Justin's favorite productivity tools (with Mac and iOS)

Here’s a few of mine (and see my top health tips):

Computer and Phone

See Macbook Pro 2017 Tips and Details. 100% the best laptop ever by miles. Way better than my loaded 2015 model. And iPhone plus iPad! 4K support is awesome in the new Macbook Pro!

I really like the iPad Pro, Apple Watch 3, and Apple TV 4K. All great products that I use every day.

Hard Goods

Bamboo top on Jarvis Frame

The above picture shows a 4’ by 30" deep piece of bamboo ply on top of the Jarvis desk mount. The topo pad and is underneath.

Standing Desk

Monitor Mounts

These are an absolute must with the standing desk. I’m using these.

These are my favorite for value and height adjustability. They are easy to assemble.

If you have 2 monitors plus a laptop, get this combination of the Fleximounts (2 in one plus single):

These are also good. If you’re tall, you definitely want the tall pole!

Another great combination is to use is a double monitor stand and a single laptop stand. However the first combination probably is a bit better with the single monitor plus the monitor/laptop stand:

We have both combinations at the office, and they are probably equally as good.

Monitors

Sound

I really love my sound system! The receiver is top-rated by the Wirecutter, and the speaker set is the upgraded version of the Wirecutter’s top pick (and CNET’s top rated). This combo far exceeds my high expectations!

Keyboard

Mouse

Microphone

Mac OS

Alfred

Calendar

Itsycal: Really a big improvement so you can click and see a small calendar even with holidays! I use this display format: E h:mm a MMM d

Editors

Screen Capture

  • SnagIt. I used to use Skitch tons, but I ran into pretty severe performance problems, probably due to having thousands of skitches attached to my Evernote account. There’s some quirks to the SnagIt interface, but so far, I’m liking it. It also does screen videos as well. I have not picked a program for animated gifs. CloudApp seems like it can do a good job.

Image Editing

  • I’m still on Apple Aperture and Photo Mechanic. I use Photo Mechanic to rename images. I should move to Adobe Lightroom probably, but Aperture still gets the job done.
  • Update 2017: I’m switching to Mac Photos with iCloud. See my post on Photos.

ScreenSharing and Collaboration

  • ScreenHero for screen sharing.
  • Zoom.us for video calls. Crazy good! Way better than Skype or Google Hangouts.

Window Management

  • Moom: More options than Magnet, such as saving a workspace, and more than just spliting or quartering desktops.
  • Magnet: Much faster than Moom, and probably good enough for just about everybody.
  • Used to use Hyperdock but not anymore as Moom and Magnet seems to work better for window management and I rarely used the dock features of Hyperdock.
  • I still use Witch for an alternative to Cmd-Tab that works more like Windows in that you can tab through windows and not just Apps. However, ever since I remapped “Move focus to next window” to a single key press, I use Cmd-Tab and F14 way more. Be sure to see how I setup my Kinesis Keyboard for this.

Backup

  • TimeMachine
  • CrashPlan: Great because it’s offsite and offers a plan with unlimited storage. However, the app does take a lot of system resources.
  • Carbon Copy Clone: Awesome backup program. Possibly I can move away from CrashPlan and make periodic copies with Carbon Copy Cloner that I take offsite?

Other

Supplements

  • I subscribed to Nootrobox KADO-3 and RISE. I tried it out for a couple of months and it seems to work!
  • Try out the Zero App and practice intermittent fasting each day.

Hydration

StandDesk.co desks

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Keyboard rate and caps lock key remapping: Karabiner

Keyboard shortcuts/macros and “super key”: Keyboard Maestro

Window Manager: HyperDock

Screenshot/short video capture and upload: cloudapp

Editor: Sublime Text 3 Dev Builds

Terminal: iTerm2

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Just discovered the Alfred Emoji Workflow. WOW! Useful!