Which Mac Apps Do I Use?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are the apps that I use on my Mac.  

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Now I'm often asked which apps I use on my Mac. I do a lot of different things with my Mac and I use it all day long. I make these tutorials but also I develop apps, websites, and I do all of the things that everybody does on their Macs like manage my photos, I check my email, I use Messages, I schedule events on Calendar. All of that stuff. So after decades of using the Mac and using it every single day here are the apps that I use. 

First let's start with the web browser. I primarily use Safari as my web browser. It works everywhere. It's fast and efficient and it syncs up with all of the other Apple devices I've got. So Safari is my main web browser. It's always open and running with several taps. I do occasionally use Chrome mostly to manage my YouTube account because you see in order to manage your YouTube account you need to be logged into Goggle. If you're logged into Goggle then everywhere you go Goggle is going to be able to track you. So, I'm only logged into Goggle in Chrome and only manage my YouTube account there. That means when I'm browsing in Safari I'm not logged into Goggle.

Now for email I use the Mac Mail app. It always works great for me. I know some people prefer other things but I need the kind of app that can handle both iCloud and other types of email accounts. Put them all in one inbox. It's a nice environment to be able to compose emails. I manage my emails easily in there and that's the only email app I Use. I get tons of email everyday. 

For Productivity apps I just use the ones that come with the Mac. Reminders, Notes, and Calendar. I like them all but probably Reminders is the one that I really wish Apple would pay some more attention to. It's kind of buggy and it could work a lot better. 

Another app I constantly have open all day long is Messages. I use that to communicate with other people. I know a lot of people prefer to do that on their phones but if I'm sitting at my desk I want to be able to communicate whether it's through iMessage or SMS using the Messages app on my Mac. I just like typing on the keyboard rather than using my phone. 

Another app I usually have open is the Music app. I'm an Apple Music user so of course I'm using the Music app on my Mac to listen to songs and I can't do that, of course, when I'm recording but for the rest of the day if I'm working on apps and websites and other things I usually have music playing. 

Now how about Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Do I really use those apps? Well, yes. If I'm going to write something that's longer than just a few paragraphs I'm probably going to do it in Pages. But I really don't have much use for writing longer documents now. I haven't done books recently. Keynote, I'll make presentations every once in awhile for maybe User Groups or maybe a little something for one of my videos. But I don't use that very often as well. But it's the only presentation software I really use. Numbers, however, I do actually use frequently. To crunch numbers, work with statistics, and things like that. So I'm always creating little spreadsheets and doing little things in Numbers. 

I do have Microsoft Office. I occasionally need to use Word and Excel. But it's getting rarer and rarer. I'll keep paying the subscription fee because it's worth it every once in awhile when I have to work with a Word document or something. But I don't use it as often as I used to when I used to write books that got published in stores. Those were always created in Word so teams using different types of computers could work with them. 

I do like working with text files though. I'm always creating small text files for little notes. Every episode of MacMost that I create has a little text file that goes along with it that has title and description and key words and other things in there. So I play around a lot with text editing apps. Now I'll use TextEdit a lot. That's kind of my go to. But I also like something called CotEditor or coteditor. I use that app a lot as well. Now I also use BBEdit which is kind of a high end pro level text editor. I primarily use that when I'm working with HTML, CSS, or JAVAscript for websites. 

Speaking of websites, in order to communicate with websites a FTP app is useful. I use Panic's Transmit for that. So it allows me to have what looks like a little finder window with my server files on it and I can drag and drop into and out of that to work with things on the server. It's really easy to open up a file there, like HTML file, and edit what's on the server. 

Then, of course, also I use Terminal not just to play around with things on my Mac but also sometimes to log into servers and be able to manipulate them from the command line. 

Another primary Mac app that I really like Photos. I use Photos to manage all of my photos. I'm not talking about for work. I'm talking about my personal photos. I have tens of thousands of them. I think people that don't particularly like Photos haven't really looked at it recently. It's now almost the equivalent to Aperture or Liferoom. It's very powerful with lots of editing tools. It's pretty easy to manage things. If you want to use Albums you can use Albums. If you want to use Keywords you can use Keywords. Best of all it syncs with iCloud. So I can manage it all on my Mac. But if I ever want to show somebody a photo, all of my photos are on my iPhone as well. 

Now you'd think since I work with video all the time that I probably use either iMove or Final Cut Pro. I actually don't use them to create this show. But I do use iMovie and Final Cut for the same things other people do. To put together little videos for different purposes. I'll use iMovie when that seems appropriate but I like to use Final Cut Pro since I have it. It's a pro level tool and you can do almost anything in it. 

There are a couple of little helper tools that come with that. One is Compressor. Compressor will take video files and basically translate to any format you want. I often use it to compress the final product of a Final Cut Pro project. In addition, Motion allows you to create motion graphics. Every once in awhile I like playing around with that. The opening sequence for this show is actually done in Motion. 

But how about audio. I do love to use GarageBand. It's a lot of fun. Sometimes I'll compose music that appears in an episode or use it in an app. I've used GarageBand in the past to produce Podcast episodes. But if I need to edit sound files I use an app called Audacity to do that. I think it's the go to audio editor for a lot of Mac users. 

Now if I'm not using iMovie or Final Cut to make this show what do I use? Well, I use ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is professional screen recording software. It allows me to record the screen and me through a camera and a microphone all at the same time. Puts them in separate tracks. It gives me all the tools I need to edit together the episode. So pretty much I spend hours everyday in ScreenFlow. 

