You Need These 30 Apps - PART 1

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have, a whole bunch of apps you need for your computer. So these are not necessarily a 100% development applications, but these are applications that Scott and I cannot live without just as people who work on computers, and they are good. They're super Sanity. So we're gonna go through I think we have a list of 30 of them, and there's gonna be some serious nuggets in them. A lot of these are going to be fairly focused on the Mac version. However, we will try recommend a good enough Windows Vercel. Or if throw it in the comments below if there's a a similar Windows version of of these apps that you like, to run.

Yeah. Because I'm not I'm not personally familiar enough with Windows or even, I'm a Wes Linux to a degree, as a platform to know exactly what's out there. So, yeah, if you have an alternative to these, please leave it in the YouTube comments below, and that way Wes can help other people out. Wes, so many of these things are gonna be focused on productivity. But if you wanna make sure you're productive in solving your issues and software, you're gonna wanna head to century.ioforward/ syntax. Sign up and get 2 months for free. This makes it really easy to solve and find bugs all over your application to make sure you're not wasting any time. This show is presented by Century.

Okay.

Where do we wanna start, Wes? What are you thinking?

Let's start with the files one. So the topics we have here are files, media, Raycast, utilities, there's a whole bunch under utilities, productivity, screenshots, screen recording, and a couple dev related ones right at the end for you there. So the first one we have here is something called DaisyDisk.

And if you have a Mac, you'll know that Apple squeezes you, absolutely squeezes you when you're buying your laptop. And, it'll say, alright. Well, it it comes with 3 gigs. That's probably enough. Hey? And then if you want anything other than through the 3 gigs it gives you, it's like an extra $5,000.

So I have a 2 terabyte hard drive here, and I still often will run out of space. And the question of where is all that space going is is often hard to find out. So DaisyDisk is a application.

They have a very generous free version. I paid for, like, $10 many years ago.

And you can drop a folder or scan your entire hard drive, and it will give you a view into what's going on and where all that space is. So often, I'll find myself running out of space on the computer, and I'll just go into it and be like, alright. Well, like, what seems odd here? You know? Like, oh, applications. What's 75 gig? Ah, DaVinci Resolve and Xcode. Mhmm. You know? 7 gigs for DaVinci Resolve, 6 gigs for Xcode. That's quite a bit. Or I'll go into my users, and they'll say, oh, oh, okay.

1.6 terabytes in my folder. Oh, it's my videos. You have 600 gigs of of videos.

The it's often hard to find. Where the heck is this space going? And this is an awesome tool. And if you have an SSD, which most laptops do, it scans your entire SSD in, like like, 5 minutes or or not even 5 minutes, like, 10 seconds. Let's see. Let's go back here.

Let's go back.

Rescan.

So you see here, I've been waiting for about 20 seconds, and it's a it's like 20% through. So it takes a minute or 2 to scan your entire disk, and it gives you really good insights as to where the hell is that space taken. Yeah. I,

I've I've been using DAISY disc for ever and ever and ever. And if somebody like me JS visual, I use it a lot even to find Wes, like, on my NAS drive. Right? I I use my NAS drive. It's just like just throw anything in there. And oftentimes, you might not even realize that, you've thrown gigabytes and gigabytes worth of video recordings that you're not using, especially someone like me recording a massive amount of screen recordings. Oh, I'd even I don't use all of that. Remote drive. Yeah. Oh, I use this on my remote drives all the time. It works just fine. Works totally fine. And, I I definitely rely on this as well. DaisyDisk is one of my favorites. Another of my newer favorite apps is Marta, which is a nice file browser for Mac OS. It has really good keyboard support. It has a built in terminal.

It feels like feels like a developer friendly file browser. I I I never liked Finder. I think Finder JS one of the worst pieces of software on the map. So yeah. So Marta dotsh, this is one of the few things I do actually, subscribe to on Patreon. So I am a patron of this. And this thing is fully extendable too. I even did a bit of a syntax theme for for mine JS you can see here.

So I I wrote a theme for it and you can do all kinds of things. You can extend it in all sorts of ways. And I think it's fantastic.

So I I even the best part about it, I think, is probably the the keyboard shortcuts and all that stuff. Can you show,

you're using it right now?

Yeah. The problem is is that you cannot easily zoom in on this. So it's very small if you're watching on YouTube. So there's no easy way for me to to zoom in on this. Maybe See. Look at my screen right now. How are you doing that? I hold down

oh, man. You don't you don't got this set up?

No.

I know how to do Wes you hold option and use the the Yeah. Or you You hold down option and you use your or hold down control and scroll your your mouse wheel. You have to turn it on. Scroll.

Okay. There we go. There you go.

Well, either way, this is it. And as you can see, there's nice little, you know, really good keyboard shortcuts and Right click on something? Right click on something. Wes.

Okay.

Reveal in finder. Access to, like, the kind of stuff that you would want.

But for the most part, it's great because you have the dual pane setup. That's, like, very common in many file browsers outside of Finder. You don't have to worry about tabs or anything like that. And what's really neat about this project is that there's this interesting this this author who made this is is really kind of a fascinating dude. He wrote this DSL that is kind of like JSON mixed with, YAML or something. You could see it's like it's kind of like Stylus. You remember Stylus? It's it's kind of like that as a a DSL for modifying this, and there's a whole bunch of built in themes. There's a plug in API, quick search disk usage. There's a lot of stuff here. And for a long time, he wasn't updating this at all. But as you can see, there's a new blog post as of August 2024, back on track. So I I've been really stoked that this development has resumed on this thing. Yeah. And, yeah, that that was it for me. I think there was a couple of little bugs, and I just got this new update today. So, hopefully, there are no more bugs, but you never know. Right? Either way, it's a cool app that I don't think people know about. There's probably no more bugs.

