This is part 5 of my Tiny macOS utility apps I love series. Here you can find: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

It has been some time. Therefore, I am beyond excited to bring the sixth part of one of Creativerly's favorite content series', Tiny macOS utility apps I love. In the previous part, I wrote about Squash, Kompressor, and PhotoBulk, three handy and simple apps for quick, easy, and powerful image editing, helping you to convert, resize, compress, rename, and even apply filters to a batch of images. So, while the previous post of this series had a dedicated focus across the three apps I featured, I picked the three apps of this post randomly.

One of them feels like a swiss army knife, packed with loads and loads of features to enhance your macOS experience, another one helps you find important documents, correspondence, photos, image files, and more super fast, and the third one gives you a one-click camera check before you enter your next call, right from your menu bar.

Let us get into it!

Supercharge

I am pretty sure that I use a super small portion of macOS' features, and the reason for that is that a lot of them are simply hidden, or not easily discoverable. Supercharge to the rescue. Supercharge for macOS is a lovely app developed by Sindre Sorhus, who is know for a variety of high-quality, powerful apps, which you can check out on his website.

Image by Sindre Sorhus

With Supercharge you get access to tools that allow you to customize, optimize, and streamline your macOS experience. In general, I would say that Supercharge is without a doubt a power-user utility app, however, there are still features that could improve anyone's macOS experience. No matter if you want to streamline your workflows with an advanced filter context menu, run actions with keyboard shortcuts, enhanced app switching, organizing your dock, or unlock hidden system capabilities, optimizing your Mac, Supercharge got you covered. The list of Supercharge's features is long ...incredibly long, and covering all of them would bust the scope this post. But I would still like to shine some light on some of my favorite Supercharge features.

I hardly ever use fullscreen mode on my Mac, but what I do see me doing regularly is exanding a window to fit my whole screen. With Supercharge, I can override the green traffic light button so it fills the window instead of entering fullscreen. Lovely. Within the Finder, Supercharge gives me the possibility to use simply backspace to delete files, instead of using CMD+Backspace. Small and simple quality of life improvement. Speaking of the Finder, Supercharge adds many useful actions to the context menu, like copy path, move to, open folder with, AirDrop, folder colors, and more. I can also easily toggle dark mode, Night Shift, True Tone, low power mode, grayscale mode, desktop icons and widgets visibility, and a lot more.

Again, listing and writing about every single feature Supercharge adds to your macOS experience would simply bust the scope of this post, so I urge you to head over to its website, take some time, and read through the list of features yourself. Or, you can go ahead and give Supercharge a try, as Sindre Sorhus provides a fully functional trial, with access to all features. The only limitation of the trial is that the app pushes a reminder to buy the app every 12 hours, and while using the trial, there are no automatic updates. In case you decide to buy Supercharge, all data and settings will get carry over.

Supercharge is available for $18, a one-time purchase, no subscription. In case you are already using Setapp, you can grab Supercharge right away as it is included in Setapp's offering of over 250 apps to boost your macOS experience*.

HoudahSpot

If you have ever been struggling finding what you are looking for on your Mac, HoudahSpot might be work checking out.

HoudahSpot is a great app to find all your important documents, photos, image files, and more fast and easy. You start with a simply search, and then continue to refine it by adding and combining criteria. It gives you the possibility to search several folders at once, as well as excluding others. Additionally, you can preview files and text matches. Besides that, HoudahSpot shows your search results in a convenient and easy-to-use interface. With HoudahSpot, you have a great companion to locate hard-to-find files, but also keep frequently used files within reach. For example, you can refine your file searches with word processing, search for image files that have a specific size, have been modified or opened in a specific timeframe, and more. On top of that, HoudahSpot helps you finding files by name, text, file extension, author, recipient, and more, it lets you customize columns in the search results lists, filter the results to see only relevant files, and even set up templates for recurring searches.

Although macOS is offering Spotlight right out of the box, it leaves you with some struggles and hassles, especially if you have to manage loads of files on your Mac, keep track of, and work across them. But besides finding the files you are looking for, HoudahSpot also offers an advacned info pane, quick look, and text preview to help you explore your search results, and pick the files you need. Within the info pane you get an overview of file properties, and metadata indexed by Spotlight, and you can use this information to filter your search results or create a new search criteria. Thanks to quick look and text preview, you can peek inside your found files without the need to open them.

Besides that, HoudahSpot is packed with loads more power user features and advanced filters. You can give HoudahSpot a try by downloading the trial. You can buy the app for €36 for the Single-User License, or for €55 for the Family License, one-time purchase, no subscriptions. In case you have a Setapp subscription, you can grab HoudahSpot right away as it is included in Setapp's offering of over 250 apps to boost your macOS experience*.

Hand Mirror

Hand Mirror is without a doubt, this one app, I had no idea I needed. Quick story time: I have been working remotely for quite some time now. As I made the transition to a different company and team, which had their webcams always on during calls, I found myself in the awkward situation of getting started with my workday, sitting in front of my desk, and quick-witted started typing at my keyboard, not keeping control of the time, hours passed, and I reached the point of a meeting popping up in my calendar, I join just to find out that after seeing myself on the screen, captured by my webcam, that I had not prepared for this meeting, as I looked pretty messed up. After this experience, I constantly used Photo Booth on my Mac to check if everything is fine before starting the meeting.

I started laughing, when I suddenly stumbled across a post from Rafael Conde, as he announced his new app called Hand Mirror. The reason I laughed was, that Rafael Conde described a similar scenario, which led to him building Hand Mirror, on Hand Mirror's website, as he found himself opening up Photo Booth multiple times to check his webcam, and what is actually in frame. So, what is Hand Mirror?

Hand Mirror is a handy app which lives right in your Mac's menu bar. If you click on its icon, a small window pops up, which simply gives you a view from your camera, and you can quickly check if your background is fine, if your hair is messy, and so on. I was already sold at this point. However, there are a couple of features which are bundled into Hand Mirror Plus. Those additional features are Mic Check, to check if your microphone is properly connected and the audio levels look ok, Reactions, to have fun with macOS Sonoma's Reactions, Smart Window, to get more flexibility than the simple Popover with a fully resizable, draggable, and always-on-top window, and more.

You can grab Hand Mirror for free on the Apple App Store. Hand Mirror Plus costs you $5.99 or $12.99 if you want to support Rafael Conde with a more generous tip. In case you have a Setapp subscription, you can grab Hand Mirror right away as it is included in Setapp's offering of over 250 apps to boost your macOS experience*.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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