These Apps Made My Mac Actually Useful

Summary

In Sara Dietschy's latest video, she runs through a list of Mac applications that have greatly enhanced her productivity and creativity. Sponsored by Acuity Scheduling, Sara shares her personal experience with a variety of tools that range from screenshot utilities to AI chat applications. The video is packed with fun examples and engaging insights into how each app fits into her daily routine, making a strong case for why viewers should consider integrating them into their own workflows. Whether you're a content creator or just a Mac enthusiast, this video offers something for everyone.

Highlights

• CleanShot X revolutionizes how you take and manage screenshots with its intuitive interface and features like markup tools and clipboard history. 💻
• Paste enhances the Mac clipboard experience by letting you access and manage your clipboard history more effectively. 📌
• ChatGPT for MacOS is a must-have for quick chatbot interactions, replacing many functions of web searches. 🤖
• Color Picker makes acquiring and using color hex codes effortless, saving time for designers and digital creatives. 🌈
• Screen Studio takes care of screen recording enhancements, adding automatic zoom-ins and more, making it ideal for creating polished video content. 🎬
• Camo transforms your phone into a high-quality, stable webcam, perfect for remote meetings and video content creation. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• CleanShot X is the ultimate screenshot tool for Mac users, offering advanced editing and management features. 📸
• Paste app is a game-changer for managing clipboard history on Mac, keeping track of everything you've copied. 📋
• The ChatGPT app for MacOS is super convenient for quick searches and health tracking tasks. 💬
• Color Picker simplifies getting hex codes from colors on screens, easily copying them to your clipboard. 🎨
• Screen Studio automates slick screen recordings with zoom-ins and more, making your tutorials look professional. 🎥
• Camo app elevates video conferencing by using your iPhone as a high-quality webcam. 📱

Overview

Sara Dietschy kicks off her video with an introduction to some of her favorite Mac apps, starting with CleanShot X, a powerhouse for managing screen captures. This app allows users to easily edit and organize their screenshots, saving time and enhancing productivity. She highlights how its simple shortcuts and tools make life easier for content creators who need quick access to visual assets.

The video also delves into productivity tools like Paste and ChatGPT, illustrating how these apps streamline daily tasks. Paste, part of the Setapp ecosystem, is praised for its clipboard management capabilities, while ChatGPT is heralded for its versatility – from everyday inquiries to assisting with health management.