That's Probably no more bugs. And it has a terminal built in. I've always said this. Like, oh, I wish that terminal had a little bit more gooey to it. You know? And That's exactly what it says. Yeah. Node can change files on the terminal, and it will reflect it up top.

It's a great question.

That's what it says. Open my terminal. I haven't been using this for, like, a a a month or two here because I was waiting for this update. So Oh, okay. Yeah. I wanna try this.

Yes. It's a cool app, and, you can get using it for free. There's no there's no, like, barrier there. And you can support their development of it if you'd like to to do that via Patreon. But it is. I found it to be great. It's fully customizable. And as a tinkerer and somebody like that, I spent way too long working on a syntax theme for this. So That's great.

Alright. Next Node we have here, and it might be Sherlock'd by the app you just recommended, but it's one called EasyFind.

So the search in macOS is awful. Absolutely awful. If you ever wanna find a file, especially us developers have bajillions of node modules, and the search will look through all of that, and often it will find that. So this one, I've only used it a couple times, but when I really need to find a file that's on my computer and I, for the life of me, cannot find where it is, this easy find does a much better job at allowing you to do, regex or fuzzy matching, or you can say only find like, you can have a bunch of presets here.

So only find code files or only look for JPEGs or or media, and it's just a much better handle on Mhmm. Doing search. There's a couple of other ones. I know Raycast is I'm in the Raycast beta right now for their built in search, but I still miss the Windows search. Wes that little dog would wag his tail on Windows XP, he would always find what I needed. But the macOS search has just been awful. So very happy with this. It takes a little bit longer, but I have, like, 2 terabytes of files, and it scans my entire hard drive very, very quickly.

Yeah. I I've never understood why finder is so awful. It's the slowest thing in the entire world, and it never finds anything. I end up almost always going to my command line and and using the find command. I I did find that the Marta,

app that I I Node, the search on it JS not at any faster than finder. So I think there's something with the indexing in it. But since you have the terminal right there, you could use find directly from there. But I I've always wanted an app that has a a better find. Is this Node fast, you said? It's pretty fast, but the the thing about find like, I asked on on Twitter a couple months ago, and everyone's like, just use grep or find on whatever. But, like, that doesn't search inside of files. Like, if I'm looking for, oh, I had a API key in in one of these files, I wanna see Wes did I reference process dotenv Scott something .openai or something like that. If I wanna be able to find that, then that will search inside of all your files, which is absolutely key for me.

Nice.

The next Node here I have is and I'm sorry. This is, you know, making my Polish heritage. Yeah. I was gonna say. Yeah. This is a Polish word. I I am I I don't even can't even read this.

Yeah, man. Polish is tough. I'll tell you that. Actually, Wes, did you know I found out that I'm only, like, a quarter Polish? Yes. I thought I Wes, like my whole life, I thought I was much more Polish than I am maybe just because of the last name, but, turns out I'm mostly British.

So

I guess that fortunate.

There's that.

So this, Czechovka is a application of something I've always loved JS a duplicate finder.

And duplicate finders, there are some that, like, Gemini, you have to pay a bunch of money for and something like that. This thing is open source.

There's a CLI version for it. There is a GUI of it. It looks like it's from 1992.

But the cool thing about this is it does work on Linux, Windows, macOS, free BSD. So it works on everything.

And I'm not going to run it because it takes a massive amount of your computer's resources to run it, especially if you're looking at, like, your NAS drive or something like that. But, again, I I I have all the social, social clips and movie clip, and I'm I'm dragging them to my NAS. I'm I keep a copy on my computer. I have a backup here. I have a backup there. And then over the course of 10 years, you end up having the same file in a whole bunch of locations. So this thing can actually, dive into the file. It can compare videos. It can compare files. It can do a search for just big files and find the largest files or empty directories and remove all the empty directories or broken files and valid sim links. And you can see this little GIF here of what it looks like in action.

And the only bummer thing about this app is that you can't just like, you I, at least, I wasn't able to find a way that you could just download it. I actually have to launch this from the command line to get it to even open up as a a gooey.

So it it's not exactly the friendliest app of all time. But if you follow the instructions on getting up and running, it does work really, really well. I I would love to have something, like, automated in this because I do have a bit of file automation where I'm sending things here, sending things there, and then maybe like this to run on an interval and, remove duplicates in certain folders or whatever because, you know, I have automatically sending screenshots that I take. So I take a lot of screenshots anytime I wanna show anything.

I take a screenshot, and then that screenshot gets uploaded to a folder on my NAS. And, just I I yeah. I need more automation with these tools at the end of the day.

Next one I have here is Backblaze.

I've been a big fan of Backblaze for, I don't know, probably 8 years or so. And what Backblaze does is it backs up your computer to the cloud. So it's not like a Dropbox where you put files in it, and it will sync it and whatnot. It's simply just a install it on your computer, and it will, by default, back up your entire hard drive over time. And as the files change, it will just kinda back them up.

And you can see here, I've got 1 and a half terabytes.

This is 5,000,000 files. That's the node modules for you, and it's just continuously backing up your files. And it saved me many times in the past of, oh, I accidentally deleted that, and I I didn't have a backup of it. Or oops.

The real one is is this file is corrupt.

When did that happen? And you're able to go back in time.

Of course, I run a time machine locally, but a backup of a single hard drive being your backup in the same spot is not burglary proof, bur burglary.

The Hamburglar could take it.

It's if you have a fire, you're gonna have it. We've always we've talked many times about you have to have multiple backups, you have to have local backups, and you have to have remote backups. And one cool thing they'll do is if you do ever need a backup and you cannot download everything at once, you can simply just get them to send you a hard drive via, like, FedEx or something That works. Which is I'm sure it's not cheap, but if you need it, you need it. So I have this. I run it on my computer. I run it on my wife's computer.

