Transcript & Summary: My Favourite MacBook Apps of All Time

[00:00] in this video I'm going to give you a tour of my favorite Mac apps this year these are 32 apps that I use fairly regularly for work and for my personal life to stay organized and productive so hopefully you'll find something here that you can try out as well hey friends and welcome back to tech club the ongoing Series where I review Tech and apps and other products that can help us be more productive and generally add value to our lives now recently I got the M2 Mac Mini and I fresh installed it a few days ago and the only apps I've [00:24] installed are the ones that I've genuinely needed to use in the last week so these are the 32 apps that I use on an almost daily basis to help me be more productive and get my work done part one five productivity apps the first app on the list is Alfred now this is an app that I install and every Mac that I ever use because it's just so good and it's essentially a replacement for Mac Spotlight so what I can do is I can hit command and spacebar and then I can type in basically anything I want and Alfred [00:46] will find that thing now if you're a normal person the way you would open an app might be you would take the mouse you would drag it over to your dock which might be on the side or at the bottom you would find the app and then you would be like alright cool let me open up Chrome and you would click on the app this is a total waste of time it waste several seconds every time you do this and given that you interact with your computer six thousand times ish every day it basically wastes a lot of time to use the mouse to click stuff so [01:07] with Alfred let's say I wanted to open up Chrome and within like a millisecond it's done because I've gone command spacebar I type in whatever I want I can type in ch or even just C and it would just open up Chrome immediately what if I want to open my downloads folder so instead of dragging to the dock opening the downloads folder and then like clicking open in finder instead I can use a feature of Alfred where if you start off with a space bar now you can open any file or folder so I can just type in [01:31] downloads and immediately within again a millisecond I've now opened up my downloads folder but the feature that I probably use most often on Alfred is actually just using it to search Google and this is one of those features that Spotlight which is built into the Mac it doesn't have so let's say I wanted to search Google for I don't know a currency conversion or something 100 USD in GBP I just type it in Alfred hit enter and immediately my default browser opens up with a Google Search app number [01:52] two that I always install is called moom and moom is a tool that lets you with the keyboard shortcut snap Windows to either screen that you have and send to different sides of the screen so for example with the sigma OS window I can hit command shift M and I can move it to that side of the screen and then with this chrome window command shift M and move it to the other side of the screen and this is a generally fairly easy way for me to resize windows and often I'm working in split screen view if I have a [02:14] Google doc for my book open or some like research on the side I'll use moom to just snap the windows on either side immediately so it works super nicely for that alright app number three is a super helpful tool called amphetamine and this is an app that runs in the little taskbar of the mac and essentially keeps your Mac on for as long as you need it to and so what I do with amphetamine is I hit the little icon at the top and then I can start a new session indefinitely Or for certain minutes or certain hours or while a particular app [02:36] is running super helpful if you're rendering a file in Final Cut and you don't want your Mac to go to sleep next on the list we have an app that I use basically daily and that is called clean shot and it's a fantastic way of taking screenshots and Screen recordings now clean shot also operates as one of those like taskbar menu bar app things let's say I want to take a screenshot of this graph from anchor who's one of our YouTuber Academy students I could set up a keyboard shortcut for this but I can [02:57] also click the thing I can hit capture area and now I can Define the area that I want to capture this is all fine and dandy so far but now it appears here in the corner of the screen and I can edit this and kind of do whatever I want with this particular graph one thing I often do is I often use the arrow tool to kind of point to different things I could add text if I wanted to the other cool thing about clean shot is that it takes nice screenshots of windows so if instead of selecting a particular area for this [03:18] screenshot I wanted to select the whole window I can go on clean shot I can hit capture window and now if we look at this because it just like looks a bit nicer rather than one where you just see the window without the desktop if you want to you can get rid of the desktop you hit the shift key while hitting capture window now it'll give you the same screenshot but just with transparency in the background and a slight shadow on the window and it just generally looks more aesthetic than a