Sara wraps up by showcasing production tools that add professional polish to digital content. Screen Studio and Camo are featured as essential apps for anyone looking to improve their video and streaming quality. She shares her personal use cases, emphasizing how these tools have become integral to her creative and professional workflow.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Sponsor Ad Introduction and Sponsor Ad: The chapter introduces the video, which is sponsored by Acuity Scheduling, a flexible scheduling software. The host, Sarahi, expresses her personal use and approval of the software. She then introduces the main content of the video, which will be about sharing useful Mac tools and apps she uses frequently, aimed at providing viewers with helpful insights, especially if they are not already using these tools.
• 00:30 - 03:00: CleanShot X and Hidden Bar Sarah Dichi introduces herself and talks about her experience being an exclusive Mac OS user for over a year, expressing satisfaction with the experience. She mentions the new Mac Studios and the intention to upgrade at some future point.
• 03:00 - 08:00: Paste App and ChatGPT The chapter explores two tools: 'Hidden Bar' and 'Clean Shot X'. The speaker begins by discussing 'Hidden Bar', a Mac app recommended by a YouTuber, and appreciates how it helps in managing clutter on the top bar of the Mac. 'Clean Shot X' is then described as an exceptional screenshot app that the speaker praises for its functionality, noting that it retains the usual screenshot shortcuts, making the transition to using it seamless.
• 08:00 - 10:30: Acuity Scheduling Ad The chapter titled 'Acuity Scheduling Ad' discusses the functionality of a screenshot tool that acts like a clipboard. This tool maintains multiple screenshot copies that stack and will not disappear unless manually swiped away. However, using the shortcut 'Shift + Option + X' allows users to access all screenshots, enabling scrolling and easy retrieval by pressing enter for them to appear as needed.
• 10:30 - 15:00: Color Picker and Screen Studio This section describes the use of a markup tool for editing screenshots, highlighting its superior features compared to the standard Mac screenshot tool. The tool includes a rectangle tool for annotations, a handy blur tool, and a text highlighter that maintains its focus. Users can also utilize various cropping options and add custom backgrounds, including personal wallpapers, to their images.
• 15:00 - 18:00: Camo App and Personal Recommendations In this chapter titled 'Camo App and Personal Recommendations,' the speaker discusses the various features of an application they use, such as adding backgrounds and circular borders to videos, which they find visually appealing. They highlight how the app allows for customization with plain colors, different alignments, and a range of gradients. The speaker expresses appreciation for the ability to add personal wallpapers, noting how practical and helpful it has been for them. Previously relying on Da Vinci Resolve for screenshots, they now prefer using CleanShot X to create visually appealing screenshots, which they then easily save back to their clipboard.
• 18:00 - 23:00: Email Apps and Productivity Tools The chapter discusses "Email Apps and Productivity Tools," particularly emphasizing popular software like CleanShot and Paste. CleanShot is highly recommended, and the speaker encourages those unfamiliar with it to download it immediately. Paste is another highlighted app, part of the Setapp ecosystem, which also includes other useful apps like Downey, used for downloading purposes. The speaker shares their appreciation for these tools in improving productivity.
• 23:00 - 28:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts The Conclusion and Final Thoughts chapter reflects on the effectiveness and utility of various software applications, particularly those accessible through Setapp. The mention of 'clean my Mac' suggests a focus on applications that optimize computer performance. The speaker initially expresses hesitation about the Paste app but has since grown fond of it, finding it indispensable. They discuss using keyboard shortcuts for functionalities like retrieving cleanshot screenshots and managing clipboard history. The chapter highlights convenience features, such as retaining the source application information for copied items, demonstrating a seamless and integrated user experience across different applications.

