Best Macos Apps 2017

Looking for a Calendar in the Menu Bar? Unlike Windows, macOS doesn’t show you a.

Welcome back productivity nerds. This is part two of a gripping trilogy on software highlights from 2017. In part one, I catalogued some of my favourite iPad apps from last year. The meat between the iOS device sandwich, is of course the Mac. So here we go again.

Before we begin, if you’re interested a number of the apps on this list come with Setapp. That is something I’ve written enough about recently, so if you'd like to read more about Setapp, you can do so here. The apps in question are clearly marked with the appropriate links. Remember, these are just the highlights.

Back to the Mac

The barometer I use for organisational tools is how much time it takes to manage them. That I spend very little time in the app itself, is a good indication Things is doing what it’s supposed to. The way Things handles the inbox is better than any other task manager I have used. I don't feel like I am double handling tasks. I thought I might miss the automation of Todoist, but so far I haven't really, the email to Things feature is enough.

I still haven’t found the time to write this up properly, but I did give it a cursory post. While you can get lightweight versions of some features, there still nothing like Scrivener. This new version is a long way from the early skeuomorphic days. Now that the interface is so crisp, and clean, it looks every bit the modern Mac app. Further to the visual touches, a long list of new features have improved an already powerful piece of software. If you do any kind of serious long-form writing, and you’re still using a traditional word processor, I’m sorry but you’re mad. ¹

Ulysses also makes the charts across both platforms. I use Scrivener a little more on macOS. But as I mentioned in the iPad post, all other project based, long-form writing, and content for this blog is created in Ulysses. I now also use it for posting directly to WordPress, and I couldn’t be happier with how well that works. Setapp takes care of my Ulysses subscription on macOS, and iOS.

Most of my reading, annotating, and editing of PDFs happens on the iPad now. I’m so used to doing that work with an Apple Pencil that marking up PDFs on a Mac can be frustrating. Despite that, there are occasions that demand more screen space, and sometime I need to extract a lot of text from a PDF. Highlights can extract highlighted text, and annotations in Markdown, which is something I cannot do on iOS — defintely not in markdown. ² Now that DEVONthink handles all of my OCR needs, this is the only other PDF app I need on the Mac.

While coverage has focused on the iOS version, 2017 was also the year I went all in with DEVONthink on macOS. I once shared the superficial concerns of some prospective users, but even if i’d like to see the interface overhauled, I’m glad I got over myself. ³ DEVONthink is a heavyweight application, so getting the most from it takes time. The depth of functionality is perfectly suited to the archive, search, and retrieve workflows required of serious research, so that time is worth investing. I no longer have any trouble finding important documents. My records are organised with some sanity, and I know how, and where to find research I have spent considerable time gathering.

I have known about TaskPaper for a long time, but never really used it properly. That changed last year. With TaskPaper’s plain text super powers, I have cobbled together something resembling a system for planning and tracking my reading, among other things. It might seem like overkill to be employing a form of task management on top of a dedicated task manager, but it helps my scattered mind no end to seperate the finer details. Setapp

Anyone working with text should have this in their kit. No matter what that work entails. Marked is a kind of Swiss army knife for writers. If you are relentlessly obsessive about what you do with words, you will recognise a fellow traveller in this app. It even includes features to improve your writing. Anything I write about Marked risks underselling it. It’s worth a hell of a lot more than what it will cost you. Setapp

I archive a lot of data in DEVONthink, but I don’t use it for bookmarks. Instead I use the perennial wonder machine, Pinboard.in for archiving web pages. Spillo is easily my favourite macOS client for pinboard. Minimal, and opinionated with just the right amount of nerdiness. It’s fully scriptable, and even has its own plugin SDK. Since setting up an Alfred workflow with Spillo, I get more use out of Pinboard than ever.

Being and Nerdiness

Until last year, I hadn’t done any programming for a long time. I still don’t, but I can at least lay claim to vandalising code in my attempts to learn how to. For my humble use of git as it is, Tower is more than I need. Then again, using such a wonderfully designed piece of software can only be helpful if I’m to learn things the right way. Working Copy on iOS is currently my favourite Git client on any platform, but this is a pretty close second. Things could change any day now.

I agonised over choosing a text editor for learning development skills. With growing support out there for Visual Studio, I gave it a test run. If easier to configure, ultimately I didn’t like working in it. I tried Atom, and liked the general feel, but I can’t yet benefit from its configurability — honestly it felt kind of slow. In the end, true to form, I landed where I started. Now that I have it set up properly, Sublime text has become one of my favourite applications. As for extensibility, the Sublime SFTP package is the best thirty bucks I have spent in some time.