A big fan of it.

Nice.

Another one here I have for files is file automation. This is one of my favorite apps. It's for Mac specifically, but it's file automation and is really, really pretty awesome. I use this for all kinds of things. So I have a dump folder where I just throw any file into the dump folder. All that folder does is it sends it to my inbox that's on the 36th chamber, which is my NAS drive. And once it's in the 36th chamber, it either finds images if it's an image like a photo. If it's a photo, it throws it into my photo backup directory, which is then consumed by Synology.

If it contains the word tax, like any of my tax documents, it automatically puts it in my financial tax folder. If it's a movie, it puts it in my movies, music, screenshots, whatever. So it does all of that automated This is called Hazel, by the way. You have you didn't mention the name yet. Oh, okay. Hazel at Node soft.com. This app works really super well. I have it paused right Node. But you can set up as many rules as you want. Those types of rules can be, like, intricate. You could even call, like, Apple TypeScript from your rules and stuff like that. So you can get really, really in-depth with it, and they have a pretty good forum full of people sharing things that they're working on themselves. But I use this to, like, clean up my desktop or or make sure that, like, I have a a temp folder Wes I just made a temp folder. And anytime I have a file that I just wanna keep temporarily, it automatically clears that folder after a month or so. And so, or I can have, like for downloads.

Here here's the thing too. Where Wes, if you have a NAS drive and that NAS drive has a ton of files into it. Like, let's say, every time I take a screenshot, it puts it in my screenshots folder on my NAS.

Mac is really awful at loading up that folder if it has a lot of files, and it comes to a crawl for for some reason. I don't know why. So what I have 1 is I said if this file is older than a week old, put it in the archive folder, or you could even have it like a subfolder based on the date or something. And then that way, if I wanna go to my most recent screenshots, it's only showing me the past week of screenshots, and it still loads fast instead of having this, like, really chugging slowdown.

So I found this automation tool to be pretty great. It it's one that you can really geek out on in terms of, like, how in-depth you wanna go into this thing. Yeah. It's an actively built thing. There's a lot of people using it. There's a lot of discussions, tips, and tricks, all sorts of stuff. So there's a a deep well of things to learn about the software, but it's super powerful.

I I need to get this because I've written a handful of, like, TypeScript or Automator sequences in the past, and it's never great. Like, Automator on macOS is very powerful, especially when you get into writing custom Apple scripts. But, like, I always feel like it's very, very clunky for what it is I'm I'm trying to do. And this just seems like a much better UI for that type of thing.

Yeah. And you can ESLint. And as far as, like, people have written ones that they have examples of that will, like, completely reorganize. Let's say, you do have, like, a folders directory that's gotten unruly.

It will use the metadata to put them in, like, the correct, you know, even by camera it shot on to date to stuff like that. So, I I found the software to be pretty pretty fantastic.

Wow.

Oh, I have another one for files here. And if you have a NAS out there and, again, on Mac, you'll know that it's constantly, turning them off or it's constantly disconnecting if you close your laptop or whatever. It's having to reconnect it. And sometimes that's, like, not always super reliable. And I found a specific issue when I was using Hazel is that Hazel would get angry sometimes because the drive would not be available when it wanted to be available.

So AutoMounter is a great app where you basically give it your NAS drives. You give it it your NAS drives credentials, and then it makes it so those are always mounted a 100% of the time. You never have to remount your NAS drives ever.

Oh, that's great.

Let's move on to some media applications. This is for consuming, converting, and working with media.

One of them that I use is this is just an automator TypeScript, and what it does is it watches for any hike or web piece that hit my downloads folder.

So often, I'll be air dropping or saving a file from the web or from coming from my iPhone, and it will just immediately duplicate it, convert to JPEG, and and rename itself. And that is so so handy because as much as I love Hike and WebPs, they don't work anywhere.

And being able for it to automatically convert it to Pnpm, or I can just right click on something, convert to JPEG, quick action, super nice.

I feel like, I feel like Apple is to blame for WebP being useless on the Mac because Wes, you know, people, like, rag on it for you know, they get a WebP on the in the the web or something, and they're annoyed by it. But, like, WebP is a good format. So, like, Mac, give us a quick view support of it. Whatever. I feel like it's because it's it's a classic Apple because it's not their format that they're gonna totally, like, pretend that it doesn't exist. But, man, these things exist. People use it. Like, just give us a little bit of basic functionality for it. The quick view can we talk about quick view for a sec? I installed all these, like, extensions

to give you quick view for coding, but you cannot quick view a dot t s file because t s is, like, a DVD format or, like, a, like, a a video format. Yeah. And it's, like, it's hard Node into the operating system that Scott Wes is it can't be viewed as text as as a TypeScript file. So it drives me nuts.

The DVD studio app that came on Mac? I remember, like, exactly the UI. You could build d v like, really I was in Imovie, but, I think there was, like, a I DVD as well where you could build really basic DVD menus. And that's actually something Oh, it was a Nero guy.

Nero. Okay. Yeah. Nero with their their, like, burning, animations and stuff like that.