These Apps Made My Mac Actually Useful Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this video is sponsored by Acuity Scheduling acue Scheduling is a flexible scheduling software that I actually used for years it's how our clients booked Blanco and I'm a really big fan more on them later um hey welcome to a new video my name is Sarahi it rhymes with Peachy i've been doing so much computer work late into the night that I thought hey let's like share some of the cool Mac tools the Mac apps that I use every single day all the time and you know maybe these aren't the most original but o if you're not using them you're
• 00:30 - 01:00 missing out did I say my name is Sarah Dichi Ranipici i don't know if I said that i have to say being 100% Mac OS for over a year now has been uh kind of nice and now that the new Mac Studios are out at some point you know uh squirreing away the monies for that at some point I'm going to upgrade to that but not not yet um okay number one CleanShot or is it Cleot X cleanshot X oh wait a little sidebar about hidden bar look at this boop boop boop i was actually watching
• 01:00 - 01:30 another YouTuber's Mac app videos um and they shouted out this hidden bar and I was like "Oh this is so great because I have so much stuff uh up on my top bar now." Um I I don't need all this stuff hidden bar boom so if you don't know about that one you know okay clean Shot X oh my gosh this is the best screenshot app that has ever existed upon installing you press all the buttons and it makes it to where the screenshot keyboard shortcut is exactly the same so shift command 4 you're going to screenshot something um just like you're
• 01:30 - 02:00 used to but it keeps your screenshot down here on essentially a clipboard and it doesn't go away unless you swipe away screenshot screenshot so here's multiple screenshots and they just keep stacking and they will not go away unless you swipe away but even if you swipe them away they're not going to disappear you just do the shift option X and boom you have all of your screenshots on essentially your clipboard and you can scroll um press enter and it appears
• 02:00 - 02:30 back on your screen and you can click this markup tool and it just has so many great ways that you can modify screenshots beyond um the standard screenshot tool on Mac you have the rectangle tool i use this so much um to say "Hey this is missing or do this do that right?" You have the blur tool which is so handy highlight text and it keeps it on the text which is very nice you have the different crops but more importantly you can add a lot of different backgrounds now this is so great you can add your own wallpaper as
• 02:30 - 03:00 the background and it adds this uh nice like circular border to things right it just looks so pretty or you can add plain colors you can have different alignments and they have a lot of great gradients here and again you can add your own wallpapers and this has been so incredibly handy for me uh honestly just for videos i used to do all of my screenshot stuff within Da Vinci Resolve but now I just make my screenshots look pretty and nice in CleanShot X i save it it goes back to uh the little clipboard
• 03:00 - 03:30 thing and then I just drag and drop over to my folder my video folder um wherever I'm keeping the assets and I know a lot of people probably already use CleanShot but man I'm putting this as number one just for like the five individuals that don't know about it you have to download it like why why are you still like pause the download it and then come back number two is paste now this is another app a part of the set app ecosystem um they have a lot of great apps like Downey that I use for downloading
• 03:30 - 04:00 YouTube videos uh they also have clean my Mac i don't know if paste is the best it was just in set app so I downloaded it and now I love it and I can't exist without it so just like shift option H uh brings up my cleanshot screenshots shift option V brings up uh essentially my clipboard for everything that I've pasted and as you can tell it keeps the applications that you pasted from on the top of um the selection so we have Chrome notes we have an image that was
• 04:00 - 04:30 on my clipboard right and this is just a beautiful way to actually look at your clipboard and recall previous things that you copied yes we all know that Windows has traditionally just had a better copy and paste experience the fact that they just like have a clipboard by default um it's crazy that you have to install uh other apps to get it on the Mac but this paste app is really great and something that I enjoy uh that is also a part of this app is called the paste stack so you're going to do the same thing shift option but
• 04:30 - 05:00 now you're going to hit C for copy and I'll show you how you use this i'm just going to select multiple different things of text that I want to paste right so copy copy copy copy and as you can see it is uh popping up on my stack and then if I go somewhere else like Google Chrome or something where I actually want to paste this text as I paste it you see it disappearing from the paste stack i love it it's so handy
• 05:00 - 05:30 number three chat GBT i know this isn't a super original one but a power user of Chat GBT my husband John he still uses it via the web i'm going to have to like steal his computer and actually download the Mac OS app on it it's It's getting ridiculous but if you do not have the Mac OS app yet what are you doing it makes it so much easier to use there is just little friction in the same way that you would hit command spacebar to access Spotlight instead you're going to
• 05:30 - 06:00 hit option spacebar and it automatically uh puts a chat GPT prompt up there you can drag your screenshot over you can type the all of the things that you need to type i just use it all of the time um and when I tweet about this a lot of people are like "What do you even use it for?" Honestly 70% of the time is just replacing a lot of the prompts that I would put into my search engine just I would Google but there's actually a lot of cool stuff that I've been able to do with it i have been um doing a lot of health stuff recently um having you know
