Tong Family

For some reason, Medium seems to be filled with these little articles about Mac apps and widgets. They are mainly identical (which is why I discontinued my Medium subscription and get most of my content from Mastodon and Reddit these days), but here are some of the great utilities I use daily and am about to try:

1. Rectangle. This thing is amazing for tiled window management. I use Gnome Tiles on Linux and basically can’t live without it (or the 55″ monitor I have 🙂
2. Bartender. This is a great utility because of the notch on my MacBook Pro 14, you just can’t see all three icons.
3. Stats. Which provides machine statistics in the menu bar.

But now it’s trying some new ones:

1. Mac Calculator RPN Mode. I didn’t know this, but if you hit Command-R, then you get my favorite RPN notation in the Calculator. So glad for ⌘R or just choose View > RPN Mode.
2. AltTab. This lets you see the screens of the applications when you ⌥Tab around rather than just icons (Yes, it should be named Option Tab since it doesn’t mask the Command-Tab function). I find that the regular Tab behavior isn’t bad particularly when I learned you can hold the ⌘Tab down and then use the mouse to select the application rather than hitting it over and over. YOu can even choose ⌘Q to close the highlighted application which is pretty cool.
3. HiddenBar. Bartender requires a small payment, this one is much simpler, it just lets you hide icons that you don’t need and then you can click and open the hidden ones. Bartender actually works better because when the notch is there, it will just show the hidden icons below it.
4. Numi. This is a sort of natural language calculator because it’s smart enough to understand conversions, you can say “5cm in inches”. I actually find that the Siri bar is actually smart enough to do all of that. It also has variables too. I’m not sure how often I’ll use it but a great idea.
5. RPN Calc. I can’t believe it but there are no HP-12C freeware equivalents on the Mac. I have a few good ones on the PC. This one costs $5 though, but I think I’ll probably use Mac Calculator in RPN for a while.