Filed under: Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Reviews, iPhone
Mac power tools: charge up your workflow
I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster and smarter. I'll examine some general system enhancements and look at a couple of powerful Mac/iPhone app combos that really work well together.
Step one was finding a replacement for my beloved QuickSilver. I had abandoned QS well over a year ago due to performance issues on most of my Macs, but after a nagging pain in my wrist surfaced, I realized I had to find more keyboard shortcuts. Enter LaunchBar, which fills in for 90% of what QuickSilver used to do for me. LaunchBar is one Ctrl-Space (configurable, of course) away from Spotlight searching, Google searching, application launching, math calculations and much, much more. LaunchBar is $25 around $35 per seat, and worth taking 15 minutes to learn the basics. Go ahead, hate me for giving up QS, but try LaunchBar before you hurl the insults.
Next I needed a better way to juggle 3 Gmail accounts. But I also needed a way to track the metric ton of inbox items that flow through those email conduits. The solution was the combination of MailPlane and Things. I had really dedicated my heart to Toodledo, but there's one trick I couldn't replicate on any setup (The Hit List included): when I get an email in MailPlane, I can select some text and press Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-0 and the Things HUD pops up and autofills the notes section with a link to the email itself. It is awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but a huge thing for me.
Read on for more power tools and tips.
Both MailPlane and Things are great in their own right, honestly. MailPlane is awesome but does cost $24.95 -- there are generous deals for families and students. It is basically a custom browser for Gmail, so if you only have one account it may not be worth it to you, although it does add features like drag-and-drop attachments. Things costs $49.95, and the iPhone app costs $9.99, but if you use DropBox to sync your database (as I do) and frequently need to sync a Mac behind a firewall and a second Mac at home, this works very well. We have discussed Things in the past.
With some productivity items taken care of, I really needed to centralize the secure data I have collected over the years. Passwords, logins, serial codes and more were sort of hanging out in encrypted items in Yojimbo. Unfortunately, Yojimbo had become sort of an abandoned quarry. Once a rich mine, the place was fetid with old data and rarely used but critical secure items.
Enter 1Password. I get eyebrows when I tell people I only recently bought this one, but I am abnormally skittish of tools that mess about in something so critical as the Keychain. Yet, for reasons unknown, I've thrown myself into the 3.0 beta in Snow Leopard and I sync the 1Password keychain via DropBox. Living dangerously, maybe, but the application thus far has been a dream. We've reviewed 1Password before, and I'll point out it's yet another great application with an iPhone app. If you are new to the Mac I would recommend 1Password be one of your first purchases. Learn it, love it, enjoy the enhanced productivity and security it provides.
A few other applications we've discussed before that I bought: Choosy, a wonderful little browser picker. I use three chat clients at once, and up to four browsers at a time. Each has a set of plugins or tweaks I use for various tasks. Instead of copy/pasting a link sent via IM to the appropriate browser, Choosy pops up a simple chooser and I select the browser I want. There are tons of ways to tweak the interaction to your liking, and for $12 it has become a daily companion.
VoodooPad Lite, and yeah, I'm only using the free version for now. The pro version offers an enormous set of features which I don't need just yet, but I will soon. In fact, as an aside, the Lite/Full version model FlyingMeat uses with Voodoo Pad is generous and brilliant. I wish more apps could do this (like iWork, which would be super).
Anyway, I use this for a lot of my research. VoodooPad is basically a wiki tool in an application. Files are saved in a funky format, but they are searchable and more flexible in some ways that a flat file of .txt documents, which I've tried and still use for more "deep storage" stuff. By putting these files on DropBox, I can open up VoodooPad and just open up a document to start working from any machine. Plus, I can organize my data just a bit without too much fuss -- something I didn't like in Bento. The wiki methodology, without getting too deep into it, is great for research because I can use links within a document to point to further research. You know, like a web.