Another of the technical tools I require, this one has a lot of tricks. To call Forklift the best FTP client I know of would undersell it⁴. With a slick designed dual pane file browser, file syncing, drive mounting, keyboard kung fu, and all round excellence, these days it is always open on my Mac. Setapp

The most deceptively simple looking app I own. Super Duper overcame a momentary rough patch to deliver an unbelievable improvement to an already excellent utility. With the advent of APFS, it now creates bootable snapshots. The scheduler works so efficiently, I hardly even notice. I can’t begin to express the peace of mind.

The Digital Cage

There was an intense time-tracking trend among a sub-section of nerds last year. Trust me, that’s not happening here. I find the idea of tracking every aspect of your life disturbing. I use this app in a much less pervasive way, for tracking writing projects. I gather data on how long it takes me to write certain things, so I can better understand deadlines. Whether self-imposed, or not. Timing makes this easy, as it can automatically capture time spent in particular applications. Setapp

A contacts app is not something that would ordinarily interest me, I have only humble contact management needs. Since contact syncing started to work properly, I have been happy to use the native contacts app and forget about it. I felt much the same way about calendars until I tried Fantastical. The Flexibits natural language engine is like magic, and sure enough they have put it to good use in Cardhop.

Utilities

Spotlight can only take you so far. For keyboard warriors, an application launcher is mandatory. Beyond a long list of built in features, Alfred is an endlessly extensible, powerful automation tool. An active, and generous user community means there are workflows for just about anything, and help at hand if you want to hack together your own.

This is one of those utilities I never knew I needed. It’s common knowledge iTunes is a mess. Apple’s answer is to remove things without replacing them. Whenever it seems I can no longer do something with an iOS device, the answer is iMazing. Setapp

I could have put this on the iOS list too. I published a post recently on how I use 1Blocker to keep me sane while using the internet. Whether you want to block ads or not, the web is often a shady place. Stopping yourself from being tracked might be a hopeless pursuit, but you can at least make it difficult. I’m happy knowing my computing resources aren’t being filched for crypto-mining. I’m also a control freak, so I’ll let through what I please thank you very much.

For much the same reason as above. I prefer to know what’s dialling home. While incredibly powerful, Little Snitch is too noisy for my liking. Radio Silence is much more simple, and yet it still gives me the control I want. In short, this little firewall rules.

Without this little utility, my menu bar would look insane. Version 3 was released a few months back. Instead of dropping beneath, the menu bar now toggles between your main utilities and whatever you choose to hide. A subtle, but worthwhile change. It works so well it will probably be sherlocked.

Making and Breaking

This is an aspirational app at the moment, it’s probably overkill. My image editing needs a fairly simple, and most of it is done on the iPad. Especially now, with Affinity Photo on iPad Pro. However, Pixelmator has always been an app that I could grok easier than other image editors, so I picked this up in the hope that I could develop some chops. What little I have done with it so far, has been a pleasure.

Another project yet to see the light of day led me to this audio marvel. If you have any cause for routing, or capturing audio on your Mac, this is how you do it. The modular, drag and drop, visual workflow, makes sense out of confusing audio chains. Along with all the built in audio processing, it even supports Audio Unit plugins.

The idea of long-form writing seems to have taken on new meaning recently. To be clear, I’m referring to books, theses, and so on. For long blog posts, it might be overkill. ↩
Unless somebody knows an app that can do this? ↩
It could probably lose a few features ↩
Yes, yes SFTP. Of course. ↩

See all the 2017 roundups!

For many of us, creating is the same as working, but I’ll make a distinction for the sake of categorization.

Apps in this list that are also available on Setapp are marked with the Setapp logo:

Standard disclaimer: this is not a complete list of every cool app I use. It’s the highlights from the ones I use the most often. Don’t be offended if your favorite app (or the app you develop) isn’t here, but feel free to add recommendations in the comments!

Pretty Pictures

Pochade 2

Pochade is still the ideal color picker for me in most cases. Simple eyedropper and color adjustments, and it’s really easy to export a color specification in hex, rgb, hsa, or even Cocoa colors (NSColor, CGColor, UIColor).

Via Ashley Bischoff, Pochade is officially not being updated anymore. She pointed out ColorSnapper 2, which looks pretty great¹.

If you want something with palette management, though, Sip (Setapp) is a top notch app and often runs alongside Pochade when I’m coding.

Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer: These 2 apps blew me away this year. I love Acorn (and its automation capabilities), and Pixelmator has always been pretty cool, but nothing has ever been a true Photoshop replacement for me. Affinity Photo takes the cake if you’re looking for a vast feature set, a list of capabilities I haven’t even come close to exploring all of yet, and a pretty easy learning curve coming from Photoshop principles (and keyboard shortcuts).; Affinity Designer is the replacement for Adobe Illustrator. It works perfectly for round-tripping vectors to Affinity Photo, too. I was never as good at Illustrator as I was at Photoshop, and I’m not as good at Affinity Designer as I am at Affinity Photo, but I do not regret purchasing both of them.
Sketch: While Affinity Designer is a complete vector solution, I still prefer Sketch when it comes to designing icons and wireframes, mostly because of its amazing plugin architecture (and the array of available plugins), and its superb batch export capabilities. It makes updating a full icon set in Xcode a one-click process, and simultaneously outputting 1x, 2x, 3x, and PDF versions of a single image a breeze.; I use a variety of video conversion apps, most based on ffmpeg, which I also use from the command line. Among these, Permute has become my app of choice for quickly converting both video and audio files without a lot of fuss. It also integrates well with Downie, automatically converting downloaded videos for iPad/iPhone/Apple TV.; I hadn’t heard of Gifox until recently, and only discovered it because of Setapp. It’s quite easily the best tool I’ve seen for recording screen GIFs. At this point it’s completely replaced all of my other solutions, except for…
ScreenFlow: For full screen recording and editing, ScreenFlow has been my favorite for years. The latest release (version 7) adds a 60fps timeline, text effects, Audio Unit support and more. David Sparks and I created the every screencast in the 60 Mac Tips series with it.; Also worth mentioning that ScreenFlow can export animated GIFs these days, too, and does a great job with optimization.

Clever Words

TableFlip: Possibly the coolest Markdown utilities to come out in 2016, I’m still using it plenty in 2017. TableFlip gives you spreadsheet-like editing capabilities for (Multi)Markdown tables, and can live update documents as your table changes.
Bear: As the purveyor of nvALT and someone hard at work on a new note-taking app, it’s harder for me to admit than most, but Bear is just really damn good.; I can wholeheartedly endorse Marked when working with Markdown documents. I use it every day. Dev is a great guy, too, super responsive and good looking.
Deckset: I went to the CMD-D conference as a volunteer, but ended up taking the spot for Andy Ithnako’s talk when he had to cancel. I whipped up a slide deck in Markdown over a lunch break and presented it from my laptop. Deckset is awesome.
Quip: Quip has entirely replaced Google Docs for me. I only use Gdocs when someone else makes me. Quip is simple, fairly friendly to Markdown users, and has an API that’s far more accessible and usable than Google’s. Great change tracking, commenting, and these days it also has spreadsheets and a host of integrations you can stick into documents (like Kanban boards and polls). My only complaint is that the iOS version disables my 3rd party keyboards, but other than that, I’m a Quip lover².

MultiMarkdown Composer: MultiMarkdown Composer is what I’m editing this in right now, and really the only editor I use for Markdown other than Sublime Text. The public release version is great, and the beta is always even cooler. The iOS version is back in development, too, definitely worth watching for.

Most of my writing workflow is built around my own scripts and services, but I think I’ll do a final post in this series with my own favorite projects of the year. Exciting, right? Hearing someone recap all of the favorite things he or she did last year. I’ll make slideshow, too. Old school, with a carousel, and you’ll all have to sit around and smile while I describe in detail what I was doing in each photo. I feel like I’ve gotten off track.

Lovely Sounds

SteadyTune: I record and edit music (and podcasts) in Logic. Logic has a guitar tuner. I like SteadyTune better. That’s it.
Shush: I podcasted a lot in 2017. I used different mics and different recording platforms. I even tried different editing apps. The one thing that’s remained constant, always, is Shush: the perfect cough button for any USB microphone.
iZotope plugins for Logic: I picked up iZotope RX Elements on a tip from Aaron Dowd (@thepodcastdude) and loved it. I went on to purchase Nectar and Ozone as well, and I regret nothing.
Airfoil: I suppose Airfoil should be included in the nerdy utilities edition of this series, but it’s so specifically for music that I’m sticking it in here. Airfoil (now updated for High Sierra) lets me use my computer to run Spotify and Airplay (or Bluetooth) the sound out to one or more external speakers. I can actually send it to my nice Phillips speakers attached to a DAC and Airport Express and my Apple TV with a big soundbar connected to it at the same time and play music through both with perfect sync. That’s a lot of sound coverage for someone who doesn’t own a Sonos.

Ok, I’m feeling like I forgot a bunch of stuff on this one. I was really hoping to avoid doing a catchall “Stuff I forgot from 2017” post, but I might have to.