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My personal top 15 Mac apps ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป

Chris Bongers on September 28, 2020

Today we'll be looking at my personal top 15 Mac apps. I'm actually quite a minimalist in installing and keeping apps, so these 15 are the only "ex...
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lesha ๐ŸŸจโฌ›๏ธ

Jeez, Chrome should really be pre-installed.

Please, don't.

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Andrew Baisden

I sort of agree as well especially when watching a video on YouTube usually my fans start running. When I use Safari that does not happen. Chrome is still my daily driver though unless I am running on battery then Safari is better optimised on a Mac.

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Chris Bongers

Haha, why not? Tracking?

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CarlyRaeJepsenStan

It's quite the energy hog - it looks nice, but my laptops runs about ~15-30ยบF hotter when I use Chrome.

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Chris Bongers

Wow! I don't note any spike when running chrome these days.
But let me actually do some testing on it

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perpetual . education

We couldn't live without Alfred. and we really like Divvy / we also use ScreenFlow for video / but we're excited to try out runjs and loom! Thanks for this list. : )

Oh! We also love Tower for git / and Transmit for file transfer. Sip is nice for color picking... TextExpander... I guess we'll have to write our own list ! hahaha.

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Chris Bongers

That sounds awesome!
I did try Tower and Transmit for a while but personally like the alternatives out there more.

As for Alfred, I've seen it around often, never got around to installing it myself, does it make a huge impact?

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perpetual . education

For the most part - we use it like spotlight - but it's just much better. Not sure why... spotlight just has crappy search like macOS. It has a ton of cool stuff - but we use it for 2 main things: command+shift+a opens a little terminal-like field that lets us find anything really fast / like the command pallet in a text editor - so, we use the mouse a lot less. and - we have some power-pack license that comes with a clipboard history. So, we have a list of everything we've copied with command+shift+c - and that saves us soooo much time and frustration.

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Chris Bongers

Awesome will give it a go!

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CarlyRaeJepsenStan

So glad I read this! RunJS is what i've been looking for all this time as a JS dev. For terminal I prefer Hyper and ohmyzsh... but now I just use my own bash script for committing to github, haha.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

RunJS might make me finally stop opening Chrome dev tools to use the console tab as a JS sandbox. Though that's usually for silly things like "Is fjfnjdfnjfdjndfjifijfijf too long?" "Idk" open console, "fjfnjdfnjfdjndfjifijfijf".length, "Nah, it's good"

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CarlyRaeJepsenStan

lol, yeah - I used jsconsole.com a lot too in the early days ๐Ÿ˜‚

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Chris Bongers

Awesome, I use OMZ inside iTerm ;)
RunJS is amazing for exactly what's described under this post.

There is also Quokka if your using Visual Studio Code.

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Diana

Postman became way too cluttered for me in the last few months. I prefer Paw now. Worth every euro.

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Liyas Thomas • Edited

If you prefer an open source free web alternative, we're building hoppscotch.io

github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

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Mustafa Anas

Heyy Liyas!
I wonder why u got rid of the name "Postwoman"
I thought it was well chosen as it benefits from the popularity of postman.

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Liyas Thomas • Edited
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Andrew Baisden

Never heard of Paw before on their website they say "The most advanced API tool for Mac" so they must be the best then? ๐Ÿ˜ I have been using Postman and Insomnia is Paw really that good compared to those two?

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Luis Hernรกndez

Insomnia also looks great, I'm using it and it's been great for developing in multiple environments (currently 5)

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Chris Bongers

Oeh and it looks nice!

Awesome, I did hear Postman is working on re-introducing the chrome app again, which would be really great.

What's your opinion on Insomnia?

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Diana

Yeah Paw is beautiful indeed.

I use Insomnia as well but more for short, independent requests where I don't need any project structure. But maybe I'll take a closer look, it has really evolved in the last few months.

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Henry Quinn

These "top whatever mac app" articles are a guilty pleasure of mine. There's always something neat you've never heard about before.

Definitely checking out RunJS!

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Chris Bongers

Haha yeah they are kind of an addiction almost

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Heiko Kanzler ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

I didn't even now iA Writer is still in business... I felt so in love with the font ("Input") which I also used for many years with my coding setup.

My favorite API Tool for the Mac is PAW. At the time Postman came out, it couldn't parse response objects and hand over the results to other requests, is this now solved with Postman?

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Chris Bongers

Heiko, yeah iA I think where indeed stopped for a little while, but all back on dev now.
It's amazing.