How about graphics? Well, I like using both Pixelmator Pro and Acorn. Acorn seems to be a little bit better of a tool if I want to create some sort of graphic from scratch. Maybe something to put up on a website or for the newsletter or maybe in an app or something like that. Pixelmator Pro though is really a complete set of tools and I use it everyday to build the thumbnails for each episode. In addition to that I use Affinity Designer, not Affinity Photo but Designer, to build graphics particularly for apps. 

Now when I make apps I'm primarily building them in Xcode using the Swift programming language. So I spend a lot of time in Xcode. But it's only actually been recently that I started using Xcode to build apps. Before that I was using Adobe Animate. Adobe Animate allowed me to take a lot of my game assets from my web based games and build apps for iOS and android with them. So a lot of my apps are still maintained in Adobe Animate but I'm slowly switching over some of my primary apps to just using Xcode. If you've never heard of Adobe Animate before, a few years ago it got a name change. Before that it was called Adobe Flash. 

Since I have a subscription to create a cloud I will go and use Photoshop every once in awhile and maybe Illustrator as well. I've never gotten along with Illustrator very well and I like Affinity Designer much better but Photoshop is a great tool and every once in awhile when I really need to get something complex done I'll just go to Adobe Photoshop, especially if I'm looking at a tutorial online on how to do something, like a plane effect, that tutorial is always going to be in Photoshop. 

Another tool I use sometime is OBS. This is a free tool that basically is like a broadcast studio on your Mac. So I can take my camera and my screen and then broadcast that out to say YouTube Live. So that's how I've done YouTube Live in the past. But you can also save to files so you can do some interesting things with it. If you don't want to spend the money on something like ScreenFlow you could do a lot of that in OBS just in a different way. 

Also, of course, as you guys know, I like to use Automator and it's sibling app ScriptEditor to automate things on my Mac. ScriptEditor is great because you're just working with scripting. It's not bothering with all the other stuff that Automator does. So a lot of times I'll start off working in ScriptEditor and then when I'm done I take that script, usually JAVAscript, and then bring it into Automator and I can add some more things to the entire workflow and save it out as a QuickAction. 

Now those are the main apps that I use. But there's a lot of miscellaneous things that are missing. For instance which Password Manager do I use. Well, I mainly use the Safari password manager. Just have Safari save the passwords. But I've been using 1Password since way before Safari had this ability. I continue to use 1Password. It's handy because you can save little secure notes. You can add other things to each item. Like, for instance, if a site is still insists in having security questions. In 1Password I can add those as notes to entry. So actually when I create a new account somewhere it prompts me to save it in Safari. But also to save it in 1Password. It's really no big deal. It will save it in both places. 

One of the few extensions I allow running on my Mac system is a clipboard manager. I've tried many over the years and I really like them all. But the one I'm using right now is called CloudClip Manager. You can get it in the App Store. It's great because it will sync between Macs and will save multiple items in the clipboard rather than in just the one for you to copy and paste. 

I also do online backups. For that I use Backblaze. So I'm doing my Time Machine backup which is local but Backblaze is remote. So if something were to happen to both my computer and the backup drive which is sitting right next to it then I also have everything backed up online.

Another app I have to include, because I do use it several times a week, is Zoom. Even before the pandemic I was using Zoom to record podcasts. But of course now I use it for that and also sometimes to attend meetings. 

You may be wondering if I use virtualization software. I do. I have Parallels, a version that I've upgraded since the very first version of Parallels. I do have a virtual drive that has Windows on it so I can test things like if I make a change to a website I can go and see how it looks in Windows. I do this less and less as the years go by as pretty much websites work across in different browsers the same way now. But I still keep Parallels and a copy of Windows around just in case. 

Another thing we have to deal with today is, of course, two-factor authentication. Very often you have to use something like Goggle Authenticator to be able to get the two-factor code. Well, that's great on the phone but if you want to get the two-factor codes on your Mac you need an app to do that there. I use Authy to do that. It allows you to get Goggle Authenticator codes. So if I need to log into a website or some service where Goggle Authenticator is the two-factor part, I can do it on my Mac without having to go and pull out my phone. It's also great while traveling with my MacBook because I'm not relying on one device, my phone, to get those codes. If my phone gets lost of stolen while I'm traveling then I'm stuck. Here I have a backup using Authy on my MacBook in order to get those codes. 

Another little app that I just want to mention because I'm so often asked about it is and app called Littlelpsum. It's a simple little app that sits in the Menu Bar and allows you to grab a sample text and put it into documents. So when making tutorials it kind of comes in handy. 

People often ask which VPN I use. You know I've tried several. They're all about the same. They probably all use the same servers. But the one I'm using right now is Private Internet Access. It's nice. It's got a nice Mac client. I don't have any reason to prefer it over any others, other than I just bought a multi-year subscription to it. So I've got it now in case I need it. 

There's one more little system extension that I actually use everyday although I don't actually have to use the app to use it. It's called SwitchResX. It basically allows you to change the resolution of your screen way beyond what you can in System Preferences. So, I can set my screen to be a special resolution just for making the videos. Because if I made them in full 4K then everything would be really tiny in the tutorials and if you're watching it on YouTube you'd barely be able to see what it was I was clicking on. So SwitchResX is a really useful tool if you ever need to kind of customize the resolution of any of your Mac displays.

That's it! That's all of the apps that I use on my Mac day after day, week after week, to get all of my work done for all the various things that I do. Let me know if you have any questions about any of them.