6 Underrated Macbook Apps for Productivity!

that okay I just think it's for peasants all I'm saying is that paid apps are just better no I don't I don't care if you found a free open source screenshot app that blurs the text without affecting the background wait what is this app called Hey friends welcome back to the channel come for the productivity tips and stay for the future star of Hollywood today we have six underrated Mac apps for productivity so let's just get started productive at

number one shotter this screenshot app has all the normal stuff you can add number counters add text uh use a rectangle to highlight something add arrows but there are five features that really blew my mind first you can blur or raise only the text in a selected area for high maintenance perfectionists like myself this is super important because other screenshot apps will also blur the background leading to fuzzy edges second you can hover over any color within the screenshot and press tab to immediately copy the hex code to your clipboard for those of you who watch my file management Mac app video you know I used to use another app called Color Picker to do this third the navigation options other than scrolling to zoom in and out you can hold down the right Mouse button to pan around like this and if you want to dive into a specific part you can select it and press Command 2 to really zoom in number four is mainly for designers but within the screenshot you can hold down one to measure pixel height and two to measure the pixel width and clicking while holding will save the measurement within the screenshot for you to send to someone else fifth is a built-in OCR functions if you press command option control o and select some text like this it will copy that text directly to your clipboard this is super useful since I work with a lot of PDFs on Google Drive and I need to copy paste a lot of the text this also works for QR codes and when someone's presenting I actually don't like to scan this using my phone so I just press command option control o select the QR code the link is immediately copied to my clipboard and I can just paste it into the browser Pro tip under preferences Advanced you should pick a primary OCR language other than Latin languages because for example if I pick Chinese and I use this feature this recognizes my Chinese name and my English name no problem but if I go back here and choose Latin languages do the same thing over again now if fails to recognize the Chinese characters but the English is fine under the general settings I choose show and copy after taking a screenshot so I have the option to paste without editing but I always choose to show editor since I know I have to edit like 90 of the time full

disclaimer I still find myself using clean shot x a lot more since I need to upload my screenshots to the cloud for easy sharing and it's slightly more responsive than shatter clean shot is a paid app but I'll still link it down

below if you want to check it out free productivity Mac app number two Mac mouse fix so check this out if I hold down the middle button of my mouse I'm able to take a screenshot immediately if I double click I move write a space if I triple click I come back this is possible because within the app I have it set up so that if I hold down the middle button it runs a keyboard shortcut uh shift command 9 which is what I have for taking a screenshot if I change a keyboard shortcut to command option control oh now if I hold down the middle button it runs text and QR recognition instead same logic applies for double click and triple click and while you can assign the default middle click to like another action I keep it as the normal motor click because I'm just so used to opening and closing tabs with it I should mention for those of us using an MX Master Mouse the native logic options Plus app does a much better job at assigning actions to the different buttons for example for the thumb button here if I just hold this down and move to the right it moves right a space and I move left it comes back for those of us not spending 100 bucks on a mouse though Mac mouse fix greatly improves the functionality of a

more affordable Mouse underrated MacBook app number three temp box so we've all probably come across a situation where you need to input your email to download a free guide or to sign up for an app the problem is sometimes they'll start sending you newsletters as well no problem if you use 10 box you can generate a real email address and use it to sign up for whatever you want and not have to worry about potentially receiving spam in your personal inbox Pro tip this might also work for those semi scammy LinkedIn posts where they ask for your email in the comments I'm Legit curious whether any of you have actually received what they promised you after leaving your email because I think I tried this once in college to get a spreadsheet but I ended up on a random mailing list anyways back to 10 bucks you can create a multiple addresses and even change your prefix to anything you want and you actually don't lose access to any of the mailboxes even though it's got 10 bucks unless you choose to delete it yourself Pro tip you can create a newsletter specific inbox and have all the newsletters land in a single location then upgrade the ones worth your time to your personal email inbox one bug I have run into though is that whenever we receive a link to something you have to right click on the link and copy link and open it up in another other browser because opening the link doesn't really work within temp box

itself productivity app number four is a quickie and it's called latest so all three apps I've mentioned so far shodder Mac mouse fix and temp box you do not download them through the App Store and the problem with this is that you're notified of updates at random times and this gets super annoying if you use a lot of these apps so what I like to do is to disable the automatic check for updates feature after downloading individual apps and once a week use the latest app to check for updates for all the apps I can now choose to update this individually ignore it or click the download all button here to download all

available updates MacBook app number five hoverly I feel bad about this one because it basically replaced another app I've mentioned before called there so there lets you see the current time in different locations around the world relative to where you are right now pretty helpful right hoverly takes this a step further by not only showing you what the current time is but also letting you scrub through the time of day to let you see what the time would be at the other location so super useful when planning meetings with people around the world you can select as many time zones as you want to keep them active in the menu bar but I usually just have one or none to keep it clean alright so I have to admit I cheated for the last app because it's the built-in

stickies app for the Mac but in my defense I was using a third-party application called transparent note up until I realized you could toggle the transparency of the default sticky by pressing command option T and keep it pinned up top by pressing command option f like so two specific situations where I use this first when I'm presenting the meeting I like to have this pinned and transparent so I can just refer to my notes as I go through the slides Pro tip if you use the default presentation mode for Google Slides it gets rid of the pinned note but if you enter presenter View this will still be kept up top and you can just like close the window here and go through the slide second situation where you might find this helpful is if you're in a virtual interview you can keep the note as close to the webcam as possible so you have like a cheat sheet in front of you I also love how you can quickly change the font size by pressing command plus or minus command M to collapse or expand and under window arrange by color this brings them all into a neat little pile if you found these six Mac apps helpful you might enjoy this video on MacBook tips that seem just a little too good to be true see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one