Necessary Mac Software

I have been sharing this list with friends. One of them is a dev and wanted to add this to the list:

Squidman: Is GUI addon for the command line Squid proxy cache. I haven't learned the cli yet for it but it makes mobile development a breeze. http://squidman.net/squidman/
 
I have a confession to make... I've struggled with this problem for a long time.

do1TmJp.gif


It was slowly killing me bit by bit. I didn't know how much it was killing me inside though. Every time the colors of my world would get a bit grayer till I was almost only seeing black, white, and shades of gray. I couldn't understand what was draining my life force away... until I came across this:

Get Plain Text - In all my years and struggle of being on the computer this one app is probably the greatest APP of them all. It hides in the background, or in your menu and does one simple thing - It pastes your text without formatting REGARDLESS of what program you are in. It takes your text that's all formatted and shit and strips it down to only text and allows you to paste it in the plain text format. (even in Microsoft Word...)

WGMtBkA.gif


For years I struggled with this stupidity of "rich text media" bullshit. There is the complicating Mac Shortcut of Shift+option+cmd+V to "paste with match style" that will strip it, but I don't have that many fingers, I just wanted to "cmd+v" and paste it without doing all that special stuff. Even within certain APPs like Firefox or Chrome they'll overwrite your keyboard shortcut, WTF, if you tried to switch the commands.

The struggle was real folks, every time I copied and pasted I died a little inside. It was horrible for coding since I had to open another app like TextWrangler or TextEdit to get the plaintext formatting. In fact TextEdit started betraying me when it started defaulting to "Rich Text Format". As the struggle continued I knew there had to be a better way. No terminal command could fix the problem, no keyboard shortcut could fix the problem. Being one step away from completely hacking OSX's source code I felt my time on the computer and the interwebs coming to an end. I felt my life force's time on this earth coming to an end.

A thousand Google searches later I came across this free APP "Get Plain Text". I was scared at first it was going to interfere with my JumpCut App I use to copy and paste multiple things - but it didn't... I was scared it was going to be some heavy app that took so much resources it'll crash my Mac every time I copied and pasted - but it didn't...

In fact I can completely remove it from the menu, have it run on start-up (which I do), and completely forget about it, but I'll know there is this beautiful app, guarding my copies, stripping away the dumbass formatting these App developers think I want, and every time, I paste... every single time... It will be in plain text format...

BLVKGfY.gif


My struggle is finally over...
Just let me go now...
Free at last, free at last... thank god almighty - I'm free at last...
 
This is going to sound like a joke but I haven't owned a laptop or anything similar in the past 10 years. I'm running on a big desktop still.

I need to buy a mac because I'll be moving abroad soon. Would love some advice from you mac freakz

Pretty much chosen a 13" Macbook Pro, but not sure whether it's worth getting any upgrades and unsure which size SDD to go with. 128gb is likely too small, 256 might be enough, 512gb is great but a bit more than I'd like to spend tbh. What size + upgrades did you guys go with? Do you regret it? Do you just run an external HDD on the side? @CCarter @MetaData @Ryuzaki @Philip J. Fry
 
Prentzz said:
What size + upgrades did you guys go with?
Click to expand...

The Macbook I just got is a Pro 15 inch (2.8GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz), with 16GB of RAM (no option to upgrade or downgrade), and 1TB SSD Harddrive.

I would have max out the RAM anyways cause I run crazy video editing Apps and Photoshop and doing multiple things at the same time. Last Macbook I got was the 17' inch with 8GB of RAM, has 500 GB of HD, whatever the max processor at the time was I went with that. I like just maxing out the stuff and calling it a day. Cause in 5 years from now it will still be able to keep up with the stuff on the market from my experience. I still use the 17 80% of the time, but am slowly transitioning over to the 15.

If you go with the 13 inch, Max the processor and RAM - that way you'll never have to really worry about using the harddrive as RAM when all the RAM is full. But since it's a SSD anyways, that won't matter much. So really the only think you have to ask yourself is What are you going to be storing on the computer? I'm keeping my 15in completely free of documents in case one of these days the alphabet boys kick down my door. I've got an external 1TB drive for all my important writes.

One advantage if a external harddrive is being able to move between computers, but really I've got both Macbooks connected to each other through Ethernet so I can access any thing I want, even a harddrive connected to the other Laptop from the one I'm currently on, also the harddrives I connect directly to my routers are all accessible for all computers, so basically if you are on one computer you can access any file on any harddrive, computer, or external harddrive within the network. What's crazy is I don't have any special setup, I just buy a harddrive with an ethernet connect or wireless and plug it in and with Mac it all just works and is accessible from anywhere (within the local network). I tried this setup on Windows back in the day, jesus christ nothing would ever work or stay connected.

I used to be a desktop guy when I was full Windows, cause I always thought the Laptops wouldn't be able to keep up with the desktop power, but when I got a hold of my first Macbook Pro, that was a wrap, they blew away performance of desktops left and right, so I haven't had a desktop since.

Edit: I just copied and pasted without formatting in this one for the first time! It was beautiful. My gut instinct was to open up textedit, but I didn't have to!! LOL fuck, I'm finally free...
 
4rdOcQasKart.878x0.Z-Z96KYq.jpg

​
But seriously, I miss my iMac :( Was perfect for work
 
CCarter said:
but I don't have that many fingers
Click to expand...

I lol'd. I was just dealing with this yesterday, right clicking before pasting so I could choose "Match style" instead... which is like the opposite of what the description should be anyways. It's confusing and stupid. About to get that Get Plain Text app. Thanks!

Another good one is any of the Text Expanders, where you can basically key up any random set of key strokes like QWER and have that automatically get converted to your email address. Anything that you type over and over again works well.