One thing that I've always wanted to build, and this is kind of stupid and potentially not possible, because I haven't really dove in. I'm gonna be honest. I really want an in browser DVD menu interface, essentially. You know, like, if you rip Node of your DVDs, nowadays, it's like you have to rip each individual file. And DVDs, like, I have this one right here, Freestyle Session, 8 disc 1. There's extras and stuff on this DVD. Now I gotta rip each of those individually Wes it's crazy that I just have a DVD sitting over here on my Wes. But I I wanna rip all that stuff. But what I'd really prefer is I would prefer to have the DVD itself ripped and then have that exist on a web server that I could then pop open and have the DVD menu in the browser and actually use it as a DVD,

was intended when I'm on the show. What it Wes it's gotta be doable. I guarantee it's just, like, add to Mel

and, like, what is it? Well, it is. It it's folders of metadata and stuff, and I've kind of looked into it to a degree because VLC can handle them. But this one that I have right here, INA, which is the modern media player, does not handle them. So INA does not handle DVDs, which is a bummer about INA. Although I do use VLC for a lot of things. VLC classic video app if anybody needs a a video player that's more robust than QuickTime or whatever your computer came with, and VLC works with everything. I like INA because there's it's just nice interface, easy to use, supports all the formats, and JS is, like, easy to use. But, like, I would love to have a a DVD man menu support. It fills our details. And and, Wes, actually, if you look at we just recorded an episode on side projects, and I mentioned I have a big running to do list of side projects. One of my big side project ideas is a DVD menu in the browser. So

Yeah. That that would be great.

Ina is a really cool media player, especially, like, as much as I love VLC, I also hate it because Yeah. Every time I open a file in it, it's like the wrong aspect ratio, and it, like, doesn't remember it. And then sometimes the audio is, like, past the little tick, so it's, like, distorted.

And, like, I I haven't been using VLC lately just because it's I find it very obnoxious unless, like, you need, like, a stream from network or something, like, weird like that. So I switched to INA as well, but then I was having issues with my videos being darker than they should be. Oh. So I've just been dragging videos into the browser to watch them. But I think I should give Ina another another shot. I have a I have a issue open on the GitHub for Ina.

Yeah. Ina, open source. So you, a lot of the software we're talking about today is open source, and some of it isn't. But, you know, the Chikawa Chikava oh, man. I already forgot that pronunciation.

The duplication.

Jakavka.

Jakavka is also open source.

Ina, open source. I have a bunch more that I'm gonna be talking about that are open source. So that's definitely a big theme. But, yeah, this is the media player I typically use if I need to watch media.

Another app I really like that's not open source, but, you know, I'm a big Vercel Adobe kind of person. I in fact, I I ditched Adobe a long time ago, and I refused to to subscribe to a creative cloud.

So I need alternatives.

One of those alternatives is for photos, and Capture Node is a really great Lightroom alternative.

It is super full featured. It's a professional tool for photographers.

If you I don't know if this is still a case anymore.

But when I bought this, they had a special discount. If you owned a Sony camera like the a 73 or any of these cameras, they give you a really nice reduced price on it. Doesn't look like I see that anymore. And it didn't used to be subscription based pricing, so I have a a license for it that I've bought, and I just not have haven't gotten the latest version of it. But this application, if you're looking for an Adobe Lightroom alternative, Capture Node, really great software.

I'm going to go with a Chrome extension.

It's a Chrome extension called Enhancer for YouTube. And what this does is gives you a whole bunch of extra features on top of YouTube so that you can have a little bit more control over it. The one that I use it for the most is simply just persisting 2 x playback by default. You know? You shouldn't have to turn on 2 x absolutely every single time that you watch a YouTube video. So mine just defaults to it, and it gives you all of these nice little features here where you can turn on theater mode or you can expand it. This this is not doing much because I'm already expanded fully, but if you are in a different layout, big fan of it. You can also just put your mouse over it, and I'm just mouse wheeling right Node, and you can use that to change the playback speed. The one thing I I think should be added to all software, and I'm gonna add it to my course player, is the the TikTok press on the left to speed up.

Mhmm. Are you I don't even know I did not know you could do that. You didn't know that? Oh my goodness. So I'm learning this right now.

If you're this is how I watch absolutely every single one. Let's,

The life of a, someone with ADHD. I could watch every TikTok at two x. Yeah. So if you simply you're watching a TikTok,

and you just put your your finger right here, and it just goes at 2 x. Oh, you got it. Off when you don't want. So, like Oh my god. If somebody's taken a while to explain something, which I am right now Oh my god. You just you just press it, and it it goes to two x. And I was like, that's good because it's you're not setting it to 2 x for by default. You're simply just kinda scrubbing it forward JS while still watching. And I was thinking, like, man, we that'd be kinda nice for YouTube videos. You know? Like, just like if you pressed and clicked,

if it would go through. That'd be easy. That'd be easy to do. I mean, you build an extension. It just overlays a div or a button, overlays a button, an invisible button. You click and hold on it. It, is is fast forwarding or whatever. Yeah. It's like fast forwarding a cassette tape or a Yeah. Like that.

Yeah.

One bad.

I have a a couple of pieces software here that are kinda classic software if you've used Mac, Windows Tolinski.

HandBrake.

Speaking of DVD ripping, I I've been ripping a lot of DVDs. So one thing, Wes, is I have I have, like, 30 or 40 of these break dancing DVDs, b boy break in DVDs that I've had for a long time, like Freestyle Session and 8 and stuff like that. And even some of them are like, they're like skate DVDs or skate v h VHS tapes even Wes they were, like, produced by 1 Vercel.

And, you know, I don't know. They maybe sold 200 or less copies of this thing in the entire existence of it. And so many of them either exist on YouTube and are awful quality or don't exist anywhere Wes YouTube. I have so many of these things, and I felt like I should I should at least back them up. So I've been using a lot of HandBrake lately. There's also, another really popular software that works with everything, MakeMKV, for ripping full on DVDs, just ripping them straight up. And, you can rip them to MKV, but you can also rip them, I believe, as a full disk, which, again, I would love those the menu support in the browser.

