What's on my mac? Apps to create a productivity weapon for work, and personal side-projects

What’s on my mac? Apps to create a productivity weapon for work, and personal side-projects

What’s on my mac? Apps to create a productivity weapon for work, and personal side-projects

Oliver Barreto
by Oliver Barreto

Categories

  • Blog

Tags

  • Side-Projects
  • Apps
  • macOS
  • Productivity

image-right I just got a (not so) brand new Macbook Pro 16” 2019 i7, so it’s time to migrate from my old 2018 Macbook Pro 13”. Let’s setup this beast as a highly productive weapon for my development side-projects.

So without further due, let’s get this machine and tune it up to create a perfect productivity weapon for work and personal use. The secret sauce will be the pieces of software that run on it, and the configuration. In the next two articles I will post my personal preferences for both.

Let’s create a productivity weapon with a Macbook

In today’s post, I will focus on productivity. In the next article I will post everything to set it up for development.

  • Productivity for Work
  • Design
  • Comunications
  • Cloud sync
  • Enthusiast Apps
  • System level apps
  • Finally, a couple of tips for configuring finder and the mac hardware as well.

Productivity Apps for Work

  1. Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) is a Must as my PKMS (also know as Personal Knowledge Management System) which is my way to collect information of my interest for processing knowledge. It deserves a special and dedicated blogpost by itsef to explain my setup. Maybe more in te future as my workflow evolves. You’ve probably heard about Notion. Obsidian is similar, but different. And well, I don’t use Notion (yet). Obsidian has fully taken over my Day-One (https://dayoneapp.com) app workflow, my favorite journaling for personal use or work app, until I found Obsidian. this app is very good but has a couple of problems for me. First, it uses a propietary ñformat for your notes. Even toughtyou can export them, they are saved into a local database. Obsidian uses simple local markdown files in your filesystem. Second, it is a paid app that doesn’t allow you to do many things on the free version. For Obsidian, the sky is the limit, and we all know that in an open source community that is an infinite disntace before reaching the sky.
  2. FlowApp is another must !!! It is a “Beautiful Pomodoro timer app for Mac, iPhone & iPad !!!” (https://flowapp.info).
  3. Libre Office & Language Pack (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/)
  4. Microsoft Office for Mac 2016. If you can’t live without Powerpoint or Outlook, I recommend you get a license instead of working with Google Docs or LibreOffice suite. (www.microsoft.com)
  5. Draw.io (https://drawio-app.com/use-draw-io-offline/) for diagrams.
  6. Xmind is a good free Mindmap app (https://www.xmind.net/download/).
  7. Lastpass (https://www.lastpass.com/es) or Bitwarden (https://bitwarden.com) as password manager

Design Tools

  1. Figma (https://www.figma.com/download/desktop/mac)
  2. Apple Developer SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/)
  3. Apple Developer SF font families (https://developer.apple.com/fonts/)
  4. Sketch used to be my go to tool… not anymore they went the greedy way by charging anually.

Communications

  1. Slack (https://slack.com/intl/es-es/downloads/)
  2. Cisco Webex (https://www.webex.com/downloads.html)
  3. Microsoft Teams (https://www.microsoft.com/es-es/microsoft-teams/download-app)
  4. Skype (https://www.skype.com/es/get-skype/download-skype-for-desktop/)

Cloud Sync

You also would want to install and sync, which willl take a while, your cloud folders.

  1. Google Drive (https://www.google.com/intl/es/drive/download/)
  2. Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/downloading)
  3. Microsoft One Drive (https://www.microsoft.com/es-es/microsoft-365/onedrive/download)
  4. Synlogy Cloustation

Enthusiast Tools

  1. VIA Keyboard Configuration Tools (https://caniusevia.com)
  2. Karabiner Elements (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org). Yet another powerfull keyboard configuration by-pass for macOS. I use it for custominzing and enabling windows keyboards with mac style.
  3. Intel Power Gadget. If you have had an Intel Macbook you know what this next tool does. It provides CPU level temperature information. (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/tool/power-gadget.html).

System Apps

  1. Omni Labs OmniDisk Sweeper (https://www.omnigroup.com/download/latest/OmniDiskSweeper). If you have a mac laptop, your desik space is a precious resource. Even with 512 GB, you want to have full control of the space that is being used, or wasted. This app is your best friend for this task.
  2. Caffeine (https://intelliscapesolutions.com/apps/caffeine) to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep.
  3. Clipy (https://github.com/Clipy/Clipy) as a Clipboard extension app for macOS.
  4. CopyClip (https://apps.apple.com/es/app/copyclip-clipboard-history/id595191960?mt=12) as a clipboard history manager.
  5. Install a good looking minimal screen saver. The one of choice is “Padbury Clock” screen saver (https://padbury.app) or Fliqlo (https://fliqlo.com).

Configuring macOS

Also, to get macOS to my linking I always set a few things:

  1. Enable dragging windows with three fingers. This is a must for enjoying the magic trackpad. This is set on System Preferences/Accesibility/Mouse Control and then in Trackpad Options enable drag with 3 fingers.
  2. Enable Zoom with CTRL + Mouse Whell. This is set on System Preferences/Accesibility/Zoom.
  3. Customize Finder Side Bar by customizing at your liking Finder/Preferences.
  4. Customize Desktop by entering Visualization Options and then set Organize by: Class/Type to automatically arrange icons on your desktop and keep things clean and tidy.

Conclusion

Macs are great, and now mine is fully loaded with powerful tools for work productivity. In the next aritcle I will set it up for development for personal side-projects to have a fully operational machine.

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