MY MAC APPS OF TWENTY TWENTY THREE

I know grumbling and complaining is sort of my thing, but it's the end of the year and even I can't keep up that pace. It's also the first time where I'll probably rain a lot of praise on some products that deserve it, sure, but also some that definitely don't. I suppose points for consistency there.

I also know that there are few things as personal as the platonic idea of the ~workflow~. It's impossible to satisfy everyone's requirements, and even employment at city hall hasn't made me enough of a public servant to even pretend to want to.

Raise your eyes up a little higher and read again: These are MY Mac apps of 2023. Not yours. You're welcome to take any and all recommendations, or use my arguments to convince you why not to use these - at the end of the day I don't care - but do me a favour and keep your thoughts to yourself. My website doesn't have a comment feature, and that's by design. And keep your grubby paws off my email.

Also, a few ground rules here. 2023 doesn't mean they came out in 2023, just that I started using them. I use an M1 Mac, a big fuck off ultrawide external display, an iPhone and an iPad. This means while I do have a Windows computer, it's just there to keep me humble and my Returnal high scores backed up. I don't use Windows for productivity. Some of these apps are paid, the big ones are free, and I try to prefer open-source where possible. It's not a must though. I'm gay enough for a design degree, but not gay enough for one in computer science.

Nobody understands the sanctity of the personalised workflow better than Apple. At least, that's what I'm getting out of the fact that the Mac ships with a half-assed Word clone, a quarter-assed Excel clone and no way to split a screen in half to use two windows at once. Yes, I know about the full screen thing. We're not going there today.

Frankly, there's... a lot fundamentally wrong with macOS that really shouldn't be left to people with Xcode copies to fix. Collapse menu bar icons? Seperate app, and none of the options are perfect. Snap a window to the side? Guess what, there's 15 apps doing the same thing in the App Store.

Which is why 1 Piece was such a pleasant surprise for me. From what I can tell, Takahiro Fujita is–similar to me–a complainer. Unlike me, he actually fixes them though, and does so with a good dose of Japanese jank-charm. This completely free app does it all. It slices, it dices, it snaps windows, it changes focus, it quits, it restarts.

Seriously. You like Magnet, Hookshot, Spectacle, Rectangle, BST? It's in there. You like Lasso? That's in there too. You like AltTab? Guess what. It's in there. Swish too, if you were thinking about it. It also can move your cursor, and lets you easily assign macros to double-tapping the modifier keys, all of which should be built in. Seriously, if you use a Mac, get it. It's so much better than all the other apps it's not even funny.

I also finally pulled the trigger on a good friend of mine - Brackets. Adobe Brackets, which was my personal Stockholm syndrome for far too long, finally broke. I mostly do web design, and that means HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. And yes, you really can't beat Visual Studio Code. It's fast enough, very extensible, and for an idiot like myself Copilot is very welcome. Also free, but you knew that. Endorsement. Easy win.

I've also become one of those assholes that use Setapp. If you can make friends with a student to get an education discount, I think 60 bucks a year is more than okay. Especially because the combination of PixelSnap and CleanShot X are already more than that combined - and definitely worth the price.

I mean, I'll be honest. If the amount of praise I'd give to those two apps alone was pure carbon, I'd have to plant a minor forest to offset that. Yes, it's pretentious as hell. Yes, they're taking themselves way too seriously for an app that makes screenshots that you'll look at once, then leave on your desktop forever. But it's also that good. Especially since macOS really doesn't have anything like Paint. A good alternative here is Shottr, which is mostly free - they changed it recently and I don't care enough to check.

Paste is also good, and in Setapp. It's not worth the price though. Think of it like a bonus app you get - if you don't wanna pay the ridiculous premium, try PastePal, Pastebot and the clipboard history in golden boy Raycast.

AlDente, QuitAll, BetterZip and DisplayBuddy... they don't deserve to be in Setapp. They're microprograms at best and could have all been a pref pane, but they do the job and they do their job well. ForkLift is a very good FTP client, Folx is a very good downloader, HoudahSpot is... well, it looks like it was made in the Mountain Lion days, but it's genuinely really good, so I can't complain there either. BusyCal is my calendar of choice, since Cron is stupid, and if you don't already have a writing app, Ulysses isn't the worst choice. The best choice is, as we know, iA Writer 6.

