I looked at my menu items on my Mac and thought I’d write a post explaining what tools I use daily. Here they are, from right to left:
Focus:
“Focus” was introduced in macOS Monterey back in 2021. It basically restricts certain apps from sending notifications during certain times. These work across devices: if I have my work Focus on my Mac, it will also work on my iPhone. For me, apps like WhatsApp are silenced when I work, while Microsoft Outlook and Teams are silenced on my iPhone when I’m with friends. Focuses has more features, especially now that Apple Intelligence has been introduced.
Time Machine:
Time Machine is a built-in backup solution for MacOS, and if you have a Mac, you should use it. I have mine set up on my Synology for encrypted backups, but you can also store those on an external drive, which you can buy on Amazon or Best Buy, etc. On a practical level, it helped me many times when I deleted an important document or a photo and realized my mistake even months later: I just go back in time, find it, and restore it back to the present. Simple and effective.
Mullvad VPN:
A paid VPN service is a good start for some online privacy. I like Mullvad because it works on Linux and Windows, comes in with many options to tweak if you’re more into that (like split tunneling, for example, or command prompt options), and also allows you to pay in several semi-anonymous ways. Lately, I noticed more sites block me when I use it, which usually means the service’s VPN servers are becoming too popular, and I might need to look for someone else soon, which is unfortunate.
Shifty
As the app’s website says, “A macOS menu bar app that gives you more control over Night Shift.” Night Shift is MacOS’s built-in solution to filter blue light and turn on the black theme during nighttime. I use Shifty to keep my warm colors past sunrise if I need to during the winter or turn it off automatically if I edit Photos in Lightroom or watch a movie.
PopClip
I had a loving relationship with PopClip in the past, and I was happy when Lou reintroduced me to it. It’s a multi-tool menu of your most needed functions that pops up (hence the name) whenever you double-click or highlight a line of text. You know how when you copy-paste something into an email, your font changes along with the colors of your letters and their size, and it drives you bananas? Not with this guy. Double-click (or double-tap), and a menu will appear, and you have the option to paste without formatting. I also use it to quickly look up words in the dictionary or past something into Grammarly (coming up) if needed.
Snaggit
Snaggit is probably Techsmith’s most popular app. It’s a professional screen-capturing tool I needed for my job, but I see myself still paying for personal use. While macOS’s built-in screen capture tool is good, Snaggit allows me more complex edits that you often see on my blog, including the option to capture quick videos.
Velja
Velja allows you to automatically open certain URLs on different browsers installed on your Mac. It comes with the ability to use complex options, but I mostly use it for one thing: open links from Microsoft Teams and Outlook in Microsoft Edge since that’s the browser I use for work-related functions. Otherwise, if I click on a link a co-worker sends me in Teams, it will open in Safari, where I’m not signed into my various work-related platforms.
OneDrive
I get 1TB of storage on OneDrive from work, and I use it to sync and share my Microsoft Office documents so they are available for me and my co-workers on whatever other workstation I use at work. For personal stuff, I use Syncthing, which doesn’t have a menu icon to show here and covered enough in the past.
Outlook
The Outlook icon doesn’t offer anything I need, so I just removed it as I was writing this post.
Grammarly
I’ve used Grammarly for free for years, and now I get the paid version through my employer. To be honest, I don’t like the heavy AI marketing, and some of their functions can get in the way of writing. With Apple Intelligence, I might no longer need it as much. For now, I use it for everything. For example, the post you read now will be proofread by this tool when I paste it into Micro.blog’s text box. They used to have an API that kind-of-sorta worked with Emacs, which I use for everything I write, but they killed that.