Handbrake is one that I use all the time for my own videos because Oh, really? If I need to like, I'll export them at, like, super high quality. And then if I need to make them available for download because Wes wanna watch offline, like, you can't give them a 3 gig file for every 20 minute video. So I'll run it through hand breaking. I find that that gets me the best. But, like, somebody needs to make a hand break with the UI that's a bit better. I find the UI kinda complicated. We have to add the queue and then start the queue, and there's all these settings.

So it's a little bit complicated to use. And that's why people use these, like, converter websites where you simply just upload your file to some random server and have them convert it, and you download it again.

Yeah. Totally. I I, I do that all the time. I agree about the interface for this. So what I do or what I what I do now, is I'll just have several export presets in DaVinci and just run those. But in the past, what I would do, because YouTube has really good compression algorithms, I'll upload it to YouTube, and then I would use YouTube DL to download their highest quality version for a small, super high quality version. That sounds absurd in, when I say it out loud, but that's what I would do.

Yeah. I know.

I've done that in the past as Wes. YouTube and Vimeo, they have very good compression.

So they can give you a much better quality a lot of times than these different algorithms. But a lot of these places I'm assuming HandBrake is using FFmpeg under the hood. Yeah. So

they're probably doing that all for you. I can't imagine it's not using. And a lot of these are just using f or, like, any sort of video app is using FFmpeg underneath the hood to accomplish things. So, really, what you need is just a GUI on top of FFmpeg that isn't garbage. I used to like Node called Miro, which is there's, like, 800 apps called Miro, so it might not be the one you're thinking of. But that that ended up getting, like, completely taken over by spam, people, at least it did at some point. So, yeah, that was a easy one because it gave you a few presets. I'm making this video for the web. I need this format. Go. Okay? In a nice UI.

I'm gonna pick 1 called Overkill for Mac, and this is simply a app that runs on your computer and will kill iTunes or Apple Music as soon as you open it.

So if you have, for whatever reason, most likely, you're pressing the play button on your keyboard or your mouse and your Spotify is not open or whatever else is going on, it tries to open up Apple Music. And the last thing I ever ever wanna do is open up the Apple Music. So this will simply just if I open up music, it just immediately it doesn't even get a half a bounce in on my dock, and it just immediately kills it. That's great. So yeah. Great great little app. You downloaded it on on GitHub. I was so happy to find that.

Like making the we're gonna get a lot of Tolinski and Windows users, being like, well, they're just using Windows. But, yeah, sometimes you need, sometimes you need systems to just make it perfect for yourself.

Yes.

And, yeah, I have no interest in

Same. In analytics or

or Mac. Because, like, most of the stuff I do is on the Wes. And, like, these desktop apps are becoming less and less of a need, but I'd I'm not interested in learning something else or and I'll say, I I don't think it's as good. Like, whenever you talk to anybody about the Windows version of Warp or Raycast or

these are Anything. Yeah.

The Windows versions are it's like, oh, well, it's similar.

Pretty good.

Yeah. You know? And you could just see the pain in their eyes as the Dell Inspiron is is flashed in their eyes by, you know, the just a single tear of I'm I'm joking.

Yes. People hate Mac people so much. But, I and I hate that as much as well, but I do think it's the best choice.

Wes, Node time when I worked at the I worked at a computer store in college, and I had my, like, knit beanie on in the summer because I was, like, one of those ones with the brands. You know? I was that kinda kid. And, some guy came in, and he was just, like, talking about how he hates Macs so much. And he was like, I hate Apple users because they're just some hipsters wearing knit beanies in the summer. And then he looks over at me, and I'm just like, like, you were talking about me.

And, unfortunately, I do fit your stereotype.

But, yeah, that that's definitely a thing. But I think any platform has holes in it. You Node? People wanna talk about Linux, but then we get into graphics drivers and all sorts of things. Fact that you Scott jump on the command line to do almost anything in Tolinski. Like, that's not for normal people. You know? I I I can handle it, but I'm not gonna give the Linux laptop to somebody I love and to to have fun with it. So, yeah, I I think there's definitely holes in every single platform. And I think the macOS holes are ones that I can fix easier, and I like the general experience better overall. But, yeah, you can come at us if you you don't agree with that.

I've got another one here, which is another Chrome extension, and it's called search by image.

And this one is way better than anything that's built in. So Yeah. First of all, if you ever go to, like, Instagram and you wanna right click on an image, you'll know Instagram does this annoying ass thing where they put, like, a div in front of it or they use a background image.

Yeah. And, like, you can't find it, and then you end up just screenshotting it. But, oh, but the silly things so watch this. Right click, search by image, open image, and boom. It knows that your mouse was over top of that element, and it finds it for you, which is amazing.

That's not even the search by image Bos. It just is able easy to find background images. But watch this. So search by image, all search engines. So I have it up set up for Google, Google Images, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and Sagu. I didn't turn that one on. I don't know what that is. Heard that. Yeah. The Yandex one is the by far the best. If you're ever trying to find an image, Yandex Vercel image search is the best. So you click on it, and it opens tabs for every single one. Holy cow. And look at that. So now if Google Images found my this was the Instagram post, but I also found it on Twitter. Right? Google search finds it in a couple places.

Microsoft Bing shows me a bunch of photos of white dudes holding babies.

Yes.

Let's see. Yandex does the same.

Oh, that's so funny. But it doesn't and what else is there? Baidu shows me T shirts you can buy, and I don't even know what this one is. So goo. I've never heard it before. But That's so funny.

I find this one so good because it automatically opens all of them. And if you're looking for where an image is from, chances are one of those 7 websites are gonna find it.

You find it Sogou?

Sogou. Yeah. Sogou is Sogou.

Yeah. You know what? Courtney really has a really high level of, a hit rate with JS on the iPhone, I believe within Google itself, in Google Photos, you can I I I don't know how she does this because I haven't seen her do it? But let's say you see a pair of shoes that you like, and it's on someone, maybe even, like, an influencer.

She's wearing a pair of shoes she likes, and she takes a screenshot of it. And she just says, find me these shoes, and it finds it every single time. It's, like, incredible. It uses AI somehow and does it. But, man, it's, like, really impressive. She she finds anything. So Yeah. It's it's amazing.

Even, like, Scott of these, like, dropshippers are getting, pooched by that type of stuff as well. There's this website called dupe Oh. Which is d or d u p e.com, which essentially does the same thing, which is if some Find it too.

White labeler or dropshippers trying to charge you $12,000 for a a a chair, and then you can oh, it turns out that's on Wayfair as well. It's the exact same thing.

Yeah. If you are out there and you're buying furniture, dupe.com is Wes essential to check before you press buy on that thing.

We just realized we're 40 minutes in and and hardly, anywhere down the the list of looking at our list. Next one I have here is EQ Mac. This one is really nice if you have multiple inputs or you wanna change the tone on some things. So I have a set of speakers here. So when I'm connected to my speaker output, I want my Spotify to have a little bit more bass in it. Mhmm. And I just turn those knobs ever slow slightly, and it makes it sound a little bit better. They're not super nice speakers, so, it makes it sound better to me.

Big fan of this app. I tried out Vercel of them.

Yeah. Let's ESLint some, utilities here because we have a we have Raycast, but, honestly, we could do a whole episode on Raycast. I have so many Raycast utilities that I use daily. So let let's take a opportunity to talk about Raycast in, another episode. But utilities, Wes, you have Istat menu. And I gotta say, Istat menu is fine, but it's fairly expensive for what it does. So I wanna put you on to this one, which is stats. It's an open source alternative to Istat Menus, and you'll happen to notice that it looks very, very similar. So Oh.

It's it's very customizable.

It's great. It's open source. It does everything that Istat Menus does. So, before you spend any money on that, which I have in the past, I've I've bought Istat menu before.

Check out stats here.

Istat menu is $12. That's not a lot. No. It's breaking the bank. It's a single it's it's a single payment too, so I'm I'm very much support of that because you don't have to pay $4 a month for the rest of your life.

Okay. Well, I've bought ISAT menus as Wes. And,

I'll check this out, though. Like, obviously, free is is great.

What I love so much about Istat menu is it gives you the your memory.

It gives you your CPU and GPU, which I use quite a bit when we're sharing screen or when I'm recording. Or anytime we're doing any video stuff, I like to keep an eye on CPU and GPU, make sure that I'm not maxing it out.

And then the other one they have, you see right here, I'm not gonna click it because it's gonna show my Location or something. It's gonna show my IP address. Oh, okay. But Yeah. This shows me my upload and download, which is really important because often Super. Wes we'll say, hey. Scott will be like, hey. You're you're glitching out, and then I'll I'll look up at that and take a look.

And a lot of times, it's, oh, my back blades is running, and I'm I'm maxing out my upload, bandwidth right here. Or if you wanna know, is it actually downloading something right now? Like, is this working? You know, something is stalled.

It downloading macOS update.

You can click on it, and it will show you which app is uploading or downloading, some stuff. So you can see, oh, it actually is doing something right Node, even Riverside, when I'm at the cottage, I often will have Riverside. It has to upload for hours after I'm done because it's a slow upload.

And sometimes I'm looking at it going from 66 to 67, and I think it's frozen. It's not doing anything. So I'll click on it and say, oh, no. I see my Firefox or whatever is still uploading data.

Yeah. I I'm gonna rattle through a couple of alternatives here to other popular Mac software. Bartender is a super popular app. This one is open source, and it's ICE. It does everything Bartender does. Bartender was also just recently sold to another company, so you never know what's going on there. You know, once once it It's they've had a bug on it for months about with the new macOS, and it hasn't been fixed. It's it was obnoxious to me. Yeah. It Wes, like, asking for permissions and all sorts of stuff. I think that it's the same bug. Either way, I found ICE to be a completely fitting replacement.

Besides, I do not need a menu bar hider to be, like, any more full featured than what do you want to hide and how do you want to hide it. So, you know, for me, it's just keeping this cleaner than having all of my things, bleed all over the top. So ICE is really good. And then another one is a lot of people use CleanMyMac, which is a software that I do feel like price gouges you a bit. And it's, it's you know, CleanMyMac is great, but there's certainly, things I don't love about it. There's an open source called pnpm Pear Cleaner.

The UI obviously isn't as beautiful as CleanMyMac, but it does the job. It finds the startup processes. It finds all of the orphan files that you might had if you deleted the app or anything like that. So, between ice Scott and pnpm cleaner, those are like 3 utilities that I've always had to buy in the past, and I there's really nice open source versions.

I still use bartender because Crazy.

I can't live without this feature, which is being able to click on menu bar apps without finding it. Because I don't know what it is about me, but when I look at the list of 30 icons looking for the app, it drives me crazy when the only way to interact with an app is by some little black and white icon in the menu bar, and they all are clouds.

And I don't know what they are, and you clicked on the wrong one, and it opens up Adobe Updater.

So I don't know. I just go goofy trying to find it, and it makes me so mad. So I use bartender, and I wish, Raycast would would do this. I I I did a YouTube video with Raycast, and I said, you guys gotta do this feature. And they cut it out of the video because I don't know if they thought they won't ever implement that or if it didn't have any space, but this will allow you to say, okay. Well, I wanna open up, CleanShot.

If I could type there we go. Then you can hit it, and then it will open it up. It's on my other screen right now. But Tay West, I got I got something for you here. This is in,

ice.

It's but it's unchecked.

But it's the next one. Oh. I mean, it's it's I don't know if they're implementing these in order or anything, but it exists on their on their radar at least. I hope so. That would be huge for me.

