Someone wrote in asking about some icons in my Dock. I figured that might be a fun thing to share, and y’all can follow suit and share yours as well. I know “Docks” are a little Mac-centric, but feel free to share your most used apps on other platforms as well. I bet this changes quite a bit over the years, so it will be interesting to re-do this in years to come and see how it changes.
The Whole Dock
I keep it as big as it can be. I also just a few days into having a really wide 34″ LG monitor, so my Dock is large-and-in-charge right now:
The spaces are added by using this old trick.
The Apps
Activity Monitor – Sometimes my laptop fans start going crazy and everything gets slow. I often pop open Activity Monitor and sort by CPU usage and figure out what it is. Sometimes it’s some Ruby task freaking out or a Chrome tab doing something super intensive. It’s good to figure out so I can kills the task and calm things back down.
1Password – Essential app for managing passwords. I also keep a lot of notes in there of things I want to keep secure. I use pretty much every feature of 1Password. Multiple vaults. Shared vaults. Drivers License. Software Licences. Passports. Most useful: Credit Cards. So nice to have all this data in one app that also syncs to my other devices.
FontExplorerX – I’m not even sure how necessary this is anymore since the native Font Book looks like it can do most of what I use this for. Mostly grouping fonts into my own categories so I can browse for what I need quickly and shutting off stuff I don’t use very much. I like the interface though so I keep upgrading it.
The browsers!
Safari – On iOS I use Safari because it’s the only browser that supports that ad blocking stuff. On Desktop I use it the least, but it’s here for testing.
Chrome – I do most of my day-to-day browsing and development in Chrome.
Firefox Developer Edition – Mostly for testing. I’m not sure why I use the Developer Edition and I don’t think I use any particular features of it, but hey, why not.
Simulator – I use this iOS simulator (comes with XCode) quite a bit. I find it the easiest way to get a faithful mobile look and experience of a site without having to use the real thing.
I use CrossBrowserTesting for all other browser testing.
Git Tower – I like a GUI for git! I use this for 98% of all Git stuff I do. I find it nice for jumping around projects, cutting and merging branches, picking out files for commits… it suites my style. I do find it very crashy though. I’d say it quits on me a few times a day. Fortunately it starts fast. My favorite feature is the auto-stashing when switching branches.
iTerm – I use the command line a ton, but only for basic things and things real DevOps people have set up for our team. I’ve heard iTerm is far nicer than the native Terminal, so I use it. I doubt I use any of it’s many features though. I do like how when it quits and restarts it keeps all the tabs and the directory location of each.
Sequel Pro – For poking around in databases. I tend to just do little stuff like change settings, figure out user ID’s, ensure the proper tables exist and that connections work, and things like that.
Transmit – When I need straight FTP, I use Transmit. But even than FTP I use it for connecting to the various Amazon S3 buckets where I need to store stuff.
Coda – I don’t use it much anymore, but when I need to FTP into a site and hotfix some actual code in there, you can’t beat Coda. I don’t use most of it’s features, like version control and previewing and whatnot. Mostly I end up using it for editing files that are .gitignored for whatever reason, like an `.htaccess` file or something.
CodeKit – Any of my projects that are in between “super simple thing with zero build step necessary” and “super complicated project with custom build steps” I use CodeKit for. Like CSS-Tricks itself. Point CodeKit at a project folder and do all the preprocessing you need.
MAMP – I use the Pro version for firing up local WordPress sites. Someday I’d like to upgrade my setup and have everything be more virtualized or Dockerized or whatever, I just haven’t gotten there. And it bites me sometimes, needing all my other projects to work around MAMP stuff so everything can co-exist.
Noun Project – the native app means you can search for icons and then drag and drop them right into apps like Sketch, Illustrator, or Keynote.
Sketch – The design tool of choice for layout and component design work.
Photoshop – I mostly use it for cropping and resizing, as my attempt at a workflow didn’t go great. A little photo manipulation. Very little layout work anymore.
Illustrator – Any time I’m working with an individual SVG file I go for Illustrator. Haven’t quite moved that to Sketch yet. Not sure why.
Keynote – I feel weirdly guilty that I don’t build my slide decks with front end technologies. I think that’s usually a cool way to go. Makes them more shareable and searchable and all that. I just like working in Keynote. I also really like Slides.com though, so I plan to use that more and more.
GIPHY CAPTURE – I like the UI and options available in this GIF capturing tool.
licecap – I still go for licecap when I need to make a GIF bigger than GIPHY CAPTURE allows or I need to very carefully control the framerate.
