My favorite computer tools, apps, etc

I always love seeing people’s favorite apps and tools. These are like my everyday essentials, and I try to keep this up-to-date (Last updated in Feb. 2026).

Swinsian — Best music player for MacOS. This app is like how iTunes used to be, but with some nice quality of life updates.

Numi — beautiful little calculator app for Mac. I keep pestering him to make a version for iOS (its coming at some point he says!)

Open Video Downloader — this is a cross platform tool for Mac & PC that can download videos from every platform, from Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and even , (and music and photos too), and its incredibly well thought out. The original was coded by Jely2002 and it actually looks like he came back recently at the end of 2025 and did some updates. I’m still linking to the fork run by StefanLobbenmeier because its what I’ve used for the past couple years and it works. If you’re on mobile, I like Cobalt which is a great option for downloading these from your mobile device.

Jumpcut — Copy Paste text manager for Mac. There’s other more advanced apps that do this, but I like simple apps that just do one thing well, and I’ve been using this one sine 2009 or something. It’s also useful when I want to paste unstyled text and ⌘+Shift+v doesn’t work for whatever reason.

Screen Studio — This is a very robust app for recording really nice screen videos on Mac (can also record your iPhone’s screen).

Alfred — This is a launcher for Mac. I’ve used it for a long time for folder search, file search and more. There’s things I kind of hate about it, but one thing I love is the 2FA launcher, which is really what this entry is about. The 2FA Launcher lets you copy the code for 2-factor auth text messages. In other words when a website texts you an SMS code, you can easily paste the code without having to check your phone or type it in anything.

Niche Tools

Calligrapher — If you want to have handwriting animate in a video, this is a great generator to animate drawn text. You can have it type anything out, take a screen video of it, and then use a Chroma-key effect in Premiere to get rid of the white background.

Medio Diff Checker — when you want to compare two texts, and see what’s differerent, this is called a “Diff Checker.” For the longest time, I used to always just google “Diff Checker” and use whatever website came up first, but I recently found this simple app Medio, which does a great job on its own. You just paste your two different texts into the two different sides and it highlights the differences.

UTM — for running Windows (or other operating systems) on Mac. This takes a bit to set up, but you can run any operating system on your mac for free. This is much better than using Parallels or VMWare in my opinion. Make it easy to test your websites and stuff in Windows. You can also install Tiny11 which is like a very low footprint version of Windows11.

Rectangle — I switch screens a lot, and sometimes this causes some layout problems (Adobe Premiere is particularly bad about this). So using Rectangle allows you to control the window location and size in my Mac’s toolbar.

DVR-Scan — Movement Detection video editing — so you can take a big video file, run it through, and get rid of all the boring parts where nothing’s happening. Really only works on a tripod kind of shot, like for timelapses, or screen recordings.

QLMarkDown — If you use Mac, you might know about Quick Look — this is feature where in Finder that lets you press the spacebar to get a quick pop-up image preview. But you might have noticed — some files don’t show up with Quick Look! Well not to worry, there are lots of apps that enable previews for all kinds of filetypes. I recenlty found QLMarkDown — which lets you see show mdx files in this mac os preview. Note: to install you’ll need to download the zip and drag the app to your Applications, then to open it, you’ll need to enable access in System Preferences > Privacy > scroll to bottom and Allow QLMarkDown — and then it should open, and you’ll need to enable it for markdown in settings. This is normal for third-party installs.

I’m also using a lot of Photoshop, Premiere, Topaz Video (the other Topaz apps are kinda bad imo). Claude & ChatGPT are great to write scripts and quick actions for Automator. Claude Code and Codex are amazing for coding, and Gemini is the best for image generation and upscaling.

Also, this site is built on WordPress. Even though AI coding tools have become a part of my workflow, I still love the simplicity of a good blogging tool. Sometimes I wish I could make changes here with the ease of Claude Code, but I still think WordPress is still a great tool in 2026.