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My Favourite Mac Apps - What's on my Macbook Pro

2021-03-04 · Tech review, setup or bag tour · Ali · recording, 18:55 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

Ali tours the Mac apps he uses in four categories (create, consume, connect, coordinate): Roam Research for personal notes and morning pages, Notion for team production, gmail.com instead of Superhuman for its friction, Figma, Day One, Grain with Zoom, Drafts for quick capture, and more.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Favourite Mac apps in four categories: create, consume, connect and coordinate

  • ★★ Ali describes his channel as exploring the ways we can get more done while having more fun, and says that should be its new tagline. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Create: Chrome with Roam Research, Gmail, Google Docs and Slides, extensions, and Notion

  • ★ These days Ali spends most of his time in Google Chrome, around a few central web apps. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Roam Research is the app Ali uses for most of his personal note-taking and life management; he calls it less a note-taking app than a generalised second brain. — 00:00:29 · Roam Research, second brain
  • ★★ Ali starts each morning with morning pages in Roam Research: three things he is grateful for, three things he will do to make the day great, and lately affirmations, which Justin Kan recommended to him on a YouTube livestream. — 00:00:58 · Roam Research
  • ★ After the gratitude list Ali writes "today is gonna be the best day ever", which prompts him to keep writing until ideas derail his morning journaling. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ After his morning pages Ali always sets a daily highlight: the one thing he wants to accomplish that day, which makes the day a win if he gets it done. — 00:01:27 · daily highlight
  • ★★ Ali also uses Roam Research for to-do lists, personal knowledge management, second-brain note-taking, the "lazy Zettelkasten" method and his weekly reviews, and says a video on all of these will come at some point. — 00:01:56 · Roam Research, second brain
  • ★★★ Ali used to manage his email in Superhuman, but it has been buggy on his M1 Mac mini and M1 MacBook Pro, so he now uses gmail.com in the browser for most of his email. — 00:01:56 · Mac mini, MacBook
  • ★★★ Ali likes gmail.com over a dedicated email app because of its friction: it takes a few seconds to load, so he replies to fewer emails; some people may be annoyed at his slow replies, but he gets a lot more done. — 00:02:31 · friction
  • ★★ For someone whose job relies on replying to emails, Ali says a dedicated email app that lets them reply very fast makes sense. — 00:02:31 · friction
  • ★★ Ali and his team write the blog posts for his website in Google Docs, and he spends most of his time there writing his book proposal and compiling research and notes for his book. — 00:02:31 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali makes his presentations in Google Slides and does not bother with PowerPoint or Keynote, because Google Slides is very easy and runs inside Chrome. — 00:02:31 · Google
  • ★★ Over the weekend before the video Ali ran a live crash course on how to use Roam Research, with all proceeds donated to the Against Malaria Foundation; he thinks it raised $8,000 for charity. (hedged) — 00:03:21 · Roam Research
  • ★★ The second cohort of Ali's Part-Time YouTuber Academy is under way, and he spends a huge amount of time in Google Slides preparing its presentations. — 00:03:21 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Google
  • ★★ Ali uses the Chrome extension Video Speed Controller daily to speed up YouTube videos and anything else he watches to 3x or 4x. — 00:03:50
  • ★★ Ali saves articles to Instapaper with its Chrome extension and reads them on any device; his Instapaper highlights sync automatically to Roam Research through Readwise. — 00:03:50 · Readwise, Roam Research
  • ★★ Ali calls TubeBuddy a fantastic Chrome extension for YouTubers: it shows search traffic and lets you run A/B tests, among other things. — 00:04:19
  • ★★★ Ali uses Roam Research for his personal note-taking and Notion for anything that involves a production process with his team, such as the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, the YouTube channel and the podcast. — 00:04:19 · Roam Research, Notion, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ The next cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy will start in June 2021. — 00:04:48 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali and his team manage much of the research for his book in Notion, with research banks for every chapter and summaries of books they read; he is trying to make the book within the next two years. — 00:05:17 · Notion

00:05:47 — Create: Loom, Figma, Day One, Microsoft Word and Sublime Text

  • ★★ Ali calls Loom a very easy way to record videos of your screen and uses it for many screencasts for his team. — 00:05:47
  • ★★ Students on the executive tier of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy get personalised feedback from Ali on their YouTube videos, which he records in Loom while watching them. — 00:05:47 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali uses Figma to design websites, thumbnails, branding guidelines and other graphic design that does not need a dedicated tool like Photoshop. — 00:06:16
  • ★★ Ali recently did a whole redesign of his personal website, aliabdaal.com. — 00:06:16 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali designed the new pages of his website, including its blog post layouts, in Figma and handed them to a developer called Dan, who coded them into the site's theme on Ghost. — 00:06:45 · Ghost, aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ The weekly podcast of Ali and his brother Taimur, Not Overthinking, now has a YouTube channel, and they design its banner and thumbnails in Figma. — 00:06:45 · Not Overthinking, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Figma for anyone interested in web or graphic design: it is free, works with a team, runs mostly in the browser and also has a Mac app. — 00:07:14
  • ★★ Besides a private journal, Ali keeps a Nice Comments journal in Day One, where he posts screenshots and auto-forwards kind emails; when he feels sad he looks through its 467 entries for a boost. — 00:07:44 · Day One
  • ★★ In his memorabilia journal in Day One Ali photographs things like a friend's birthday card, so he keeps it forever and can throw the paper away. — 00:08:13 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali still uses Microsoft Word because his editor at the publishing house likes it: for the book they send Word files back and forth, though he uses Google Docs with his team for everything else. — 00:08:13
  • ★★ Ali still knows enough coding to tweak his website, and Sublime Text has been his code editor of choice for the last decade. — 00:08:42 · aliabdaal.com

