Welcome to the second part of this series. Make yourself some coffee (I definitely need one) and let's go through some of the tools I use every day and keep me productive.
Arc
Arc has been my default browser since June 28, 2022 (as my Arc passport shows) and I cannot imagine going back to any other browser at the moment.
What I love about it is that it provides a distraction-free environment where you can focus on the tab or two tabs you are working with, and forget about the rest. You know that your important tabs are there, and the non-important ones you've just been having a quick look at will get automatically removed after 12 or 24h (based on your settings).
I also love how it lets you customize your experience to fit your needs with different profiles (imagine work vs personal) where accounts and passwords are not shared with each other, different spaces within a profile (that trip to Japan you're planning can have its own space, free of clutter), and very cool themes for each of them!
Now, behold the power of the search bar. With just a keyboard shortcut you access a world of many possibilities. The search bar allows you to very quickly change between tabs that you have recently opened (even those that have been removed), it let's you run extensions, and it lets you run Arc actions like "Add split view" to open a website side-by-side, change profiles or spaces, create a folder, open a new Google Slide, etc.
And finally, Arc makes use of AI in very clever ways. For instance, the search function we all use to find words can be used to ask AI questions about the page! Arc also uses AI to rename the files you download so they have a more meaningful name than a bunch of random digits. But probably my favorite is the option to search for something and let the AI find the page and open it for you 🤯
The Windows version is in beta and there is an incredibly good iOS version I highly recommend (I use it all the time).
VSCode
You may be thinking that VSCode is just another IDE to write your code with but it is so much more than that. In fact, I could write a whole blog post about it but for the sake of it I will cover my favorite extensions.
GitHub Copilot has to be my favorite. Ever since I tried it for the first time I knew I wouldn't want to go back to coding without it. The cool thing is, LaTeX and Markdown are code too, so Copilot can help you when you're writing your papers 😉 It has also made me stop using a couple of language specific plugins because its suggestions already do what the plugins were supposed to do. Copilot also has a chat that is aware of the code you're looking at, but I haven't made much use of it just yet.
Error Lens is a great plugin that highlights entire lines to signal where the warnings and errors are in your code. It also tells you what the error is and suggests fixes (though you can use Copilot to fix them too).
GitLens is an awesome plugin to know who to blame for faulty code. It tells you who wrote the line of code you have clicked on, what commit it was part of and when the commit was made. It's not that fun when you learn it was you who wrote the faulty code though.
Jupyter is a very good plugin to make Jupyter Notebooks natively work on VSCode. If you write many prototypes with notebooks, this is a must. Especially because it allows you to use Copilot within the notebook, which is not possible in the original notebook environment.
LaTeX Workshop is the plugin if you write LaTeX. It is probably the best way to write in LaTeX as it has all the features you would expect from a LaTeX editor plus it has all the goodies of a code editor like having Copilot to help you write.
Finally, if you're into web development and more specifically React, you are probably using Tailwind to style your sites. If that's the case, Tailwind CSS IntelliSense is your plugin. It will automatically lint your tailwind options on every save. And speaking of automatically linting on every save, this can be done with any language. For instance, you can set up VSCode to run isort and black every time you save a Python file.
GitHub
GitHub is where I do (almost) all collaborative work, be it software development or scientific writing. The peace of mind that comes with using GitHub makes it 100% worth it. Of course, one has to get used to being consistent with version control, but once you make it a habit, you will never lose an older version of your code or documents. At the same time, I love how it is also a look into the progress you have made. Anyway, this is all to say that whenever I get a new laptop it takes me about 1 hour to having it set up just like the previous one, and that's mainly because all the work I do is on GitHub. A quick clone of the repositories with their own settings and voila! Immediately back to how I like it.
But it's also where I do collaborative work and that means I get many notifications. Luckily, GitHub has it's own notification page that isn't too bad. You can choose how often you want to be notified on a project-by-project basis. If you want to know of everything that happens to one of your projects, you'll get all the notifications. If not, you will only get them when notified.
Then, there's all the GitHub Actions which make GitHub really powerful. You can deploy a website, make your code available on PyPI, or even convert your LaTeX document into a PDF. It's automation at its best, connected to your version control system so nothing gets lost and everything can be easily reverted when issues arise.
By the way, I would highly recommend having a profile that shows who you are, what you're interested in and what you've been working on. GitHub profiles are like CVs and specially in tech, recruiters will want to see it!
Finally, GitHub has an incredible phone app that can be really useful to review pull requests or even make quick changes to your website when on the go (maybe on your everyday commute even).
Apple Mail
I love how simple, yet effective Apple Mail is. I'm very much an inbox zero person, and despite not having any fancy features, Apple Mail is enough to achieve this in more than one account without having to pay yet another subscription.
Amie
Not only does Amie have one of the most playful landing pages on the internet, it also is one of the most playful calendars there is. Think of Google Calendar with a gorgeous design and a handful of integrations like Spotify (yeah, it's really cool to see what you've been listening to while you worked on that blog post), Linear or Apple Health (sleep, workouts, heart rate). But Amie is not only that, it allows you to share your availability, see different time zones at once, use AI to schedule events, add todos directly to your calendar, and has recently added emails as well. Yes, emails take time and it should be reflected in the calendar.
But what I love the most about Amie is how friendly and open to feedback the developers are. From the very beginning they have made me feel valued and part of the process, making sure my ideas and suggestions were heard.
Finally, I'm looking forward to reading the different experiences and tricks that the team behind Amie share on their new blog.
Texts
I love Texts and I still wonder how my past self did it to follow up with conversations in so many different platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Discord, Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage... By the time you think of checking some of those platforms, you may have missed an important message. In any case, Texts provides a unified inbox for all of them and dealing with all these platforms couldn't become easier. In fact, I have now started to apply the inbox-zero philosophy into messaging as well.
Cleanshot X
Cleanshot X is the tool to make your screenshots look professional with very little effort. It gives many different possible screenshot selections, quick access to your screenshots, allows you to annotate them, change their background, hide sensitive content (my favorite for sharing screenshots), it has text recognition, etc. It also allows you to record videos of your screen showing your webcam, recording microphone and macOS audio, highlighting mouse clicks and keystrokes, and automatically hiding notifications. And finally, it allows you to share all your screenshots and screen recordings with a link using their cloud service.
I hope you found these tools useful and I hope they make you more productive if you choose to use any of them. Please share your favorite productivity tools in the comments below (I'm always looking to learn of new tools) and I look forward to telling you more about Tana next week! 💜
Cover photo by Fernando Hernandez on Unsplash.