3rd party, roughly in descending order of use
Default Folder | rapid navigation in open/save dialogs |
Al Dente (pro) | keeping my battery at 70% – prolonging its life |
iStat Menus | keeping me constantly informed about network & CPU activity |
BusyCal/Contacs | superior replacement for Calendar and Contacts |
CopyClip | clipboard history |
Command X | ⌘-x (followed by ⌘-v) in the Finder |
Strongbox | password manager, very Mac-like interface and secure (so far). Replaced LastPass and 1Password |
BBEdit | all unformatted editing |
GraphicConverter | graphics swiss army knife, occasionally helped by Pixelmator |
Alfred | keyboard shortcuts, macros across all apps |
PDF Expert, UPDF | better at editing than Apple’s good Preview, but bad pricing models |
Reeder | daily news on my topics |
Houdah Spot | Searching → Finding! Much better than Spotlight |
PDF Squeezer | PDFs much smaller w/o visible loss |
ImageOptim | perfect image optimiser for jpg, png |
Vinegar | YouTube w/o hassle |
SilentKnight | daily check on security (and other) updates |
OcenAudio | editing & transcoding audio |
Jekyll | static CMS for all websites I author / maintain |
Guitar Pro | music stuff |
iReal Pro | music stuff |
MacGiro | accessing my bank account securely |
Zotero | science |
Apps from Apple
Mail | since several decades |
Safari | browsing, of course; keep Firefox, Chrome etc. always in dock too |
Pages | half of my (formatted) editing in Pages, especially layouting |
Numbers | some of my spreadsheet work |
Keynote | for (nearly) all my (>900 so far) presentations |
Notes | quick notes, quick lookup; tried Obsidian |
Books | for reading & audiobook. HORRIBLE interface, getting worse every year |
Maps | by now nearly eye-level with Google maps |
Music | good, though annoyingly pushy with ads |
Home | (too) slowly improving |
Photos | good |
QuickTime Player | still my preferred video editor |
Time Machine | markedly improved, slow over WLAN (helped to switch to the 5 GHz band) |
Xcode | good for programming |
🌐-A | Selects an item in the Dock, after which you can use the arrow keys to select different items and press Return to switch to the app |
🌐-⇧-A | Opens Launchpad |
🌐-C | Opens Control Center |
🌐-D | Starts dictation (or set a modifier key to do this when you press it twice) |
🌐-E | Open the emoji picker (same as choosing Edit > Emoji & Symbols) |
🌐-F | Toggles full-screen mode |
🌐-H | Hides current windows to reveal the desktop; a second press restores them |
🌐-M | Selects the menu, after which you can use the arrow keys to navigate menus and activate the selected command by pressing Return |
🌐-N | Displays Notification Center |
🌐-Q | Starts a new Quick Note in Notes |
🌐-⌫ | Forward delete on keyboards without a Forward Delete key⌦ (or use ^D) |
🌐-⏎ | Equivalent to the Enter key on the numeric keypad, which is slightly different than Return⏎ in certain contexts |
🌐 ↑ | Scroll up one page (same as the Page Up key) |
🌐 ↓ | Scroll down one page (same as the Page Down key) |
🌐 ← | Scroll to the beginning of a document (same as the Home key) |
🌐 → | Scroll to the end of a document (same as the End key) |
All glyphs for Apple’s special symbols