Tools
In no particular order, these are the apps and services I use in order to be productive and feel "at home" on my computer.
Moom by Many Tricks
I'm not into manually moving or resizing windows on my Mac. Instead, I have a large grid defined in Moom, and I constrain every window to one of several predefined sizes and positions. It kills me a little when I see people's work environment that consists of a bunch of randomly sized and placed windows. I don't get how they can handle that.
iStat Menus by Bjango
When people come to me asking for tech support – "my computer is being slow" – the first thing I wonder is if some process is taking up all of the CPU time. Of course, they're entirely unaware because they're not keeping an eye on Activity Monitor. And who would want to do that anyway? Network traffic, Disk IO, CPU and GPU load – it is all in my menu bar so that I can, at a glance, see what my computer is up to.
BBEdit by Barebones
Quickly open, search and edit a multi-gigabyte file. And that's just the start. The biggest productivity boost I get from BBEdit is its regex support. I'll post-process a file in BBEdit, manipulating / removing / transforming some aspect of it before using the data elsewhere. And what's your alternative? TextEdit or vi?
HextEdit by Finn Voorhees
Back in the day I used 0xED (SuaveTech), which was excellent. HextEdit has since replaced it on my computers. When you need to view and edit a binary file, this is the best way to do it. While working through countless little issues trying to piece together a compliant movie file to support MPEG-DASH YouTube live streaming, HextEdit was an essential part of that.
Icon Set Studio by Nicolás Miari
Creating the million required sizes of an app icon is one of the most tedious and annoying aspects of app development. Icon Set Studio takes away that pain.
Creating size-compliant screenshots for the app store is one of the most tedious and annoying aspects of getting an app into the app store. Depending on the platforms you're targeting, you may need to create a set of images for iPhone (in various sizes), iPad (in various sizes), Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch and Vision Pro. Yay!
The app store reviewers can be particularly obnoxious when it comes to what may and may not be in your screenshots. You can have screenshots in the app store for years, and out-of-the-blue your next app update is rejected because the app reviewer decides he doesn't like something about your screenshots.
Anyway, Screenshot Studio can't fix the schizophrenic app store review process, but it makes the screenshot creation process so much easier.
I'll grant you that it isn't particularly popular, the idea of paying for access to a search engine, but Kagi is worth it. If I want to see ads or terrible search results, I'll use Google. Duck works decently as well. Kagi consistently produces the most valuable search results for me.