Productivity Tools for New Mac Users
Whether you’re newly transitioning to using a Mac or just looking for some productivity hacks to enhance your workflow, my hope is that this article will provide a solid jump start for using some of my favorite tools. Just as my workflow developed (and continues to evolve) yours will be unique to you and what you’re doing — I’ll show you the path but it’s up to you to walk down it and tailor a system of tools that work for you.
Alfred 3 (FREE / 17£ / $22.60 Powerpack)
This is it folks, lead with your best. I have been obsessively using Alfred for about as long as I’ve been a Mac user, just over a year now, and I could never do without it. According to my usage statistics, i’ve had just about 12k Alfred uses since 9/15 and average 40 uses a day. Alfred is accessible, but complex to a depth that I would still consider myself to have a casual understanding of its true power.
At it’s most simple, it’s a suite of productivity tools centered around Alfred’s utilization of OS X’s very powerful Spotlight search utility. Not only can you define in more detail how the search works, setting file/folder filters, but you can completely customize the appearance and behavior of the Alfred search bar. Everything from transparency, colors, font and font size to the keyboard shortcut that activates Alfred in the first place.
Where Alfred really shines, is in its workflows. The workflow utility gives you the tools to create custom actions based on a multitude of possible triggers, integration with third party APIs and a deep level of customization. Even better, is the massive community of workflows already built that you can download and use—even customizing to your own preference. Packal.org was created by Shawn Patrick Rice and quickly became the de facto source for Alfred workflows. It’s full of interesting workflows and the forum is a great resource for debugging/tweaking existing workflows or getting started making your own. I plan to write up another post focusing on my favorite workflows for developers that I will be sure to link to here when published.
There are enough powerful features in Alfred to justify an entire post dedicated to learning them all, but between Alfred’s excellent documentation, some basic tutorials and the forums, both on Alfred’s site and Packal.org are enough to get anyone started. Just for good measure, here’s another one my most utilized Alfred features: Snippets!
Alfred gives you some significant clipboard customization, enabling you to set how many items are saved to it, how long they remain, and even deeper features—but even cooler than that is the snippets feature.
You can create collections of snippets and call them up lightning fast through Alfred or even skip the Alfred bar and turn on auto-expand to automatically expand snippets by keyword. I honestly only started taking full advantage of this recently and it’s taking over my workflows. For example, I used to use the snippets like this:
- type ‘snip’ into alfred bar or use my hot key (⇧+⌘+→) to open snippets menu
- select snippet by browsing snippet menu or typing keywords (which copies to clipboard and pastes to cursor on enter
What I do now is just type my keyword into any OS X text input and in a fraction of a second it recognizes the keyword and automatically expands it to a snippet. When I type ‘*webpack’ this pops up:
var webpack = require(‘webpack’);
var path = require(‘path’);module.exports = {
devtool: ‘inline-source-map’,
entry: [
‘webpack-dev-server/client?htt://127.0.0.1:8080/’,
‘webpack/hot/only/dev-server’,
‘.src’
],
output: {
path: path.join(_dirname, ‘public’),
filename: ‘bundle.js’
},
resolve: {
modulesDirectories: [‘node_modules’, ‘src’],
extenstions: [‘’, ‘.js’]
},
modules: {
loaders: [
{
test: /\.jsx?$/,
exlude: /node_module/,
loader: [‘react-hot’, ‘babel?presets[]=react,presets[]=es2015’]
}
]
},
plugins: [
new webpack.HotModuleReplacementPlugin(),
new webpacl.NoErrorsPlugin()
]
};
A basic webpack config, scaffolded in an instant. If your mind isn’t already racing with possibilities you’re just not paying attention. Now I’m a terribly slow typist, but just as a concrete example, let’s say it takes me about 10 seconds to call the snippet and tweak it to my needs. Let’s say it takes me a minute and half to type it out. Now even very conservatively, let’s say I use webpack once a week for year. That snippet alone saves me roughly an hour a year—compound that with a new snippet for anything I ever type more than three times a day, and you got a stew going baby!
You can even have some fun with it: every time I type “it’s not working” anywhere, it autocompletes to “it’s not working yet” for a mild dose of inspiration/amusement.
Alfred is free, with the premium “Powerpack” option running about $22 and enabling deeper search filters, more advanced features (I believe the auto-expand option for snippets is Powerpack only but I’m not positive) that you may or may not make use of. Just download Alfred, play with it, customize it, look around for some workflows and I promise that between all of the existing workflows, deeper features and base functionality, it’s just a matter of time before you feel guilty not throwing the developers some money for the full version.