Pathfinder isn't so much a replacement for Finder, but the proverbial "Finder on steroids." Like Onyx, Pathfinder provides a GUI for stuff you could do in Terminal, but also provides handy features like tabbed windows and split-views for when you have to move things around two folders or more rapidly. If you ever wished Apple's Get Info dialog box had a lot more info, Pathfinder amps up that as well. There's too much to say about Pathfinder in this post, so check out the trippy demo video and you'll see what I mean. This thing is more like strapping a chainsaw on the bloody stump of Finder. It is so choice for heavy file work. Oh, and did I mention the Subversion support?
I know Snow Leopard includes text expansion as a basic feature, and I know a lot of hep cats dig Typinator, but I wound up using TextExpander on a daily basis. If you find yourself writing the same things over and over, like "Best regards," with your name and address, TextExpander (or Typinator) will save you lots of time. By typing, say, 'bstrg' these tools automatically expand to write the full text. Hence, text+expander. Something I've found neat, but not entirely reliable, is TextExpander's iPhone app [iTunes Link], which we reviewed before. TextExpander offers MobileMe sync as well, although the iPhone app does not sync using MobileMe, so you can run into sync duplicates if you're not careful. I wound up losing some snippets at one point as well. Typinator doesn't use MobileMe sync, but rather has a file you can keep on something like DropBox (or your MobileMe iDisk). TextExpander for the Mac is $25, and $4.99 for the iPhone app. Typinator is 19 euros (about US$28).
DefaultFolder X was mentioned by Mel Martin a while ago, and I was smitten. I particularly loathe the system Save As dialogs, and really needed a way to locate frequently-used folders without cluttering my sidebars or Finder windows. DefaultFolder X not only gives me some great favoriting and history features with folders, but allows some previewing when ordinarily you wouldn't be able to preview a file. Throw in a very useful menu bar tool and the $35 price tag doesn't really sting at all.
I've waxed poetic about BusyCal before, but I use it to sync a couple of Macs on my LAN and a couple of my Google Calendars. It rocks, and as an iCal replacement BusyCal brings a raft of improvements to the venerable Apple standard. It also costs $40 per computer, and even though you can save buying several licenses at once, that may be too much for some folks.
TextMate is what I use for writing blog posts. Due to the extensible nature of TextMate (which costs about $60), I use a custom suite of tools (a 'bundle' by our own Brett Terpstra) to speed up things like linking and tagging of posts. Not only is TextMate a responsive, customizable text editor, there's a bundle for just about anything related to writing code, words or other stuff and a shortcut for many of these features. As one simple example, if I type 'lorem' and hit Tab, I get a chunk of the Lorem Ipsum dummy text I might use when building a website. If you write a lot of code, TextMate rocks. If you want an extensible, powerful writing tool, it's good for that as well. If I wrote more fiction I'd probably choose one of the many awesome writing applications for the Mac.
There's but a sampling of Mac power tools I use. I'm sure everyone does things differently (and I respect that), so let me know in the comments what particular setups you have found to make your Mac experience better, faster or more complete.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Don Parr said 6:53PM on 10-08-2009
On the topic of Quicksilver, have you given Google's Quick Search Box (QSB) a look? In my opinion it is the future of Quicksilver, and Alcor (original Quicksilver developer) is on the QSB team! Check it out if you haven't already. http://tinyurl.com/mnmemr
Reply
MarB said 4:24PM on 10-10-2009
I used QS for a while and I thought that i couldn't live without it. Now i tried LaunchBox and QSB. I like QSB a lot. It has a very nice design and it finds everything i need. LaunchBox does something more. It finds me things I'm not searching for. I can't say that I miss something in LB or QSB. QSB just makes it easier. So, I already deleted QS.
But when looking at Activity Monitor, QSB takes twice as much memory then LB. I'll give it a while, so it can get indexed and running. But if it'll be this way, I'm gonna use LB.