• 06:00 - 06:30 a couple breakthroughs which is good i'm actually solving some things um but I got really diligent about my blood work and now uh I am you know supplementing and taking different vitamins um but I put all of that in chat GBT i know some people would be like "Oh that's private information why would you do that?" Honestly guys at this point I don't care i'm just trying to figure out how to live my best life i don't think the robots are going to weaponize the fact that I'm extremely vitamin D deficient uh anytime soon but the value I get from
• 06:30 - 07:00 it it just surpasses what I um would be scared of if that makes sense you can think that that's wrong and that's okay anyways you know I'll let it know how long my cycle is and then it tells me at what times of my cycle the three different times that I should get my blood drawn because depending on uh when you are in your cycle certain hormones should be up should be down and that was really helpful for me and then I can basically put in my lab report that is a lot of different values everywhere it's just a PDF it's very hard to sit there
• 07:00 - 07:30 and manually just like copy and paste the values so I'll put in the PDF and essentially chat GBT in its memory has the order of all of the biioarkers that I have in an Excel spreadsheet and it's able to pull all the biioarkers uh from the PDF and then export it to me in just a CSV and then I just take that copy and paste it into my Excel spreadsheet and you know I'm able to see the trends and all of those things super cool right but then you can take it a step further and say "Hey here was my blood over 6 months
• 07:30 - 08:00 what's wrong with me?" Right it's a little bit more indepth with that but that's an example of a cool unique way that I've been using it and it's been extremely helpful um but if I'm going to be honest yeah like 70% of all of my chat GPT uh queries are not that cool i actually took an entire day and just vibe coded this really cool web app that's for a entirely different video maybe one day i'm just out here having fun so download the chat GBT Mac app it's so good it's not even like the best
• 08:00 - 08:30 model it's just they they hooked me first right and the app is on my computer i use it all the time that's just what it is now i've been hearing great things about Anthropics 3.7 Sonnet but I just I'm in the GPT ecosystem now oh my gosh this next one is so clutch but before I get that just a very quick word from our sponsor Acuity Scheduling something that I have personally used a ton acuity Scheduling is a flexible scheduling software that offers calendar management easy booking tools client
• 08:30 - 09:00 communications secure payments custom branding and just so much more as I mentioned before I used Acuity Scheduling for Book Blanco for the creative studio space that we had here in Texas and it was so easy to use it integrated beautifully into our Squarespace website and it really allowed me the time to just worry about the actual creative space and not the tools that we were using so as I just mentioned Acuity Scheduling integrates directly onto your website or you can use it on its own as a branded
• 09:00 - 09:30 scheduling page and you can set it up with your own custom branding your own custom logo and the clients can do everything on their own on your website they can self-ch they can cancel and they can rebook all on their own on your website with Acuity Scheduling this is amazing not just for physical studios or say like a hair salon but also if you do you know online consultations or you teach um some sort of class you can put this on your website and you just don't have to worry about it people can book
• 09:30 - 10:00 their own sessions you can sync your own calendar with other platforms incorporate buffers between appointments and even set custom cancellation windows acculing also helps you with payments it integrates with popular payment providers like Stripe Square and PayPal and you can even send contactless payment links for easy mobile payments or you can even let your clients tap to pay in person so listen I am a big fan it is always a pleasure to partner with brands that I actually use and have
• 10:00 - 10:30 known their products so intimately if you want to check it out you can go to acuitycheduling.com/adichi uh that is me and when you're ready to launch use my offer code Sarah Dichi 20 for 20% off your first Acuity Scheduling subscription all right back to the video and back to this very simple Mac app that is just so small not a lot of features but so handy and it is called Color Picker i feel like I was always just copy and pasting hex codes of
• 10:30 - 11:00 colors into my notes app or just seeing a website and being like "Oh what is that color?" and I would have to screenshot it bring it into Photoshop uh you know have the little color picker there and get the hex code from there and I was just like there has to be an easier way and yeah it was this Mac app super simple you just hit pick color bring the color dropper over here boom and then it has your recently picked colors uh right here when you select a color in the app it automatically copies it to your clipboard and then you can just paste it wherever you need it i
• 11:00 - 11:30 love it up next we have Screen Studio this is a really great way to do screen recordings on your computer if you've ever been watching a Thomas Frank video or some of the more like edutainment style channels and you're wondering hey how are they getting all of these really slick zoomins right it could be in post-prouction you know in Premiere or Resolve it could be but Screen Studio does this automatically so you can um create your environment on your computer
• 11:30 - 12:00 make sure everything looks good you can pop up your webcam um so it almost looks like a Loom recording and then just do the screen record and Screen Studio does everything for you in post if you don't like the timing with some of the zoomins or you want to add your own you can do that all in post in their own app as a video editor first some of their shortcuts and some of the ways to just like cut a clip or um you know do different things isn't super intuitive but once you learn those shortcuts it is
• 12:00 - 12:30 super quick to go in and kind of edit things on your own i really like that you can add the padding you know very similar to uh Cleot i don't know why it took me so long to find an application like this because I've needed it for so long but it feels like an app that people kind of gatekeep because it makes your screen recording look so good so fancy uh you know like you have like a screen record professional editor for your videos but no it's all this app it's really good it's also a onetime payment no monthly fees which is very
• 12:30 - 13:00 nice and the last but certainly not least app is the camo app I have been in this thing so much uh mainly because I've been working on a big pro I might as well just u say the thing cuz only two of you guys are probably going to be watching to the end of this video takes the pressure off it I've been making this very elaborate video training uh titled how to podcast and it really dives into a lot of different setups and most importantly the overkill setup where I basically use all of my video switchers and my you know classic setup
• 13:00 - 13:30 I've been using for years i walk you through that in both video and written form and there's just there's so much more to it if you're curious about it when it launches because I also have a free version of it i'll put my email newsletter link in the description below you guys will be the first to check it out and also like a very very big discount and I'll also send the free version to you anyways all of that to say in the budget setup that I highlight and I talk about Camo is at the center of it and it's a free app another free app and I just it's so good it's such a
• 13:30 - 14:00 good app for video conferencing for elevating your Zooms or your streams i use it in a way where basically I set up my phone as my webcam and you can use Apple's uh continuity camera to do this but I'm not a big fan of doing it over Wi-Fi and with a Camo app you can plug a USB into your iPhone and then plug the other end into your computer and you just have a much more stable connection of using your iPhone as your webcam and then in Camo you can um select the
• 14:00 - 14:30 microphone you want to use you can add different graphics um you can adjust all of the settings like the white balance and all of those things it's just a really great app and the fact that it's free if you want to unlock 1080 and 4K you don't you do have to pay um but yeah the fact that it's free is just fantastic i'm just a huge fan of that app and so yeah i mean we did a lot i feel like we got through a lot of things i didn't want to add apps that I'm like trying out or they're new and quirky and oh I'm cool for finding this app these are the apps that are like my tried
• 14:30 - 15:00 andrue i've been using them for years and I just use them so much right so hopefully there was one or two that you can try out that's new to you some of the stuff that I have been trying out uh it's funny I tried Arc uh I'm very late to that trend i hate it i need tabs i still use Google Chrome um so Arc lasted for like one day and I'm like do I need to just sit down and learn this better or is this bad and I just think it's bad i don't like it some of you are going to be mad at me for for saying that i'm
• 15:00 - 15:30 still on the hunt for the perfect email app i need to start taking email more seriously and I tried superhuman um gosh I think it was like just around the pandemic but then I was like I don't need email email's not that important to me now I need to keep up with my email um so I'm going to try Superhum again ironically I'm actually an angel investor in Superhum so I should have been using it already but email is just a very intimidating thing to me so instead of like conquering it and figuring it out I kind of have just
• 15:30 - 16:00 always like shoved it aside and no more i'm an adult right seven or eight or nine months ago I made a video talking about me moving away from notion and using Apple Notes more that resonated with a lot of people and yeah still to this day it's the same workflow when it comes to um videos that I'm making they're much more just I have an idea in my head and I do all of the note-taking and then I just make them so nothing about the pre-production of it like requires a team and I like it that way
• 16:00 - 16:30 it keeps it more intimate so Apple Notes is perfect for that and I just keep all of my notes for all of the things in Apple Notes it's super quick it's super handy it's perfect so I don't keep any of my personal notes or anything about videos or sponsors in notion anymore but what I still do use it for are my bigger projects where I am working with more freelancers where it is more projectoriented and more people are involved and there's just like so much content whether written or images or just you know so for the bigger projects I'm still using notion um and I use it
• 16:30 - 17:00 for one project right now but everything else is Apple notes so a little followup on that that's still the same and yeah this this was just like a fun little chill video gosh I've just been at my computer writing so much editing so much so yeah I was like "Oo I haven't done one of these in a while." Hopefully this this will be helpful to you all um and if it was smash that like button smash that subscribe button check out my Acuity scheduling link down in the description below and until next time everyone stay peachy okay bye