Offscreen Magazine

5 Apps To Help Your Design Workflow


by Daniel July 15, 2015
fantastical2-app

As far as calendar apps go, most Mac users will admit that the in-built OSX iCal is fairly limited in terms of functionality. In want of something desktop-friendly, reliable and attractive it's hard to go past Flexibit's Fantastical 2. Using natural language, the app allows users to quickly plot and plan location-based calendar events in a beautiful, simplistic menu bar, or within a broader desktop layout. It scales gorgeously down to mobile sizes and even links to your choice of Google or Apple Maps to find and record event locations. The price for a standalone app is a little steep, but it's hard to imagine going back to the native iCal app after working Fantastical out for awhile.

simplenote-app

Amongst the multitudes of note-taking apps available for OS X, Simplenote will never rank amongst the most feature-laden or offer the best synchronicity with other apps. Instead, it is a simple, functional and elegantly designed cloud-based notepad. Whereas some note-taking apps can seem crowded or a little burdened by various rarely-used services, Simplenote instead satisfies with the speed in which it syncs all your devices, and a simple but polished layout. Perfect for everything from shopping lists, random numbers and ideas, all the way to writing complete articles in full-screen mode, this app has become my go-to basic text-editor on all my devices.

coda-app

Choice of code-editors is always a bone of contention amongst designers and developers, and much of the choice really depends on what you expect out of the program. Coders who work mostly in Javascript might prefer Atom for example. For those who love working with multitudes of third-party extensions and add-ons, Sublime Text is the first choice. For the development and designs that I work with- primarily HTML5, CSS3, Php and JQuery with smatterings of Javascript , I've fallen head over heels for Panic's Coda 2. It has a gorgeous layout, is Emmet-compatible, has great support for my front-end languages and it's easy to jump between projects without getting files mixed up. A very well-thought out and clean code editor.

caffeine-app

Caffeine is a tiny, lightweight app that sits in your menu bar to do one simple thing - at click it keeps your Mac from fading to black or going to to screensaver mode. It might not sound like much, but I find it stupidly useful for times when your attention isn't 100% on your screen. For example, while working or reading while watching TV, using your screen to read research notes, working off two screens at once or using a your screen to watch video or tutorial. Small and perfect.

transmission-app

Finally, for entertainment purposes you might occasionally need a bittorrent client to download an item or two. A lot of bittorrents are so heavy and crowded with features that they can become a headache to use, particularly if your computer is already running a number of other weighty applications. Transmission is the most lightweight client I could find and it is so intuitive and pleasantly designed that you'll wonder what the hell is wrong with all the other ones you've been using. It's open source and free to download. We definitely recommend giving it a try.

Share this: