đŸ”¥Essential Mac Tools You can't Miss 2024

·

3 min read

Introduction

Adhering to the philosophy that a good workman must first sharpen his tools, I've explored various types of tools over time. Based on personal experience, I recommend some software that I find quite excellent.

Efficiency Powerhouse

Alfred

Alfred is a tool that allows you to ditch your mouse.

As the most powerful efficiency tool on Mac, Alfred enhances the quick launch and search functions built into Spotlight (MacOS X's built-in search and quick launch engine). It introduces powerful extension features like Workflows, making it a "tool platform" software with limitless automation potential. You can use it to implement almost any idea related to automation.

Alfred also supports quick commands like lock screen, shutdown, empty trash, and sleep. Some of my frequently used recommendations include:

  • lock 1s: Locks the screen – time to grab a meal!

  • empty: Instantly satisfies the compulsive need to have a clutter-free trash bin.

  • eject: Ejects disks, storage cards, or virtual disk images like .dmg-mounted disks.

For temporary shell commands, Alfred allows you to input > in the wake-up box to launch Terminal and execute the command string following >.

ServBay

ServBay is hailed as the lazy developer's essential tool. With ServBay, you don't need to spend 2 or 3 days setting up a development environment; you can download and use it immediately. It includes a range of commonly used web development service software and tools, covering web servers, databases, programming languages, mail servers, queue services, etc., aiming to provide developers with a convenient, efficient, and unified development environment.

Features:

  • Supports simultaneous running of multiple PHP instances.

  • Custom domain and SSL support.

  • Startup on boot and quick menu bar operations.

  • Command-line support.

  • Unified service management.

  • Supports Docker and Node.js.

Notes

Evernote

Access, organize, and share notes anytime, anywhere, keeping inspiration with you.

Brings order to life, enhances efficiency at work, and facilitates convenient collaboration.

Compression/Decompression

Keka

Keka meets the daily decompression needs on the macOS platform. It is compact, user-friendly, and offers fast speeds.

Official website on GitHub: [github.com/aonez/Keka](github.com/aonez/Keka/)](http://github.com/aonez/Keka).

To download, go to Assets => Keka-1.1.26.dmg.

Image description

Calendar

Itycal

Itycal is a small menu bar calendar. To achieve the displayed effect, enter "E h:mm" in the input box, and then disable the system default time. It gives a neat appearance.

Image description

Terminal Tool

iTerm2

While the default terminal on macOS may not be the most convenient, iTerm2 is a relatively user-friendly terminal tool. Common operations include theme selection, syntax highlighting, auto-fill suggestions, hiding usernames and hostnames, and split-screen effects.

Image description

System Monitoring

iStat Menus

iStat Menus is the premier system monitoring tool for Mac. It provides real-time monitoring of CPU, GPU, memory, hard disk, network, temperature, battery, and system time in the menu bar. It is stable, resource-efficient, and considered essential software.

Image description

Screensaver

Fliqlo

Fliqlo is a minimalist clock screensaver application for MacOS devices.

Image description

Â