Favourite Mac Utility Apps

This one's gonna come out in about probably in about a month. In about a month or so. So we may even be back to normal by then. But the chances of that, I doubt it.

Yeah, you never know. Armageddon might be over. Yeah. We might be fully locked down by now.

We don't know. God knows what's going to happen. Zombies. They might be a zombie outbreak, man.

You never know. Do people still exist? Everything's down. The system's gone.

Yeah. I can't put us to exist anymore. Yeah, finish the last podcast. This could potentially be the last one.

That's a title for a movie, the last podcast. Alright, so all of you out there, if you are still listening to this, if the world hasn't fallen apart by the time this is aired, welcome to Inspect. Yeah. And in this episode, we're going to talk about our favourite Mac utility apps.

Yeah, yeah. So we love the Mac. We've both been on the Mac for many years. Both use Macbook Pros.

And yeah, there's loads of little utility apps for the Mac. So this list is not going to be exhaustive at all. It's only got about 10 on the list. But these are just some of the cool ones that we use on the daily basis.

Yeah. Alright, cool. Why don't you kick us off? Okay.

On the Mac or, you know, when I'm working on the Macbook and doing what I'm working on, when I'm working, because I'm browsing the web. And I've got an MPP folder where all my music's stored in sub-folders and everything. And what I do with those is I kind of set up my playlists within an app called Vox. And a lot of people out there might know about this one.

And it's a nice little music app. Very lightweight. And I generally just use that to play my playlists. I've got set up and folders that I've got set up in my music folder.

And I've got quite extensive library of music. So I find it works really well. And I think the key thing for me is that it's like waiting for calls and issues. And there's nothing on there that doesn't need to be there.

It does what it says. And it's so easy to use. And I'll just leave it on in the background. Yeah.

I've got Vox as well. And I don't use it as much as these days because I've got a Spotify premium account and a Spotify for almost everything. But one thing I do like about Vox is how you can hook up your SoundCloud account to it as all. Yeah, you've got those kind of little plugins.

Yeah. So you can pull in your SoundCloud feed directly into Vox. You don't have to have the SoundCloud website open, which is quite nice because you can mix those SoundCloud tracks in and amongst your actual music library. And you can hear all sorts of new music, new and unreleased music in between you.

Exactly. Yeah. I think the other reason why I use it, I've got a Spotify premium account. And the thing is, Spotify, I've got playlists and things.

And there's no real kind of organization there. It's the stuff that I find and I'll click all this stuff recommended to me. And that's changes all the time, which is cool. But with the music library that I have, I've got a really extensive list of music going back, like 80s and 90s kind of hip hop R&B, old-school garage, jungle, and all of these.

And it's all organized really well. So every now and then I'll just drop the folder in two box and take myself back in time with my music playlists. It's cool that way. Yeah.

Yeah. No idea. Nice. I like that.

Cool. Yeah. I recommend it too. So the app.

Okay. Mine is also sort of musical-related. It's called Spot Menu. And it's an app to be used in conjunction with Spotify.

And basically what it does is it creates a little icon in your menu bar and it tells you what the current playing song is because Spotify doesn't have any sort of mini player or any sort of notifications when songs change that. And that's one thing I like about Vox and other music players is just that notification when the track changes and it just tells you what's currently playing. And I just don't understand why Spotify haven't added that. It sounds like a very simple feature.

I'm sure it is, but I'm sure there's probably a reason why they don't. But Spot Menu is pretty good and you can have it running in just an icon mode. So you have to then click on it to show what song it is or you can have it show the track name or the artist and the track. You can show the time, current play position and all sorts.

And then when you do click on the icon you can see the cover art as well. And then you get like a mini player as well. Right. The only downside of it is it doesn't automatically launch when you open Spotify.

So you have to always remember to open it separately. Okay. Yeah. So you have to have some sort of hook from Spotify to automatically launch the app.

So if anyone is out there who can probably hack that together, Spot Menu is on GitHub. So there's obviously opportunity to fork the app and modify it. And it's an open source app, contribute to it. That'll be a nice feature to add.

Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Spot Menu.

Yeah. My next one I've got on the list is Light Shot. And I think everyone's got their own specific type of screenshot tool on the map because it loads out there. I know you use something else.

I can't remember what it was that you used to do. Yeah. So I'm using Light Shot and it works really well. It's so fast.

It's quick. You can do a screenshot of your whole workspace of you can outline a certain portion of the screen in the screenshot that you can add comments and notes. You can create like a diagram using a mouse or your drawing tablet. And then you can either say that down as a file or you can upload it and it gets uploaded to the cloud and then it creates like a link for you as well, which you can share with people.

And that works really well for me because I've got clients who need to be told where to find certain things within their WordPress dashboard or admin of their website or things like that. And it helps me really well to screenshot certain things, explain stuff with a diagram on the actual screenshot itself and then just fire it across to them. And it just makes life a lot easier for me when I'm working with clients. So yeah, Light Shot is a good one.

The one I'm using for screenshots is called Mono Snap. Again, very similar to Light Shot. But one of the cool features about Mono Snap is once you take a screenshot and you can take a screenshot of the whole screen, just a portion or an actual App Windows or a specific App Windows. And once you've taken it, it drops that screenshot onto a canvas within Mono Snap.

It's got its own little UI that pops up. And then there's an option to add another screenshot. And if you click that button, it basically hides the Mono Snap UI, takes you back to wherever you were working. And then you can take another screenshot and it puts that same, that second one onto the same canvas.

So it's a good way to compare two different things or take a screenshot of one state of your, you know, if you're looking up a website or something, you can take a screenshot of version one and make a few changes and then take a screenshot of version two and have them both side by side on the same canvas. And then you can annotate them, you know, with arrows and texts and all sorts. So that's quite a cool feature which I use now then. And the other thing I like about it is it has a blur tool.

So if you're taking a screenshot of something which may have sensitive information, you can just quickly blur it out. And it's got like an undo history. So if you blur something and then go and draw some annotations and stuff like that, you can then go and unblur, you know, you can go and step back to any point in history and undo that bit. So that's why, yeah, that's why I use Mono Snap.

And it's pretty good. It just launches on startup, runs in the background. It doesn't have anything that gets in your way. Cool.

So you might look into that, won't you? Yeah, it's good. I mean, I haven't used Lightshot in ages. So maybe Lightshot has sort of caught up with Mono Snap and may have some of these features.

Yeah, it might have. I've not explored it completely, but they did the basic things over there. They're not about the blur tool. That sounds pretty handy though.

Yeah, because the default Mac screenshot utility, it doesn't have any option to blur. I think it was in Mac OS High Sierra maybe when they sort of revamped the screenshot tool. And then you can open it up. You can take a screenshot and then open it up in the preview app and then you can annotate it.

But I still don't think there's a blur option in there, which is really handy. So yeah, check out Mono Snap. Yeah, definitely. I'll have a look at that.

The next one I've got on my list is Handbrake, which we've mentioned before on a previous episode. And it's a video encoding app that I use. And again, it's really handy. When I'm recording sort of video tutorials on how to perform certain tasks on, let's just say WordPress or Shopify, I've got to explain to the client how to create a new product or how to create a category or carry out any kind of task on their website.

What I'll do is I'll record the video. And then once that's recorded, I'll export the file. And then that file is usually really big. And what I'll do is I'll import that file into Handbrake and then optimize the file size and everything and just export it out and share the video with the client.

And then also client send me some videos on themselves, interviews, video shots that they've taken on, maybe products and dental studios that I've climbed out with recently. And then I'll kind of do some real basic editing for them and kind of put the videos together using Handbrake. And it works really well. It's really simple to use.

It's not on the level of some of the more professional kind of video editing suites or video encoding suites, like Premiere and that kind of stuff. It does work really well. And I'll find it handy. I think it's one of the most popular encoding apps anyway, maybe apart from Adobe Media and Coder, which is part of the creative cloud.

I used to use that when I was on a Windows based platform, I used that one a lot. The Adobe one. But this one, it works really well. The only issue I have with it is the UI isn't great.

It needs to be revamped badly apart from the functionality. So it matters with it. And that's what it does. It functions really well.

Yeah. I mean, if you are just encoding video, you may be worth checking out FFmpeg, which is a command line utility, but it's not the most user friendly command line interfaces. You definitely need to refer to the documentation every time you use it. Or you can set up some aliases, I guess, but it'd be good if there was a little UI built for FFmpeg.

I'm sure there is, but handbrake is pretty good. I've got a couple other video ones as well. One that uses 4K video downloader, pretty obvious what that does. It's for downloading video in high-res.

And you can download from YouTube, from Vimeo, various other sort of online platforms. It is free, but I think with the free version, you have a limit on what you can download. So it's worth buying. It's not expensive.

I bought it quite a few years ago. And one thing I do like about it is that you can download full YouTube playlists. So you just put in the playlist URL and all the videos into whichever format you choose. You can do it in a few different resolutions of video, or you can do it all your own as MP3.

And with the playlists, it just drops all of them into a folder. Nice thing to watch online. What's offline then? You can get into all the other things.

No, that is, yeah. And then another one is similar to previous screenshot thing is called CAP, which is K-A-P. And that's basically a mini screen recorder for the screencast, but it allows you to export to MP4 or to GIF. So I use CAP a lot when I'm creating little screen captures for Twitter.

Because when you upload a video to Twitter, the UI that it plays in within the Twitter app is quite small. But if you upload the same thing as GIF, then it expands to its full resolution. So that's just a little tip. If you're sharing something short, share it as a GIF rather than as a video, and Twitter doesn't restrict its dimensions as much as it does with video.

So you can get a nice zoom. So if I was looking for an app like that, that does exactly what you just said it does. And I just know we decided looking for that kind of application. So I'm looking for that one.

So the good thing you're listening to this episode. Yeah. It's a CAP A-P AP. It's cool.

And obviously the show notes will have all links to all these apps in them as well. Cool. All right. I'll have a good one.

My next one is a magnet. It's a workspace organization tool. And it's really handy. If you've got a big monitor that you're working on and you usually have a lot of windows open, there's a lot of stuff going on that screen at the same time.

What this lets you do, it lets you make your windows sticky if you like, or magnetic. And what they'll do is they'll kind of stick themselves to either the top, the left, the right, or the bottom of your monitor and against other windows as well. So it has like these sort of presets or layouts in there. So you can have a grid like a two by two.

You can have like six columns across the monitor. You can have different sizes and things like that. You can create these presets. You can save them.

And you can sort of like roll through those. You might want to have like a, the top right one could be like a, I don't like your Netflix application. So you can be watching Netflix in the top right corner in really small window. And then you can have your email application open slightly bigger on the left.

And then you can have something else open at the bottom. So little things like that. And I was thinking about, you know, organizing this stuff. It becomes a bit of a nightmare when you're just manually doing it with the mouse, you know, opening windows, making it slightly smaller.

But this makes life so much easier. And I've actually paid for it. So I can't remember how much it was. It wasn't that much.

I'll put these in the show notes as well. But it's really handy for organizing that works, basically to stop. Can you save presets off your layouts? I believe you can, yeah.

That'd be handy because one thing I do like to do when I'm doing some sort of development, especially if I'm running Webpack or Gullp or something like that, you know, I like to have my terminal window visible. I don't always need it visible for most tasks. But when I've got a task run running, I like to have it visible so I can see if there's any errors happening on the fly. And yeah, I've always liked playing around, especially if I'm at work and then I'll come back home because I've got different monitors, different resolutions, you know, the setup that I have at work on that monitor won't be the same as I've got at home.

