A few weeks ago I went to the Apple Store at Friendly Center in Greensboro, NC to pick up my M4 Mac Mini. This would be my first official use of MacOS on any kind of a regular basis. Needless to say, I would have a lot of learning to do, especially with regards to apps that would be useful and help make my experience the best it can be.

Now that it’s been a few weeks, I figured I’d jot down some of the apps that I have discovered and started using in my short journey so far. Hopefully by listing these apps others will find them useful or discover something that might make their experience that much easier or more enjoyable.

Ice Menu Bar

Ice is a powerful menu bar management tool. While its primary function is hiding and showing menu bar items, it aims to cover a wide variety of additional features to make it one of the most versatile menu bar tools available. Some of the features of Ice Menu Bar include.

It doesn’t take long at all to start getting a ton of icons on the menu bar at the top of the screen as I quickly realized. My OCD hated this, so I needed something to make my life better, and Ice Menu Bar was just the app. So many features and options to hide icons, show hidden icons and so much more.

  • Show hidden menu bar items below the menu bar
  • Drag-and-drop interface to arrange menu bar items
  • Customize the menu bar’s appearance
  • Menu bar item search
  • Custom menu bar item spacing
  • … and much more!

Lickable Menu Bar

Lickable Menu Bar – the app that brings back classic menu bar styles to your Mac. If you miss the beautiful menu bars of previous macOS versions, this is the app for you. Lickable Menu Bar offers three predefined styles to choose from.

The MacOS menu bar isn’t the best looking, nor is it very configurable by default. Lickable Menu Bar makes it look considerably better and works very well with Ice Menu Bar mentioned above.

  • Matte, reminiscent of the menu bar in Mac OS X Mavericks
  • Flat, similar to the menu bar in macOS Catalina
  • Glossy, like the menu bar in Mac OS X Tiger

Alt-Tab

AltTab is an app that gives you a much nicer and more configurable window switcher with MacOS. The default that the system uses is pretty boring, but AltTab makes it much more tolerable and has extra features.

I am so used to use AltTab to switch windows as I’ve been doing it for years. The MacOS built-in system is decently ok, but it’s not that nice looking so AltTab provides me with a better looking solution that also has quite a few features to make it that much better.

  • Switch focus to any window
  • Minimize, close, fullscreen any window; Hide, quit any app
  • Customize AltTab appearance (pick one of 3 styles, then customize further)
  • Custom trigger shortcuts with almost any keys
  • Blacklist apps you don’t want to list or trigger AltTab from
  • Light and Dark Appearance
  • Drag-and-drop things on top of window thumbnails
  • Accessibility: VoiceOver, sticky keys, reduced transparency, etc

CleanShot X

CleanShot is the ultimate screen recording app made for macOS. With its rich toolkit, CleanShot actually feels like 6 apps in one. You can use it to swiftly capture Mac’s screen without desktop icons, record and trim video, annotate, save screenshots to dedicated cloud, and more.

I take a LOT of screenshots for various things, so having a tool that is quick and easy to use is important. Cleanshot X is just that, but so much more. All of the screenshots included in this article were taken and edited with Cleanshot X.

  • Hide desktop icons
  • Annotate
  • Background tool
  • Quick access overlay
  • Screenshots and screen recording
  • Cleanshot Cloud save

LocalSend

LocalSend is exactly what it likely sounds like it is, an app that allows you to share files locally to your various devices and to do so with ease. It’s available not only for MacOS, but for Windows, iOS, Linux and Android.

I use LocalSend for sharing files, mostly photos, directly from my iPhone 16 Pro Max to my Windows and MacOS devices. This helps me post them easier on social media or do other things that I might need or want to do.

I wrote a full review of LocalSend a while back here on the SeerOfSouls blog that you can view here: LocalSend: A Fast, Secure Way To Transfer Files Between Devices.

Final Thoughts

The list of apps above are just a few of the apps I’ve discovered in the first few weeks of fully switching to MacOS. There are many others and I’ll be writing about those in the future. The ones I’ve chosen to list here are the ones that I am currently using the most and that make my switch from Windows to MacOS much easier and smoother.

I’d certainly love for you to list any and all MacOS apps that you enjoy or find useful in your daily routine. I’m sure there are many that y’all use that I too would or could find useful and beneficial for the things I do.

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