Essential desktop enhancements

Do more on your Mac with these tools that help you to boost efficiency and speed up your workflow

Alfred Around $19.99 (Powerpack) alfredapp.com

Spotlight’s capabilities continue to grow with each release of macOS, but it primarily remains a tool for finding things. Alfred can do that too, but lets you perform actions on what you find, so you can manage documents without resorting to Finder. Beyond that, it has a slew of productivity features, such as a clipboard history, custom web searches, and text snippet expansion. Perhaps best of all, you can string actions together to automate complex tasks, and remove the need to perform repetitive manual tasks. Get Alfred and you can save time and invest it elsewhere.

Bartender $15.00 macbartender.com

Many apps and services have components that sit in macOS’s menu bar. They can be useful — for example, to quickly switch networks — but may also be a distraction. Bartender lets you manage these menu bar items, stashing those you don’t want to see in a separate menu that can be triggered with a keyboard shortcut. But this isn’t a brute force tidy–away utility — Bartender’s smart enough to enable an item to appear when it needs your attention, and to let you navigate items using keyboard shortcuts, or get at a specific one quickly by way of search.