Happy New Year! I managed to get the bulk of the Best of 2024 series out before the midnight deadline. Nice job, Brett. But here are a few late additions that I missed, and ones I’m looking forward to using more of in 2025.
OK, this one snuck up on me. I’ve been buying licenses for it for years, but never let it become a central part of my workflow.
Last week I moved a bunch of research into DEVONthink to see what would happen. I’d tried (many times) in the past and it overwhelmed me with organization options. Something finally clicked for me and I realized exactly how good it is. I think I’m going to be using it a lot more moving forward.
When you need a break and you’re still feeling intellectual, crosswords are a perfect respite. Black Ink makes solving them so much nicer than doing them in, say, the NYT app, and way more fun than doing it in pencil (or ink, you daredevil).
I’m a big fan of Daniel Jalkut, the developer, too. He makes a few great apps (MarsEdit, FastScripts, and more), plus he’s always willing to take a minute to help out other developers, even ones with stupid questions (me).
I still use TextExpander, but have really gotten into TextBlaze as an alternative. Great possibilities for automation. It’s especially useful if you work in Chrome or Chromium browsers (I don’t), but the Mac app is perfectly usable and very handy.
Bartender switched owners and they pulled some shenanigans that upset the Mac community last year. I think they’ve smoothed out that snafu, and for menu bar management I still love Bartender on my laptop, but I’ve been using Ice on my Studio and it’s pretty darn good.
Bartender’s “groups” feature is pretty killer, though, and I have my menu bar set up so that I don’t need the extra Bartender bar, I just expand groups. I have about 40 menu bar apps running and I can fit them all in my menu bar to the right of the notch on my MacBook Pro, which is pretty impressive. I’m fairly certain Ice can’t do that yet, but it’s still being developed.
I’ve been using Hookmark for a while and have gotten into the habit of hooking files, websites, and emails together as I work. DEVONthink is replacing some of that functionality for me, but you can use Hookmark even inside of DEVONthink, and you can easily hook DEVONthink documents to other places you might not need to import into your database.
Hookmark requires a bit of a mode shift as you get used to it, but it’s a smart way to approach navigating your documents, research, brainstorming, and daily work.
I use Sip all the time, from web design to app design. I can grab palettes I like from Coolors and import them into Sip, where I can adjust and edit them. I have a dock on the side of my screen with the palettes I’m using most frequently, and I can get a code (whether it’s hex, rgb, or any form of NSColor) with a hover and a click. It’s great. It even has a very complete URL handle for automation.
Bonus mentions of Pastel, another great tool for managing palettes, and Pinwheel, a great app for color conversion.
I’m a patron of Iconifactory and get all of their wallpapers included. Wallaroo is the perfect app for browsing them and applying them to your Mac desktop and iOS screens. Such great work. Plenty of free wallpapers included without a subscription.
Speaking of wallpaper, Backdrop is in beta and is a great way to apply animated/video wallpapers. It has a really cool selection, and only costs $10/year. I’m partial to the dark, cyberpunk cityscapes, but there’s a wide selection.
A friend of mine just launched this project this year. They’re currently making each one by hand, and the quality is amazing. If you have any kind of anxiety, putting one of these on will change the world. My breathing slows, my skin stops crawling, the noise of the world becomes bearable. I can’t guarantee that everyone’s experience will be the same as mine, but I would be remiss not to mention this as a top pick for 2024.
And then there’s all the usual suspects and daily drivers I’ve used for years and mentioned frequently. Well, less frequently these days because I feel like you’ve heard about them from me plenty. But just to list a few:
