I've got 13 Mac applications that I cannot live without. And I think after watching this video, you'll be able to see why. So let's jump in. Let's kick things off with look away.
So I often get carried away with work and end up with strained eyes. And this app has been a huge help. So it encourages you to take short breaks at set intervals so that you are not staring at your screen for hours on end.
And the big selling point for me, was that look away actually makes the experience peaceful. It's not interruptive like similar apps because a, it gives you a heads up with a notification that follows your mouse cursor. So it's not, you know, unexpected. It doesn't break your focus and B, it only works when you're working.
It's disabled if you're not actually active or if you're in a video call or watching a video, it also just has a beautiful UI with complimentary sound effects. It supports my dual monitor set up. and they make it easy to skip breaks, add time or pause. Next up is Sparkle. And this is a relatively new application that automatically organizes your desktop, documents and downloads folders using AI.
It lives up in your menu bar. And once you grant Sparkle access, it sorts all of your files into the right folders and even assigns images. to those folders which is a nice little touch so once it does its organization it will give you three folders so the first one is ai library and this is where sparkle will create folders based on the file names and the context of the files and it will categorize them then you have a manual library which is where you'll have your existing folder so those will not be rerouted into a ai created folder and then you have a recents folder that includes files less than three days old so you have easier access to those without getting categorized into a folder and you lose the file.
But the best part about it is that sparkle always runs in the background. So you don't need to click on the application or do any type of refreshing. It will just auto categorize your files once they land and your desktop documents or downloads folders. So this has a seven day free trial. And then after that, it doesn't organize the files anymore.
They just stay in recents, but all the existing folders remain. Next is drop over. And this is going to make your life a lot easier when dragging and dropping files from different locations. So let's say that we have three different folders here and we need these files all to go to one spot. So previously what you would have to do is just take these and drag into a folder, go to this tab, drag these into the folder, go to the next tab and drag these into the folder.
Well, now thanks to drop over, what you can do is just do a little shake motion like this. You just shake back and forth real quick and you get this pop-up right here. for drop over it's a really nice ui here and we can just drag and drop our files in this little drop over box and now we can do that for everything in here so we're going to take these ones and we'll take these files from three different locations and three different tabs and now we have everything in one spot even if we click out and x out of finder and go into a new finder window we can go ahead and add more files we can continue adding files to this drop over window and from here you have multiple options so you can just take and drag these into somewhere into a folder or into a sidebar or onto the desktop you have these three dots right here where you can have actions so you can batch rename these you can create a zip archive you can copy the path and you also have these options down here as well so this just makes it again much easier to drag and drop files from different locations next up is perhaps the most simple application on this entire list and this one is called hand mirror so this one also lives up in the menu bar and the premise is very simple this allows you to check on yourself before a video call so if i go ahead and click right there it's going to show me in this little preview view that way you don't have to go into like a google meet you don't have to go into a zoom and start a test call with yourself you will now see it right up here in the menu bar and you can also see how you look with portrait mode studio light and center stage Next up is Klopp and this is the best file compressor app I've used yet on the Mac.
So this runs in the background and it will instantly reduce the size of images, videos, and PDFs with a clean feature packed interface. So I've set up Klopp to auto optimize files that enter certain folders. And one of those is my desktop, which is where my screenshots and my screen recordings get saved.
So if I take a screenshot or a screen recording, it'll automatically optimize that file and show the size savings along with the quick options here to quickly convert, to share, to downscale and much more. And you'd be surprised by how much storage this actually saves. Like it's a big difference, especially for screen recordings. And you can also simply drag files over to the bottom right corner of the screen.
You get this nice little UI, and that will optimize whatever files you have selected. like these PDFs, for example, which you can see just saved me a lot of storage space by having CLOP. So that's great. And the UI is terrific, but one of the underrated features with this application is the ability to auto convert certain image types. So for example, I have it set to auto convert the annoying web P image format to JPEG.
Anytime I download a web P file. So that saves me some time and for advanced users, it does also integrate with the shortcuts application for deeper workflows. So this app is free, but it does have a pro version for 15 bucks. So pretty much every application I've covered lives in the menu bar. And if you have a lot of applications running at one time, your menu bar can look very cluttered and very messy.
And that's where this next application comes in handy. And this is a free app called ice. And what this does is as you can see up here in my menu bar, it's very clean now because of ice. So we have this little black dot right there and that's all it does. It just hides your menu bar for you.
unless you click on it or hover over it speaking of cleaning up it's time to clean up your name online with the tool that i've personally used who also happens to be today's sponsor incogni data brokers and people search sites are constantly collecting and selling your personal information and posting it online for anybody to find with a simple google search this includes info like your address your phone number login credentials and even your social security number i used to get bombarded with random spam text messages, phone calls, and emails, until I got my information removed from all of these websites using incogni. Thankfully, I never had anybody show up at my house or have my identity stolen, but I'm sure that's happened many times before since this data is so easily accessible these days. Their automated system works around the clock, reaching out to data brokers on your behalf to request the removal of your personal data.
And it's super simple to use as well. You just create an account, you tell Incogni what data that you want removed, and you just sit back and let their system do its thing. So I have a challenge for you. Go to Google and type in your phone number or your email. And if your name pops up when you search for that, you need Incogni.
And thankfully for you, you can get 60% off an annual plan by using my special link below or using code Butch at checkout. Next up is Eni and this is a free open source native video player with a completely customizable UI. Like it has features like thumbnail preview while skimming.
You can take a screenshot of the video by pressing a button and it takes a full res screenshot right there. It has a built-in subtitles, a downloader, playback history, and much more. In the settings, you can customize the onscreen toolbar, the initial window size, the subtitle text, the gesture controls, and basically anything else.
you can think of and this is what i use daily now instead of quicktime player i've actually set this to be my default for videos now next up is rise and this is probably the most important application on this list because i can never go a day without it so this helps you understand where you're spending your time and it has helped me realize when i'm under and over working and it just graphs everything in such a beautiful way so the app works in the background to track your total work hours how long it's been since your last break and the percentage of time you spent in the three main categories, which are focus meetings and breaks. So on this main timeline, you can see the day, week, month, and year view, and it breaks down how much time was spent in each category, along with easy to read stats up top. There's a productivity tab where you can visit to see your focus score and focus time. There's top interrupters right here, which is very convenient to see what's interrupting your flow.
most often and also these beautiful interactive graphs you can also integrate with a google or outlook calendar you can set your goals in here there's also a built-in timer you can create projects and track the time spent in those projects and my personal favorite little feature here is that there's a built-in music player where i can play my focus lo-fi music without needing to use another service just a small little easter egg here small feature but it makes a big difference for me i use it literally every single day and there's a lot more to this application so if you want to check out rise be sure to use code brandon at checkout and that will get you 25 off your first three months that link is down in the description below as well so this next application is very well known but i still wanted to include it in this video because a i've never covered it before and b i use it every single day this is called alfred alfred is essentially a supercharged spotlight search this allows you to open applications empty the trash quickly search for google or find products on amazon all from the spotlight search so if i search for iphone 16 for example you can see right away we get options to search google search amazon or search wikipedia and i can even shorten that as well so if i just type in g and then iPhone 16, it will automatically Google that, or I have it set up. So if I type in YT and then I do iPhone 16, I will automatically search YouTube for iPhone 16. So that was on my other display, but you can see that's what it looks like right there. But one area where this really stands out compared to the traditional spotlight search is when searching for files on your file system.
So if you do command space, which I have it set to do command space instead of the spotlight search, and then i press space again you can see it says open file so from here you can start typing in the name of a file if you know it and it will open that so if i just type in ipad for example it will show me everything that shows ipad as a file now for example if i go to spotlight search and i type in ipad you can see what the results are so sure i can scroll all the way down to the bottom and eventually see what i want to see but it shows me these suggestions it shows me websites it shows me whatever this is apple.com ipad just a bunch of stuff that i don't really want so that's why just one of the main reasons i really like alfred is the ability to quickly search for your files on your file system and it's just so much more efficient at locating files that you're looking for it's much better also than just searching inside of finder and if you start typing in preferences you can see we have show alfred preferences so we'll hit return right there and it will open up the preferences there are quite a few in here so you have your alfred hot key that you can set right there and if you go to features this is where you'll see this is where you'll probably spend most of your time so you have the default results right here you have the file search which we just talked about so you can exclude you can see i excluded emails contacts calendar bookmarks history i exclude all of those when i'm searching for a file because i'm usually looking for you know a jpeg a pdf or something like that and then the web search section is awesome because this is how you can easily search any of these websites with just the spotlight search or with alfred so this is where i did it for google as well so if you go back here to youtube all i did was i simply changed it from youtube to yt you have web bookmarks you have clipboard history so i use another application i'll show you after this for clipboard history but if you wanted to pay for alfred for that you can do that you have snippets you have the calculator so it does work just like the spotlight search for calculator and if you pay for the power pack you can even get the terminal you have the large type you have previews you have all that you also have workflows right here if you pay and the appearance is awesome as well so i have mine set to alfred modern but you can change the appearance of how that looks when you are typing into alfred so that is just a very high level overview of alfred there's a lot more nuance to it but it is a pretty awesome application that i would recommend that to everybody raycast is another alternative i like alfred better than raycast but you might like either one of those So I mentioned that I don't use the clipboard history and Alfred, and that's because I prefer to use an app called a paste pal. This is a complex clipboard manager that not only shows your clipboard history by clicking the icon in the menu bar, but you can also search for something you copied a while back. You can create collections, you can drag and drop text.
You can transform text and you can even search your clipboard history on a per app. basis. I've used this specific feature so many times and it has saved me, especially for things that you cannot search.
Like for example, final cut pro, if I copy edits or copy something in the application, that's not really something that I'll be able to search for in the clipboard history. So I can go in here and find that app and just see everything that was copied from that app. It's wonderful and well worth the $15 for me since I use it daily.
Next up is clean shot X, and this is how I make all of my screenshots look beautiful. for social media, for my YouTube videos and for the PDF guides that I put together. So once you take a screenshot, the editor is pulled up and in here, you can add and move shapes easily.
You can blur out personal information. You can highlight text, you can add numbers for tutorials and even combine multiple images into one image easily without Photoshop or anything like that. But the best part about the editor is over here to the left, and this is where you can transform your boring screenshot into a professional looking image with a gradient or a custom background. You can customize the padding, the insets, the shadow, the corners, the aspect ratio, whatever you wanna change, you can basically change it.
And once you get a screenshot, how you like it, just press the plus button and save it as a preset. And then next time you go to take a screenshot, you can just go to your presets, click it and your job is done. It also has a scrolling capture feature where you can do scrolling capture screenshots. You can freeze your screen to easily capture video scenes. And there's even a built-in screen recorder with its own video editor.
So yes, the app is 30 bucks, but there's honestly nothing better out there. At least not for me. Next up is an app called rocket.
And this allows you to add emojis easily with just one character. So for example, if I wanted to respond to this comment here on YouTube, if I just put in colon and I start typing fire, you can see that we have this little pop-up right here. So YouTube has its own little random emojis right here, I guess, but I want to use the actual fire emoji. So I'm just going to start typing out fire and you can see it shows fire right there. I'll just click on that and it inserts the fire emoji.
Or if I go to a social media site and I just type in a colon and I just start typing in laughing, for example, I can enter the laughing emoji very easily. And then the final application is called Pika. And this is a must if you do any type of creative work. So this allows you to simply get hex colors easily. and see how well the colors coordinate so if i go to the pika icon up here in the menu bar once again you can see that we have this option so if i go ahead and select the color to the left i can go anywhere on my desktop and choose a color so if i want to choose this you know purple color right here it will show that and down here it shows the wcag compliance and it failed right here with the foreground and the background So those are 13 of my favorite Mac applications.
And I hope you found at least one new application to download. If you did, I would appreciate if you gave this video a thumbs up and also leave a comment down below with which application was your favorites. And if you want to see more videos like this, be sure to hit that subscribe button.
But anyways, guys, thanks for watching and I'll see you soon.