Hello 👋🏻.
Welcome to my "Week in Review" series. Each week I'm going to share what I discovered, learned, and tested with you. This series will be my own digital garden one day. Let's sow some seeds and jump right into the review.
Last week I skipped my weekly review. I took a week off and enjoyed the time with my friends and family. So this week will contain more links than usual. Let's look at the highlights first.
Highlights
For the first time ever, I reached 1 Mio. Impressions on Twitter! AMAZING. Thank you all!
Alfred is finally improving my workflow on my Macbook. Why did I wait that long... It is very helpful and some workflows are just amazing. My installed workflows are listed below.
Besides playing around with my new favorite app, I got in touch with Recoil. It is a promising experimental state management library for React apps. Jack Herrington posted a video on YouTube (besides one about Deno) about it. Watch it to get to know Recoil.
I had to update and optimize my backup and update scripts for my Unifi-PiHole network setup this week (German article). Some shell commands are still confusing to me so explainshell.com, besides shellcheck for linting, was very helpful.
Spectacle was one of my most-used apps on macOS. When I switched from Windows to macOS I instantly missed shortcuts for resizing and moving windows. Spectacle solved the problem for me. Because it is not maintained anymore I had to find an alternative: Rectangle (there is another one called Magnet, but I did not test it). It is even better because it has snap areas!
Adding tracking (e.g. with Google Tag Manager) to React apps can be a challenging task. Luckily a friend of mine, Lukas found react-tracking from the New York Times. We are going to add it to our current projects! I'm curious if it works out well. Here is an example on codesandbox. What do you use for tracking in React apps? Let me know in the comments below, please.
My tweet about clipboard managers was the most interesting of my tweets this week. After reading through the comments I wanted to test Paste first, but then decided to give Alfred a try - and as mentioned above it was the perfect choise (for me). Other people mentioned these tools: CopyClip, FlyCut, CopyQ, Pastebot, Maccy and Clipy. Maccy would be my Alfred alternative.
⛓ Links of the Week
- Next time you are looking for music for your video take a look at Jamendo. They offer free music for personal entertainment and various licenses for projects or businesses.
- Masonry layouts are still highly coveted (e.g. Pinterest has one) and here is a great React component for you: react-masonry-css.
- Quickly run JavaScript with RunJS.
- Alexander suggested DaisyDisk when he answered my question on Twitter which apps are a must-have on macOS. With DaisyDisk you can analyze disk usage and free up disk space on Mac. I cleared more than 30+ GB. YES!
- Are you looking for a fast, privacy-focused commenting platform then commento is for you.
- Shortcut Detective finds applications handling global shortcuts.
- SetApp: "Setapp is a desktop suite with a collection of Mac apps inside, like a portable Launchpad. With a Setapp membership, all of these apps are yours."
- Nick Alico suggested Yoink for Mac ("Simplify and improve drag and drop on your Mac and speed up your daily workflow.") as another must-have app for macOS. I have not tested it, but want to. It looks pretty promising.
- We have created our own closed-software package for Google Maps at Lovely Systems, but google-map-react looks promising.
- quickref.dev: Experimental search engine for developers (thanks Catalin)
- In our last company review session, I mentioned the page visibility API. "The Page Visibility API provides events you can watch for to know when a document becomes visible or hidden, as well as features to look at the current visibility state of the page.", according to MDN. It can improve the user experience. You could postpone fetching updates on your news site when the tab is inactive to save bandwidth for instance. Check out this article and react-visibility-sensor when thinking about integrating it in your React app.
- Using DataLoader to batch API requests
- responsive data tables
- quotefancy.com - We're on a mission of turning inspiring quotes into beautiful wallpapers
Alfred Workflows
I am new to Alfred, but instantly hooked! Within 10 minutes of using it, I bought the Mega Supporter pack. Workflows are awesome! Here are a few workflows I installed:
-
Alfred Spotify Mini Player
- Alternative: citelao/Spotify-for-Alfred
- Unicode Symbols Search
-
Shorten URL: with goo.gl, bit.ly, t.cn, j.mp, is.gd, or v.gd
- if you want to use your existing bitly account, use alfred-bitly or liannario/alfred-bitly-shortener instead.
- Refresh WiFi
- GitHub Repos: easily open Github repositories
- Stackoverflow Search
- Movie and TV Search
- Strong Password
- Alfred Convert: Convert between different units
- Battery: view summary stats about your laptop battery
- Date: Display and calculate with current date and time
- Alfred VPN: connect and disconnect to a VPN
- Alfred Kill: kill a selected process on your macOS
- Network Info: display local & global IP address and other network details
- Network Tools: Collection of some useful network commands
- Random Mac: Generates and applies a new MAC address to en0.
- Alfred Currency: get exchange rates from exchangeratesapi.io.
- Lorem Ipsum: easily create a Lorem Ipsum text
- Join Zoom Meeting
- Philips Hue Controller
- shush: Alfred workflow for muting your microphone
-
Countdown-Timer
- or Simple Timer, but you need to fix this workflow with Fixum
- caniuse: Search for browser compatibility support of HTML5, CSS3 and more using caniuse.com
- TemporaryEmail: Create temporary email inboxes via Teleosaurs Mail. You need to do this the first time you start this workflow.
- Faker: Generate fake data such as name, email address, credit card number, etc.
- Toggl: Alfred Workflow for interacting with the Toggl time tracking service. You need to do this the first time you start this workflow.
- Colors: Color tools for developers (suggested by @WellBrained). Similar to Toggl and TemporaryEmail, you have to fix the Error popup first when launching the workflow.
You can find plenty of Workflows on packal.org, but also on GitHub (e.g. ctwise/alfred-workflows, zenorocha/alfred-workflows, derimagia/awesome-alfred-workflows, or vitorgalvao/alfred-workflows. Especially the last one is great and up to date).
Bookmarked Tweets
This is it for week 23/20.
See you next week - same place, same platform. 👋🏻
Thanks,
Stefan
Do you have tools you want to share with me? I'm always ready to try new things! Just comment below, mention me on Twitter, or send me a DM. That would be awesome. 🥳
Let's stay connected on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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