The best Macs are known as outrageously easy to use, and I won’t disagree with that. After spending half a day at the office writing and editing stories in Windows, I come home and fire up my Mac to play around, and likely make some changes, to that same story for the next morning’s edition.
Because I switch from Windows to macOS back and forth every day for all my work, I am ideally suited to tell you that the reputation is well-earned. But macOS isn’t ridiculously easy to use, like a soothing puddle – it’s also a tremendously deep, powerful operating system for power users.
Much of that falls to the vibrant app ecosystem available on macOS. Swap in a few savvy selections, and your Apple computer will do so much more than you’d ever imagined, from eliminating boring chores to clever idiot-proof AI and everything in-between.
Here, you’ll find eight Mac apps for power users – and only Mac apps for power users. Each and every one of them has been hand-crafted to bring you more from your Mac.
BetterTouchTool
BetterTouchTool is one of my favourite Mac apps in large part thanks to the insane amount of things it can do. Want to be able to do sexy gestures with your mouse/trackpad? Need awesome ways to automate your life? Want some sweet custom keyboard shortcuts designed specifically with increasing ease of use in mind? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
My favourite use of BetterTouchTool actually relates to one of its simplest features: it allows me to set up window tiling and customise shortcuts for each window position. It can be as basic or as complex as you want, but either way it’s a gigantic leap over Apple’s window management.
Beyond that, this app allows you to design your own ‘drop zones’ to work with your MacBook’s notch, create new layouts and functionality for your Elgato Stream Deck, use MIDI devices as triggers for actions and shortcuts and so much more. It’s such a power user toolkit that the best way to get a grip on what it does is to actually try it – I promise, you’ll be glad you did.
ChatGPT
With ChatGPT, the world has changed. Now, with a few button presses, you have an entire universe of tools at your fingertips that can help you research new concepts, improve your writing chops, create images or videos, and more. All without having to open up a web browser, as ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI, has now made available a standalone Mac app that you can use from within your desktop.
They’ve also included a few minor ‘features’ designed to coax you to use the desktop app over the www, such as letting you have it fetch images from your Photos library or from your webcam, or from a screenshot, and then upload them to ChatGPT without you having to go through an intermediate step of uploading them somewhere like Google Photos. (Even faster uploads of something that usually takes forever.) And since I have the use of my webcam, I can also talk directly to ChatGPT – something you can’t do on the www.
Even this was handled in an elegant fashion: triggering the service is as easy as hitting Option-Space to pop up a chat box on screen. I was reminded of the standard Command-Space control in macOS, which triggers the Spotlight search bar. This approach is easy to remember, and significantly faster than opening up a web browser.
If you are one of those who uses the powerful tools of ChatGPT in your life, this macOS app will become indispensable in no time. This app with all its capabilities will prove to be a perfect addition to your Mac.
Alfred
As its manifold supporting files and their constantly self-updated Karma outside dependencies suggest, Alfred – as the company calls it – is an all-encompassing service for resurfacing and completely replacing the macOS user experience. It covers rescuing you from spending time procuring files (whether on your Mac or online), looking up things on the web, maintaining your clipboard history, making use of the Terminal, sending messages and attachments, and more.
One of Alfred’s most important features is its Powerpack, which you can use to create branched, customisable workflows that automate almost anything you can envision, binding hotkeys, keywords and actions into detailed automations, without any coding.
Alfred also offers a text replacement feature, that can save you untold amounts of wasted typing. Set it up and the next time you have to type a common phrase, like a forum signature or email footer, you’ll only have to type a few characters, an abbreviation, or a key combination that Alfred will auto-expand into the full phrase remembers. If you type the same thing over and over this could make you more efficient.
That’s just one Alfred touch, but it’s part of the app’s crowded list of features – ask (we can’t resist putting the question in upper case) and you shall receive. It’s probably the best Mac life hack you’re gonna find.
Hazel
The more you use your Mac, the more those nooks and crannies are likely to fill up with files. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the need to sort through them — or if you would rather that you never get yourself into a state where you do — Hazel is essential.
