Software Switching Sickness

If you are involved in the tech or productivity hacking community at all, I'm sure you already use or have at least heard of Raycast. The hype around the product is inescapable and totally deserved.

If you haven't heard of it, imagine if by simply pressing ⌘ + space on your keyboard you had instant access to every basic (or advanced!) tool you can think of.

Basics such as file and web search, calculator, clipboard history, and much more.

You can also add extensions for an incredible amount of apps to quickly launch specific features of certain utilities or apps that you use.

Is the single utility that will make you feel like a Mac Power-User within 20 minutes of downloading.

The built in screen-shotting on Mac leaves much to be desired.

Shottr adds in all the extra features you want and more.

I personally use it for the excellent area capture feature, OCR/QR, and scrolling screenshots.

Paired with Raycast you'll have instant access to every feature available in Shottr without even needing to worry about remembering hot-keys.

I'd be shocked if you haven't heard of VLC or at least recognize their little traffic cone logo.

If you have an obscure video file, VLC will support it.

VLC's feature-set goes deep but, if that's the sort of thing you need, you already know about VLC. Great utility to have downloaded alongside Mac's default Quicktime player for those edge cases.

I'm putting this on here to shame you if you aren't backing up your computer.

Apple makes it so damn easy with Time Machine!

Plug in a external hard drive, open Time Machine to run initial setup, and backup your machine!!!

It sucks so badly to lose a file or God forbid your entire hard drive and not have it all backed up. You don't want to have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for data recovery that won't get everything back, especially when it's so easy to back everything up.

If you backup to the cloud, that's okay, but trust me, you're always better off having a local backup too.

Homebrew makes downloading CLI utilities (if you have to lookup CLI and aren't a tech person, don't worry about it) and Desktop applications that aren't on the App Store much easier.

Not only easier to install, but easier to update and maintain as well.

Many of the applications you see on this list will have a little line of code that looks like this: brew install --cask raycast right on the homescreen. That lets you download the application easy without needing to download the .dmg and clicking around and all of that non-poweruser nonsense.

Afraid of the Terminal? Raycast has a Homebrew extension so instead of looking at the scary blinking cursor you can do ⌘ + space to bring up the Raycast launcher, type brew and easily run a search for whatever you want to install.

If you're not afraid of the CLI you also probably already know about Ghostty.

I've tried many terminal emulators and Ghostty is the only one that's stuck.

It has all the features you need and none you don't.

It's fast. It's minimal. If you're interested in trying a new emulator or learning more about what you can accomplish without a GUI, there's a reason you can't stop hearing about this emulator.

If you only ever unzip files, you probably don't need Keka.

If you find yourself needing to zip files that need to be encrypted or are too large to keep in one .zip, Keka is simple, easy, and awesome.

If you're like me an avoid using Adobe products at all costs (or rather, to avoid their costs) delete Acrobat off your computer right now and download PDFgear.

This utility is better in every way, is free, isn't Adobe, I can't recommend it enough if you ever have to work with this terrible format.

It took me a very long time to settle on a note-taking application/system. It's so easy to get overwhelmed. Unless your brain really works in a database system more akin to Notion just stop looking for a better system and stick with Obsidian. I tried so many other apps along the way needlessly.

Obsidian is free, the company is intentionally small and not run by VC zealots who will constantly push bloated features and subscriptions in your face (Notion....) and everything is local.

Obsidian was the application that introduced me to the flexibility of Markdown, a format I now literally use for everything.

You can keep everything as simple as you want, notes in folders that are all stored in plain text files right on your machine. You can take the next step up and use links to create connections between your notes and ideas. Or you can push it as far as you want with a giant plug-in library which is completely open.

Download any feature you want, remove the built in ones you don't want, or code/vibe-code the feature nobody else has thought of yet!

One important tip: you will waste weeks of your life if you try to make the perfect system right off the bat and there are endless Obsidian setup tutorials on Youtube... just start taking notes, linking them, and adding features/systems as you go.

Every document I create I create in Markdown. Whether it's writing for my blog, technical documentation for work, journaling, literally anything where I'm writing shit down, I use Markdown. I need to write a whole post sometime about markdown but it truly makes using a computer and organizing a life so much easier, portable, and resilient against change/corruption.

Anyways, my non-note-taking writing I do in Typora. I've tried a few others but they try to do too much. Typora keeps it simple, a blank white page with extensive markdown support. All of your in-line formatting will instantly transform to beautiful rich-text like rendering. I'm open to other options but this is the best I've tried and I doubt I'd have reason to switch.

One .md caveat is that I will often use TextEdit or even VScode for certain purposes. TextEdit for when I'm just making a quick note or writing a few notes during a meeting, VScode when I'm working with a coding agent and providing lists of UX improvements.

I just recently found out about Blip and I believe this may be the first tool to fix something you'd think was easy by now: file sharing.

Sure you can upload your file to Google Drive or AirDrop it or if it's small enough even email it, but all of those services have about 30 different ways they fail or are otherwise annoying.

With Blip you just sign-up, search for a friend or co-worker by username, and send them the file. I've only used it a couple times so far but it's completely seamless every time. Don't need to worry about file size, type, or uploading it to the cloud.

This feels like how it should've always been.

Like many people, I was introduced to the next evolution of web browsing by Arc around 2023. I loved Arc and was depressed when they sunset it.

After that announcement I tried a few other browsers, including Zen, switching back to Chrome, Firefox, Atlas, and Dia (the successor to Arc).

I was not enthused with Zen at first but a few months after I first tried it (the service was and still is in beta) I decided to give it another go. Chrome wasn't allowing ublock origin anymore which was a complete dealbreaker for me and I like using as much open-source software as possible, especially for something as important as my browser.