Photos – I quite like Photos lately. It seems a little slow to sync new stuff from my other devices, but it does do it. I’ve managed to port over pretty much every photo I’ve ever taken into it. So now I have this massive collection of photos, but only a fraction of which are stored in high res directly on my machine. The shared albums works great. The smart grouping works well. I can blast things up to Flickr as needed. Not much more I want!
iTunes – I don’t hate on iTunes as much as a lot of people, and I think it’s finally starting to get better. I probably shouldn’t, but I feel pretty locked into the whole iTunes ecosystem. I’ve boughten a ton of stuff from it. I have a ton of playlists and ratings and whatnot. I don’t use it a whole lot on my laptop anyway as I’m one of those weirdos who can’t work well with music playing. I use iTunes stuff way more on the phone and AppleTV.
Quicktime Player – I actually use the crap out of this since I use it for recording local audio bits for all the various podcasting I do. I also use it for quick screen recordings, which is useful for stuff like Buffer > Instagram.
ScreenFlow – For longer screencast stuff, I use ScreenFlow. Mostly because it has this really cool robust feature set that you could use to make screencasts much more compelling and watchable… that I only think about using but never do. I do use the timeline feature for stitching together multiple video and audio tracks.
Sublime Text – I switched to Atom for a good month there but ultimately couldn’t get it to stick. I find Sublime fast, comfortable, and productive.
Fantastical – This is the calendar app that stuck for me. I tried and essentially liked BusyCal, Sunrise, Google Calendar and the native iCal and they were all pretty good, but I just like this a bit better. Behind the scenes, it’s really all still Google Calendar though so it syncs nicely. If anything weird went down with integration, I’d probably just use the Google apps.
Messages – I only use this for SMS and whatever the Apple version of that is. iMessage or whatever. I don’t use AIM anymore and Google Hangouts works best through the Chrome add-on.
WhatsApp – I mostly think of this as a phone app, but recently found the desktop app and it’s pretty good! I don’t use it a lot, but I have a bunch of family and friends groups on it. So it you’re at the desktop anyway, might as well use the desktop app instead of having to change contexts over to the phone.
Slack – All communication lives here. I still find it so weird how Slack came out of nowhere and absolutely dominated team communication.
Zoom – The UI ain’t great, but it’s hands down the best video and audio conferencing software. Skype UI is infuriating. Google Hangouts feels slow and buggy. ScreenHero feels abandoned and buggy and the bits that made it into Slack doesn’t seem to work great either.
Front – A team-based tool for managing incoming email and Twitter and stuff. We love it at CodePen.
iA Writer – The best Markdown editor.
Notes – I use the crap out of Notes for personal organization. These are my to-do lists, thought dumps, publishing schedules, general notes. I haven’t even used all the fancy new features like drawing in them and whatnot. I love that they automatically sync through iCloud though.
ImageOptim – I upload a ton of images to the web intended to be seen on websites. Like all the images in this blog post. I drag and drop all of them onto this first to make sure they are as small as they can be. Ideally I”d have a WordPress plugin automatically optimize everything I upload, but I haven’t found anything that has worked great and stuck yet.
Recent Documents – Anything that I’m super actively working on I drag over here so they are one-click away.
Alfred is my absolute favorite app for macOS. I try to keep my dock as clean as possible and use Alfred to launch common stuff. For me, it’s a nice bridge between using GUIs for everything and being a super cool command line duder (which is still pretty weird and hard for me). It pairs nicely with cdto which lets me open whatever folder I’m currently viewing in a terminal (also works in iTerm, which I currently use).
The other big one I use is BetterSnapTool. It lets you snap windows to half/quarter/whatever width kinda like Windows does natively. It also lets you set up keybinds which I’ve become super attached to — not just for changing widths but for doing stuff like moving a window from one screen to another.
Re: text editors, I recently picked up Brackets and it’s pretty nice. The git extension is preeeeetty sweet if you’re into GUIs for git. I still use sublime at work for now, but I’m trying to give Brackets a fair shake since so many people recommend it. I tried Vim and gave up after a few hours. I get that it’s one of those things that takes a long time to be really fluid in, just didn’t seem like it was for me. Haven’t tried Atom yet.
As for messaging stuff, I’m a recent convert to using the Messages app. For some unknown reason I just never enabled it before. It’s great, I regret not using it sooner.
I wanna love Alfred and keep trying it but I can’t get it to stick. I’ll have to come up with a regiment to force myself next time.