The Pages and Numbers apps, and the rest of their "office suite" totally destroys Microsoft Office for the Mac too. Microsoft's stuff is a crazy resource hog and would hang up constantly. Copying text, literally just hitting CMD + C, would take upwards to 3 seconds before it was ready to be pasted out. All kinds of stupid stuff.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The Pages and Numbers apps, and the rest of their "office suite" totally destroys Microsoft Office for the Mac too. Microsoft's stuff is a crazy resource hog and would hang up constantly. Copying text, literally just hitting CMD + C, would take upwards to 3 seconds before it was ready to be pasted out. All kinds of stupid stuff.
Click to expand...

I have to disagree with this, coming from iMac to Windows, Microsoft office is 10/10 IMO. I haven't noticed any performance issues, but then again I have a gaming rig and not a laptop
 
built said:
I have to disagree with this, coming from iMac to Windows, Microsoft office is 10/10 IMO. I haven't noticed any performance issues, but then again I have a gaming rig and not a laptop
Click to expand...

I believe @Ryuzaki is talking about the Microsoft Office experience on a Mac. It's complete garbage. Opening a spreadsheet file on a computer with 8GB or 16GB shouldn't take 10 seconds just to load the "recent" menu. It's a perfect example of "no-fucks-given" programming cause it's a horrible experience.
 
CCarter said:
I believe @Ryuzaki is talking about the Microsoft Office experience on a Mac. It's complete garbage. Opening a spreadsheet file on a computer with 8GB or 16GB shouldn't take 10 seconds just to load the "recent" menu. It's a perfect example of "no-fucks-given" programming cause it's a horrible experience.
Click to expand...

Oh I see. Pages and numbers also really sucked on my Mac. The main thing I miss about the Mac is the OS in general, it's so much more user friendly and overall the design is a lot better than Windows.
 
If I was going to make love to a computer, it would be a mac.
 
Calamari said:
If I was going to make love to a computer, it would be a mac.
Click to expand...

Something tells me that would void the warranty. Call it a hunch...
 
^ It's probably a Hackintosh.
 
EpochClock - If you are a programmer and mess with epoch daily, if not hourly, this app is extremely sweet. It's just a running calculation of the current time in unix timestamp format (epoch). You can click it and copy and paste the unix time and call it a day. Here is a image of what it looks like:

WFoajwb.png


Before I had a dashboard widget of this, then I was using unixtimestamp.com every time I needed the time. I didn't want to waste time opening up terminal and typing in date +%s either, now it's just there like a clock, love it. Man I feel like there is an App for everything!
 
I've tried Mac, I just can't love it.

It's just too user friendly and not power-user driven. There was a documentary on this and I have to say I agree. Sometimes that user friendliness gets in the way. On windows everything is instant or I can crash/restart it, on a Mac there's so many instances where that damn circle wheel loads and loads forever, even for small setting changes.

The UI design is there, it's amazing. So are the apps, etc...

One day I'll make the switch but it's really tough coming from Windows 7.

Windows 10 is a fail though, that's complete garbage. I'd rather take OSX than ever be forced to use 10.
 
CCarter said:
words
Click to expand...

Thanks for all the advice I'm feeling the love over here!
Pretty much decided that I'm going to go with the most basic 13" model, only 128gb SSD and no upgrades to RAM or processor.

The most intense things I see myself doing is some basic photoshop work. Almost all my day is spent in my browser, skype and maybe itunes. I think even the most basic model should handle all those simultaneously without strain?

Going to then just grab a 2TB external harddrive for any documents, music, videos. Keeping the SSD purely for any work programs.

I'm also going to have to buy a mouse... how some of you work with just a touchpad is beyond me!
 
On the topic of working without a mouse...

How the hell do I do this?

Wt8eP2o.png
 
Option + Shift + Command + S
 
Just started adding apps to my beefed up 15" MBP, and this thing rips compared to the 13" I use at the agency.

Anyways one of the must haves for doing any video rendering is App Tamer (http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/)

I tend to have about 8000 things open while I am doing shit. Rather than go and kill all those apps 1 by 1, I just open this bad boy up and slow/stop the CPU hogging while I am rendering a quick video or something. The slow feature is dope, that way I can speed up whatever I am doing without killing everything and having to restart.
 
Apps I couldn't live without (only the mac specific ones, not shit like evernote and sublime text) :

  • Pixelmator (I still have PS, AI, etc, but this is the fastest way to get something done, IMO)
  • Sketch (destroys AI, love kicking out css styles)
  • Fluid App (lets you create an 'app' out of any website - I use it for Trello among other things)
  • Alfred (does the copy paste shit you guys talked about up above and so much more)
  • Fantastical (natural language calendar, so dope)
  • Airmail 2 (love this email client.)
  • Hemingway (for writing)
  • Ghostnote (so cool for taking notes on windows / apps)
  • 1password (duh)
  • Sequel pro
Seriously though, why aren't you guys using Alfred? The workflows are amazing. I type 'dev [projectname]' and get my entire dev environment launched with every app i may need (psd, vagrant, subl w/ dir open, terminal in the proper directory, sequel pro...)
 
Holy shit alfred just made my research tasks go to auto-pilot. I am stunned how bad ass this app is.
 
dresden said:
Fluid App (lets you create an 'app' out of any website - I use it for Trello among other things)
Click to expand...

I'm all about Trello... any reason in particular that you use this Fluid App for it instead of Trello's own app?
 
j a m e s said:
I'm all about Trello... any reason in particular that you use this Fluid App for it instead of Trello's own app?
Click to expand...

Trello doesnt have a native mac app. They have iOS versions, but nothing for the desktop.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back