Justin said 4:27PM on 10-12-2009
I use almost all of these, and more. However, I would add a few important ones.
Leap and Yep are hugely powerful tools for organizing documents, and even though I haven't used them too much (due to my current document mess) they're really amazing. Yep, in particular, makes it a snap to scan multi-page documents and offers a super-simple way to straighten and crop them after scanning, unlike others that make you set crop and straightening before scanning. (although I think this feature is only available on Snow Leopard). This feature alone makes this program a must-have for me. And don't forget the excellent PDFPen, which allows me to edit PDF documents quickly and easily.
Ulysses (or Scrivener) is an incredible writing tool that is great for almost any type of writing. My preferred one is Ulysses, but Scrivener is just as good and may be better for you - try them both before you choose. In addition, an upcoming tool that's more like a word processor than a full-fledged writing tool is Pagehand. It is unique because of its clean, intuitive interface as well as its unique file format - it saves as PDFs! Yes, that's right, PDF is its native document format! So sharing with Windows users (though not editing) is trivial.
Just recently discovered is SketchBox by OMZ Software. For quick notes (and pen input as well) this is a really cool program. You can type, sketch, take a screenshot, and even set a timer for the sticky! The best part - it's free. And the interface is absolutely stunning.
NoteBook by Circus Ponies is just that: a notebook, complete with spiral-bound edges. (or whatever type of binding you like for that matter). I use this all the time to take notes in class, instead of an, um, notebook. Really a versatile program once you get around the design methodology; don't use it like you would an ordinary information management program. Use it like, you guessed it, a notebook.
Reply
Professor said 7:15PM on 10-12-2009
Thanks for reminding us about NoteBook by Circus Ponies. It's an excellent tool that really helps keep things organized. It's similar to VoodooPad, but differs in its approach (as do other similar products, like Zengobi's Curio).
Geoff said 6:59PM on 10-08-2009
Agree with (and use) most of the apps you mention above (1Password and LaunchBar being critical). To your list I'd add:
Fluid for making single site browsers. (Thanks, Todd!)
Evernote for notes across Macs, PCs, and iPhones.
I also use TextMate, but if all you want is a better editor than what comes standard, TextWrangler (recently updated) is free and solid. WriteRoom is strangely alluring. For big projects, Scrivener is fantastic.
Other workflow enhancers include the Readability and Instapaper bookmarklets.
I use OmniFocus for tasks.
Reply
xekc said 7:09PM on 10-08-2009
I can't imagine my life without CodeRage Zooom and work 10x slower when it happens to use a mac without it. Fantastic window management solution.
Reply
Pete said 8:43PM on 10-08-2009
Zooom looks really sweet! On the topic of window management, I recommend Witch by Many Tricks (http://www.manytricks.com/witch/). It's great if you use applications that open a bunch of windows and want better control of them.
Crash7800 said 7:12PM on 10-08-2009
Spark makes controlling your Mac with your keyboard a snap - Everything from app launching, iTunes control, pre-defined text and scripting becomes mappable.
afloat is one of my all time favorites - let's you organize your windows into layers for easier use. Has to be seen to be understood
Reply
xekc said 7:12PM on 10-08-2009
Afloat does not work with Snow Leopard btw.
Devin said 7:53PM on 10-08-2009
Giving up QS? Blasphemy!
FYI, in Snow Leopard's open/save dialog, you CAN use QuickLook to preview files.
Reply
scott.quincy said 7:55PM on 10-08-2009
I have never had any performance issues with Quicksilver, and frankly can't imagine my Mac without it. I, too, have recently upgraded, and am running Snow Leopard, so I don't know why I'm not running into similar issues as the ones Agreda mentions. But if Quicksilver were ever to become obsolete, I would turn to Google's Quick Search Box before I'd plop down $25 for Launchbar. I'm just saying.
