I started using a Mac as my work machine a little over a year ago. MacOS was the only operating system that I haven’t used professionally and I felt that I needed a change.
As part of that change, I decided to declutter my browser tabs and switch to desktop apps for whichever browser-based software I could replace. That made me explore a lot of macOS apps.
Here’s a list of the ones I currently use, in alphabetical order:
- 1Password – password manager; I switched from LastPass a couple of years ago.
- Affinity Photo – photo editing software; nice alternative to Photoshop.
- Calendar – I have seen some very interesting calendar apps but for now the native one does the job.
- Chrome – I tried Safari but I'm not ready for such a change yet!
- Day One – great for journaling.
- DBngin – manages local database servers.
- Magnet – a window manager for Mac, to replicate some of the amazing window management functionality which comes natively in Windows.
- Microsoft Office suite – Teams for comms; OneDrive for files; I intend to try some alternatives to Word & Excel but for now they do the job.
- Mimestream – a native macOS email client for Gmail. I tried a lot of desktop mail apps and it’s the only one that finally convinced me to give up opening Gmail on the web.
- Notion – holds all of my notes.
- Oh my Zsh – a great addition to the native terminal.
- PhpStorm – my IDE of choice.
- Spotify – for my music.
- TablePlus – database management tool.
- Todoist – where I keep all of my to-do lists.
- TorGuard – for when I need a VPN.
- Slack – communication tool.
- Sublime Text – simple text editor.