My (little) MacOS helpders 2024 Edition

We all love them and use most of them in our every day lifes, little tools/helpers we use to fulfil our goals when working with our system(s). Here’s my current list of tools that make my life easier. This is the successor of the 2021 edition.

System extensions / menubar tools

• Espanso [Free]: free and mighty text replacement tool
• MOS [Free]: adds smooth scrolling for non-apple mice
• Lasso [Paid]: window manager with free definable window areas
• AltTab [Free]: brings the common Alt+Tab behavior to MacOS, replaces CMD+Tab with single window previous
• Shottr [Paid - free option available]: my favourite screenshot and annotation tool, native macOS application and ridiculously fast; comes with a screen ruler, OCR and the possibility to create scrolling screenshots
• Ollama [Free]: download, manage and run large language models on your local machine (Apple silicon)
• Amphetamine [Free]: prevents your machine from going to sleep
• Alfred5 [Paid]: spotlight replacement on steroids, you can literally search every file on your mac, the web or anything else you can imagine. Easily extendable via customer workflows built by other users or you invest some time developing your little snippet
• Itsycal [Free]: tiny menu bar calendar, syncs with the macOS calendar application, supports dark mode, iso week numbers and much more
• Menu World Time [Free]: displays multiple timezones on the menubar, valuable whenever you work with global remote-based teams)
• HiddenBar [Free]: open source lean Bartender alternative, simply hide icons in your menubar that you don’t need to see all the time
• Meeting Bar [Free]: displays upcoming Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts calls in the menubar
• QuickRecorder [Free]: open-source screen recorder

Productivity tools

• ZEN Browser [Free]: privacy-first firefox-based browser
• 1Password [Paid]: password manager, simple
• IINA [Free]: modern media player for MacOS, replaced VNC for me
• PyCharm [Paid]: Python IDE
• wezTerm [Free]: cross-platform terminal emulator
• Msty [Free]: frontend for locally (or remotely) running large language models

WebApps

• NextCloud [Free]: own-cloud Fork, basically your very own Cloud solution for file, storage, calendar, contact management - easily extendable via apps
• ProtonMail [Paid]: privacy-first e-mail solution from Switzerland
• StandardNotes [Paid]: privacy-first note-taking from Switzerland
• MIRO [Paid]: one, if not the best collaborative whiteboard solution out there
• Figma [Paid]: complete UI/UX setup in the browser