00:09:11 — Consume: Kindle, Instapaper and Spotify

  • ★★ Ali uses Kindle on his phone, iPad, Kindle and Mac; on the Mac he can easily flick through and add highlights, which sync automatically with Roam Research and Notion. — 00:09:11 · Kindle, Roam Research, Notion
  • ★★ Ali would love to switch to Apple Music to be fully in the Apple ecosystem, but every time he has tried it has been far worse than Spotify, which he loves. — 00:09:40 · Spotify

00:10:10 — Connect: Zoom, Grain, Slack and WhatsApp Web

  • ★★★ Ali recommends Grain with Zoom: it records and transcribes Zoom calls, and notes he takes in Grain during a call are flagged at that point of the transcript. — 00:10:10 · Zoom
  • ★★ Ali is doing many interviews and calls with people for his book; when someone says something interesting he marks it with a star emoji in Grain to find it later. — 00:10:39
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy runs on Zoom, for which Ali thinks they pay about £400 a month for the features they use. (hedged) — 00:10:39 · Zoom, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali runs Zoom coworking sessions every morning with people from around the world: he shares his Spotify instrumental playlist and they work together using the Pomodoro technique. — 00:10:39 · Zoom, Spotify, Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ Ali uses Slack for most of his team communication, and the Part-Time YouTuber Inner Circle, a membership community, has its own Slack team. — 00:11:08 · Slack
  • ★★ Ali and his brother's podcast Not Overthinking has a private, members-only Slack group. — 00:11:08 · Not Overthinking, Slack, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ By actual usage, Ali's top four apps are Roam Research, Notion, Zoom and Slack. — 00:11:08 · Roam Research, Notion, Zoom, Slack
  • ★★ Ali replies to WhatsApp messages with WhatsApp Web, which has a native Mac app, because typing on his phone is painfully slow. — 00:11:37 · WhatsApp

00:12:06 — Coordinate: Alfred, Moom, f.lux, Dashlane and Drafts

  • ★★ Ali uses Alfred as a Spotlight replacement: Command and Space opens apps, runs web searches and gives snippets, among many other features. — 00:12:06
  • ★★ Ali uses Moom for window management, mostly on his 49-inch ultrawide monitor, where with that much screen space he needs a way to snap windows to the middle and the sides. — 00:12:36
  • ★★ Ali finds f.lux turns the screen more yellow; working late at night, he wants to limit blue light to his eyes, which he says is apparently good for you. (hedged) — 00:13:04
  • ★★ Dashlane is Ali's password manager of choice; he cannot live without it because he does not remember any passwords. — 00:13:04
  • ★★ Drafts, which Ali finds a little faster than Apple Notes, is the first app he opens on any device to type something on the go; on his Apple Watch he dictates notes into it. — 00:13:34 · Drafts, Apple Watch

00:14:03 — Photo and file management: Apple Photos, Lightroom CC and Google Drive

  • ★★ Drafts is Ali's quick-capture inbox: notes start there and usually end up in Roam Research or Notion, depending on their use. — 00:14:03 · Drafts, Roam Research, Notion
  • ★★ Ali uses plain Apple Photos for his photos: he drags in photos from his camera, his iPhone syncs automatically, and he trusts they will be there when he needs them. — 00:14:03 · iPhone
  • ★ For a less tech-savvy person's birthday Ali can send the video Apple Photos generates automatically from its people albums, and they may think he made it for them. (playful) — 00:14:51
  • ★★ Ali edits his thumbnail photos in Lightroom CC to make them pop, because YouTube compresses and shrinks thumbnails so much. — 00:15:49 · Adobe Lightroom
  • ★★ For file organisation Ali uses Google Drive, usually on the web, without local syncing, since these days he works with few local files. — 00:16:17 · Google Drive
  • ★★ Ali puts his video files and Zoom recordings in a folder called "the holding zone" and uploads them straight to his team's Google Drive, which has unlimited storage; they have used 12.3 terabytes so far. — 00:16:17 · Google Drive, Zoom

00:16:47 — Nebula, the Workflow series and the CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:18:43 — Pointer to his iPad apps video and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Gmail · MacBook · Notion · Roam Research

Also: People: Justin Kan · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Inner Circle · Not Overthinking · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Workflow series

Organizations: Against Malaria Foundation · Google · Nebula

Concepts: daily highlight · friction · magical insight logging framework · morning pages · personal knowledge management · Pomodoro technique · quick capture · second brain · weekly review · Zettelkasten

Products: Adobe Lightroom · Adobe Photoshop · Alfred · Apple Music · Apple Notes · Apple Photos · Apple Watch · Dashlane · Day One · Drafts · f.lux · Figma · Ghost · Google Chrome · Google Docs · Google Drive · Google Slides · Grain · Instapaper · iPhone · Keynote · Kindle · LG 49WL95C · Loom · Mac mini · macOS · Microsoft PowerPoint · Microsoft Word · Moom · Readwise · Slack · Spotify · Spotlight · Sublime Text · Superhuman · TubeBuddy · Video Speed Controller · WhatsApp · Zoom

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