macOS Software Checklist

• TextSniper: OCR any printed text on your screen.
• Swish: The application site claims it as the missing gesture layer for macOS. Its a whole bunch of useful gestures that have made my life easier on the MacBook.
• Soduto: File sharing between Android and macOS. While the current public version is quite old, it works flawlessly with KDE Connect, which works well with my Linux and Windows devices. There’s an alternative called AirMore, which I’ve yet to try.
• MacPorts: I pick this because its better to work with for me. Homebrew doesn’t work for my use-cases.
• Transmission: For dealing with torrent downloads. And doing other useful stuff with torrents. I would prefer qBittorrent, but that software is not notarized on macOS. I don’t know if the issue is mine alone, but the network speed used to drop to zero a lot on macOS. Too bad, it worked fine on Windows.
• curl and Wget: curl command comes bundled with macOS and is pretty much all you need to download most of the content. I use wget when I need to work with http directories.
• PDF Expert: The default Preview app works fine with PDFs. But it has its limitations - it cannot work with large PDFs and cross-device annotation and editing of PDFs is a pain to work with.
• Amphetamine: Handy utility to keep my device awake. Available for free at the App Store.
• Movist Pro: Media player that mostly plays anything I throw at it. My recommendation earlier was VLC since its free and it works, however, there are some issues with it - it can’t play AV1 files properly without crashing sometimes, doesn’t do well with HDR content and consumes more battery. Movist Pro, while paid software, has sensible features like playlist detection, better battery stats, flawless AV1 playback, fantastic HDR playback and it better integrates with macOS. However, VLC still remains my go-to media player for the iPad.
• Parallels Desktop: Best for virtualizing Windows 10 and 11.
• VMWare Fusion: Best for running Linux Distros (hardware accelerated graphics didn’t work for Ubuntu on Parallels).
• Vim: Insane text-editor. Its old, but it remains unmatched once you master it.
• CrossOver: Run Windows software at native speed on macOS. Kinda wish there was something for Android too. The software is a hit or miss, but at least it works well for my use-cases.
• Paragon NTFS: If you are using NTFS on macOS, my first suggestion is to avoid it, if at all possible. If you can’t, don’t look anywhere else besides this one. Writing to NTFS drives is better with Paragon NTFS than anything else.