I have had a MacBook Pro since mid 2009 as my primary laptop (currently experimenting with moving to a Surface Pro completely, will cover in a later blog post). I am a .Net dev and spend most of my time in a Windows Virtual Machine, but I have found a couple of cool tools on the Mac side over the last few years, either to help with some coding on side projects, or just to get some work done.
Generic Utilities
- Bartender lets you clean up and organize your menu bar.
- LICECap Capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to a .GIF.
- SelfControl Block access to distracting websites to get work done. I use this a lot.
- Slate A keyboard driven window management application. Great Setup instructions here.
- ClamXav Free Anti-virus.
- MiniUsage displays various data like CPU usage, amount of network flow, battery status and process names which uses much CPU time in a menubar.
- TimeOut Break reminder tool with micro-breaks.
- iTerm2 Awesome Terminal replacement.
- KeyCastr lets you easily display your keystrokes while recording screencasts or during presentations. Very useful when demonstrating complicated keyboard shortcuts.
- Keymando productivity and automation platform for Mac developers and power users.
- Quicksilver is a launcher utility app.
- ClipMenu A clipboard manager for Mac OS X.
- VMWare Fusion to run my Windows and Ubuntu VMs.
- Sketch Vector graphics app.
- ScreenFlow Screencasting software.
- KeyRemap4MacBook A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for OS X.
- Disk Inventory X Disk Usage Utility.
- Caffeine Prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers.
Developer stuff
- AppCode is an Objective-C IDE. I am a big fan of ReSharper from JetBrains, and AppCode is their offering for Mac/ios dev. Besides great refactoring support, it also has a Vim plugin, which in itself was enough for me to justify getting it.
- Viemu XCode Vim plugin.