normal screenshot the other cool thing [03:39] that cleanshot does is that it lets you do scrolling captures and so I often use this to take a screenshot of a whole page and now what it's doing is is that it's automatically scrolling through the page and it's turning this into a really really long screenshot now the fifth app in terms of productivity tools is called rise and Rise is great because it's basically an automatic time tracker it sits in your Mac and it tracks all of the apps and all the websites that you're using although in an encrypted [04:00] fashion and then you can select how you want to categorize certain apps and websites and I've been using this since like November 2021 and so I can see like on average in a given month or in a given week how much time am I spending on video calls how much time am I spending writing or project managing or using my to-do list or wasting time on YouTube it's also nice because it's got a Pomodoro Timer situation built into it so I can hit start Focus for example let's say my goal for the session is edit chapter [04:24] to or book I can tag it with book for example I can set a duration so let's say I want to do this as a 30 minute session because that's how I'm feeling I can select my music silence Lo-Fi beats Jazz I often use Lo-Fi beats because it's just kind of nice or I use silence if I'm using my Spotify study with me playlist and then I can hit start focus and now it's going to start this Focus timer and if it senses that I'm doing something that doesn't look like Focus like if I go on YouTube for example it'll pop up with a little notification [04:47] on the side saying hey it looks like you're getting distracted now ryzen not sponsoring this video but if you fancy checking out the link in the video description I've got an affiliate link so if you sign up I get a bit of a kickback I think I'm not even sure but that'll be linked down below it's also cool because if you want you can enable this thing in the corner over here where it says 24 minutes time Sun's last break 3 hours 12 total work hours 40 of workday so it just kind of lets you know be like oh how much time have I spent [05:09] since the last time I took a break part two five apps that help me organize my life so first on this list we have the app that I use to manage my to-do list and that is things things is amazing I'm gonna do a whole video on it another time but basically it's a to-do list app and it's available on all Apple devices so phone iPad Apple watch even Matt I have it on all my devices it's on my home screen on my iPhone and I also use it to keep track of all of the projects So within relationships I want to be a [05:31] great boyfriend I create a group Adventure leader a dinner party Chef within Fitness within work live admin fun and hobbies and basically every morning I figure out what am I doing for the day and so I look at my anytime list which shows all of the things in my to-do list categorized by projects and then I'll pick which of these which of the ones do I want to do today so today I want to weigh myself which I haven't done yet I need to log my book hours oh crap I need to order some stuff from ocado and it integrates nicely with my [05:52] calendar so I don't have to look at my calendar so often throughout the day speaking of calendar the app that I use for my calendar that I've been using since like 2015 is called fantastic Cal and the cool thing about Fantastical is that it does have pretty good natural language processing so if I wanted to add a new task I could just say Tuesday 8 pm to 10 P.M dinner with Tom at hawksmore and so it would take the parameters from the thing that I've typed in and turn it into a calendar event which is very handy at [06:19] number three that I used to organize my life is superhuman which is my email client that I've been using since I think around 2019 and I've integrated that with my personal Gmail and my work Gmail and superhuman is nice because it lets you use shortcuts and it's just generally a faster and more pleasant way of navigating email which I also have on my iPhone compared to the Gmail default app or compared to doing it in a web browser window the app that I use to manage all my passwords is Dashlane which again I've been using for [06:40] absolutely years and then at number five we have a new app that I've been using recently as a replacement for Chrome and that is Sigma OS and sigma is great because it's built on chromium IE it's basically the same Vibe and same speed and same interface as Chrome and you can use Chrome extensions as well but what it does is that on the sidebar you can categorize the different tabs so I often have dozens and dozens of tabs open in Chrome and it can be hard to keep track of them but for this I have a life [07:03] design I have a health I have relationships I have a book I can basically categorize my tabs into different workspaces and so if I'm working on the book for example I just open up the book space if I know that I'm taking a break from work and I want to do a 10 minute stretch routine like this one I'll open up the health space where I already have this pinned at the top so I always know that it's there I'm gonna be honest I've kind of been going back and forth between Chrome