I drag a file instead of the left or right edge of the screen. That eliminates what would otherwise be a lot of long drags across my 27-inch display.

Once files are in Yoink, I can drag them to another destination or lock them in place so I can drag them off Yoink’s shelf and into multiple email messages for instance. The iOS version of Yoink has made the Mac version more powerful too by allowing me to use Handoff to move files and images quickly from my iPhone or iPad to my Mac. One way I often use this is to send screenshots to my Mac which I can then right-click on in Yoink’s shelf to access the Services menu where I have a custom Service for uploading images to the MacStories CDN.

Moom. I’ve never been a fan of the way the traffic light buttons in the corner of a Mac’s window work. Maybe that’s the hard time I did in front of a Windows PC, but I want my window to fill the screen when I click the green button, not go into full-screen mode, which I almost never use on my Mac. That’s why I use Moom.

The utility, which is made by Many Tricks, overlays window resizing options when you hover over the green maximize button. For the most part, I use the full-screen option or left or right half of the screen options when I want to work in two apps at one time. Although I don’t use the features, you can also customize the window resizing, snap windows to corners and edges where they will resize based on your preferences, drag out the window size you want using the same popup you get when hovering over the green button, and have Moom remember the position of windows, which can be reset with the press of a hot key.

PopClip. I use PopClip over and over every day. It works like the contextual menu that pops up when you select text on iOS, letting you manipulate highlighted text or send it to other apps. My most-used PopClip action is one of the simplest: search. If I see something in an article I’m reading that isn’t linked to something and want to learn more, I highlight the text, click the search icon, and a Google search is instantly initiated in Safari using the highlighted text. I also use PopClip to open links, convert rich text to Markdown, and Markdown to rich text or HTML.

I don’t use it a lot, but my most complex PopClip extension is one that takes a highlighted promo code and converts it into an on-screen image formatted like an iTunes gift card that I can scan with my iPhone to redeem. It’s a little thing, but now that promo codes for apps can’t be redeemed on a Mac, the extension lets me deal with the code in the email message that is open on my Mac instead of finding the message on an iOS device.

Bartender. Bartender lets me hide some of the menu bar apps that run on my Mac behind its menu bar icon. When I’m running my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode on a 27-inch display, there’s plenty of room for all of my menu bar apps across the top of my screen, but despite uninstalling ones I don’t use, things get cramped quickly when I’m using my Mac’s built-in 13-inch screen. Using Bartender prevents that by letting me hide my least-used menu bar apps behind its icon.

The other reason to use Bartender, even if you run a Mac full-time on a big display, is organization. The app allows you to hide some items completely, show others only when they are performing some task, and tuck others away behind Bartender’s icon, all of which provide a better menu bar app experience regardless of whether your display is space-constrained.

Maintenance

Backblaze. I rarely need to think about Backblaze, which is one of its greatest strengths. The app just sits quietly in my menu bar, sending files off to the cloud in the background, updating itself, and sending me periodic email reports on the status of my backups.

I’ve been using the online backup service for so long that I don’t recall when I first signed up anymore. Fortunately, I’ve never had to resort to Backblaze to recover data, but it’s a cheap insurance policy against disaster for the 500GB or so of data it is safekeeping, and one I bought for my kids when they went off to college too.

CleanMyMac X. I create a lot of temporary files throughout the week that would fill up my MacBook Pro’s storage quickly if left unattended. To help minimize the clutter, I run CleanMyMac X once a week. I could empty my Mac’s Trash on my own easily enough, but CleanMyMac X also takes care of large caches and other unnecessary system files that are wasting storage. With the introduction of the latest version earlier this year, the scanning process became much faster, which has kept me on a more regular cleaning schedule than in the past. The app also scans for malware and performs other system optimizations that I let run but aren’t what I care about. What I like is recovering 10-20GB most weeks with minimal effort.

Freeing up storage with CleanMyMac X.

iStat Menus. I rediscovered iStat Menus earlier this year and have had it running in my menu bar ever since. Currently, I’m using the CPU and memory gauges as well as monitoring the internal temperature of my Mac. If an app or processor is misbehaving, iStat Menus can often provide a clue about what might be happening. Also, if I’m processing audio, which maxes out my MacBook Pro’s CPU, a sudden drop in activity is also a quick way to tell that the work is finished.

Encrypt.me. Like Backblaze, VPN app Encrypt.me is an app I rarely have to think about. It launches at login and sits in my menu bar hidden by Bartender. When I’m at home, Encrypt.me just sits there doing nothing because I’m on a network I’ve marked as ‘trusted.’ When I leave home and connect to the WiFi in a coffee shop or hotel though, Encrypt.me kicks in, securing my connection to the Internet. Most of the time the data I’m transmitting over WiFi wouldn’t be interesting to someone, but using Encrypt.me gives me the peace of mind to check my bank accounts and make purchases online without wondering if someone else can see what I’m doing.

1Password. Looking back at the security breaches that punctuated 2018, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince people that they should be using strong passwords. 1Password is one of the first apps I install on a new Mac. Without it, I couldn’t log into many of the services I use because I have no idea what the passwords are; only 1Password does. In addition to safely storing passwords, I have secure notes with banking and other information I want to keep behind a strong password.

