10 Mac Apps You Haven't Heard Of (but should be using)

you probably haven't heard of YY cow before it's an extremely lightweight calendar app I keep pinned in the menu bar so that when I'm making plans with my amazing funny supportive imaginary friends I can uh click the arrow icons here to jump to navigate between months or press command shift T to jump to specific date for example September 1st 2030 uh take a screenshot like so highlight this week my birthday week add some text want to uh go this week and send this off to the imaginary group chat pretty seamless it gets even better for Apple calendar users since not only can you choose which calendar to appear in iCal under settings you can also just add a new event directly by clicking the plus icon here or you can just bring up Apple calendar app directly by clicking the calendar icon Pro tip from within the app we can click the dot here to jump back to today and we can even drag down to show the next month by the way if you haven't met my name is Jeff and on this channel we go over extremely practical productivity tips so stick around for nine more completely free apps that will streamline your Mac workflow app number two local send long

story short if you're a billionaire and use Apple products exclusively you can skip this one because local send is the best file sharing alternative to airdrop it is completely op source and crossplatform meaning you can install local scent on your iPhone Android tablets Mac window windows and yes even Linux for example here I have What's this called again a Android and Android phone apparently have a few features we copied from if I want to send a video from this Android to my Mac I first install the local send app on both devices make sure that connect to the same Wi-Fi select the video on the Android and Click Share select local send and when I click on the Mac device when it shows up right here I'll be prompted on my Mac to accept or reject this file and that's it it's that simple this obviously works the other way as well from Mac to Android and basically across all the platforms I mentioned earlier so it's super useful if you use multiple operating systems like I do speaking of

simple and secure file Management Solutions I've been using Dropbox since I started YouTube years ago so I'm pretty excited they're sponsoring this portion of the video in my experience as a part-time Creator Dropbox has been super reliable when it comes to uploading and downloading large media files before when I used other services I've noticed my files would occasionally fail randomly in the middle I think we've all experienced that right but with Dropbox that's never happened plus I can make documents available offline so I can access my files anywhere even without Wi-Fi and of course I can make them online only with a simple click which helps me save space on my hard drive also I'm kind of security SL paranoid for no good reason so I really like the fact that when I share files with external Freelancers for example I can create a link set an expiration date and even add a password for particular files and folders lastly and this is mainly for creators and creative teams Dropbox replay is dope when I use it to give feedback on video edits I can literally draw on the video to leave extremely specific comments and then I can use the compare versions feature to play back the versions side by side check out the link in the description to learn more and thank you Dropbox again for sponsoring this portion of the video

moving on at number four trans nomino is an absolute GameChanger when it comes to file management here's how it works by default without the app we can select a multiple files within Finder right click rename and if these are all my business trip receipts I can select the format option here and select the name and date to add a date to these files file names space business trip and that's it that's basically the batch rename function within finder it's very limited with trans nomino I drag the files over set and watch this I can select the date created and if I don't like this format since it's too long I can click the drop down select a shorter format space BP space again click three dots again and I have all these Dynamic options to choose from I can add the last modified date the original name of the file or the name of the folder it's currently in and as you can see you can preview the results here before you click rename and we're not done because we can add another step select conversion and I can convert all the text to uppercase lowercase or capitalize each word and we can yet add another step conversion because if you notice there is a special character above the E here I believe in French it's pronounced I can remove that by selecting remove diacritics to make sure there are no compatibility issues if I'm moving these files between operating systems Pro tip we can toggle off the step if you want to skip SK it or press command delete to delete the step Al together and of course we can just select all the files press delete if you want to remove the files from the trans nomino app and for all the photographers out there we can drag the images in under set we can choose date created again sure nothing new Under GPS though we can select address country and address City that's pretty awesome and we're still not done because we can go to exf and select pixel height and pixel width so you can see the dimensions of your image from the file name we can type X here and add space accordingly in here and we go from this meaningless jargon to a transformed and meaningful name I've barely scratched the surface here so if you're someone who works with a large amount of files you should definitely check this out at number five