There is one app that has saved my ass many times, though. It's called TextSoap, it's also in Setapp, but I'd pay 60 bucks for it regardless. It is another of the hideous ones, but oh lord does it make up for that in features. TextSoap is, in essence, a text formatting app. You paste in your text - rich or plain, doesn't matter - and then apply your "Cleaners". These do various things - like de-smartifying quotation marks, cleaning line breaks, extract text from HTML, reposition or redecorate, and you can even write your own cleaners in their simple-to-use builder. For 50 bucks, it's honestly a steal if you have to work with text in any capacity, really. It even sits in the services menu so you don't even have to open it.

Timing– and Rewind, but I have a bone to pick with them– is a really solid app to look back at your history. Think of it like Screen Time, but on steroids. In fact, it is Screen Time, and it even pulls in usage from your other devices through that API. Seeing your workday visually laid out in what you did, all fully automatic, is really really neat and saves you a lot of time when it comes to doing your timecards. Rewind, the greedy fuckers, finally added a free tier that doesn't suck - but I'd still box it in with a firewall. Don't trust all that GPT nonsense. My data stays on my device, especially when it's everything I ever did.

All right, quick fire round. PDF Squeezer, solid addition for Setapp. Makes your PDFs smaller and strips out metadata. PCalc, extremely good calculator, and supports my flavour of autism with Reverse Polish Notation. SideNotes is neat, but I don't use it as much as I should, Finalist looks very nice for a todo app, Craft is way less cool than it looks, Permute does what it needs to as a nicer HandBrake, Logseq is still stupid if Obsidian exists, and TextPal should be built-in to macOS, StopTheMadness stops the madness of the modern internet and should be awarded a purple heart.

I also had a lot of fun with Monodraw. It's a design app for making ASCII art, and it's honestly just a blast to fuck around with. Probably useful too if you're in the business of making text-mode apps that run from inside the terminal. Speaking of!

Finally, I've set up my terminal how I wanted. Currently, I'm using iTerm2 with Zsh, and yes, I have OMZ installed. I also have Starship installed, if only to customise my prompt. It's fun, and it makes my terminal fashionable and a joy to use. Don't forget to write your own aliases and functions, even if it's just to save two keypresses. It's worth it. The font is Berkeley Mono, by the way. Highly recommend.

On the creative front, not much has changed. Affinity, CC, Sketch to season and Pixelmator to taste. I did get a new camera this year though - a Blackmagic 6K - and I was honestly blown away by how much better Davinci Resolve is at video editing than even Final Cut. It's intuitive, even if you've only used Premiere and Final Cut before, and it comes with Fusion for mogfx and Fairlight for audio editing. Oh yeah, did I mention it's free?

Quick look over at the phone, since that rotation of apps is constantly changing as well. Currently, I really enjoy Longplay for the album-focused Apple Music client that I've always wanted, Peaks is a cute way to check on your biorhythm even though I don't know if it works that well - and because Apple Mail doesn't want to talk to my brilliant perfect Email server (it must be nervous) I switched to Edison Mail. Free, fast, and no serverside nonsense like with Spark. On the Mac, MailMate reigns supreme. If you're in Germany, use OPNV Navigator for your pubtrans needs. No, not DB Navigator, that one blows - although I wish the Mac version was also free.

I also really like Noteshelf on the iPad to take, well, notes. It's a one-time payment and can go toe to toe with Goodnotes and Notability easily. Oh, and, secret tip: Yattee is a free and open-source client for YouTube through Invidious and PipeD. Yes, a free app, in the app store, that gives you ad free and sponsor blocked YouTube, with PIP, with background play. To set it up, open it, go to Settings then Locations, and paste https://r.yattee.stream/manifest-invidious-piped.json in the URL field, then hit Reload Manifest. Voila!

And, let's give a quick shoutout to services: Tailscale is what I've always wanted a true VPN to be, and it's completely free, and for the kind of VPN that they sell to you on YouTube video essays I recommend Mullvad. They store all their stuff in RAM, and keep no logs at all. That alone deserves the rec.

I also switched to hosting on Uberspace. They're honestly very refreshing and humble, and the servers you get are very reasonable for small web services and personal sites. Don't give IONOS money. Go to Uberspace instead, and register at Cloudflare - they know what they're doing and it's usually very cheap.

So there you have it - all the best apps and services I've added to my arsenal and that I can recommend. And before you go and complain that your favourite window manager isn't on there: I don't care. Nobody cares, and your one app isn't an exception.

Swish is still cool though.