Hey everyone, how's it going. My name is Mayuko,
and welcome back to my channel where we talk about tech, career, and life.
so I asked my Twitch stream the other day what video y'all want to see,
and a lot of you were interested on 'What's on my Mac'.
I made a 'What's on my iPhone' video a couple months ago, and so today,
I'm going to show you all of the things that I use on my Mac
and how I use it. This will include Mac applications that I use on a day-to-day basis,
as well as the functionality and features of Mac OS that I use all the time.
And yes, it's Mac, not PC. If you put a PC in front of me,
I wouldn't know what to do with it, 'cause I've used a Mac since I was like...
seven or something. My dad was really into Apple computers from the early days,
and so I've just kind of like kept going with that. And now look at me!
I had a career as an iOS developer, and I'm like fully in the Apple ecosystem
at this point. And just a little background before we get started, I use the Macbook Pro.
I have the 15-inch model because I bought it in mid 2018
before the 16-inch model came out. The processor is a 2.9 gigahertz, 6 core
Intel Core i9. It's got 32 gigs of memory and 1 terabyte of storage.
When I bought it, I wanted to do kind of a lot of things,
I wanted it to handle iOS development super smoothly, and also video editing.
So it's kind of like a souped up version of a Macbook Pro.
The next year up after this is probably like an iMac or iMac Pro,
but I'm pretty happy with what I've got right now.
So without further ado, let's dive in.
So the first thing I'm going to show you are just features of Mac OS
that I really enjoy using. You may or may not know about them,
but these are the ones that kind of have made it into my workflow.
[DO NOT DISTURB - MAC FEATURE] So the first thing is Do Not Disturb mode.
There's a lot of notifications that come flying through on my Mac,
and when I need a little bit of focus time, and I don't want to see
what emails are coming through or Slack messages or Discord messages,
then this is really handy. Also, when I'm like in a phone call,
on a Zoom call or something, then being able to silence everything
so that I am completely focused on the task at hand
is something that has really helped me to get my stuff done.
And right next to Do Not Disturb mode,
[NIGHT SHIFT - MAC FEATURE] is Night Shift. now I used f.lux before
the invention of Night Shift on Mac OS, but it really does help me with my eyes.
I have mine set to a schedule where I have it turned on at sunset,
and then turned on until sunrise. I kind of like my screen to be a little
bit warmer. Like my eyes are already very bad, so they're doing a lot of work to
concentrate on a screen right in front of me. And so taking away the blue light
definitely helps with my eyes so that I can fall asleep at night.
And I know like, blue light stuff, there's like a lot of competing debates
about it, but really I have noticed that since using Night Shift,
I don't feel my eyeballs in my eyes when I'm trying to fall asleep.
And so I have Night Shift on my Mac and I also have it on my phone.
And sometimes if my eyes are just tired I'll just turn it on the middle of the day.
Like it really does just help relieve my eye of that strain.
The next thing I want to show you is Spotlight.
[SPOTLIGHT - MAC FEATURE] So, unless you've changed the settings on your own Mac,
then you can trigger Spotlight with Command + Space.
I have mine set so that'll search through applications, which really is
what I primarily use it for. And so, instead of digging through
like the applications folder and trying to find what you need,
being able to go to Spotlight search and then type exactly what I need and then
press Enter, and it launches thing makes it super easy.
Its origins are in something called Alfred that a lot of people used at
the time that Apple adopted, and it's made my workflow a lot easier and
it really helps. You can have it set to search through your
different files as well as different text. It can also even do math for you,
which is really nice. Uh, and so that's just like a really
handy thing to have at your fingertips. Another thing that
I really like using that's part of Mac OS is Spaces.
[SPACES - MAC FEATURE] I have a lot of spaces all the time,
and usually there's like an application per space. And I like this
because I like having full screen windows for everything,
and it's easier for me to navigate between different spaces than it is
to navigate between different applications.
So I usually have one for video editing,
another one for browsing the internet, another one for
text communication like Discord and WhatsApp. And I usually also have one for
Spotify. I can always add more spaces, I can also take them away.
And it's just been a good way to organize all of my thoughts and
the applications that are running on my computer.
So those are the features that I enjoy that are part of Mac OS.
Right now, I'm using Mac OS Catalina, and I'm really excited to use Mac OS Big Sur,
as well as future releases to see what functionality Apple adds to Mac OS.