chat GPT for the Mac I used to have chat GPT pinned in my browser for easy access but ever since they launched their desktop app I use alfreds Spotlight for an e even more seamless experience within settings I first recommend updating the keyboard shortcut to option C since I think the default shortcut conflicts with both Spotlight and todoist now I can bring up a new chat using option C and pro tip if I have an image saved in my clipboard I can press command V to attach the image directly to this new chat and use a text expander app to input a prompt in seconds I personally use a paid version of Alfred but a free alternative would be cast for those of us using the memory feature within chat GPT just know that you can press command shift n to create a temporary chat that will not appear in history use or create memories or be used to train open AIS models incidentally I also just found out today that pressing command shift n in our browser opens something called an uh incognito mode which is so weird because like what could we possibly want to use incognito mode for in in their browsers finally the use case I love the most with the desktop app for chat gbt is after enabling the voice chat function I can continue speaking to chbt even when I'm reading something or working in another window so it does sort of feel like I have a virtual assistant right there next up we have

only switch an insanely useful app that is basically the control center on steroids after installing the app we want to first go to settings and under the customize tab here we want to enable the system settings that we access the most frequently they have a crap ton of options but for me I keep it super minimal by enabling the settings I can't easily access anywhere else for example this is what I have um hide or enable desktop icons I can turn on the pomor timer with just one click uh keep awake super useful when you're transferring or downloading large files and you don't want the connection to be interrupted night shift and uh airpods and for me the most underrated one is eject all discs because I use a lot of like external hard drives at number seven we have image optin short for

image Optimizer an extremely userfriendly and minimal utility app designed to decrease the file size of your images without losing quality which is extremely useful if you're trying to upload a high resolution image but the platform limits the file size what makes it so user friendly is that if I have a folder full of images I want to compress I can drag all of them over into the image optin app and once it finishes processing as denoted by the green check mark the images have already been compressed in their original location so I don't need to export or import additional files Pro tip if you want to be a bit more aggressive in compressing your images go into app settings and under the quality tab you want to check enable lossi minification this will literally give you the smallest file size possible but might change how your images look so I recommend backing up your images before enabling this feature

app number eight has been a GameChanger when it comes to my productivity and it's a little known app caught HyperDuck regular viewers know I don't like working on my phone since it's not very efficient for example I would label or archive emails in my Gmail mobile app when I'm on the go and only work on them when I'm back at the desktop similarly if I come across an interesting article on my phone I would first copy the link paste the link into the todoist app and then review and take notes when I'm back at the desktop now with the HyperDuck app installed on both my iPhone and my Mac if I want to share anything from my iPhone to my Mac I can just go to the share function and click this new send to Mac button and the URL will open directly on my Mac and notice that it doesn't have to be Safari it could work for any browser this makes capturing information frictionless we don't have to copy and paste a link somewhere and it's better than airdrop handoff and all the default Apple functions because HyperDuck works even when we're not near our Mac or if our Mac is turned off so for example your Mac is powered down at home you're outside and you click Send to Mac when you're back home you turn on your Mac and the link opens up automatically so you're always reminded to review the information you saved Pro tip after installing HyperDuck Click Share in any web page on your phone uh go all the way down scroll click edit actions here scroll down again and click the uh Green Plus icon next to send to Mac and now the send to Mac option will appear pinned on top whenever you click the share feature by the way if you rely on Google tools for personal productivity you might want to join my free newsletter to receive an insanely actionable Google workspace tip every week link down below next up we

have grab to text a utility app you won't know how you live without for so long in a nutshell it is the most reliable op character recognition OCR app I've used other than cleanshot x under the app settings after changing the keyboard shortcut to command shift Y and checking remove line brakes I can now capture and paste any text I see on screen even if the text is blurry or has a weird font for example uh command shift y I'm going to copy and paste all this and then command shift V or command V there you go and if we click into the app from the menu bar we can access the text we've copied previously and we can click read QR code to scan a QR code on screen like so and uh open the link directly within our browser which is super helpful if you're listening to a presentation and a speaker has shared a QR code for us to submit questions last

but certainly not even close to least we have rocket a lightweight Emoji picker many of us know the default Mac shortcut for emojis is command control space but it's a little bit awkward uh with three keys you have to use both hands and sometimes it doesn't respond after the first command after installing rocket head on over to the app preferences and then I've set my trigger key as Tilda so that I can access this with just my left hand I have checked double key so I don't uh trigger this by mistake and below I can even add apps uh where I want rocket to be disabled now instead of command control space I can just press Tila Tilda the Emoji picker appears super responsive type smile enter and there we go if you saw me use an app I didn't mention I probably talked about it in a previous video so check that out after in the meantime though as usual have a great one