For those unaware, sherlocking is real!

It’s almost a year since I last took stock of what I use daily on my Mac but having recently gotten a new MacBook Air (for work) I realised that in that time some of my choices had changed and, even more exciting, I’ve discovered some new/better ones along the way! Huzzah!

Many of my choices are free, some are donation/coffee ware, and some are paid. I have no problem paying for software and where the option is available I’ve usually plumped for £10 as a suggest price for any donation ware app. In fact just pulling this list together has reminded me to go back and donate again as it’s been almost a year and there is no doubt that I’d be lost without each of these apps (something VERY apparent when you set up a new Mac and these apps aren’t there).

Anyway, this is the list of apps I consider useful and that scratch some minor annoyances I have with MacOS when it doesn’t quite handle things the way I want. YMMV of course.

Productivity

• Spark – FREE – email client I use across Mac and iPhone. Handles multiple accounts, and the Snooze feature is a lifesaver (and lets me go as far ahead as I want, other apps seem to limit this to a few months or so). I do want to use Apple’s own but the limited Snooze is just enough of a deal breaker for me.
•  Tot – £20 – (on iPhone or Watch, free on Mac) a wonderful utility for temporary text capture/edit. “Tot is an elegant, simple way to collect & edit text across your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It’s your tiny text companion!” or if that’s not what you need try…
• Plain Text Editor – FREE – Simple distraction-free notepad (with tabs)

Utilities

• VLC – FREE – video player, supports a multitude of formats.
• AppCleaner – FREE – for when I want to remove some of these apps, it’ll find all the related files and get rid of them too.
• Hazel – $29 (one off) – a simple way to keep your Mac tidied. Watches folders then runs rules, very powerful and very useful – I do not use this as much as I could, gonna investigate it again. 
• Flycut – FREE – Clipboard manager, nice little popdown menu of the last [x] copied items.
• Contexts – $10 – For those who also use Windows, this provides a smarter CMD+Tab app switcher, which includes sub windows too. So, if I have 3 draft emails, I can bring either one to the front.
• Timeout – FREE – a simple enough idea, an app that helps you take a break more often so you don’t end up staring at the screen for hours. Very customisable too.
• Ice – FREE – menu bar tidier (less visual clutter) 
• CopyClip – FREE – a free clipboard manager
• MacMouseFix – FREE – finer control over scroll direction between trackpad and mouse
• Contexts – $10 – better window switcher than Alt + Tab 
• Today – FREE – a simple menubar icon that shows list of events for the current day, but if that isn’t enough, try..
• Dato – £9 – more extensive but same idea as Today (same developer too)
• Pure Paste – FREE – automatically paste as plain text by default 
• StandApp – hourly reminders to stand (because I don’t always register the notification from my Watch)
• Alfred (FREE) /Raycast (FREE) – I like Raycast but the VC backing doesn’t always bode well so I’m back to Alfred which is good enough for me as I’m mostly using it for opening apps and files.
• Wallpaperer – FREE – A lovely little app that grabs an image each day from a given Reddit. 
• Caffeine – FREE – one click to stop your Mac going to sleep until you say so, handy for viewing movies, keeping Teams showing as online 😜 etc.

Creating stuff

• Pixelmator Pro – £50 – because sometimes you need a little more power than the standard image editor gives you. Has just been bought by Apple so I’m intrigued as to what will happen to this app next!
• Simplenote – FREE – simple text/note app, syncs with iOS app. Has become a useful app for writing, clutter free and most of my longer blog posts or journal entries start here. Not used for storage (Apple Notes keeps my important stuff). 

Lifey stuff

• Day One – £35/yr – Journal app, only downside is no web app, syncs with iCloud. I use this almost every day, and for the letters I’m writing every month to my son (which he’ll get when he’s… 18 I think).

And finally, if you’ve been through the list you’ll spot that quite a few are by one developer, well worth checking out their website for some other useful apps, free and paid! 

Hopefully if you are on a Mac you might have found something useful here, there are many many more little apps for many niches out there; I’d love to hear what your favourite discovered apps are!