While we're on the topic of 'What's on my Mac',
I want to talk about one of my favorite websites on my Mac which is Brilliant,
who is a sponsor of today's video. Brilliant is an amazing website and app
that makes learning super accessible and fun. Their whole approach
is based on problem solving and active learning, which I think
is really kind of one of the best ways to learn new things.
They teach you concepts visually with interactions to help you better understand,
and then also ask you questions, so that you're engaging with the topic
and content. And unlike school, there's like, no tests, no grades,
it's literally just to fulfill and enrich your learning.
They've got a ton of courses in math, science, and computer science.
One that I'm really interested in that i'm going to take is
the knowledge and uncertainty course. This course gives you the mathematical
tools for dealing with the flood of information in our lives.
And you'll learn cutting edge mathematics like information theory,
Bayesian networks, and causal inference but in an accessible way without
the calculations getting in the way. They've also got a lot of great courses
in computer science as well, so whether you want to brush up on your
fundamentals and your algorithms or you want to dive into something
like Python or even cryptography, they've got it. So try out Brilliant today
by going to brilliant.org/hellomayuko, and only the first 200 subscribers
will get 20 percent off the annual premium subscription.
Thanks so much for Brilliant for sponsoring, and let's get back to the video.
So next, we're going to talk about applications. So I have all of the
applications that I use on a day-to-day basis in my dock,
which shows and hides if I go to the bottom of the screen.
So we're going to start with Brave. Brave is a is a Chromium-based browser
that really emphasizes privacy. It comes with built-in ad blockers and
everything, and so it's been really easy to use, and I feel good using it
because it blocks all of these ads for me to begin with.
I actually used to use Safari because Safari is also really good for privacy,
but a lot of websites are built on top of Chromium, and web developers are
mostly focused on delivering a good experience on Chrome
and not so much Safari, which is why I've been using Brave.
I have my bookmarks at the top, and I have a couple of extensions, but
that's just, that's kind of my web browser – there's not really a whole lot to it there.
So next, let's talk about email.
[SPARK - EMAIL] I've been using Spark – I use it on my phone,
and I use the calendar for it as well. I used to just use the web browser
for Gmail and then also the Mail client on Mac, but
I needed something that was a desktop app that also divided my email
just like how Gmail does. I like that I can pin messages on Spark,
and that it divides my newsletters, as well as my notifications.
And the calendar app's pretty intuitive too.
There are some things that I don't really like about Spark in that
I can't completely make my 17,000 newsletters marked as read,
and I don't think this email client is for everybody.
If there is like a more elegant solution in the future that I enjoy using,
then I think I'll hop to that. But for now, this meets my needs.
next we're going to talk about my project management tools,
mainly ClickUp and Trello.
[CLICKUP - PROJECT MANAGEMENT] So I talked about both of these apps in the video
where I talk about how I organize my life, but
these are the two main things that I use to organize all the tasks
and projects that are going on. I really like that ClickUp has
a dedicated Mac app, because then it doesn't get lost in all of my browser tabs,
and it's really just easy to access. It does all the things
That the web app does, and I just kind of have it in a space
somewhere so that I can always look at it if I need to.
[TRELLO - PROJECT MANAGEMENT] and in addition to ClickUp, I also use Trello.
So, I use Trello mostly for projects that I'm working on with
other people, and it's just a lot more lightweight than ClickUp, and so
for simple projects, it's been really good to have this on hand.
Next, we're gonna go into video editing things.
[VIDEO EDITING - ADOBE PREMIERE PRO] So, I use Premiere Pro. I used to use Final Cut,
but then I moved to Premiere Pro because
there's just a lot more tutorials out there on how to use Premiere Pro,
and while the learning curve for Adobe products is always really big, I feel
pretty comfortable with it now, and it does all the things that I want it to and more.
It's been really nice because I also have the Logitech MX Keys,
and the MX Master 3. And so I've programmed my mouse and
keyboard with specific key bindings to work for Premiere.
And that's really improved my editing workflow, it's made it so much
faster, and it's a lot easier to edit videos.
so that's Premiere. Next, I'm going to talk about Figma.
[FIGMA - DESIGN] So Figma is a tool used by designers.