Yeah. It's a cool app.

Yeah. Next one I have here is called NewMe, and this is for people who like to just have, like, a scratch pad in their Versus Node.

Well, they're you're trying to figure out some numbers or trying to do some some quick math as to, like, how does this split work. So what NewMe will do is you can kinda just write markdown, and it will just evaluate it to the right of it. So, like, if I say, like, I don't know, like, 10 Scott has $10. I have $12.32.

You know? It just immediately evaluates to the right, And then you can just kinda view it as you go, and it will do all, of course, like, all of your inches and converting currencies

and liters. There's kind of cool stuff on here where it says next Friday plus 2 weeks, and then there's a date.

2 milliliter in teaspoons. Wow. This is really neat. And, hey, folks. This is Mac, Linux, and Windows. So, not just Mac folks on this one. I I didn't know about this. This is pretty awesome. Is is it open source too? Yeah. It's on GitHub.

You can install via Homebrew even. Oh, man. It's it's a really cool app. Big fan big fan of it. Here's what I have Node, that is, you know, kind of related to stats and that kind of stuff. It is a command line utility, so it's not like a full app here. But, if you've ever used top on your computer to see the processes and stuff like that, like, very much like what you would use Istat for, this one is bottom or BTM. It's a Rust based one. It's really cool, really beautiful, runs nicely in the background, and, I I use this quite frequently. It also just let like, if 1, I have a computer over here that I just use as a a Vercel, really, and Mhmm. I just keep this on the, the screen all the time, so it looks like I'm I'm cooler than I am.

That's awesome.

I like this app called SIP as a color picker, and there are a bazillion color pickers out there. And I really like that this one can be bound to a keyboard shortcut. So I just have hyper p and it automatically open up my color picker. Oh. And then you can also have it export the values in the different what what you want. So if if you're pasting into Versus Code, it will paste as a hex. If you're pasting into Xcode, it will give you a RGB.

And and it will also keep all of your colors as a color picker so you can go back and and see ESLint of them. And it's I think it's, like, $5 a year or or something like that.

Wow. And,

been a big big fan. A little a little much for me. But, you know, I I just use Raycast for this, which we'll obviously talk about Raycast in another episode.

But

this is the first one that I've seen that's made me consider not using Raycast because Yeah. The the Raycast JS, like, everything built in. And often I find myself being like, I just don't wanna open it or, like, I guess you could you could put a a thing on it, keyboard shortcut.

Yeah. Totally. And, I mean, I I use it. You know what? It it boggles my mind completely that Figma has a color picker. Right? And you cannot use the color picker in Figma outside of the Figma window. It is 2024, folks. There's 2 features in Figma that drive me nuts. You cannot drag an image from the browser, SVG or otherwise. Like, I wanna drag an SVG from my for a website into Figma, and it cannot do that. What? I gotta drag it to my desktop and then drag it into Figma? Sketch could do that. Sketch. Sketch could do that. And same with the color picker.

I I I you get the little color picker, and it stops at the edge of the window. What are you talking about? Why?

Yeah. Oh, man.

SIP is now $27

a Yarn? A year?

Oh.

For color picker? Updates.

Okay.

No. Thank you. This was like I'm guarantee I paid, like, $4 for it. I sit for just $20. Buy a color picker $20 Wes seat. Every freaking company is doing this per user, per thing.

That bothers me. This thing is great too. I I I really wanted to use it. That sucks.

Un unpick that. You can't no one's paying yearly for a color picker.

It's it's probably because, you know, people love it, and then they always go, like, corporate.

Share your color schemes with your,

entire team. You know? That's why I talk about habit trackers. Right? All of them start off very simple, and they do one thing. And then next thing you know, it's got a full on RPG system in there where you're like, level up by completing habits and do this and share that. I'm like, I don't I just wanna track my dang habits. I just wanna color big.

Man, that sucks. I feel like we could build this in a weekend, Wes.

I'm pretty sure we could. I'm trying to find no. I can't find my receipt from it, but I guarantee it was, like, $6 by once.

And I I realized that that's hard for people to make money on because at $6, Bos couple bucks goes to Stripe for processing, and then you that's all you have. You know? And then and then you gotta provide updates forever.

You know? All these new color spaces, and every time macOS updates, you gotta fix everything. So I realized that that's hard, but I prefer the, like, let me buy the upgrade if I need it. Version 2. Version 5. Yeah. I think that's that's what they do here, but $27. I think that this is still a onetime payment. Okay. But $27 for a a onetime payment, and then you don't get updates after a year

That's still more palatable than me than, like, a a subscription.

Yeah. Totally.

Sketch is like that. You pay for 1 year of Sketch, and then you could use it Vercel. And until after a year, you stop getting updates. And then if you need it again, if you want the newest updates, you can pay a bit more.

Yeah. I I honestly, it looks great. And it the hard part is is that, yes, I wanna support development. I think that's great. If this JS, in fact, like, an automatic subscription and you can't just do it, then, you know, that's a different story. But I would pay honestly, I would pay $20 to use this and not pay again unless I wanted to. Sip, you may have me back on your side. We'll see.

Alright.

Man, so we have so many more for productivity, screenshots, screen recording, some developer ones.

We'll have to do a part 2 of this episode, because we're getting a little long here. But there are literally so many little apps that we use in our day to day that makes things so much easier.

