The only Mac apps you need for a productive 2018 👨🏻‍💻

Sarthak Sharma
The Skynox Blog
Published in
5 min readJul 23, 2018

Remember this article I wrote approximately 2 months ago on how using only a few apps on your iPhone can actually boost your productivity. I hope it helped you as it helped others.

Minimalism gives you more focus and being focused is the most valuable skill in today’s distracting world.

So keeping the spirit of minimalism alive, here’s a follow up article on the only apps you need be more productive this year. Few apps that can replace the work of many. Let’s get started. 🏃🏻‍

1. There

💵 Price: Free
🖥 Windows availability: Windows app coming soon!

Here at NatureHub, we work remotely and our team members are scattered across the world. Gotta be omnipresent if you wish to help the whole world. Anyways back to business — so to work properly I have to keep track of various time zones at all times. This is where THERE comes in. It’s a small app that helps you track your colleagues who’re working in different time zones. Coolest part is you can add your teammate’s avatar by their twitter handle. Do check it out!

2. Aware

💵 Price: Free
🖥 Windows availability: Awareness (alternative)

If we are talking about minimalism, this app is the king because it just does one thing and that is to tell you how long are you using your laptop. That’s it. But the idea of this app is to keep you informed so you can stop and take a break whenever needed, stand up and stretch a little. Or maybe you can relax your eyes by doing some eye exercises. Remember my article, in case you missed it here is the link.

3. Agenda ✍🏼

💵 Price: Freemium
🖥 Windows availability: Evernote (alternative)

This app is my personal favorite ❤️ app of this year. What does it do? It’s a to-do list app, note taking app, and project planner all in one. It can ingrates with your calendar app so that you can link a task or note with an event. The best part is it’s also available for iPhone and everything syncs up with iCloud so each and every note you will make is safe. Highly recommended.

4. Spectacle 👓

💵 Price: Free
🖥 Windows availability: WindowSpace (alternative)

I know we all have faced the problem when trying to drag some item from one window to another. You have to first decrease the size of one window so that both your windows can fit on the screen simultaneously, and then drag the item(s). Or if you are a designer or writer and you want to open two apps to see content from one and do stuff in the other, it’s the same issue. Spectacle is a great solution for this. By pressing keyboard shortcuts, you can resize and move any windows in any part of the screen. There are many paid apps available that offer similar functionality but this one’s free and works really well.

At Skynox, we help young startups develop and launch their MVPs! If you have an idea but don’t know how to start executing, get in touch.

5. Popclip 📎

💵 Price: 9.99$
🖥 Windows availability: Click to (alternative)

Very, very handy tool. What this app does is show a popup whenever you select something, and in that popup, there are many actions you can perform. You can do a google search, open link in browser, see dictionary suggestions, and choose from a range of more than 50 operations! You can even link it with other apps like Evernote, Todoist, Slack or pretty much any popular app you can think of. Check the complete list here.

6. Cheatsheet 📋

💵 Price: Free
🖥 Windows availability: Hotkey (alternative)

This app is the ultimate cheatsheet you need to know each and every shortcut in your computer. It works with all applications automagically. All you have to do is just hold the command key ⌘ and a popup will be shown with all the shortcuts structured type-wise. It’s free and easy to use. In my opinion, it’s the perfect example of a minimalistic app.

7. Numi 🛠

💵 Price: Free
🖥 Windows availability: Uhh… have you considered getting a Mac?

This app is insane. It can help in any kind of calculations you can think of, from currency conversion to crazy time calculations. It just understands you so well. If you write something like “20% of 25$ converted into INR”, it will tell you exactly what you . It’s still in beta but it is amazing nonetheless. Can’t imagine what are they planning for the final release.

Note for fellow developers: I am thinking of starting an open source project for a cross-platform Numi-like app. If you are in, DM me at Sarthology. Also I am planning a developer specific version of this article so don’t forget to follow me!

Well that’s it for this post, guys. These are all the productivity apps you need on your Mac. Do tell me in the comment section if you like these apps. Also if you know of any other productivity apps that you think deserve a place here, let me know.

If you found this helpful, don’t forget to leave some claps 👏🏼 . Share this with your friends and followers! Tweet to me and let me know how you liked the apps!

If you enjoyed this story, you can check out more like this on our publication The Skynox Blog. We write about product development, lifestyle, health & fitness, and more interesting stuff. We also run a global initiative for open-source development, Team XenoX. If you’re a developer, you can check out and contribute to our open-source projects by starting here.

You can connect with me on Twitter and you can also find me and my team on DEV.to! 😃

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Sarthak Sharma
The Skynox Blog

JavaScript Nerd👨🏻‍💻| Philosopher🧘🏻‍♂️ | Life Hacker🔧 | Health enthusiast🏋🏻‍♂️