My Favorite Mac Apps in 2020
Hey everyone, I welcome you to yet another blog. This blog will be about The Mac Apps I use every day. Apps play a crucial role in our daily life for all sorts of activities like Getting some work done, Entertainment, Fitness, and many other aspects. A person’s choice of apps will be crucial for his/her productivity. Let's dive in to know more about these life-changing tools that are available on the Internet
1. Notion
Notion app is indeed the ALL IN ONE WORKSPACE app for everyone. It has a steep learning curve but once you master it, you can create wonders with just this single app, and your productivity increases exponentially. You can have your own space or you can even collaborate over that dream project of yours with your comrades. It has a ton of features to explore but I wanted to keep it for another blog
I used Apple Notes and Evernote for almost 2 years. I also had some other apps for other tasks like a Calendar App, A Reminder App/ To-Do list app. I found out about Notion from one of Thomas Frank’s videos and since then, I don't use any other app for keeping track of my life events. Notion has become the one app for everything. I use it for Studies, Personal Development, Security research, and Mainly Note Taking. I have been using Notion for 2 months now and this is the one single App I cannot live without.
Notion has an awesome community of passionate people who wish to share their ideas and give back to the community, This is what makes it special. They have a stream called Notion Office Hours which is a must watch to improve your Notion skills.
Resources for Getting Started with Notion
- Notion’s Official Youtube Channel
- Notion’s Subreddit
- August Bradley’s Youtube Channel and
- Thomas Frank and Ali Abdaal’s Videos on Notion
2. Calibre
I am an avid reader and I have been reading books since my 10th standard. Since the time I've become a Minimalist, I did not want that extra clutter of books in my place. So, I took an Old Kindle from my Brother In Law. This decision saved me a lot of money
With the help of Calibre, You can convert ebooks to any format you like. On top of this, this app is Open Source and has been there helping readers for 10 years. My use case for this app is simple. I download books and I convert all of them to MOBI format which is supported by the Kindle. This is very convenient as I don't have to spend money on ebooks from the Amazon Ebook store. If you like reading ebooks on iBooks, You can download the books and convert them into .epub format. Explore this amazing app and I'm sure you will like it
3. IINA Media Player
Though Mac has Quicktime media player, It has not been up to the mark for a powerful media player. The alternative for a good media player was VLC. I have been using VLC from the time since I got a laptop. However, there were some very common issues like The video stutters when I load a big media file and like you have guessed, Frequent crashes. So, I found IINA
IINA can play almost every media file you have. With the support of youtube-dl and our browser extensions, you can also play a variety of online streams in IINA via one click.- IINA website
IINA is a feature-packed media player for macOS. It is free, Open Source and it is under active development. It has all the features of a great media player and truly, Open source projects are the best ones since they are made by the Community for the Community
Good things about IINA
- Never Crashes
- Supports Picture In Picture(PIP)
- Has the support of Youtube-dl
- Can play online streams with a single click
- The last one, Supports Dark mode :)
4. Appcleaner by FreemacSoft
Uninstalling an app in mac is done by finding the app in the Finder and hitting the Command + Delete keys. But do you know that when the app is uninstalled, some of the files of the app are still on your computer? This may not be a big deal but for someone who always keeps installing and uninstalling apps eventually, the junk keeps increasing and it is hard to find the hidden junk.
What Appcleaner does is it finds the folders and files associated with the app during the uninstallation and it deletes those folders along with the app leaving your mac junk-free. It is a very handy tool and you should definitely give it a try.
5. Rectangle
Window snapping has been the major problem in macOS even though Apple has been developing it by adding some tweaks. Windows is really good at window management. To fix this issue, there are many paid apps like Magnet which are really good at window management.
As I am a fan of Open Source, I was able to find Rectangle which has the same functionality as of Magnet and it is free of cost. You can snap windows anywhere on the screen. This might be of great help for people working on UltraWide Monitors. With your own customized keyboard shortcuts, Multitasking is more enjoyable and gives a boost to your productivity. Do check this tool out
These are the main apps/tools I use everyday for getting my work done. I will make more blogs about Notion and its advanced features in the future. Though I missed out on some great apps like Alfred 4, Spark mail, Amphetamine, etc.. I wish to make a part 2 of this blog in the future
Do let me know what your favorite Mac apps are and Don't forget to Clap and Share this article with your friends. Stay tuned for more future articles
Peace 🖤