BetterTouchTool (Free 45 day trial / Choose your price $3.99–$50)
BetterTouchTool started out very much as it sounds, as an arsenal of tools for tweaking hotkey and gesture mapping on OS X. Not only has it advanced to be much more full featured than that, but it is ridiculously powerful. This is another I’ve hardly scratched the surface of and the depth of customization is downright intimidating. BTT allows you to essentially customize almost any possible input device you could use; everything from your mouse, trackpad and keyboard to apple remotes and motion detection. The menus can be downright intimidating at first, but start with the simple settings and start playing with some of the more advanced features as you go.
What really makes it a must-have for a macro-junkie such as myself, is the ability to set every macro and gesture in a global or application scope. When I play League of Legends I have completely different macros, gestures suited to gaming. When I have the terminal, chrome or vlc as an active window, they all have their own respective macros. Two of the most simple and most favorites are both global, three finger swipe down focuses/opens my terminal regardless of which window space it’s running in, if at all, and a four finger swipe down anywhere will open the apple file menu and contextual application menu at the cursor—without ever moving the cursor, enabling me to use commands like File>New or accessing preferences and so on, much faster. Okay maybe not much faster but these things add up over time, as any seasoned developer will tell you (I imagine).
Another thing I must use it for dozens of times a day is to resize windows. By dragging almost any window to the sides, corners, or top you can snap the window to that half, quarter or full screen respectively. This may be slightly faster set to keyboard shortcuts (yes of course you can) but I’ve gotten used to the cursor set up and use it constantly. You can even set it to resize back to it’s previous size after dragging it away or retain it’s “snapped size” and like everything else, this has great depth of customization allowing you to change the color of the overlay, the snapping animation and many more details I’ve probably never even looked at.
Another similar honorable mention here would be Keyboard Maestro 7. The GUI looks a little dense, but well-organized and powerful. I’ve heard very good things about this but I’ve grown attached to BetterTouchTool and never found myself needing to try it out. As I said in the beginning, a lot of these app choices and preferences will and should be unique to you, so take a look at both and decide what feels like a better fit for you.
OS X Spaces (Free)
This one may be a touch obvious to longtime Mac users, but if you’re new to using OS X it’s not immediately obvious, despite being terribly useful. The above link is just a Spaces FAQ from Apple Support so give that a quick skim if you need to, and spend some time playing around with the spaces feature, and the settings in System Preferences>Mission Control — or just type mission into Alfred ;). By default, it arranges the spaces by most recently used, but you can turn that off and make them absolute unless moved. What’s really cool though, is being able to assign applications to be locked into specific spaces. Maybe you’re into that, maybe you’re not. Personally, I love it, and find that having those designated spaces keeps me organized. For example my setup is almost always:
Window 1: Always Evernote. Nothing else.
Window 2: Spotify and iTunes only
Window 3: Slack, Things (todo app), Airmail (email client) only
Window 4: Web development, text editor usually terminal
Window 5: Personal web browsing only
Window 6–16 (or whatever the limit is—I rarely go over 6–7) Whatever.
This is yet another thing where your mileage may vary, but it’s a great feature to familiarize yourself with — especially if OS X use is new to you.
Cheatsheet (Free)
Who among us doesn’t love a good cheatsheet? Cheatsheet is a simple app with one helpful feature; a long press of the command button will open a list of keyboard shortcuts for the currently active application. That’s all. Whether you need to remember that one obscure hotkey you used once, or simply want to learn more shortcuts for your most frequently used applications Cheatsheet is a free, clean and simple way to do it.
Evernote (Free / $35/yr Plus / $60/yr)
Evernote might already be a no brainer for some of you, but if you’re not using an ‘everything bucket app’ like Evernote or Onenote you’re missing out. I use my Evernote to store lists of resources broken up by category, class notes, brainstorming, and until I started using 1Password to manage all of my passwords and accounts, I just had an Evernote excel sheet with all of my login information. The real game changer with Evernote however, is the Evernote Web Clipper chrome extension. Once you connect it to your account you can quickly save anything in chrome to Evernote by saving a selection, the full webpage, taking a screenshot or even more options. This makes filling up your Evernote with helpful resources a breeze.
Evernote allows you to create cabinets, and notebooks within those to organize your content, which is great, but I actually prefer the tags system. tags can be made on the fly (even through the web clipper extension) and even niftier than that, they can be nested. Yet again, YMMV and your best route here is just developing a system that works for you, but by doing so and being consistent with it you can quickly come up something that makes it easy to store and find just about anything.
I’m sure there’s more tools worth mentioning here, but these are the primary ones that I use most consistently. I’ve been accused (more than a few times) of being a little too obsessive about my macros and workflows and spending too much time researching and developing mine but the best ones are a healthy mix of your own of your own experiments and other tried and true aliases/macros. Remember that things like macros and snippets should be in service of working better and more effectively—not lazily or less. Your time is more valuable than money—always—and I personally get a lot out of optimizing my expended time as much as possible; how are you going to spend yours?
