Appearance
For wallpapers, I download Unsplash Wallpapers. This gives me beautiful wallpapers that rotate each day. When I come across one I really like, I usually set it aside for the newsletter, for those weeks when I don’t have a personal photo to share.
Dock
For the Dock, there’s a few settings that I change immediately. The first thing I do is remove almost all the apps from the Dock. All but the few that I use daily.
Next, I right click on the dock and go into Dock settings. In there I change a few things:
- Turn on “Minimize windows into application icon”
- Turn off “Show indicators for open applications”
- Turn off “Show suggested and recent apps in Dock”
Dark/Light
For Dark and Light Mode, I have two shortcuts that help me instantly switch when needed:
Inside of the Shortcuts app, I add those two shortcuts to the dock, but then remove them from the dock right after. This makes them searchable without being visible.
Now, I either type Cmd+Space Dark or Cmd+Space Light and then press enter, and the Mac now goes light or dark. There might even be an easier way to do this, but this is what works for me.
Heavyweights
The heavyweights are the two apps I use every day: Ulysses is my writing app, and Things 3 is my task manager. I’ve been using these the two apps for so many years now, and I couldn’t imagine using anything else when trying to tackle big projects.
Foundational
As far as native apps, there’s only a handful that I use. Safari, Apple Notes, Photos, Finder, Freeform, Weather, and GarageBand.
In Safari, there’s two apps that I use. PiPifier and Downie. PiPifier allows me to open have a video playing in the bottom corner of the screen at all times. Downie allows me to quickly download a YouTube video.
There’s also a few apps that I download right away to make the Mac easier to use:
BetterSnapTool lets me drag an app to the top of the screen and that causes the app to snap into the very center of the screen, with a clean space on all side. This keeps all the apps in a uniformed clean look.
Alfred 5 is my favorite way to search the Mac. I replace the built-in Spotlight feature with Alfred, making it so cmd+space opens up Alfred to search. Spotlight is probably good enough for most people, but I like how clean I can get Alfred to look.
Bartender hides all the apps in the menu bar, putting them behind a little arrow. This gives the top of the screen a much cleaner look.
And last, Unnatural Scroll Wheel is one I found, if you use both a trackpad and a mouse, it helps scroll the right way.
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