Hazel is a batch processor. You tell it a few rules, say, how you want all files named or what folder they go into, where on your disk it should look for them, then Hazel gets to work, tearing through your files for you and getting everything sorted out in seconds – hours saved.
The best part is, you don’t even have to tell Hazel to start working. Because it watches the folders you tell it to, it knows when you’ve placed files into a folder that should have your rules activated, so you just drop a file into a folder and see it get moved, renamed, deleted, downloaded … whatever. It’s one of those apps that’s simultaneously super-powerful and truly useful.
Keyboard Maestro
Everything that Keyboard Maestro does comes down to one thing: automation. And we don’t just mean a few handy scripted routines. As the developer puts it: ‘Want to automate something?’
That includes everything from opening an app or website to creating full-blown reports and working with complex clipboard histories. Keyboard Maestro can link actions together in long, complicated macros with conditions and loops and the like, and most things I’ve asked of it singled out I can get it to do.
It’s dynamically adaptable to whatever demanding task your Mac-power user head dreams up and – somewhat like those gorgeous-but-bemused models in the Apple ads – if you put in the effort (a relatively painless learning curve to master), you’ll never want to be without it.
Shortcuts
Apple isn’t averse to power user apps – its own Shortcuts app (preinstalled on your Mac) can run some very powerful, enthusiast-friendly actions. Load it up and you can create shortcuts that do repetitive or complex tasks for you. You can also trigger automations on a time-of-day basis – when you arrive at a location, at a specified time, when a device’s battery level goes below a certain point, when you connect to CarPlay, and so on. All your shortcuts are sync’d between all your Apple devices, and available to whatever your device currently is.
Contrary to its name, Shortcuts doesn’t just help you save time by automating things you’d otherwise be doing by hand. It can also help enable things that, while they might be tedious or time-consuming to do yourself, also happen to be just plain difficult to do. One of my favourite Shortcuts, for example, was created by a blog called MacStories that places a picture of a screenshot inside a device frame, such as taking an iPhone and placing an iPhone screenshot inside an image of one of Apple’s phones. I don’t personally have the skill to do this but, thanks to a Shortcut, I can do it in seconds.
It’s a great metaphor for the potential that’s locked up in the Shortcuts app. This bit of automation shouldn’t be too difficult to build, but I do wish the barrier to entry was a bit lower. Yet there’s no doubting the potential that’s packed under the hood of Apple’s app. If you fancy yourself a power user, you’ll relish learning what that hood has that can do.
Little Snitch
It is useful to know what applications you have running on your computer that connect themselves onto the internet, and to which servers or services they are sending your private data. It is all too easy to give away far more than you might imagine was possible.
To do so, use an app called Little Snitch, which can tell you what application is going to the web, when, and how much data is sent and received. With this information you can stop those leaky applications that are sending out (possibly personal) information without your express consent.
Nor just for applications: you can granularly select which network connections will come up for which website; and given a plethora of tools at your disposal, you won’t have to guess at what the Little Snitch data means.
SoundSource
On a Mac, audio is a mess. If you have output devices and input devices (e.g., a Bluetooth speaker, your Mac’s speakers, microphones) there are different combinations of audio and sources that work well together, but audio doesn’t always seem to do the right thing. What if you want your music in Spotify to play out of your Bluetooth speakers, but you want system sounds to play out of your Mac? SoundSource makes it easy, which by default it does not.
This handy app sits in the Mac menu bar and presents a simple menu to control audio in fine-grained detail. You can have sound output – playback of music or movie audio – go to your headphones but not have the macOS’s own sound effects audible (thus avoiding distractions), or you can change which microphone is being used, no settings menu required.
Even better, via SoundSource, you can control all this on a per-app level: you can tell it to stream only the Apple TV app out of your headphones – and only sound from Safari to pour out of your Mac. If you’ve ever wanted to pull your hair out someone for the obscure or meagre audio controls macOS gives you out of the box, SoundSource will pay for itself in entertainment value.