So if you could, you know, sometimes I do just want like my browsers to take up about 60, 70% of the screen and then just have a small terminal in the corner and then maybe a small, you know, like a slack window or something in the other corner or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Yeah. It works really well. You've got shortcuts there as well. And you know, it just utilizes, you know, every, you know, pixel that you're working with.

And it works really well on. So if you've got a monitor that you can, you know, rotate that you might use vertically, for example, so you might be, you know, working in like the stock market, you know, market and listen or something like that. Yeah. They tend to use their monitors in a vertical sort of setup.

It works really well with that as well. So it is really handy. So, yeah, definitely worth having a look into. Nice, nice.

I use something similar to that. Probably not as feature rich as what Magna is, but I use an app called Better Snap Tool. And basically I hold this app just to achieve one thing. And that was to replicate the, the windows behavior of when you drag a, an application window to the left, right or top of your screen.

And on windows, you drag it to the left, it snaps to half the screen and then you can, you know, same with the right and you drag it to the top and it becomes full screen. And that's exactly what this app does. And I use this so much that whenever for any reason this app is not running in the background, like, you know, if I shut it down by accident or something, it's crashed, whatever. Or if I'm on someone else's machine, I just will have lost that because I use this constantly.

The main thing I do is I like to run most of my apps full screen, even on, you know, the IRIS monitor. I like everything to be full screen most of the time. I've never really been this type of person that tiles windows apart from that scenario where I was just explaining about having the terminal window open. But generally I like everything just screen.

So yeah, just whenever I launch Firefox or whatever, just drag it, grab the top of it and drag it straight up towards a menu bar and then it just automatically becomes full screen. So really handy. It's nice to have a lap. I don't think it's free.

But yeah, it's just one of those things. For me, it's pretty essential. Cool. Yeah.

It's got a bunch of presets in there as well. So you can have like certain layouts. But by default, you have like top and then top left, right, and then you have the four corners. So you can have up to four apps on the screen at one time if you use the four corners.

You can add more so you can have like a third of the screen if you want. But I'll just use out the box how it is. Cool. That's good.

My next one, it's called a splash.op and it's basically a remote desktop application. So it just allows you to get access to a remote computer or a remote laptop or your client's computer and just to control it and to gain access to stuff really. And this came about from a client because we used to use TeamViewer to do the same thing. So remote desktop functionality.

And this kind of, one of my clients, you know, semi-normal, I'm not using TeamViewer anymore because of whatever reason. But splash.op works really well. So why don't you just download it and do a remote desktop session that way. And so I got hold of it and it works really well on the Mac.

And I actually do quite like it. So whenever I am doing a remote desktop session, that's why I'm using now. I'm not using TeamViewer anymore. Because I find TeamViewer sort of kicks you out sometimes.

It freezes as well. And I find that a lot with Windows machines. If I'm a remote desktop connected to a Windows machine, I do find that it freezes and then it will just cut off randomly. And if the client's disappeared, you'll kind of suck at that moment.

So it's like, how do I reconnect and all that kind of stuff. But with this one, I'm not experiencing that at all. And I'll use remote desktop at least once, twice a week. So it's one of the things that I'm using.

And it works really well. Yeah, it's good. And I think it's available on PC now as well. When I got it, I don't think it was just like a Mac solution.

But I think it's available on all platforms. Cool. I don't really do much remote access stuff. So not something that I have useful.

But there's a lot of people I do. Yeah, I get it a lot. I get clients who, you know, they just absolutely stuck with, you know, setting something up. Let's say, for example, on their website, they want to create a new product when they're using Shopify.

They just don't know what they're doing. So I'll kind of like, you know, just connect to the machine, show them exactly how to do, you know, that particular task. And then they'll get, you know, they'll understand it there. And then, and it works on that way.

It's better than just being on the phone, explain to them, or write an email. You know, they can see it in front of them actually happening. You know, just saves a lot of time and has also. Yeah, it works well for that.