and sigma as my default browser Sigma they're [07:24] constantly updating it like loads of Cutting Edge features but it's still a little bit buggy some of the time and so as much as I love it I can't yet fully just completely get rid of chrome Sigma also it's it's kind of like superhuman it's built on the idea of keyboard shortcuts um but I spent a lot of time in Google Docs these days because we're an editing stage for my book and Google Docs already has loads of keyboard shortcuts in it and sometimes those like don't interact with Sigma and I find [07:45] myself getting a little bit frustrated specifically when I'm in Google Docs and the team are very responsive to bug reports so if something doesn't work I just message something like guys sort this out please and then this sort it out so yeah check out Sigma OS if you like so over the last few years I've had a ton of people asking me about learning to code because actually my original kind of the way that I made my money on the internet initially was through learning how to code and when I was in [08:03] medical school and this YouTube channel hadn't yet started it was through my coding and web development background that I was able to make quite a lot of money on the side and at the time an app I used to use all the time was called PHP storm PHP was the coding language I would build my product in and phpstorm is an IDE an integrated development environment that's developed by a company called jetbrains and so it's particularly exciting that this video is very kindly sponsored by jetbrains now jetbrains is a software development [08:26] company they've got more than 12.8 million developers using their software but they've recently launched a new platform for learning to code and learning computer science and that's called jetbrains Academy and the cool thing about jetbrains Academy is that it's all about project-based learning if you're just trying to learn to code based on a syllabus it's going to be boring and you're never going to do it but if you try and build a project build your own app build your own website and through creating those projects you can [08:47] learn how to code while you learn it you can pick from over 120 projects and you can select different programming tracks and then once you've selected a project you get a personalized study plan and this is kind of split up into different levels of difficulty so that you work through the difficulty levels and the great thing about jetbrains Academy is that you're learning through these projects but you're also learning within an IDE and integrated development environment and you're learning the principles of coding all while creating [09:08] actual real world applications and the system is pretty smart in that you write the code and then the system automatically checks how legit the code is so that you get those instant feedback loops which is super helpful for learning anyway if any of that sounds up your stream and you want a totally free one month free trial where you can check it out then head over to hyperskill.org join slash Ali underscore adult and that link is going to be in the video description as well and if you hit that link then that will let you [09:28] sign up for a totally free one month free trial so thank you so much Chef brains for sponsoring this video part three three apps that I use in my personal life now I'm not going to show you what's in my journal obviously but in this calendar view you can see that I've been kind of journaling on and off for the last since 2014. yeah it's great and day one is fantastic for journaling I have it on my Mac I have it on my iPhone I have it on my iPad you can also use an Apple Watch dictationally type thing [09:50] which realistically I never use but it's just by far the best journaling app I've ever found and sometimes even if I'm physically journaling what I'll do is I'll write down on a piece of paper and then at some point I'll go in and like take photos of them on my iPhone and Chuck them into day one so that I have this as a digital and also analog Journal backup the other thing I love about day one is that they have an on this day feature so because I've been literally using it for years I can see that for example on this day the 2nd of [10:12] February 2018 five years ago this is what I wrote it's been an absolute bloodbath of a day from the crypto point of view bitcoin price crashed down to around 6K I sold 5 Bitcoin at 6450 oh God you can see you can see what's going on here quite excited for the date with reducted on Sunday we're going to Bella Italia at 5 PM though although and I'm not really sure what we're going to talk about it's just kind of nice it's cool similarly on this day last year the 2nd of February 2022 man this been an [10:35] incredible day as I was walking back to the flat after parking the car at redacted I felt a profound sense of fulfillment this was when me and Angus and Gordon drove up to gymshark HQ to meet with Steve Hewitt who's the executive chairman of gymshark and he did a whole like business planning session for us all right next we have an app that I use for messaging and that is text.com it's a great app it's cross-platform and basically what it does is that it brings together WhatsApp