Gray MacKenzie reviews Magnet, a Mac window manager that organizes your open apps into neat grid layouts. It saves time switching between windows and keeps your workspace tidy without the learning curve of more complex tools.
Hello. Welcome back to the Agency Toolbox podcast. The very first episode of season number two here. I am Gray MacKenzie, I'm your host and we have a really short episode for you guys today. We're gonna be doing here in just a couple episodes, just some real simple productivity tools that I use that speed up my workflow every day. And so the app that we're gonna be looking at today is called Magnet. It's a Mac OS app and it just helps you to improve your productivity by speeding up your, your window management. So snap in all the windows for all the apps that you have open around to different places. So right now as I'm recording this, I'm working on my 27 inch iMac. This is where I use it most. I also use it on my 15 inch MacBook Pros though, especially if I need to do like I need to do side by side work for some reason. So I handle a lot of our finance stuff. So if I'm comparing rows of numbers or credit card statement and reconciling that with whatever, I'll do that using Magnet to snap stuff around as I need it. So you can see here, I've got a whole bunch of different things open right now. So what I can do is I can just take, and I already have been using it here, but I can just take this and take Sublime Text and go full screen just by hitting a quick little keyboard shortcut. Or if I want to go to the left side, the right side, down to the bottom, up to the side. If I want to go full screen, I'm able to do all that really quickly just by using the keyboard shortcuts here. If I want to take slack and I want to take it to the left 2/3 of my screen, I can expand it like that, I can bump it back over, put it on the right side, expand it, do whatever I want to do there. And so there's not really any application that I don't use this for. I use this for pretty much every single thing that I have. I might take Finder, throw it over on the right hand side, but that's what I am using right now to throw stuff around. So you can see here, there's a screen flow which I used to record these episodes. And we're back over to Chrome. I use that all the time. Most of my days. What I'm doing is I'll keep slack up on the left half of my screen and then I'll use Chrome in the right 2/3. So it'll cover up a little bit, but I'll be able to see previews of new messages if there's something I need to respond to. Tab back over I actually use Do Not Disturb mode quite a bit for going through my days and when I really need to get something cranked out, making sure that I have the attention and ability to do that. But a lot of times I'll have Chrome windows up side by side or I'll have Chrome on one side and a spreadsheet or PDF or something else on the other side of my screen. So it all depends on what I'm working on, what the specific application is going to be. But I've really enjoyed this app. Just so you guys know, it is a paid app and on the App Store it is currently now I'm recording this in February 2017. It's currently just 99 cents. If this thing was worth $20 by this point, it saved me plenty of time to make it worth that. But at 99 cents it's kind of a no brainer. So unless you have a great solution for this now, highly recommend using it. And then here's the trick though is you can't just go buy the thing and then now what you can do. Actually one feature that I didn't hit on, which I'll kind of start with first, is you can drag and choose what you want to have happen based on where you drag that. So if I want to go left side or right side or down to the bottom, down to 2/3 to the center, I can do that just by dragging it around to different places on the screen. But for me at least I'm much more, much faster and much more productive when I can just keyboard shortcut it around. So what I did is I took the first week after buying it and I said I am not going to resize a window unless I'm on a call with somebody and I absolutely need to do it urgently without learning the keyboard shortcut and doing it. And you can set all of your own keyboard shortcuts whatever you want to. But basically what I would do now the basic ones are pretty simple. I just use, I left those alone. Control option and then to the side the arrow keys. Very simple. But some of the other ones took me a little bit longer. Right two thirds, left two thirds. I use that an awful lot. So what I did is for that first week I just forced myself to use the shortcut or customize the shortcut every time I wanted to resize a window at all. And it didn't even take me a full week to pretty much have them all kind of ingrained in my muscle memory and in my mind to know what they would do. So with any new tool that you're trying to pick up or keyboard shortcuts that you're trying to memorize just for yourself, it's going to be inconvenient. Slow you down a little bit for a couple days, but you'll pick it up so quickly. And then once you have it, it just saves me so much time at this point. So highly recommend Magnet. Like I said, 99 cent app. Looks like it'll go up to around $5 whenever they're done running this, which who knows when that'll be. There's a lot of competitors, so maybe that'll keep the price down. This is the best one that I found and used consistently. So if you want to get it, you can either just go to magnet.crowdcafe.com there's a link right there to take you through to the App Store and purchase it, or just go to the App Store and search for it. So that's all I have for you this week. Next week we'll be back with another quick productivity tool review for you guys. If there's any tool that you think I should know about and might benefit from and would be worth sharing with other people, let me know. And in the meantime, hope you have a great and productive week and we will talk to you again next week.
