Boost up your developer productivity with these Mac Apps
Our CEO, Saket Modi, promised the entire engineering to be upgraded top-end Macbooks as soon as we get good funding, till then we were responsible to get the best out of our existing laptops. We went through multiple RAM and SSD upgrades (basically, utilised every last drop of the CPU juice that we could) to scale and enhance our product, SAFE to raise a good investment round
And recently, our engineering promises came true when we raised about $33 mn from British Telecom! 🤑
And weeks after we announced we had our shiny new Macbooks getting delivered all across our engineering teams and everyone getting their new toys to play with (and now a top of the end Macbook Pro is a bare minimum for any new developer entry 😎)
A lot of us were experiencing our first Mac development environment, a few already had a fair amount of experience. I, being in the latter, as soon as I got my machine, went on tweaking and customising based on my liking and a few apps that I’ve always wanted, but couldn’t in the Linux environment. A few of my teammates and other engineering folks reached out with some Mac help so wanted to just put down my favourite apps (all FREE!)
AppCleaner
Download Link: Here
All Mac users out there know how simple it is to install most of the apps (excluding AppStore). These come in a simple .dmg file and all that one needs is to copy them to their Applications folder and you’re ready to go. How about the uninstallation? Simple, Move to Trash and Empty the trash!
However, a lot of the apps now start generating a lot of data in configuration files, local caches and a lot of other files depending upon the apps. At times, I have faced that re-installing the apps sometimes magically brings back my old data (old data was problematic and re-installing didn’t help which made me find this a long time back). The AppCleaner is the neatest app to do a complete uninstallation of any Mac App. Instead of moving to the trash, just move the App to the AppCleaner window, it’ll list down all the linked files across your filesystem and you can put all of them into the bin at once!
Maccy
Download Link: Here
“May-see”, is what I used to call it the first time I read about this app. I just checked the pronunciation before writing this. Seems like, it’s “Maxy”. Nevertheless, in short, it’s an amazing Clipboard Manager app
I came about Clipboard Manager apps just recently and started using apps like CopyQ on a Linux environment and were pretty cool. I have always been copying multiple things at once, logging into remote machines, passwords, images, screencasts, code, everything and almost every second time, I had to copy multiple things, pasting them one by one was unnecessary slowness, and these clipboard managers made my life easy.
I was looking for a similar experience in Mac and stumbled upon this. Maccy is one of the simplest apps that get the work done just perfectly! It supports text, images, videos, everything you’d generally be using in a copy-paste scenario. The ease of use, with a simple ⌘-Shift-C keyboard shortcut it pops up in a small dropdown fashion and lists down your recent copied items (you can configure how many items to remember). It works on any app, terminal, IDE, browser
Microsoft Remote Desktop
Download Link: Mac App Store
Working with multiple CI systems, remote environments, a lot of being Windows machines generally need to use some RDP clients to log on and work. Remmina has been my most favourite on a Linux, and honestly, haven’t been able to find the closest to this on a Mac with all the features that Remmina had to offer. My most loved and used was the ability to use a Jump Host over SSH and RDP, I have extensively relied on this since the majority of our Windows CI systems have been in Private subnets in our cloud infrastructure
Coming back to the actual app in talks here. Microsoft Remote Desktop has a clean, RDP interface. That’s it. If you want to connect to a remote windows machine, configure it once and off you go. Nothing more, nothing less
Numi
Download Link: Here
The built-in calculator is quite handy for most operations. Also, the Spotlight has built-in support for some basic calculator use cases as well as some unit and currency conversions. But that’s all. Numi provides a whole new experience to the calculator. Currency conversions, unit conversions, equations, dates, times and everything that you’ll never need to add/subtract/multiple/divide/solve is handled by Numi
It’s lightweight and can be enabled to be toggled from a menu bar app as well for easy access. I don’t use it that often, but whenever I have to (mostly validating some dates, calculations involving currencies), it’s such a breeze to use that than the native calculator which needs almost double the number of operations (for things like currencies)
Rectangle
Download Link: Here
One thing I’ve always liked about Windows is the window arrangement that is used to offer. With a simple keyboard shortcut of Win+Arrow Keys, you can arrange multiple windows in a productive arrangement. In a Mac system, you only get very limited options out of the box, which is just a full-screen mode and two apps in one full-screen window.
Rectangle brings seamless window management and plugins in some very convenient keyboard shortcuts to use these. My favourite has been the two-column mode by Simple ^+⌥+← and on the other window ^+⌥+→ . The other frequently used is maximising the active window with a straight ^+⌥+↩ shortcut. It also adds a tiny little menu bar for mo›››re options and other shortcuts to verify. The entire value of this apps adds up if you have multiple monitors as the shortcuts work well with monitors as well based on the layout selected
SnipperApp 2
Download Link: Mac App Store
This is one of a kind that I’ve recently started using and has been part of my daily development routine more than any other app. I have a lot of handy commands, code snippets, monitoring utilities, debugging scripts that I had noted in a few random places (Notes, personal slack chat, etc.) and had to always go back to them, copy and paste to wherever it was required. A lot of the time saving was a pain as all these aren’t native development tools (I mean notes, etc.) and make such code snippet management difficult
SnipperApp 2, has a very nice interface, supporting a host of programming languages for syntax highlighting to save your snippets (of any size). For some extra money, you can add Cloud Sync and backups to the app as well, but everything is free if you want to remain on a single system in an offline mode (has both a subscription-based payment mode as well as a one-time upfront fee)
My usage of the Snipper App has been mainly around some lengthy terminal commands for our stack, docker containers. It comes with a menu bar app as well which places a fancy icon on the menu with one-click access to all your snippets (I didn’t like the search functionality much, as it doesn’t work well on the snippet titles). But the menu bar app lists all your snippets and clicking any one of the saved snippets, automatically copies it to your clipboard (you now know how to manage your clipboard as well 😉)
I know there are a few paid alternatives that are much better, but I liked this because it’s FREE and gives a lot of functionalities, almost everything I need. Although, I’m still evaluating SnippetsLab as an alternative, but haven’t found major differences in paying that amount of money as compared to this free option
Stats
Download Link: Here
I’ve always had this weird knack of monitoring my system resources time and again. Some of our docker containers are kind of heavy and at times eat up a bit more resources than we want in the development environment owing to file watchers and instant code refresh mechanisms. I have this habit of monitoring the system temps and usage at such times to ensure, if there is a bad thing going, I get to know it almost instantly
Earlier, I preferred the iStat Menus, but somehow felt that it added up to the system resources with only this running, nothing else. The other aspect was the unfair pricing. As soon as I got the new mac, searched for similar utilities and Stats was the first result, that too of a GitHub page (open source, yay! 🥳). Installation and setup was a breeze and once you experience it, no one can say it’s a free, open-source app. I could get each and every (more than what I wanted, and have disabled some) system metric right onto my menu bar, refreshed in real-time. I have mostly configured the core temps, N/W usage, RAM & CPU usage which serves most of my needs. This has truly become one of my best open-source findings as a Mac App!
Let me know your favourite, interesting app discoveries and I’d love to try them out. Please clap if any of the above apps help you and follow us for more 🤓