and iMessage and Twitter DMS and it's [10:57] like superhuman for messages so you can archive messages you can get to inbox zero on your messages you can use loads of keyboard shortcuts and it's so good that when I find myself having to reply to a WhatsApp on my phone I think oh I wish I was on my computer right now because it's just blazingly fast to reply to messages using text.com and then the third app on the list of personal is Spotify obviously I would love to be a subscriber to Apple music but Spotify is just a way better Apple around I have my study with me playlist [11:19] with like thousands of songs that are all like instrumental bangers from films and video games and TV shows I'll link that down in the video description if you want to check it out part four six apps for research and writing damn this video is getting long but that's okay hopefully you're finding it useful if you are please do drop a cheeky thumbs up on this video really help out for the YouTube algorithm app number one for research and writing is Obsidian which is the app that I use for my personal [11:40] note-taking and personal Knowledge Management obsidian is my personal second brain I've been using it a bunch when I've been researching and writing stuff for my book so for example this is me this is some of my notes that I took from the handbook of positive emotions and took some screenshots while reading it on Kindle and copied and pasted some quotes and it's just really good for that kind of thing next we have another writing app which is scrivener scrivener is an app that's like specifically [11:59] designed for writing books and so this is what I was doing the first draft of my booking and it's nice because you can track the overall word count on your entire manuscript you can track a daily word cut so you can set targets for yourself these days I don't use it so much because we're in the editing stage so everything is being done in Google Docs but it's fantastic as like a first drafting piece of software alright next up we have zotero which is the app that I use for reference management for [12:19] scientific papers that I read so I've been through dozens if not hundreds of papers at this point for again research for the book and also research for some of our videos and zotero is nice because it's a great way of for example reading PDFs but it's also great because then you can highlight stuff Within These scientific papers and because zotero has an extension for obsidian means I can automatically export my highlights from zotero directly into obsidian and that means it's a lot easier to copy paste [12:41] and move them around and build a book outline out of the stuff in the research papers next on the list is pretty standard this is the Kindle app which I mean I don't often use to read stuff on directly on my Mac but in particular if I'm doing research for book or for videos and I know there's a book which I've read or that I want to flick through then I can just use the Kindle app on my Mac and I can screenshot bits from Kindle or copy paste them and Chuck them straight into obsidian or notion or [13:02] click up or Google Docs or whatever app I'm using to actually craft the thing I'm trying to create app number five on this list is very boring it says Google Chrome everyone has Chrome great browser and then at number six on the list we have an app that I genuinely use and that is surfsharkvpn and the main thing I use surfshark VPN for is that if I'm using a sci Hub if you know you know because scihub has a connection with zotero which means I can get PDFs for free and stuff I'm not going to talk [13:23] about that too much for obvious reasons but surfsharkvpn is the best VPN I found for easily connecting to secure private networks it's also been really handy I was in Bali a few months ago and the hotel had weirdly blocked a bunch of different websites so I just opened surfshark connected to through VPN and then suddenly everything was unblocked so life is good part five seven apps for Creative work all right so number one on this list is screenflow which is the app that I use to record my screen on my Mac [13:46] so for example I'm using screenflow to record this very screen recording and I also use screenflow extensively when I'm doing live sessions for my part-time YouTuber Academy so I'll have my presentation which is being screen shared on Zoom with the people who've joined live but then I'll use screenflow to record the whole screen so that when we do a fancy edited version of the video for the video recordings of the part-time YouTuber Academy we have it as a nice little high quality screen recording unlike the crappy quality Zoom [14:08] recording app number two on this list is Final Cut which is my video editing app of choice I don't do a lot of video editing myself these days because I have a lovely team who do the video editing for me but still every now and then my mum will ask me to edit a video for a friend wedding or something like that and I'll just open it up in Final Cut or if for example I just want to do a quick edit or just Flex those creative muscles then Final Cut is my video editing app of choice been using it for years since [14:27] like 2017 and I actually have a course on skillshare if you