Friday, December 30, 2016

Must Haves for MacOS Sierra from Glenn Fleishman

'Must Have' may spark an immediate creep of someone overspeaking but Glenn Fleishman has obvious experience going way back with Mac systems and some of his tips I regard as Good to Have but there are others which are long-time favorites.  (MacWorld:  The 10 must-have utilities for macOS Sierra)


TRANSMIT (active)

The FTP utility which makes it easy for slinging files and folders around as you will to distant systems.  I couldn't guess how many years I have been running it.  I've used many over years but this one is the best and, by far, the easiest to use.


DEFAULT FOLDER (active)

A Finder extension which makes navigation through folders much more clever by making them hierarchical.  This is another which has an ancient history with me and it's been continuously reliable throughout.


BARTENDER (active)

While maybe not indispensable it definitely takes it for cuter 'n a bug's ear.  If you like dropping extensions of various types into your system, you likely have lots of things in the menu bar but some or many don't require immediate accessibility.  Bartender lets you hide them to pop them up when you like.  It's really not indispensable but it keeps your Mac looking tidy and tight and you will miss it if it's gone.

All together with the immortal words of Jean Stafford:  "Cleanliness is next to haulin' ass."


1PASSWORD (strong contender)

A password management system I have resisted because of questions of whether such a system makes the problem better or worse.  It's become clear over time there's no alternative since most passwords are required now to be impossible to remember due to the need for Sanskrit characters and who knows what else.

Note:  unlike the others, 1PASSWORD is available from the App Store.


All of these products are actively and intelligently supported and these are only four of the ten.


These two get Honorable Mentions:


LAUNCHBAR

A short-cut for launching applications and this one competes with the MacOS launcher which I find suitable.  With a hot corner on the screen, I can pull up the Launcher to point and shoot in a most acceptably snappy fashion.  I  have ALFRED which is a similar keyboard-based launcher but I don't use it much.


PASTEBOT

An excellent Clipboard manager which retains an enormous number of previous versions of whatever you have copied or cut.  For this task I have been using PASTE but PASTEBOT has some superior features and I wasn't aware of the product previously.


Hat tip to Glenn Fleishman on an excellent list which was definitely worthy of review for confirming some of what I run and for some excellent suggestions on additions.

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