Reply
Ben said 7:57PM on 10-08-2009
If you are an academic looking to organize pdf files of journal articles, you absolutely must get Papers. It allows you to tag with all the meta data required for a bibliography, but best of all, it almost always can do it automatically! You can also tag with custom tags and assign notes. What's even better is that it provides article links which you can copy and paste into other application, most notably omni outline.
If you're writing a paper, it's indispensable.
Reply
Rev. John Canales said 7:04PM on 10-12-2009
Agreed. Papers is absolutely essential for handling PDF files in an academic setting. Much of what I do in academia is now done in PDF, and Papers makes handling the large volume of files usually associated with any research project much easier.
FamousPete said 8:51PM on 10-08-2009
Great list!!
As an obvious coniseur of power tools, you owe it to yourself to take Git for a spin. Once you spend a week with Git, you'll look back on SVN like it's Windows 3.1.
Reply
donnacha said 9:29PM on 10-08-2009
It is worth noting that there are a lot of unhappy Things customers out there, mainly because the company has been compulsively dishonest in it's dealings, despite the fact that bloggers seem so mesmerized by the company, customers who have actually paid for and tried to use the product have made their feelings clear in the comments following every glowing mention of Things on TUAW.
There were so many customer complaints this year that the company first hid and then deleted their forums, replacing them a month or so later with a heavily censored version. They promised to deliver vital features that their competitors have had from the start, but failed. At the beginning of this year, when they prematurely launched their paid version, they hustled users into buying by offering a time limited discount and promising that WebDAV "cloud" syncing (instead of having to remember to sync your iPhone by hand every morning) would arrive within the next few months. It never did and, when hundreds of customers complained, they simply ignored them.
Things may suit some people but, seriously, if you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, understand that, unlike every other application of this type, you must remember to sit through a manual sync every day or you will be out-of-sync all day. That's right: Things is the only task manager that gives you extra tasks to do every day.
That is a major problem but the real problem is that Cultured Code are a dishonest company who hide their inability to code by deleting users complaints and heavily manipulating their public image. You cannot trust these crooks.
Reply
elasticthreads said 10:08PM on 10-08-2009
http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list
Rumors of Quicksilver's demise were a bit premature.
The most recent beta has QS running as snappy and stable as ever (back to its haydays on Tiger). A few plugins don't work anymore, but its still more functional than Launchbar. And free.
Though Alcor has left to work on Google QSB, the crew keeping things running has done a fantastic job. Some of us are still writing actions for it too. Here's two I wrote that let you enter a phone number into QS and have Google Voice initiate a phone call or SMS that number
http://drop.io/elasticthreads/asset/gvqsactions-zip
Reply
elasticthreads said 10:14PM on 10-08-2009
I included 2 Snow Leopard services which accomplish the same thing as the QS Google Voice Actions. Which is another productivity trick with Snow Leopard: services services services
http://elasticthreads.tumblr.com/post/196451895/snow-leopard-services-pt3-google-voice
Aloysius Snuffleupagus said 2:18PM on 10-09-2009
Dude, you are my hero! I have been inconsolable ever since Vocito stopped working when Grand Central became Google Voice. I've been dying for something like this. You made my day.
Jacques said 11:38PM on 10-08-2009
Launchbar, 1Password, Things - these I can certainly agree with.
I also find Growl (universal notifier), Flip4Mac (helps watching video), Perian (helps watching video), VLC (video player for what QT can't handle), iStat Menus (status updates of any sort, menubar), EXIF renamer (rename photos according to date/time they were shot), Chax (great iChat extension without using plugins) and two that seems to get overlooked quite a bit - Skitch (screenshots done right) and AppCleaner (free, good trash utility) - all very handy.
I also like Twitterific, Weatherdock and Speed Download.
Check 'em out!
Jacques
Reply
bikeham said 12:35AM on 10-09-2009
Looking at the Lauchbar webpage, it appears that the cost is 25 Euros not dollars as stated in the review?
Reply