For once, the YouTube algorithm came up trumps and I stumbled, across a new channel to subscribe to. Jeff Su makes productivity videos (doesn’t everyone on there) and I’ve found some of his content really helpful. First whilst researching improvements for my productivity, and I then watched a video on simple Mac that he thinks are underrated.

Two stuck out straight away for me and I have been using them ever since. They are Shottr and Latest, both of which combined to produce this post yesterday when the new micro.blog Mac app update came out.

Shottr

I really love Cleanshot x, it offers more options but it’s also £30. Whereas Shottr is completely free and gets you 80% of the way there. With powerful keyboard shortcuts, the option to include backgrounds and also mark up your screenshots, it’s outstanding that you get all this for free.

It also has built in OCR and you can blur out text without blurring the rest of the image, which helps when you share as many screenshots as I do.

Latest

For all the apps you have installed from outside the App Store, Latest offers a nice update interface. Instead of setting each app to check for updates and call home every so often, you can turn these all off and just check Latest once a week or so.

The reason that app is so appealing is the awkward updates that seem to pop up when you are trying to do something, and this simple app puts you back in control. It will present all updates in an essay to understand interface and even pull in all the information such as descriptions and changelogs.

I hope that these two free apps can be as helpful to you as they are to me. I am always on the lookout for new things to make my Mac better considering how much time I spend sat at it so I will keep posting new things I find.