And I'm finding myself using it quite a bit because if I write an email to explain, you know, instructions on how to carry out a task like that, it'll just, you know, it'll kill, kill, it'll just part of my day. And you know, they might misunderstand something you wrote in the email, then they'll find trying to find you up, you're not available, then that whole task gets pushed back. And they just, you know, it's always you really in this delays the whole process. So this really does help to nip everything in the bud when it comes to remote working.

Yeah. I've got a little audio utility app called Ballast. I've mentioned it on the podcast before quite a while ago. And basically what it does is there's a little bug in Mac OS, which when it happens, but when your CPU is under like heavy load, for some reason, your volume drifts to the left or the right, usually for me, it's usually to the left.

And this little app, it basically just checks your audio balance every now and then, every few seconds, I think. And if it sees that it's not centered, it just shifts it back to the center. Right. Oh, actually, I do remember why it was happening.

It was when I got my docking station and I found that every time I had my docking station plugged in, my audio was coming out the left speaker. But as soon as I unplugged it, it would, and I reset it back to the center, it would stay in the center, plug the dock back in and it would drift again. And I thought it was a bug with actual docking station, but it turns out that it happens for all sorts of reasons. So it is a Mac OS thing.

It just so happens to be triggered by my dock. And yeah, it just runs in the background. You can have it visible in your menu bar or you can just have it, which I have it. You know, I have it in the default.

That's cool. It also keeps the track of how many times is rebalanced your audio. So if you ever open up the app, you can see how and you can just open it. It doesn't tell you when or when to not that or why.

But yeah, it's by a guy called Jamie Sinclair, Jamie Sinclair. And he's got a few little utility apps on his get out. So he's worth checking out. My next one, I'll just change it.

Actually, it was something else. I've just realized you're mentioning that ballast. I've got something similar with another bug with on the Mac book. It's called no crash MVP and the MVP stands for MacBook Pro.

This thing a lot of people know about this. And the only reason why I have it is because my MacBook Pro has a problem. We did have a problem. And what it would do is it would just randomly just turn itself off, the screen will go blank and then it'll still be running, even though the screen goes blank.

And the fan started to get louder and louder and louder. It'll be more revolutions and get faster and faster and faster. And then it will cut out completely and just die. And then you'd like to restart the Mac, you restart it.

And then everything that you had open had shut down. So you've lost everything that you're working on, essentially. And then it just resets from fresh and then you carry on working. And then within about five minutes, the same thing happens.

So I went to the Mac store and I spoke to the technicians out there and they were trying to get it to happen in front of them and it happened right there. And they're not seen it happen before. Although this has been mentioned on the forums by quite a few people on different types of MacBook Pros, so different year and different releases. So they can figure out and they don't have a diagnostic check on it.

And they couldn't find anything out of the norm. So they were like, well, it's going to be a logical problem. Right? Because they couldn't figure out what it was.

They said you got to change the logic board. And that costs quite a bit of money. I'm not going to spend a lot of money on this thing. It's got to be something simple and often some research, I spent weeks on this, maybe months, trying to find the solution.

I came across a no crash MVP and some guy out there has literally written this app for this specific problem. And I don't know the technical side. I don't know exactly what it's doing, but there is an issue within my actual Mac but pro and a lot of them have the same issue where a lot of the multiple threads that are running are controlled and they're not being, I don't know, is they're not being monitored properly or god knows what. But what this does is it keeps everything in check.

Right? So you're not redlining your Mac, but basically that's essentially what it's doing. Something without this app, something's telling the Mac, but pro, you're redlining. Even when you might just have one application open, you might have no applications open.

But something's telling it, the CPU that, you know, is redlining, turn it off. Right? But this app, you know, it's running in the background and it prevents the Mac from shutting down randomly. And I mentioned to the guys at the max, you shouldn't be running these unauthorized applications on your Mac anyway.

And I said, well, it's helping me use the Mac without any problems now. So, and I haven't spent like £600 on a new logic board. Yeah. And this app costs me about $5, one of payment.

Yeah. I'll get the guys details, the developer created it because a lot of people have downloaded it. There's a lot of people out there using it now. Yeah, I think I found it.

