Jason Perlow is becoming a corporate Mac user. What does he need to get started?
Our very own Jason Perlow just changed jobs. His new company is a Mac shop, which means that Jason’s primary work daily driver is now a Mac. Jason has worked on so many operating systems over the years that switching to a different primary desktop platform isn’t going to be much of a problem.
But being able to jump from OS to OS doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re familiar with the latest miscellaneous third party tools that make daily work output go more smoothly. To that end, I put together a list for Jason of some of the go-to tools I use every day to get the most out of my main Mac. He suggested I share it with you here.
First, let’s talk about the productivity essentials for getting work done on the Mac.
At the top of the list is Office 365. While you can certainly use Google’s apps (and I often do), for any corporate user, Office 365 is pretty much an essential get. While the subscription comes with access to Web-based apps, the native Mac apps have come a long way since I started actively using them back in the day. Today, nearly all you need to do with Office can be done with the Mac versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. There are some obscure features that still only live in the Windows versions.
Also: 7 ways you can (maybe) get Microsoft Office 365 for free
A close second is Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Unlike Microsoft, which for some reason still maintains different versions of Office apps for Mac and Windows, Adobe’s apps are identical across platforms.
Since I’m not a fan of how Adobe implements its subscription program (limiting it to two machines per account), I tried to find a way around it. But even though products like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are excellent, I just couldn’t get into them. I have too many years of muscle memory in Adobe apps to lose productivity to what are, essentially substitute-solution apps.
I did, however, stop using Adobe Premiere and instead went all in with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X and Motion. As I discussed last week, Final Cut provided a huge increase in productivity over Premiere, so that’s my go-to non-linear video editor now. I found Final Cut to be so productivity enhancing that it, alone, justifies moving to a Mac.
The next item on my essentials list is Parallels, a virtualization engine. There are a number of VMs that run on macOS, including VMware’s Fusion (not to be confused with 3D modeling program Fusion 360) and the free VirtualBox. While Fusion and VirtualBox are good, Parallels has tight integration with macOS, allowing you to run windows from VMs side-by-side with windows from the native macOS – and even cut and paste between them.
Parallels allows you to run full Windows installs, full Linux installs, and even additional macOS instances in virtual machines. My experience has been that if you host the VM file on fast storage and you have a Mac with an i7 processor and at least 16GB of RAM, the performance of Windows 10 VMs in Parallels is as good as nearly all Windows laptops. You don’t get the touch screen, of course, but Parallels is definitely a lean, bare-to-the-metal VM engine and is well worth the fifty bucks a year it costs.
In case I buried my lede, Parallels lets you run all of Windows 10 on your Mac. That means if you’re used to a Windows 10 app, or are reliant on an application that’s Windows-only, Parallels can save the day. I often run with active Windows 10 apps and active Mac apps running side-by-side and that helps me get my job done.
The final item on my essentials list is Luma Display. This is actually a hardware plug that inserts into a Thunderbolt 3 slot on your Mac. Since I’m pretty certain Jason’s going to be issued a MacBook Pro, this is an essential upgrade. Luma Display allows you to turn an iPad into a second display – with no lag. There are other tools that do this over software or via a dedicated cable, but Luma is just a set-and-forget solution. If you have – as Jason does – a 12-inch iPad Pro, then Luma Display instantly lets you convert your MacBook Pro into a dual-display system.
There are a lot of other tools I use to extend capabilities of my Mac. Here are some of the ones I use most frequently.
A Better Finder Attributes 6: Terrible name, useful tool. The other day I brought in some images taken from an action camera with an incorrectly set date. This tool allows you to change the created and modified dates, as well as many other Finder file attributes. You won’t need it often, but when you do, it’s a big help.
