My (little) MacOS helpers 2021 Edition

We all love and use them everyday, those (little) helpers that help us on a daily basis to fulfil our goals when working with our system(s). Here’s my list of tools that make my life easier with macOS and the web (I’ve already published this on Linked-In).

System extensions / menubar tools

• Alt-tab [Free]: simple CMD + Tab replacement tool that brings the power from ALT + Tab Windows OS window switcher behavior to macOS
• Rectangle [Free]: window manager, easily resizing of windows via keyboard shortcuts or snap areas
• Alfred 4 [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
• Flux [Free]: blue light monitor adjustment based on your geolocation
• SwitchResX [Paid]: complete control over the resolution of your internal/external screen
• Menu World Time [Free]: displays multiple timezones on the menubar, valuable whenever you work with global remote-based teams
• Marta [Free]: fully native file-commander-like two column finder replacement
• Stats Panel [Paid]: customisable menubar application, displaying all relevant stats like CPU utilisation, memory usage, bandwidth usage and so on
• aText [Paid]: simple text replacement tool
• Meeting Bar [Free]: displays upcoming Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts calls in the menubar
• Kap [Free]: open source screen recording tool, easily extendable with plugins provided by the community
• HiddenBar [Free]: open source lean Bartender alternative, simply hide icons in your menubar that you don’t need to see all the time
• Shottr [Free]: 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

Productivity tools

• Notion [Paid / $0 plan available]: one, if not the best notes tool on the web
• 1Password [Paid]: the password manager for macOS and iOS, absolute no-brainer
• IINA [Free]: open source, modern and fast media player for any kind of video or audio material on macOS
• VSCode [Free]: modern IDE by Microsoft
• Reeder [Paid]: beautifully designed RSS feed catcher, plays nicely with web services like feedbin.com
• iTerm2 [Free]: the one and only terminal emulator for macOS
• MIRO [Paid]: game changing online collaboration web service based on an unlimited white canvas; basically draw.io on steroids, must have for all remote-based teams
• Figma [Paid]: one of the best design applications, fully web-based - like Sketch but in the cloud

What are your favourite little helpers? I’m always curious to get to know new software.