Some stuff I've always setup early through multiple devices:
- Homebrew for installs.
- Bartender for managing apps in my menu bar.
- Flux for managing bluelight filters on my screen.
- Rectangle for managing window position & sizing (great on multiple monitors).
- Cheatsheet to quickly see keyboard shortcuts in any app.
- Google Drive Sync to backup important files on my drive automatically.
- Muzzle to be able to remove notifications during videocalls.
- VLC for never having issues with playing some video/media formats.
- Hazel for doing some automations on my file placement (not sure if free).
- Tripmode for controlling what apps access the internet (i think i paid for this).
- CleanMyMac for cleaning up files and checking for malware etc (paid).
- Gifox for creating and sharing gifs quickly.
- Loom for creating and sharing screen recordings + webcam (great for work).
- iTerm + Oh My Zsh for pimping my terminal.
I heard Alfred is great and wanted to try that soon.
Also do spend some time in your system preferences do discover what you can do with your mousepad etc.
I have a shitload of free and useful extensions I use often (Chrome):
ORGANIZATION:
- SimpleExtManager
"A simple menu to enable, disable and access options of extensions".
This allows me to have a zillion extensions and not be all active all the time.
- OneTab
"Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter". I use that to not have 30 tabs open when I'm researching a given subject. They're all saved as neatly organised links. It's super useful to quickly share a group of tabs (links) to a friend.
- Raindrop.io
"All-in-one bookmark manager". Prettiest and most useful bookmark manager, automatically takes thumbnails, tags and meta info from a website. They also have desktop and mobile apps so all my bookmarks are super available. It's my default window when I open a new tab.
- Save to Notion
"Save links to your Notion databases". For saving website pages as part of a given workflow because Notion is where I manage my work (freelance & indie projects). You can save pages in templated formats, it's really neat.
Basically I use OneTab for saving, reopening and sharing groups of tabs of a given work session, I use Raindrop for saving bookmarks of my favourite websites (dev & design tools for example), and I use Save to Notion to save pages as part of a project workflow (landing page of a potential partner for a project or linkedin profile of a potential client).
- 1Password
That's just my password manager. I think it works great, on all devices.
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CONVENIENCE:
- Google Translate
"View translations easily as you browse the web. By the Google Translate team." I translate stuff often, English isn't my native language.
- I don't care about cookies
Auto-removes cookie banners and auto-accepts them if it's the only way to remove the banners.
- uBlock Origin
"Finally, an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory". I think everybody already has that haha.
- Dark Reader
"Dark mode for every website. Take care of your eyes, use dark theme for night and daily browsing." So my girlfriend doesn't kill me when I open super bright tabs at 2am in bed.
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DECONSTRUCTING PRODUCTS (to learn how to build them)
- Wayback Machine
"Reduce annoying 404 pages by automatically checking for an archived copy in the Wayback Machine." I love seeing how some websites evolved over time to learn about their owners' decisions.
- CSS Peeper
"Extract CSS and build beautiful styleguides." Getting color HEX codes from existing websites or deconstructing how they set up their paddings, margins etc is always neat.
- Wappalyzer
"Identify web technologies". I like to use it to see if something is built in no-code with a webflow CMS for example. But you really see everything someone's used to build a website. I've tried multiple tools like this one and I think this is the simplest one to understand. Builtwith has too much info to my taste.
Then there's a few other extensions that I'm trying now but I'm not sure I'll keep so I won't recommend them yet. Mostly work-related for specific tools I use.