3 Useful Mac Apps That Changed Everything
Mac apps.
I love them.
A few months back, I told you about 3 cool Mac apps that I use every day.
Here are 3 more.
🔋 1. Al Dente
Battery life is key to a good laptop experience.
Did you know that your battery lasts the longest if you keep it in between 30% - 80% of charge?
This app lets you limit how much your battery can charge up.
If I set it to 75% my MacBook will start using the power cable to power itself and ignore the battery once it reaches 75%.
The pro version has even cooler features but I currently use the free one.
🔆 2. Monitor Control
As a Mac user, you might have to get your hands dirty and use an external monitor from another brand that’s not in the Apple ecosystem. Ikr.
But unlike your Mac’s monitor, your other one can’t emit more photons when you press F2.
This app will allow you to control your external monitor’s brightness with your Mac’s keyboard or through the menu bar.
🖱️ 3. Mousecape
I always wanted to customize my Mac’s mouse cursor the way I can do it on Windows.
And only recently did I discover this little utility.
It basically lets you create and apply your own custom mouse cursors.
I created one set for fun that looks just like the Windows 11 cursor and I’m really liking it.
Couldn’t get the beam cursor (the one that selects text) to look exactly right so ended up going with Mac’s default one because I think it still looks very good with the Windows-themed cursors.
Bonus: Unhook - it’s not really an app but a Chrome extension that lets you hide distracting elements on YouTube. For example, you can hide the homepage, the suggested feed, the comments, the end screens, etc.
It’s really nice if you find yourself mindlessly binging YouTube (which happens to me all the time).
Also made this free spreadsheet with all the apps that I use.
Thanks for reading 👋.
P.S. I found a “My favorite things” section at the bottom of Ali Abdaal’s newsletter so I decided to yoink it for myself. Hope it’s useful.
❤️ My Favorite Things
📚 Book - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
This is a must-read.
I’m currently halfway through listening to this book and so far it’s been amazing.
I especially enjoyed the first 3 chapters.
The author walks you through the history of mankind, homo-sapiens, but instead of presenting dry facts, he talks about how the way that the early hunter-gatherer sapiens lived 60 000 years ago impacts our lives today.
There are so many crazy interesting things in the book that completely shifted my perspective.
For example, hunter-gatherer sapiens were very healthy and rarely suffered from starvation/health problems because of their diverse diets. Moreover, large amounts of the population were rarely wiped out due to diseases because early groups of Sapiens didn’t live close together which made it hard for diseases to spread. The low average age was largely due to high infant mortality.
Or another interesting fact that I read was that when our species “stood up” on two legs instead of 4 it gave women a hard time giving birth because their hips became slimmer. That’s why human babies are born prematurely compared to other species and require extensive care for a few years. This made us want to group up together because it was hard for a single woman to raise a baby. That’s why evolution favored sapiens who gathered into communities.
🎬 YouTube Video - Life is NOT a Journey - Alan Watts.
Just a cool video about perspective on life. It talks about how life is not a journey that has an end.
Rather it’s like music or dance.
The goal of listening to music is not to finish it as fast as possible. You’re listening to enjoy it. You’re not dancing in order to end up in a particular place in the room.
We dance and listen to music because the activity itself is enjoyable. We don’t do it to get somewhere. The process is what matters. Doing it is the thing that makes it amazing, there is no end goal but to enjoy the process.
It’s the same with life - living it is what makes life amazing. Not racing somewhere.
💻 App - Google Sheets.
I recently decided to move my finance tracking to Google Sheets from Apple Notes (made a video about it here).
But I didn’t want to use an off-the-shelf tracker template because they’re so overcomplicated and I wanted to make one that fits exactly what I need (you can download my finance tracker for free here).
This forced me to re-learn some cool Google Sheets keyboard shortcuts, formulas, and other tricks.
Knowing at least a little bit about how Excel or Sheets work can lead to so many benefits both for someone’s professional and personal life.
I think I’ll make a video about the Sheets tips and tricks that I’ve picked up over the years.
✍️ Quote of the Month -
“It’s sad what most people are willing to settle for in exchange for some fleeting sense of security. And make no mistake, it absolutely is fleeting. The walls can’t hold forever. Only a matter of time.”
- Attack on Titan S01E1
⌨️ Keyboard Shortcut - Shift + . (period) and Shift + , (comma) - increases and decreases YouTube video playback speed (or Shift + > and Shift + <).
🎬 My New Videos
💻 How To Create A Course (& Why You Should)