Spectacle is also worth a mention for window management. :D
I don’t use my Dock at all, actually. It’s hidden, as small as possible and sticks to the left of the screen. There’s no apps in it, except for the ones that are running.
But I exclusively use ⌘-Tab to switch apps and use Alfred to open them.
I try to enable myself to use the keyboard as much as possible and moving the mouse cursor to the Dock to open an app is not for me.
I like this idea, but I often have the same app open on multiple spaces, and ⌘+tab often switches to the wrong window. For example, I may have a Chrome window open on one space while I do work for one client and another Chrome window for another client’s work on a different space. If I ⌘+tab to get to my e-mails, then ⌘+tab again to get back to my Chrome window, it switches to the Chrome window that’s on the same space as my e-mail client. Then, I have to either control+down to bring up all my Chrome windows or cycle through the spaces to find my Chrome window again.
This has bitten me enough times that I don’t rely on ⌘+tab as much on a Mac as I like. With the dock, I can cycle through the windows by clicking multiple times on the icon.
I use a hybrid of Harman’s solution and Chris’s. Currently I am in a non-web role. I use Windows 7, so I have my primary programs pinned in order, so I can remember consistently where they will be and I can easily drag into them just from muscle memory. Then for everything else its Windows key and first couple of characters for the program. As I am mainly doing print and presentations: Outlook, IE (corp intranet), Firefox, Explorer, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Bridge. Everything else is in what ever order it opens in. Usually ‘po’ will get me PowerPoint and ‘ke’ Keepass.
I can’t remember my order at home, but I use a program called WinPad. Its like AeroSnap, but keyboard operated and configurable. I have a 1440P screen, I use 0+4 on the keypad to use the left hand 60% of the screen at full height, this give me my primary program work area. 0+6 for the right 40% full height or 0+9 and 0+3 for top and bottom halves for that. More often I will have some small secondary program or window in the top right and things like a music player or chat window in the remaining space. This works well as I have 1536×1340 ish for the main program, 1024×670 mini programs. You can move aroun just by selecting the window and doing the key flip. makes windows arrangement very fast. Great to have some code top right or a reference page whilst working.
I used to have a monster dock, but sometime last year I trained myself to begin using spotlight exclusively, so the only things displayed in my dock are apps that are open and the trash. Between spotlight and command-tab to switch between apps, I rarely see the dock these days, unless my mouse pointer happens to land at the bottom of the screen. Some blasts from the past in your dock. Transmit, FontExplorer & SequelPro… It’s been ages!
Careful about Spotlight – it sends a TON of info to the web/cloud – and not just Apple’s – EVERY time you type something in it and you’re also online!
@Matthew Eis
I think that Spotlight behaviour is the default, but it’s not required. If you disable spotlight suggestions and bing web searches then all of the rest of the searches are local device only — at least if I’m reading the privacy info correctly.
Obviously if you want to be able to use Spotlight to find movie times and suchlike then you’ll need them on, but if you’re using it as a launcher and quick file search you should be ok, AFAIK.
Ahh yes, I disabled suggestions from web because it was super annoying. My move to spotlight came about after working with Jetbrains IDEs. I just got so used to searching everywhere rather than browsing files, that spotlight feels like a natural way to open apps and search files. I even find myself hitting command-space in IntelliJ sometimes instead of double shift. Spotlight definitely doesn’t feel right searching the web and I had spotlight “learn” several incorrect results while I still had suggestions enabled.
So good point, if you’re going to use spotlight to navigate, disable suggestions.
Speaking of dock icons, just wanted to share a link my free tool for customizing your dock icons: iConvert Icons. It’s a simple little utility for quickly converting PNG images to the special mac icon format – no apps other other tools needed. (Tip: after making your icon, download the “icns (finder ready)” version and follow the directions). Enjoy!
I want to use all the space on the screen so I hide my dock and use Alfred app to start my programs and scripts.
However, I found it most timesaving to have ‘Archive Utility’ on the dock if I wanted to zip individual files or folder at the same time, just drag en drop the files you want to zip individually and it will do it quick and easy!
re: ad-blocking, for Chrome and Firefox, uBlock Origin is amazing, in addition to ads, it also blocks all tracking scripts so lots of web sites load noticeably faster.
I would check out Typora as well. It’s nice and clean. Also free!
What was it about Atom that made it not stick for you? I’m a Sublime guy myself and have used Atom a little, but haven’t really felt compelled to make the switch (yet).
As a markdown editor, I recently discovered Moeditor, it’s still really minimal and gives you a preview of what you’re writing in real time. I love it