A lot of UI/UX designers use Figma or Sketch in order to create
mock-ups for apps and websites, but I use it mostly to create thumbnails
and other assets I might need for my videos and content creation.
So for instance, I made all of my merch on this, as well as all of my overlays
for Twitch, and then also assets for Code With Friends.
It's pretty intuitive to use, it's pretty easy to collaborate
with other people on it. Again, I really appreciate it that it's
its own Mac app, because I don't like using these heavy tools on web.
Because again, it'll get lost in my tabs, or it's just not as efficient,
and so being able to use it as a Mac app, regardless of how it's built underneath,
has been a really good thing for my workflow.
All right, so next we'll talk about my coding tool. So I'm
an iOS developer, so literally, like the main IDE that I would use is Xcode.
[XCODE - Coding] I have it on my dock at the bottom, and,
if you're going to make iOS apps, you have to use Xcode.
I don't really got a choice, and so... yeah. It's there. Right now, I'm on 12.0.1,
and... yeah. it's easy to access it's, it's how you write Apple apps.
And for everything that's not iOS development, then I use
[VISUAL STUDIO CODE - CODING] Visual Studio Code.
I've been through all the iterations of going from Sublime to Atom,
and it seems like now Visual Studio Code is like the de facto code editor.
And I like it a lot. I like that I can add extensions to it, the organization of
everything is really easy. Being able to preview markup files has
been a real life saver as well. I'm not really a heavy user of
Visual Studio Code, because I'm not a web developer, but I know that a lot of
web developers like using this and it's a really powerful product if you want to
use it that way. Next on the dock, we've got Spotify.
[SPOTIFY - MUSIC] Usually when I'm listening to music,
I'm usually on Spotify, because that's where all of my music is, Spotify.
[NOTES - NOTES...] Now, next is Notes. So in the
video where I talk about how I organize my life, I talk about
the various note-taking systems that I have. And the Notes app, I use it
as just kind of like a note-taking dump. I use it as like a scratch pad really
to like copy & paste Instagram captions, as well as just like
quick To-Do lists as well. And so, just having a place that I can go
to just like write something out really fast, right on my doc is why Notes
is one of my most used apps on Mac. Honestly, I should probably go and like
clear a lot of things out, because there's just a lot of random notes in
here that make zero sense. So that's Notes.
Next, I've got my slew of communication tools.
[MESSAGES - TEXTING] So I have Messages on here, so I can like
talk to my friends during the workday.
[DISCORD - MESSAGING] I've also got Discord, because I have my own server
for people who watch my Twitch stream.
[SLACK - Messaging] And then I've got Slack because I just belong to
I feel like so many different and random Slack groups,
and keep in touch with folks every once in a while.
[ZOOM - Messaging] I also have Zoom down here because
our life is like on Zoom nowadays, since we're in quarantine,
and I use it at least once a day. And then I also have WhatsApp.
[WHATSAPP - Messaging] Mostly to communicate with my brand manager,
as well as people who live overseas.
Lastly, I've got LastPass, which is my password manager.
[LASTPASS - Password Management] Just having it there so I can either
generate a new password or copy & paste an existing one.
Has made it super easy. I also have the Chrome extension
for LastPass as well, but that also deserves a spot on my dock.
We're gonna skip over Quicktime Player. It's usually not in my dock, but it's
there, just because I'm recording my screen right now.
But, next are the folders that I have. And in that, I've got Downloads.
A lot of the stuff that I draw on my iPad, I AirDrop to my computer which then
lands in Downloads, and having this fan out view has been really
easy to work with, because then I can just grab things
that have been downloaded to my computer or AirDropped.
I've also got my Dropbox folder, because I put a lot of my
business things in there. And then I also have my Videos folder.
This just makes it super easy for when I'm video editing and I need like a
quick asset or something. It's just there within reach.
Oh, one last thing that I forgot: for keyboards, I have the US English keyboard,
and then I also have the hiragana keyboard for when I type Japanese.
That's also up there so that's easy within reach that I can
flip between the different languages very quickly.
And that's it! Thank you all so much for watching
this video. I hope you liked it, I hope you found out
about a new application or two that maybe you'd consider using.
Let me know what features or applications you like to use on your Mac
in the comments down below. And make sure to subscribe to my channel
if you'd like to see more videos from me, and I will see you next time.