Useful mac modifications

Stop built in applications automatically saving to iCloud rather than On My Mac (source: MacUpdate)

It’s extremely irritating when the Mac always takes your save dialog directly to iCloud, which you don’t use.  This gets around that.

The default save location for TextEdit (and other apps that can store documents on iCloud) is iCloud. It takes a few clicks if you want to expand the save dialog and save a file locally. There is no way to change this in the GUI, but if you run the following command in Terminal, this will set the default save location to On My Mac for all iCloud-compatible apps:

 defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

To change this back to the default, run this command:

 defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true

Useful mac applications

Good mac applications for researchers

The following are a list of mac applications I’ve found useful in a research setting (e.g., keeping mac running, managing time, editing stimuli for publications, managing references).  To track down related software, Macupdate has great application reviews and is reputable.

General:

AppCleaner (free): Easily, completely delete unwanted applications.

Disk Inventory X (free): Make space: Identifies unused documents and files for removal.

Divvy (paid): Hot keys for sorting your windows on screen.

Ink2Go (paid): Create screen recordings.

Little Snitch (paid): See what information applications are sending out of your computer.  Takes a while to get used to.

Onyx (free): Clean and speed up your mac.

SuperDuper (shareware): Program for creating exact, bootable duplicates of your hard disk as a backup.

TrueCrypt (free): Encryption software.  See discussion of the warning at the top of the page here.

Organization/getting work done

Evernote (free): Great cross-device notes program with a billion applications.

OmniFocus (paid): Great cross-platform (mac, iPhone…) organizer application for getting things done.  Free trial.

Vitamin-R (paid): Good time organization software.  White noise generator for if you’re working in a coffee shop.

Research-specific (stimulus generation, data presentation etc.)

Audacity (free): Record and edit audio.

GraphicConverter (shareware): Insanely good photoshop alternative that can be used for free indefinitely.  Excellent for editing images for journal articles.

Mendeley (free): Great free reference software.