want to check it out completely free how to edit videos in Final Cut Pro that'll be linked down below if you want alright number three on the list we have the Adobe Creative Cloud I have a subscription for it um back in the day when I was a kid I used to Pirate all of this software not gonna lie um but since you know starting to actually make money and have a job where I do creative stuff we now spend lots and lots of money uh for on the Adobe [14:50] Creative Cloud for basically everyone in our team and so I feel like I'm giving Adobe back the value that I kind of owe them from all of the piracy that I used to do when I was a kid anyway the three main apps that I use personally are Photoshop Lightroom and Lightroom classic so Photoshop is great because thumbnails we use canva for a lot of our thumbnails but sometimes something needs something a bit fancier until we bring it into Photoshop for that Lightroom classic is great because if I have loads [15:10] of photos on an SD card let's say I've been to a cousin's wedding in Pakistan I've taken a thousand photos it's kind of a faff going through those on Lightroom mobile which is nice for like a handful of photos at a time but I can just SD card them Lightroom classic again been using Lightroom classic since 2015 so I'm very kind of comfortable with using that workflow next we have Lightroom itself which is like Lightroom mobile because they kind of have these two weird versions but Lightroom is nice [15:32] because if I need to just touch up a photo for Instagram or or touch up a photo for editing a thumbnail and I want to take a photo on my phone and do it on my iPad then Lightroom the mobile version is great for syncing across all devices next we have the app that I use for streaming which these days is streamlabs desktop I've been dabbling with more streaming recently so that's the app that we use for streaming and finally the app that we use for a bunch of design work is figma we use it to design landing pages and thumbnails for [15:54] our YouTuber Academy stuff and thumbnail mood boards and a bunch of other stuff we also use figma for a bunch of Social Media stuff so Instagram carousels and things like that where we can just create a template and then it's very easy for us to edit the text whenever we need to part six seven apps that help me run my business alright firstly we have notion which is the app that we use for almost everything in the business we use it for all our team management all of our one-on-ones every employee of the [16:15] team has a Hub on notion we use it for our knowledge management we use to keep track of basically everything that's happening in the business I've made loads of notion videos already I'll link some of those down below if you want to check them out but an app that we've started using more recently specifically for keeping track of the video production pipeline is called click up now click up is like a notion competitor sorry notion but it's more suited for direct project management it's less flexible the notion is because notion is [16:36] basically anything you want it to be but the nice thing about click up is that it seems to be more specifically tuned to to-do lists and tasks and that kind of stuff and integrating with calendars in a way that notion doesn't quite do thirdly we have one password which is our password manager for our team fourthly we have slack which is just how we communicate as a team number five we have zoom zoom is kind of boring everyone knows what Zoom does number six we have Loom which is great for like recording screens and that kind of stuff [16:58] and so often instead of having a meeting we'll save time by just someone recording a loom instead and this is particularly handy because if someone on the team needs to present something to me to get my sign up on something it's way easier for them to just send me a loom that I can watch at Double speed on my own time rather than try to get our calendars to line up which is basically never going to happen and finally an app that we use within the team for a lot of brainstorming is called Miro and so if [17:17] we're having a meeting on Zoom or even in real life and we just need an interactive whiteboard to play around with everyone will open up mirror on their devices and we'll be able to put stuff on the screen for example this was some brainstorming we were doing around what are the problems that people have with their YouTube channels and how do we make sure that our part-time YouTuber Academy actually ticks the boxes that we're trying to help people with and mirror is nice you can move stuff around [17:36] you've got arrows you've got diagrams you can kind of do whatever and it's an infinite canvas that is infinitely big and so you can sort of play with it as much as you need to all right that brings us to the end of this ridiculously long video I hope you enjoyed it if you're here so far if you did you might like to check out this video over here which is my top 10 tips for managing my time if you've gotten this far in the video you're probably interested in productivity and in managing your time and you might like [17:55] that video over there so thank you so much for watching have a great day and I'll see you in the next one bye