Jason Snell’s productivity picks (The Mac App Store/Jason Snell)

Jason Snell is a journalist, podcaster, and Jeopardy! contestant. The editor-in-chief of Macworld for 17 years, he currently runs the Apple-focused website Six Colors and appears regularly on several podcasts, including MacBreak Weekly and Upgrade. His latest podcast, Designed in California, details the 50-year history of Apple over 50 episodes. Fun facts• First Mac: Macintosh SE• Favorite Mac: 11-inch MacBook Air• Favorite macOS feature: Screen sharing• To-do app: Reminders• Rainbow or solid Apple logo: Have you seen my website?• Productivity pro tip: Saving time is great, but productivity systems are never a replacement for doing the actual work. We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows. BBEdit“I write almost everything using BBEdit, generally in Markdown format, but where the app really shines is as a text utility. I regularly use it for complex pattern-matching search-and-replace jobs on massive documents; to sort and organize messy text files; and to clean up text files before importing them into a spreadsheet. The latest version adds Shortcuts support so you can use BBEdit’s text-munging features directly in shortcuts.” Pro tip: “The Sort Lines, Process Duplicate Lines, and Process Lines Containing features for munging text have saved me dozens of hours of manual work.” BBEdit can search (and replace) across multiple documents, saved files, and even an entire folder or drive. Mic Drop“Even professional podcasters need to occasionally clear their throat or have a quick side conversation while recording. Mic Drop gives me a software mute toggle switch that lives in the menu bar, and it can be activated by a keyboard shortcut, AppleScript, or shortcut.” Pro tip: “I use Shortcuts to control Mic Drop using an Elgato Stream Deck. It gives me a dedicated hardware mute button anytime I feel a sneeze or cough coming on.” Transmit“Publishing content on the internet means moving loads of files around on remote servers. Transmit is the gold standard of Mac file-transfer apps, giving me quick access to the files on my Linux box; letting me upload podcasts directly to my content-delivery network; and even automatically syncing my cloud podcast files to a local drive. Best of all, the app’s Finder-like interface makes it as easy as dragging files between folders, regardless of where those folders reside.” Retrobatch Pro“Retrobatch Pro is all about automating image workflows via an easy-to-use, flowchart-style interface: Simply drag actions into the workflow canvas, configure each action, and arrange them in the desired order. For example, my book publisher, Take Control, uses the app to automatically process screenshots to fit their style guide by resizing each image, converting its format, and adding a border. I also use it to generate podcast episode art in all the sizes required by my content-management system.” Pro tip: “Once you’ve got your workflow perfected, create a Retrobatch ‘droplet’ that automatically runs that workflow on any image you drag onto the icon.” Retrobatch Pro’s drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to create image-processing automations. Elsewhen“In my line of work, coworkers and audiences can be anywhere around the world. Elsewhen lets you create presets of time zones; when you enter the time and date of an upcoming event, the app generates a text block listing that time in all your chosen zones. If I try to do this myself, I know I’m going to do the math wrong.” Pro tip: “Most of my professional communities are in Discord, and Elsewhen can generate Discord time codes so the date and time information is automatically presented to each user in their local time zone. It’s like magic!” My hidden gem: TextSniper“Sometimes you need to grab text on your screen that isn’t selectable. This is the magic of TextSniper. It takes a ‘screenshot’ of the selected area of the screen (just press Command-Shift-2) and then puts any text it finds on your clipboard. I have used this to extract text from an error message in an app, a paragraph from an out-of-print book that existed only as a janky scan, and even part of an App Store description. If you can see text, TextSniper can grab it.” Some titles may not be available to download on all devices or in all regions. More productivity spotlights: