Its been a while since I’ve written on here, and I’ve had a few friends lately ask about utilities I run on my Mac, so I thought I’d share some of my favorites. These aren’t all of them, but these are my favorites.
Bartender 3, $15
Bartender 3 is what make this list work. Bartender hides all of the utilities I run in the background, so that I don’t have to see them. ⌥+Space later, and all of the utilities running in the background are revealed.
Greenshot, $2
Greenshot is a great and easy utility for screenshots, and there is a Mac and Windows version, which is great is you a Mac at home and Windows at work, like me. I’ve got mine set up to bring up the screenshot crosshairs with F1, then send to screenshot to my clipboard. I even used it to take the screenshots used above!
Tripmode, $8
Tripmode is a utility to modulate data use when tethered to a smartphone. The Mac makes it very easy to connect to a smartphone for data when traveling, but none of the apps on your computer (like Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc.) know that you’re on a network with a data cap. Tripmode solves this by allowing the user to determine which apps can use data, and these settings can be network-specific.
BetterSnapTool, $3
BetterSnapTool emulates the Windows 7 feature of snapping windows to one side of a screen. Although the Mac now has a native split screen mode, this wasn’t always the case, and BetterSnapTool brought this useful functionality to the Mac with lots of customization. I use it to simply split my screen for a moment, but if I’ll be using a split screen for a while, I’ll typically use the native Mac feature.
Amphetamine, Free
Ever need your laptop to finish something and not go to sleep. Well, Amphetamine will keep you awake.
Turbo Boost Switcher Pro, $10
I got this one from a great episode for ATP. Basically, if I’m using my laptop in “laptop” mode, I want great battery life and I’m unlikely to be doing anything computationally expensive. If I’m sitting at my desk and plugged in, I want my laptop to be as fast as possible. Turbo Boost Switcher Pro does this by enabling and disabling Turbo Boost, which pushes your CPU past its base clock speed at the expense of battery life, based on whether your computer is plugged in or not. Better battery life when using the battery, better functionality when on power. Marco Arment has a good post on this too.
Parallels, $80
Okay, Parallels isn’t really a utility, but I think its at least worth mentioning. Parallels is a Virtual Machine software, which means you can other operating systems within Parallels on your Mac. This is another indispensable app that I need from time to time, when I need to run a Windows specific application. Parallels gets an upgrade every year, and I’ve sort of put myself on an every-other year upgrade cycle. Those seem to have big benefits in how resource intensive Parallels can be.
CleanMyMac X, $40
CleanMyMac X will, hold on for this one, clean up your Mac. Dump your RAM, clean out Caches, empty your trash, etc., all in one fell swoop.
Screens Connect, Free (iOS counterpart is $20)
Screens is a great iOS app that I use to connect back to my Mac. Screens Connect is the Mac end that lets my access my Mac from my iPhone or iPad when I’m out and about.
1Password, $5/month for five accounts
I love 1Password. 1Password is a password storage app, which keeps track of all your passwords and will generate random passwords for all your accounts, on all of your devices. Theres a version of 1Password for every operating system. They even have a feature to inform you if a website where. you have an account is hacked! This is another one that is absolutely indispensable for me.
Backblaze, $50/machine/year
Back-ups are a part of any healthy digital life. Backblaze will back up as much as you can give it for $50 a year. This is mostly for a worst case scenario. If my laptop and my local backup were to fail, all my data is also stored at Backblaze.
Time Machine, Free
This is the only 1st party utility on this list, and it’s for a good reason. Time Machine is great, simple, and reliable back up solution for the Mac. At a minimum, you can plug in a hard drive and it’ll back up everything new. At its best, you can point it to a NAS and back up wirelessly every hour.
FruitJuice, $10
FruitJuice is just a handy utility to track battery health. It’ll send little push notifications asking you to unplug your laptop from time to time, and with updates for how much battery life you have. In addition, it tracks how many cycles your battery has, and its overall health.
At Ken 