Add some quirk to your computer.
At some point, macOS became boring. What was long ago a quirky operating system, today feels sterile and corporate. You can add a bit of humanity back by installing kinda useful (but kinda dumb) software from independent developers.
I write a lot about useful applications. This is not one of those articles. Which isn't to say that the apps featured here are completely useless—they're not—but none of them are the most efficient way of doing something. I'm talking about animated flies circling your trash bin and emojis that replace your battery indicator—that sort of thing. Here are some of the oddest ones I've found.
It's really easy to let your computer's trash fill up without noticing. BananaBin is a playful app that adds flies to your dock's trash bin when it gets too full—you can decide whether 10MB, 1GB, or 10GB is your threshold.
The flies are ... shockingly realistic. They circle your trash icon and even scatter when your mouse pointer gets too close. I've had to fight the reflex of trying to catch them. On one hand, this is obviously silly. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who likes to regularly free up space on your device, this serves as a helpful reminder—if you see flies, it's time to empty the bin.
The Mac battery icon is boring. Juice doesn't have to be. This application allows you to replace the battery icon with emoji, ASCII art, or even weird strings of text that say things like "i'm full." You can use one of the built-in sets or get truly weird and design your own. This won't make you any more efficient, sure, but it might make you smile, and life is too short to not occasionally do dumb stuff on your computer.
Do clocks stress you out? FuzzyTime can't reduce the existential horror of time, but it can dampen that horror just a bit. This app can be used to replace your clock with a string of fuzzy text—for example, it will say "ten to three" when it's roughly that time. Set this up and disable the clock in the menu bar settings and you'll be able to think about time in a less precise way. Just don't blame me if you end up missing meetings.
One of the best Slack features is the ability to type a colon and then a few letters in order to quickly search for and add an emoji. Rocket is a free Mac app that brings this power to every application on your system. If you're the kind of person who uses a lot of emoji this application is for you—you'll wonder how you lived without it.
Now, have any of the applications on this list made you a better, more productive individual? Probably not. But they've made your computer just a little bit more personal, and dare I say human. That's why I love finding small applications like these, and why I hope you'll get in touch and let me know if you know of any others. I'm looking forward to hearing what you found.
