Keeps the menubar clean. Very handy!

I really need to leverage this a lot more, but even simple actions like swipe down with three fingers to close a tab, or tip-tap right left to move between tabs is pretty awesome already. Also use four-finger double tap to make the mouse pointer larger when it's lost between screens... I'd guess this app can probably subsume a lot of the functionality offered by apps like Keyboard Maestro and Alfred.

Good-looking stats in the menubar 👍️

Mostly to keep track of file sizes via the Space Lens.

Alternative if using only this feature: Daisy Disk

Use this all the time to stash away stuff where it belongs to keep Downloads clutter-free. Also the Alfred DFX collection is handy for finding recent items even if not 100% reliable.

Use this to supplement manual time-tracking. Do not use it to its full potential at all, I think a little investment with setting up the right projects etc. can go a long way.

Handy for all kinds of (bulk) file conversions.

Impressive OCR "from anywhere".

Intuitive gestures for window management. Pretty confident all this can be done in Better Touch Tool (above), but the actions are inspiring, and I'm lazy, so yeah, this is explicitly installed.

Use this for downloading videos from Youtube for offline viewing/listening. Fairly robust.

Icon collection, enough said. 🎁

Handy 🎨 color picker.

Visually appealing world-clock, nice for scheduling stuff across timezones, great screensaver option as well.

Documentation lookup, handy that it works inside VS Code (via an extension).

Lovely mindmaps.

Although I mostly use Preview, PDFPen is useful for quickly rearranging and removing pages. Not sure about the several other features claimed, I find that it sadly crashes more often than not, so not my default application.

Occasional use, but very useful when I do need it for some pesky hidden-unicode-character-removal exercise.

Niche app - on the rare occasion that I have a complicated LaTeX formula to write, I can write it in the iOS version of this app and receive it on the Mac (I don't think the desktop app is even necessary for this; the iOS purchase can be bypassed by using the Mac app via Sidecar, but this is where I discovered the app so it makes the list).

Powerful previews for Markdown documents. Lots of interesting export features.

This helps with keeping certain folders in sync, and setting up some backup schedules. Nothing that can't be done with a few scripts (?) and/or Time Machine, but I did end up setting (and forgetting) a few things in here.

I'm (admittedly* experimentally) using Notion as my primary PKM tool, and it's also where I am keeping most of my public-facing content (including this blog). My usage of Notion is gradually expanding in scope to include time/task/finance tracking as well.

*and also admittedly yet-again, after a fairly committed detour through Obsidian, Craft, and VSCode extensions for several months...

Fairly robust reference management that has most of what I need — priority features include speed, reliability, flexibility in generating citekeys and decent auto-filing of papers added to the database (popular free and paid alternatives that I've tried briefly: Zotero, Mendeley, Setne, Papers, Readcube, JabRef, Bookends).

Incidentally, if you are into Obsidian and Zotero, you might enjoy this video.

LaTeX and related tools, including TeX-friendly IDEs and reference management tools.

Need these to work with code.

The app that I miss the first when on a machine that doesn't have it, next to Alfred. Makes window switching much more search and keyboard-driven.

Really elaborate shortcut/automation app. I've only scratched the surface with my use cases, but one of the things I really dig about my setup is simulating keypress sequences.

The way I do this is to activate a macro group for one action with one keyboard shortcut (e.g, CMD + ;) and then have all macros within that have one-letter or one-letter + one-modifier triggers - basically very easy triggers. This way, I only have to remember a bunch of high-level shortcuts for things in various categories, and from there it's just a letter (and the same letter can be overloaded in different contexts).

As a concrete example, I have a macro group called launchers, and a shortcut within that for launching chrome. So something like CMD+L followed by c would launch Chrome. Although I have to confess that I mostly launch stuff through Alfred still (at the cost of one or two extra keystrokes).

Keypress-sequence-triggers are native to Better Touch Tool and since BTT supports AppleScript, you could also run KM macros from BTT. I haven't quite tried this yet.

More advice on this here.

Fast snippet expansion - faster than TextExpander (one of the main competitors in this space) in my experience. Recent updates have some rad features, which of course I'm yet to explore and exploit!

Reasonably user-friendly and robust password management. Syncs to iOS, but I haven't managed to leverage it so much on iOS. 1Password is ideal for storing confidential information nicely (IDs, bank stuff, and the like) - if used only for passwords I suppose the Keychain does a good job too.

Fantastical is a nice (but expensive!) calendar app, mostly use it because of the calendar sets feature that keeps my time blocking calendars separate from the official one that is public within the organization. Of late, I especially like the way you can join online meetings from the notifications.

Having said that, I realized that much of what I was doing with Fantastical was overkill and I've switched to the default calendar app for now, and it's one paid subscription less* to have.

Looks very promising for cross-linking stuff across apps that have a common context (say, a project). I really need to explore this more!

Particularly useful for switching OBS scenes although I use it less than I thought I would!

In particular, I want to explore their VSCode and KM integrations.

If without the physical device, Streamdeck does have a nice iOS app that simulates the hardware, but the pricing is based on a subscription model.

I can't make up my mind between Chrome/FF/Brave/Safari. I mostly switch between Chrome and Safari, with a mild preference for Chrome because of it's more comprehensive extensions space, but I often end up with Safari as default for speed and privacy.

Use this for RSS, although I’ve mostly migrated away to DEVONthink. Still looking for a nice stand-alone RSS reader though, Readkit doesn't always render everything the way I expect, sadly.

For recording and live-streaming videos. Also useful as a virtual camera for meeting apps.

For recording videos, lots of features, still finding my way around them.

Online communities. I sometimes wish there was a native app for discourse too (is there?)

Presentations - main alternative: Beamer + LaTeX + pgf/TikZ; or one of the JS-based slide generator tools from Markdown files (I did use react.js for one entire term).

Use this fairly minimally (especially relative to the possibilities). At the moment DT indexes a couple of key finder folders and pulls in information from a lot of RSS feeds and even Twitter accounts. I try to review the stuff that automatically piles up in DT regularly, but — at the moment — it's mostly a dumping ground and... messy.

Use this for classes and online meetings.

Use it only to open files I receive.

Useful battery health monitoring, discovered the app from a MPU podcast episode IIRC.

Surprisingly good LaTeX-aware OCR.

Budgeting and finance management.

Until I setup Mailmate again, I'm checking email in my browser. 🙈

I use these when others use them.

A few automations here and there, still on my bucket list to take full advantage here. Integromat has been great for tracking Exportober contributions, incidentally!