PAW I keep hearing people mention, so going to try it out.
As for Postman, the new native app does solve that yes, you can set vars to send trough to another request.

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Andrew Baisden

Good list I use a few of those. Would have used iA Writer maybe but you have to pay for it multiple times I think right? I have been using Typora for my blog posts on here and 1Writer on iOS because Typora has no mobile app yet.

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Chris Bongers

Yes true, IAwriter is paid, not sure what their current plan is, back in the days a once-off was pretty affordable.

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Reza Amini

Mac Books are great for web developers but a nightmare for data scientists who work with loads of data :))

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Chris Bongers

Haha yes depending on what you need to do with Data they can be very slow in parsing lots of data.
What do Data scientist use?

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Reza Amini

Simplest work is building MACHINE LEARNING models, but due to the RAM, GPU and CPU of MacBooks you should wait days to have your work done! but actually, you can use Google Colab or any other online machines, but they have their disadvantages!

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Chris Bongers

Interesting! Seems like quite a cool area to be in.

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Jonas Wanner

If you would switch Chrome to Firefox you'd get a heart more ;)

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Chris Bongers

Hi Jonas, darn missed a heart.
I started my dev career on Firefox, but seeing how good Chrome syncs everything and not keeps changing their dev layout I just like it more.

Still have FF installed, but only for browser testing ๐Ÿ‘€

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Jonas Wanner

Fair point. Personally, I like the layout and functionality of the dev tools for Firefox more then the one for Chrome. But I can understand why a lot more devs use chrome because even for me its sometimes nerve-wracking to get used to the many layout changes...

For me its mainly the privacy aspect which binds me to firefox. :)

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Chris Bongers

I totally get the privacy point, honestly just gave up caring about my online privacy haha.
And yeah it's cool we have so many options actually, flavors for everyone.

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Naman Gupta • Edited

I use almost all the apps. Just couple of different apps like
Hyper in place of iTerm2
Insomnia in place of Postman. ๐Ÿ˜›

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Chris Bongers

Awesome, Yeah those 2 are very replaceable, I do like Insomnia as well, swap around with whatever my teams use.

Hyper I haven't use in a while actually might check if out on a next re-install.

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Naman Gupta

For sure. Hyper is a little resource consumer ๐Ÿ˜› if you compare with other terminals bt works fine in my system so I am pretty okay with it. Not the best but looks good and easily configurable.

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Liyas Thomas

If you prefer an open source free web alternative for Insomnia, we're building hoppscotch.io

github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

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Sooraj (PS)

Nice Post! Definitely going to install RunJS because I code a lot of small javascript snippets and usually try them on a temporary folder :)

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Chris Bongers

RunJS is lovely for that yes!
I was doing Codepens or making actual index files locally, but this is some much quicker.

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Sooraj (PS)

Thanks for posting this :)

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Chris Bongers

My absolute pleasure, love seeing these lists so it's cool to show people what I'm using :D

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Vimalraj Selvam • Edited

I use Quokka js VS Code extension (instead of Run JS) which is very handy when I wanted to try quickly right in VS Code while developing something.

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Chris Bongers

I've heard Quokka so often, going to give that a try!

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Prabhu Murthy

Didn't know runjs existed. Thanks for sharing

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Chris Bongers

RunJS simple, but does exactly what you expect

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Braydon Harris

since I work heavily in Unix based systems I dropped the use of ftp for scp it's right in the terminal and no extra app or setup

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Chris Bongers

That's awesome, I wish I could rsync everything, so much faster ๐Ÿ‘€

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Tahseen Rahman • Edited

Apart from the above,
I use spectacle for window management.
Copyclip for clipboard
And amphetamine for keeping the mac on with going to sleep when needed.

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Chris Bongers

Awesome, I'm going to have to check out Copyclip, sucks the default only stores 1 clipping haha.

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Ayrton

Hey Chris !

Did you know for the video recording QuickTime do the job perfectly ? With Mic / Screen recording sync.

I 've discovered RunJS , very helpfull thanks !

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Chris Bongers

Hi Ayrton, I know yes ๐ŸคŸ, but it can't record your screen + camera at the same time.

Awesome, RunJS seemed to be the undiscovered gem in this list.

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MichaelDevC

Try Figma! Itโ€™s like sketch for UI/UX Design and Prototyping

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Chris Bongers

Awesome, Figma is on my replacement list for Sketch.
Just because I keep hearing amazing things about it.