My MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2011 edition) is the best Mac I have ever owned, and a handful of apps I use every day really help me churn. I write this stuff up occasionally to help me review how I work. Maybe it’s helpful for you.
Always running
These are the apps that power my daily Mac, listed in rough order of usage.
- Path Finder 6 is my Finder
- Safari for web browsing, Google Chrome when Flash is required
- Tweetbot, for sure
- BBEdit or Sublime Text for editing text, often complemented by Brett Terpstra’s Marked.app
- OmniFocus fuels my Quixotic quest for focus
- Rdio provides ambient entertainment at my home office, though iTunes is still hanging around for obligatory syncing le sigh
- DEVONthink Pro Office is my bit bucket
- Apple Mail for email augmented by Mail Act-On and MailTags
- SpamSieve scrubs out junk mail
- Apple Messages so I don’t always need to pick up my iPhone to text (when it works), with Adium waiting as understudy when Messages loses her voice
Background apps
I almost forgot several other apps that mostly hang out in the background or from the menubar, which stays uncluttered thanks to Bartender.
- Dropbox1 is the glue that holds so many things together; easy to forget about this linchpin application
- TextExpander does what it says, shaving minutes off my work time and pushing RSI further down the line
- Keyboard Maestro can automate just about anything on a Mac
- Fantastical replaced BusyCal, which pushed iCal off a bridge years ago
- Spirited Away is an oldie but a goodie that automatically cleans up my desktop, hiding apps that haven’t been used recently
- Default Folder X provides more RSI relief, helping me leave the mouse alone and navigate folders to save (or find) documents
- Delibar is my Pinboard portal
- Hazel is my assistant organizing files in the background
- Flux adjusts screen gamma at night to ease eye strain
- FastScripts introduced me to Mac automation with keyboard shortcuts
- Moom shoves windows where I want them using keyboard shortcuts (though this will be replaced with Keyboard Maestro when I make time to set it up)
Occasional apps
Another smattering of apps get launched as needed, either for a quick task or long stretches of focused work.
- Fever is my newsreader, powered by Fluid.app and hosted at A2 Hosting2
- MarsEdit for publishing articles here at Carrying Stones
- Coda 2 wraps web development into a tidy package
- Day One is a beautiful journaling app that should be running all the time but I’m a slacker (Brett Terpstra earns another gold star for giving us Slogger(, which should you go check out right now)
- nvALT by Elastic Threads and (you guessed it) Mr. Terpstra for quick synced note-taking
- iTerm is my console window for local command line work in zsh (also souped up by oh-my-zsh)
- 1Password manages all my website logins, credit cards, software licenses, and other items I need to secure while having ready access at any time
Wow! Sorry to puke all of that out at once. What started as a quick list of favorites turned into that pot of stew; add a little of this, a touch of that… Boom! 18 gallons of stew. Have a seat and try some. Here, let me get you a bowl. Where are you going? Come back!