Yeah. We have a lot more for you, and I promise they're not all Mac. Some of these are online. Some of these are all kinds of things. So, yeah, I I hope you enjoyed this. And if there's any particular tool, maybe alternatives, the things that we said in this episode, stuff that you cannot live without, drop those in the comments. We're on YouTube, so the best place to let us know is in the comment section of YouTube. We will check this stuff out. I'm I'm the type of person that downloads a massive amount of these things and gives them a try even if they don't end up being the thing I keep on my computer. Luckily, I have something like Paraclear that just removes them all for me. So, yeah, let me let us let us know what you think about these options, and let us know if you have any better options. But that's all I got. What about sick picks and shameless plugs, Wes? Do you have a a shameless or a sick pick for us today? I'm gonna sick pick another TV show. Ever since we had Tim from,

Next JS on, and he recommended Apple TV, there's so much good stuff on there that I've never heard of, and it's like a like a breath of fresh air getting a new subscription.

So we had finished this 1 series called The Big Con, which was about this, like, lawyer down in the south Wes he would, like, get he he was, like, in it with a judge, and, he would get people money that they're not supposed to have, and then some people were supposed to have it. And it's a wild, wild story. So it's called The Big Con. I'm doing a bad job at explaining it. But if you love docuseries type of documentaries that are about, like, scams and and peoples whose personality is just like, I cannot believe that JS a person.

Mhmm. You're gonna wanna check this one out.

Yeah. Have you watched Severance on Apple TV? No.

Okay. Severance is a bit slow, if you're not into slow stuff, but it's fantastic. It's about a a corporation that Adam Scott works at. And when you join this corporation, they put a chip in your brain so your brain does not have it separates your memory from while you're at work and while you're away from work. So when you enter the doors, your the time you don't remember anything that happens while you're at work. And when you leave, you you don't remember your whole day. And there's a whole lot there. It's very aesthetic. It's it's a really cool show. It came out a couple years ago, and season 2 is just about to come out. So Yeah.

Yeah. It it was really, really cool show. That's interesting. So my wife, she always love she loves everything Scott recommends.

Okay. Well, don't well okay. Don't don't put this in a pressure. As an official endorsement or, like, a you might like it? Oh, well, we really enjoyed severance. And it is a little slow in in plotting sometimes, but it's very, very smart and really, intense in some ways. So if you if you watch 1 or 2 episodes, you'll get the vibe for the rest of the season. But it's got a a great cast and, overall, like, really cool aesthetics, given that we're just talking about, like, apple, whole episode. Sweet. Yeah. I'm gonna sick pick these wild protein chips. Protein chips. We're getting into snacks here.

Specifically, the ones that I like were the I don't even know if they have them in their little carousel. Oh, the pink salt ones. It is a cool website. Look at this. We wanna talk about carousels.

This carousel is like got a double layered navigation here.

Chicken and waffles ones are pretty good, a little sweet, but the pink salt wild chips. What's great about these chips is that they're made of chicken breast. So they're not potato chips. They're chips made of chicken breast, and therefore, they have protein in them. What? Like a dog treat? Really good.

Dude, they're so fantastic because they're really they're really thin. So they're not, like, chunky like a dog treat. Right? They're thin like a potato chip, and they crisp and all that stuff. They sell it at Costco in Colorado. So we get these all the time at Costco.

But they are man, Scott out to the wild web development team. Did anybody get to see website. You don't see

this kind of love on websites anymore.

Watch this bag fall over on Scott.

Sorry. My Internet's choked out right now for some reason.

It's not the website. I promise. It's my, network. Alright. Watch this bag fall over. Oh. Woah.

Yeah.

That's great. Oh, yes.

Okay. Shout out to the wild team. Every single chip is its own element. Oh, it's built on Shopify Oxygen too.

Okay. Shout out to the Oxygen team.

But also, man, agency that put this together, developers that put this together, y'all got it because this thing is is gorgeous.

What do you think they're what do you think they're using? Parallelizing. Oh, look at those parallelizing. The an animations.

For the anime I mean, it's React. So the whole thing is probably Framer Motion. Is my guess or GSAPP? GSAPP or Framer Motion?

They got Sanity on there.

You buy Wild Chips. Wild. Wild.

Yeah. Wild Chips.

I think Wes should bring this on bring on here. This is kinda interesting.

Maybe

in vendors. I feel like this is the only podcast that would dive into a chip website.

Klaviyo So try

It's all chunked up, so it's kinda hard to

Yeah. The chunks are hard because, well, you gotta look in every single chunk.

Sometimes you can inspect a chip and, then go to the associated React component.

Oh, yeah. And get some If they haven't stripped the names Do you have the React dev tools in here? Oh, you do. You do. You have the React dev tools open. Okay. Remix provider, suspense, context, transition context provider, transition context provider. I don't know if that is leaning towards anything specifically.

Yeah. A lot of these are minified, so they're kind of nonsense names here.

I was hoping I could just go into the chunks themselves and see

Yeah. Usually, they'll have, like, a A function name or something. Yeah.

Sometimes it's like a a global GSAP, but probably not.

The carousel is ESLint Carousel, which that's available.

It is GSAPP. There we go.

Wow. GSAPP folks. Shout out to Cassie Evans,

Yeah. From GSAPP. Yeah. That's a great website.

Cool platform. Okay. This makes me wanna use GSAT more. Vercel me wanna get some chips? Yes. They're fantastic, y'all. I've only had the pink salt chicken and waffles and bar buffalo ones, but they've all been amazing. So yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, that's enough for chips.

As always, if you want to get more syntax, you wanna see the visuals, you wanna check out this website we're fawning over, head on over to youtube forward slash add syntax f m. We're on YouTube all over the place. CJ has been putting out a lot of really great content lately. He even did a video on hono Node? Hono? Hono? Hono. Which one? It's not Hono. I say Hono, and that's all. I know. I'm do you know what? When the the Veet thing came about, it was like, there are so many different people saying it. Like, I got confused on which one's the right one. So Oh, yeah. I got that one because

we learn French in here in Canada.

Yes. So thank you so much for watching or listening, and we will see you in the next one.