I've noticed recently
there's been a massive influx
of brand new Mac owners watching the videos on my channel.
I wanted to make this really short video
as i followup to the video I posted on this topic
at the end of last year.
And that is three apps that I now cannot live without.
So without further ado, we're getting straight into it.
Let's have a look at the first one.
And yes guys, I am using Microsoft edge as my browser.
I'll get into that in a different video.
Also quickly as well, this particular video isn't sponsored,
no one has actually paid me any money to make this video.
I just think these particular apps are helpful.
All of them are free to download and test.
I believe two of them, you actually have to pay for them
if you'd like it and want to unlock more features.
But even then the price is relatively low.
So this first app is called Text Sniper,
and this is actually probably one of the most helpful apps
I've ever come across.
And like the name suggests and like what you can see here,
you can basically copy text from an image
and then paste it to your word document
or your notepad or whatever you use on the Mac.
So how does it work?
Well, it's very, very simple.
All you need to do is on your keyboard,
hold down shift, command, and then press the two key,
that's going to bring up the highlight tool.
You want to select the text, you want to copy
and just let go.
That's going to take a screenshot
and it's actually going to analyze the text
in that particular screenshot.
And then you can open up your notes program,
or word, or whatever you're using
and then you just hold command and then press V
and that's going to paste in that text.
So as you can see there,
that has copied and pasted the text here
in the exact same format.
So you can see there's actually obviously two lines there,
and you can see that has been replicated here as well.
Now this is going to be perfect for people studying.
So university students, high school, middle school,
whatever you are, and I'll show you why.
So let's say, for example, you're watching a lecture online
and you need to copy and paste notes,
or you need to write down some stuff.
So let's say for example
this is a lecture here playing live.
This is obviously just an example, one off the internet.
So if we do shift command, and then number two,
we're going to copy this particular slide,
and then we're going to come in here
and we're going to paste it.
You can see that has pasted exactly
what is on the slide word for word, formatting is intact.
And that's going to save you a ton of note-taking time.
And obviously apart from screenshotting it
and typing it out word for word,
there's really no way you can get the text
from here without actually sitting down and typing it out
which is a complete waste of time.
Now, in my experience,
it does pretty well with this kind of stuff.
It's going to get most of the formatting.
If you're taking a picture of say a book
and maybe some of the edges of the book
are a little bit curled,
or a little bit out of focus, it might struggle.
But for stuff on the screen like this,
it's absolutely perfect I've had very, very few issues.
So this next part is a really common thing
you're going to find yourself doing
either at school or university.
At least I did when I was doing my undergraduate degree.
So you'll get these big PDFs.
Sometimes they've been scanned,
sometimes they're just textbooks put together
and you're going to have to take notes,
or you're going to have to possibly copy out a section
to put it into a different slide or whatever you're doing.
This is where texts pop really shines.
So you can see here, this has been scanned relatively well.
It was originally a printed article on pieces of paper.
So whoever's scanned this has done a pretty good job.
There's no sort of curled edges, It's all quite legible.
So you can see here, this is actually a different language.
So we're going to hold down shift command and two,
and we're going to select this paragraph here,
that's been copied to the clipboards.
We're going to come here and we're going to paste,
and you can see there that has done a pretty good job
at copying everything.
And if we come down the bottom here,
so you can see here, it's actually gotten this,
a telesized option down here
which is in a bit of a weird font.
It has actually picked that up fairly well.
One thing I will mention, if you don't want to do
all this formatting yourself, you can actually specify
that text sniper actually doesn't do that.
So if we come in here and we untick keep line breaks,
let's try it again on the same page paragraph.
I'm going to paste that in here, and you can see there
that's worked pretty much perfectly.
I've done this a few times before this video
and I couldn't really find any errors here.
And you can see there
you don't need to do the formatting at all
because text sniper has just spat it all out for you.
So yeah, definitely a really, really cool app.
I definitely think it is worth the six or $7
it costs in the long run,
especially if you're doing any kind of data entry work
or you're a student, or even if you work
in a corporate job and you need to copy
some kind of legal contract or something like that.
Because even though the preview function
on Mac OS is pretty good,
so like you can see here with this particular document
I can actually copy and paste it like that.
But a lot of documents, you won't be able to do that.
And that's where texts sniper is going to come in clutch.
Moving on to the next app and that is Rectangle.
So if you guys watched my previous video,
you would know that I actually recommended an app
called Magnet to do this,
but I've since swapped to Rectangle
because it's completely free and open source
as you can see here.
And the way it works is pretty much exactly
the same as magnet.
So if you guys are familiar with windows,
they had this really cool windows snapping feature
that allows you to effortlessly snap windows
into the corners, or to take up half the screen.
Now there's a good reason why Mac OS doesn't have that
and it's because Microsoft actually patented that feature.
So windows is the only thing that's allowed to use it.
Luckily there are third party options
like rectangle and the way it works is very very simple
as you about to see here.
I just drag it and I will just drop it there.
And you can see it has immediately resized the window.
If I take this particular window out,
i drag over to the left, boom, exact same thing.
Now you can obviously do different set up
so you can have it taking up the bottom of the screen,
or maybe just like a corner.
There are also shortcuts here
you can memorize or even customize yourself.
I personally don't do that
because I only ever really do the left half
and the right half.
But if you want it to get crazy here
you can see you've got a lot of different options.
So you can have multiple multiple windows
going on your Mac without any issues.
And it works pretty much exactly the same
as the windows snapping feature on windows.
Moving on to my third and final app in this video,
that is iSTAT Menus 6.
Now this is a free app, but you can obviously
pay to upgrade to unlock more features.
And this particular app is going to be really helpful
for those who want to know a little bit more
about their system, you would have actually seen me use this
in a couple of my videos on this channel
where I'm testing stuff out.
And it just gives you a lot of really, really cool features
that Mac OS does not give you by default.
So you may have seen up here
I do have some menu bars and this is where iStart Menus
really shines.
So if I click here, you can see I have a CPU dropdown.
This is going to give me a really detailed view
of my system usage.
It's also going to give me a quick snapshot here,
all the different cores, processes, GPU, load average,
and things like that, uptime as well,
that's how long your computer has been on.
You can come in here and you can completely customize this.
So if I just go to the i-STAT main menu, you can see here
you've got a number of different options.
So you can turn on notifications,
you can customize the CPU and GPU.
For me personally I like to use
these four functions here mainly.
Now you can see, you can obviously customize the menu bar.
So this 50% icon up here, it relates to the memory capacity.
So this is how much memory I'm actually using
at the moment, which is 63%.
And you can actually customize this.
So if I drag that down, I can change that
to something like a simple pressure graph like that,
or I can just have the percentage and remove that,
or I can turn it off altogether
and that will actually remove memory.
And you can see here with each of these different options,
you have a number of different menu items
that you can stick in there.
I generally don't have many running,
these are my main ones.
So I'll quickly explain what each of these do.
So starting with the first one,
I've already touched on that, that is the CPU.
Moving across we have the memory or the RAM,
and this just gives you a really really quick overview
of what's going on.
So if you guys have an M1 Mac and you're worried
about swap memory or how much RAM you're using for example,
this is going to give you a really clear idea
of what exactly is going on.
You can see they have really intuitive charts,
have a swap memory bar here, but the most useful feature
for me is actually the read and write disc feature.
So if you guys have watched a previous video on my channel,
you would have seen that regularly
I actually test out the read and write speeds
of actually physically copying files
to different external drives.
Mac OS by default does not give that information
unlike windows.
So what you can do is you can enable this little widget
up in the menu bar.
And this is going to tell you the exact read and write speeds
of a particular transfer,
and even break it down by the hard drive.
So say for example if I was going to be dragging
a 10 gigabyte file from my Macintosh hard drive
onto an external SSD,
you would actually see the right speeds up here,
and that would give you more of an idea
of how long that's going to take.
Now moving on to the right
you can see we have the little Australian flag there.
This is actually a network feature.
So what I've actually got this set to is a flag
because that's going to replicate my IP address.
Now if you guys are like me,
I use a VPN a lot to access different websites
or even just see how my own created labs website
will react when I'm visiting it from a different IP.
This just gives you a really quick snapshot
of what particular countries IP address you're using.
So it's very, very helpful.
It also gives you more information here about your ethernet.
I don't particularly use that.
It'll also do Wi-Fi as well
but the main feature I use it for is the public IP
just with the flag there
just to let me know which country I'm connected to
with a simple glance.
And that's pretty much all I have in the menu bar.
Now, you might've noticed that this particular menu bar
is getting a little bit cluttered.
Pro tip, if you hold command on your keyboard,
you can actually move these icons around,
but if you're more of a minimalist
and you don't want all of these to appear,
I have a little bonus fourth app
that you can actually download and use.
And that is called the hidden bar.
And essentially all that does is
it allows you to actually collapse and hide
all of these icons into a single little icon.
And it just makes it seem a lot more cleaner.
And if you just want to have one thing up here
such as the time, or maybe just the battery,
you can remove everything else and have it hideable
so that it really clears up what you're looking at.
Anyway guys, that's it for me for today.
Hope you enjoyed this video.
If you have any app recommendations for me to check out,
or if you have any questions,
please let me know down in the comment section below.
But apart from that, I will see you in the next one.