I was pleasantly surprised at the pace of improvement, it went from sloppy Arc on Firefox clone to polished Arc on Firefox within months! The project has tons of traction and it gets better all the time. I'll still run into performance issues here and there but it's worth it to me to have all the amazing features it brings to my experience, all while running on open-source Firefox rather than privacy nightmare Chrome.

That being said, I do still have Chrome for the very rare cases that as site requires it or performs unacceptably poorly. Also for cross-testing websites and trying out Chrome-only extensions like Claude in Chrome

I'm not gonna lie, I'm was pretty underwhelmed by my purchase of Pixelmator Pro. I bought it after it was announced Apple acquired the service because I figured if Apple is buying it it must be pretty good.

I've used Affinity products from time to time but since Serif, the company behind Affinity, was purchased by Canva, I figured I should look elsewhere. Well actually it was more because I barely do very advanced photo editing so every time I went back to Affinity Photo I'd feel overwhelmed when I just wanted to make a few small edits.

Pixelmator is fine for basic photo editing but I honestly hate the UI, the AI features feels hopelessly behind, and the "advanced" features are mid-weak.

I'm still using it for now but I've been thinking about switching to Canva's new Affinity or Gimp.

I have more and more relied on Gemini Nano Banana Pro/2 for simple photo edits but it's only useful for tiny edits or meme edits for my use-cases. I find OpenAI's ChatGPT images to still be superior in terms of overall image and edit quality but I'm trying to completely cut OpenAI out of my life.

I bought FCP so long ago I forgot that is was $300. Did I really pay that much...?

Apple's new Creator Studio is honestly a pretty damn good deal $12.99 a month and includes Final Cut Pro if $300 is too steep for you.

OR if you really only need the basics then the non-pro free alternative classic, iMovie, can do all the basics 99% of people need.

I doubt many of you will ever need to flash an OS onto a thumbdrive or SD card but, if you do, and I hope you do, balenaEtcher works flawlessly for me everytime.

Want to speed up an aging Windows laptop or Desktop? Flash a Linux distribution on a $10 thumbdrive and install it. Want to get into Raspberry Pi or other similar SoC projects? balenaEtcher will make creating your install media easy as ever.

If you have more tabs open than you have hairs on your head, just, stop.

We have solutions for this now, solutions that can handle all of the websites, articles, videos, etc. that you want to do something with but not right now.

I primarily use Raindrop to keep track of applications I might want to try (how do you think I got to the point where I could write this blog post), startups I think are interesting, Frameworks that might be useful for a future project, and other similar not right now sorta things.

I honestly love scrolling through it when I have some downtime. It's sort of like having a Reddit feed of all the stuff I've found interesting in the past but didn't have the time or mental bandwidth to actually check out.

The pro tier has some pretty cool features I've tried out before but for me, the basics were enough. I've also considered vibe-coding an alternative but that's a project for another day.

I'll also note that there are so many similar applications available now, basically services where you dump all your random BS into them and organize or get some sort of AI functionality out of it. I've tried a few (some bookmarked in Raindrop!) but again, the simplicity of Raindrop made none of the others seem worth it.

This is a beta utility that I only recommend if you're okay dealing with slightly janky independent software that could break something if you use it.

That is, if you even want this functionality at all.

I primarily use my apps in full screen across two monitors. I switch between virtual desktops with all my different full screen apps. I rarely use two apps open side by side on one monitor.

This leads to a very annoying issue, especially when I'm typing in multiple applications, where I type some notes into Obsidian, then I'm going back to my other monitor with some school work or Claude, or whatever else and start typing or use a hot-key only for it to trigger something in my other application because I didn't click in yet.

AutoFocus fixes this issue by automatically "focusing" on whatever window by cursor is hovering over.

It took a bit of getting used to, and is very finicky when I do have multiple widows open on one screen, but it feels much more natural to my computer-use style, especially when moving between multiple hot-key heavy applications at once.

I purchased the $14.99 a year subscription to Backdrop because I'm not sure yet if I'm an animated wallpaper type of guy.

I'm a month in to using the service and I can say that, while it's definitely cool having an animated wallpaper for the few times I don't have anything on my screen or my screen is locked but not asleep, I'm not sure if it's personally worth the money for me.

The wallpapers themselves work great though I was surprised at the rather lackluster performance of the actual store/library part of the application. Had to click in and out of the discovery or browse sections a number of times before I could get any options to load.

Otherwise the service works great and doesn't slow down my M2 Macbook Air (24gb memory) at all. I do need to update this poor girl though, I push her to the limit far too frequently.

One more thing, I guess I can't be surprised, but the store is absolutely chock-full of anime girl wallpapers so... brace yourself.

As much as the folks on HackerNews like to pretend that ffmpeg commands are easy to learn, if you don't need to do Video Transcoding often and your formats aren't crazy obscure, using HandBrake's minimal GUI will make your life a lot easier.

I primarily use HandBrake for encoding old digital formats into modern ones I don't need VLC to play and encoding large video formats into compressed ones to run on tiny devices.

When you're dealing with the often sketchy world of torrenting (100% legally obtained files I'm sure!), you really shouldn't be using some insecure, closed-source, sketchy torrent utility.

Transmission is free, open-source, secure, easy to use, and super fast. Don't bother trying anything else.

OnyX is an application I use very infrequently but is super nice to have.

You can think of Finder as a himbo librarian that looks nice and wants to help but if you're asking for anything more complicated than opening a file from you home folder, it will struggle and stutter and possibly get so scared that it just quits.

OnyX unlocks the full data structure.