I also spent part of 2018 going back and auditing old passwords from years ago that aren’t as secure as they should have been or were used in multiple places. 1Password makes that easy by evaluating the strength of your passwords and flagging ones that are weak or used more than once.

iOS Companions

More than the other members of the MacStories team, I work across both iOS and the Mac. As a result, I prefer apps that are strong on both platforms and use utilities and hardware like Screens and the Luna Display to bridge the two systems. A couple of new utilities in the same vein became must-haves this year: iMazing and Remote for Mac.

iMazing. I use iMazing primarily to keep my iOS devices backed up. It works over WiFi or a Lightning cable connected to my Mac and, unlike iTunes, has the benefit of creating incremental backups, which make it easy to roll back to a particular stable version of an iOS setup. iMazing can also store your iOS apps on your Mac for faster future installation and backup purposes. Finally, once in a while, I have a reason to dig into the data stored in an app, which is something that can be done with iMazing’s file system browser.

Backing up an iPad with iMazing.

Remote for Mac. Remote for Mac is a helper app that pairs with an iOS app of the same name. Maybe this app is a little bit of a cheat since it’s only a helper app on the Mac, but it’s made my Mac life better this year, so I wanted to call it out. Remote for Mac became one of my new must-have apps this year when it added Siri shortcut support for basic Mac system functions like turning a Mac’s display on and off, restarting, and a long list of other functions.

Earlier this year I discovered that my Mac wasn’t always turning off its display according to the timer set in System Preferences. Remote for Mac has provided the perfect solution. Now, when I leave my desk for the day I tell Siri ‘I’m finished working,’ and Shortcuts takes care of turning off the lights and the display on my Mac.

Other

Deliveries. It’s the holiday season, and I can’t help but be reminded of Deliveries, an app that I’ve used since it was an OS X widget. The app by Junecloud manages to stay on top of a long list of delivery services around the world, making it easy to add orders and track them straight to your door.

My favorite integrations are the ones for Amazon and Apple. Both need nothing more than an order number to pull the necessary information about what you ordered and when it’s arriving. Add to that fast, reliable syncing across the Mac and iOS, and Deliveries has been one of my must-have Mac apps since long before I was writing about must-have apps.

1Blocker. I wish we lived in a world where I didn’t feel the need to use a content blocker. I don’t have a philosophical issue with ad-supported web content, but too many sites take ads and other page elements too far, ruining the reading experience. That’s where 1Blocker comes in. I’ve tried alternatives, but 1Blocker still does a better job than other blockers I’ve used, letting me block not only the worst advertising, but also social network widgets, cookie notices, trackers, and other garbage. I also appreciate that the app makes it simple to whitelist sites that don’t create reader-hostile environments, which I make a point of regularly doing.

1Blocker has loads of blocking rules.

Dropbox. If iCloud Drive added folder sharing, I might consider leaving Dropbox. I pay for more storage than I need on both, so it’s an area that would benefit from consolidation and save me money. Until that happens, most of my work files live in Dropbox where they are available on all of my devices. The cross-platform convenience and knowing that when I’m finished recording AppStories, Federico’s file will appear a few seconds later in a shared folder, make Dropbox indispensable. Beyond AppStories files, we have shared folders related to big projects and administrative aspects of MacStories, which allows either of us easy access to the latest versions of various files.

Other than as a shared file system, the only Dropbox-specific feature I use is its ability to remove screenshots from the Desktop and deposit them in a Dropbox folder. I like the automated cleanup the feature offers as well as the access to those screenshots across devices.

Looking at my 2018 must-have Mac apps, there’s an interesting contrast between what I consider must-haves on iOS and the Mac. On iOS, many of the apps I consider must-haves are compelling because of a single feature that sets one app apart from others or because it fits especially well with how I work. Too often that’s not the case on the Mac. I find myself explaining that I use a particular app because ‘it gets the job done.’ That’s because there are too few alternatives to some apps, which is a shame. The situation isn’t dire, and there are pockets of healthy competition and abundance among Mac apps, but the choices I have are not anywhere near what I have to pick from on iOS.

We’re heading into an interesting transition period that I expect will fundamentally change what a Mac app is. I’m cautiously optimistic because I’d rather have Apple lead the way with its Marzipan initiative than watch the macOS app ecosystem continue to be balkanized by cross-platform apps that don’t feel right or perform poorly on a Mac. There’s no guarantee that what Apple has in mind will work, but I’m glad the company is trying.

I also hope that 2019 continues to bring Apple’s plans for the Mac into focus. With a new Mac Pro on the horizon and further news about Marzipan likely at WWDC, the picture of where things are headed should become more clear. My hope is that part of that future is tighter integration between iOS and macOS that acknowledges the differences that make sense given the hardware you’re using, but allows the platforms to meet in the middle in a way that is less about how the underlying operating systems work and more about the task to be completed. That may be a lot to ask because it means the Mac will change, which will be hard for some people to accept, but the time feels right to ‘think different’ about what Mac apps can and should be.

I’m right there with you on this one John. ↩

On iOS I use lire. ↩

The remaining 10% primarily consists of non-app purchases made within 48 hours of clicking one of my app links, which still counts for Apple’s affiliate program purposes. ↩