Well, I found it on this website, realmacmodts.com. That's the one, right? I think it was that. Yeah.

OK, that's new. I know my Mac does often get a black screen, but it normally happens when it's normally triggered when I connect or disconnect an external monitor. That happens to mine. Sometimes my screen stays black and then it just won't come back on.

And the Mac is on because the trackpad is still responding and the caps lock light is still coming on and off. And you can still hear sounds like if you press and keys, you can hear like UI sounds of the Mac. But there's no way to bring it back. And then you just have to do a hard reset on it.

Yeah, that's a signal thing. I've seen that as well. And there's no signal being read. And on one it will tell me the signal, the conference signal from your Mac book.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's pretty cool.

And it's a couple of quid. And it's solving more problems for me, so. Yeah, Mac books are weird. Yeah.

Well, it sounds like Apple needs to hire this person who's created this app and fix the issues. That's what I said, because this problem is this guy has identified the issue. Like he has actually found what causes the problem and he's able to fix it. But Apple won't do it.

So there are you spend the money on the logic board? Yeah. No. That's good.

Yeah. All right, cool. My final one is an Apple type horror. I think I've talked about this before as well.

It's a Markdown editor. And it's just a very lightweight, nice note taking up. All files are saved in Markdown. It doesn't have any sort of like propriety file format or it doesn't.

It's all the files in its own cloud repository anywhere like that. They just files that are on your desktop or on your own computer and it's saved in a Markdown format. So the way I use it is I've got folder in Dropbox and I just point this application. So point type horror looks at that folder and it just loads up all the Markdown files as notes.

And it's just got really nice interface. It's the way it works is quite clever because a lot of Markdown apps, they you write in Markdown and then you get a preview next to it after the rendered version of it, you know, the rendered HTML. But type horror combines the two. So you're writing in Markdown and then in real time it's rendering it as HTML.

But then if you want to go and edit that text, when you then either move your cursor back into there or you click on to let's say you've typed out a Markdown link. So you'll open your square brackets, you'll put in your link text and then you'll open your normal brackets, you're rounded brackets, you'll put in your URL. And then as soon as you hit the spacebar to go to your next word, it'll convert that into an actual hyperlink. Right.

But then once you want to edit that, if you mouse back into that hyperlink, it converts it back into Markdown so you can edit it. And it's just very slick. Like all those things jump around on the screen a little bit when that's happening. It's not really that jarring.

You get used to it very quickly. And it's just a really nice way of working. And then you can then export that as HTML, you can export it as plain text or as a PDF or as a Markdown file. So I tend to, any blog posts and stuff that I'm writing on my website, I tend to jot them down in type horror first, do all my brainstorming and then I'll import that Markdown file into my Gatsby website.

And then I didn't need like different variables and stuff like that. I need to add in. And then that's it. It's ready to publish.

So it's cool. Markdown. And just totally free. Nice.

I'll look into that one as well. Right. That's it from my list. I believe that's all of your list.

Yeah, that's a lot. Cool. So yeah, there's loads of users, apps, small app apps by indie developers. It's always good to support these developers as well.

Generally, they don't cost too much. And it's worth throwing some money at these people because they are solving some really cool problems as well. And so it was good to find these. So yeah, good work.

What do indie developers keep up? Yeah, definitely. So as usual, links to all these apps will be in the show notes. They can view those and hopefully you all download them.

If you've got any that you like as well that we haven't mentioned, maybe let us know on Twitter and Inspector Finn. Yeah, hit us up. Definitely. And yeah, we're there for there.

I mean, is there anything recommendations today? I mean, all of these apps are recommendations, I guess. Yeah, they're all highly recommended. I think what we could do is just ask the guys to listen up there.

If you've got any anything different that you guys swear by them, please hit us up on the Inspector Finn. Yeah, I always like finding new apps to try out. So send us your apps. No, OK.

We'll catch up soon then. Take care, man. Catch you soon. Bye, bye.

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