Annotations

As soon as you capture your first screenshot, it goes into an area called Quick Access, where it waits until you need it. From there you can quickly bring up a full size preview of your screenshot, and easily add annotations including text, shapes, arrows, and more. From there you can simply drag your newly annotated screenshot directly into other apps, like Slack. There’s no need to save the file first, so you don’t end up with a desktop filled with junk you no longer need. The process is super slick, and saves me a ton of time throughout the day.

Quick Access can hold several screenshots until you’re ready to work with them, and it’ll even move between displays as you move your mouse, so they’re always nearby.

Video

Sometimes, a screenshot won’t cut it, you need to capture a short video. CleanShot has you covered here too. It can easily produce video clips either as MP4, or as GIF. The full size preview in this mode also lets you quickly trim the clip, and can even capture any audio your Mac is playing at the time.

This is very slick, and because CleanShot encodes the video efficiently, you end up with much smaller file sizes, which is perfect for sharing. I’ve found it also does a great job at producing compact GIFs, without the quality sacrifice you see in other solutions.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition or OCR is the process of capturing text from inside images. CleanShot has a built-in OCR reader that allows you to take a screenshot of any block of text, and convert it instantly into actual text which is placed on your clipboard for you to paste into other apps. I use this when doing tech support so if someone sends me a screenshot containing an error, I can easily copy the error message text from the image, and paste it into my search engine to help me troubleshoot the problem.

Customisation

There’s a lot of polish and attention to detail in CleanShot. For example, the developers realised that many people use personal photographs as their wallpaper, so there is an option to use different wallpaper when capturing a screenshot to keep that private. You can also go further by hiding your desktop icons completely, and choosing a plain colour for the background, which looks really tidy.

When capturing windows, you can choose whether the background is visible, and whether or not the window has its drop-shadow. You can also customise the image and video format to use when saving files.

Finally, there are even settings to capture the mouse cursor, highlight clicks, and display any keystrokes on screen, which I find useful when recording demos, and will really help your screencasts standout.

Summary

Overall, CleanShot X is one of those fantastic little applications that really feels at home on a Mac. Powerful, yet easy to use, with a great fit and finish, as they say on their website, it really does feel like 7 apps in one, and I highly recommend it.

CleanShot X by MTW https://cleanshot.com

CleanShot X provides over 50 features making it the ultimate screen capturing tool. Capture your Mac’s screen like a pro.

$29 one-time payment, includes one year of updates, but the app is yours to keep for as long as you like. Renew for $19 to get a further year of updates.
$10 a month for a subscription including cloud features and storage.

Containers should be a joy to use, not something you have to put up with. Let’s build the future of dev envs.

https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1750965469518176438

So what makes it so special? Well let’s start with the performance. OrbStack is fast. How fast is it? Well I’ll let one of my Mastodon posts answer that question:

That’s right, after rebooting my Mac, the OrbStack user interface was up and running before the macOS Dock had even finished sliding up from the bottom of the screen. Everything about OrbStack is so fast you never feel like you’re waiting for it, it just gets out of the way and let’s you get on with things.

Another thing I really appreciate is the entire user interface is native SwiftUI. There’s no slow clunky Electron code to be found here. This means not only does the app perform faster, it also feels right at home on macOS. Controls behave how you’d expect, and it follow the system conventions properly.

Like Colima, OrbStack is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop. This means you can install it over the top of your existing Docker Desktop setup, and it will Just Work. In fact it will offer to automatically import your existing container images and stotage volumes when you first run it, which is a nice touch.

Value added

There are a ton of features in OrbStack that really demonstrate the attention to detail and care, which shines throughout the product. They’re so numerous in fact I could spend a week talking about them, but instead I’m going to list a few of them here:

• Automatic HTTPS certificates and DNS for your containers
• Rosetta support for transparent x86 emulation
• Start/stop containers from the macOS menubar (including Compose projects)
• Explore Docker images directly using Finder (they can even show up as disk mounts)
• Two-way file sync between containers and your local filesystem
• Easily search through logs with a native log viewer (supports clickable links in the output)
• Automatic cleanup of unused build-caches to save disk space
• Much lower energy usage

The list goes on! Check out the feature comparison between OrbStack and Docker Desktop to see a more complete list.

Kubernetes and Linux

OrbStack also provides the best local Kubernetes story out there.

You get a single-node Kubernetes cluster which has been optimised for development, and because it uses the same container engine as the rest of OrbStack, all your Docker images are immediately available for use in pods, without needing to push to a registry. You also benefit from the other OrbStack features, for example automatic DNS names for your pods and services, no need to mess around with port forwarding. Ingress resources will Just Work. It’s super slick.

As if all that weren’t enough, OrbStack even allows you to spin up Linux virtual machines, again with a level of polish that really sets it apart from other solutions.

Summary

I’ve been using OrbStack since the early beta, and immediately subscribed when v1.0 was launched back in September last year. In that time, it’s gone from strength to strength, continually adding great new features that really sets it apart from the competition. I love the proper native macOS application, the sheer speed, and all the nice “quality of life” features that make it a joy to use, and recommend you give it a try today.

OrbStack by Orbital Labs https://orbstack.dev

OrbStack is the fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux. Develop at lightspeed with our Docker Desktop alternative.

Free for personal use, $8 per month for business/commercial use.

Well to be honest, although the setup was working really well most of the time, there were a few situations where I found it lacking.

Drafts

I was finding the process of writing a draft post a bit “fiddly”. Because every commit to the blog’s Git repository is deployed automatically, I couldn’t commit any unfinished writing without first remembering to set some special flags at the top of the post, in the front matter. Those flags would need to mark the post as a draft, tell the system not to render the page, and not to add it to the posts list and RSS feed. Occasionally I would forget those steps and accidentally “publish” a half-finished mess. It was a bit frustrating.

Image galleries

Dealing with images was also painful. You’d need to deal with naming them, putting them in the right subfolder, and then adding them to the document using a shortcode. I ended up writing some custom code to make creating a gallery of images easier, as I was finding myself making use of the feature quite often, but it was still quite painful to deal with.

Writing on the go

The static site generator approach required me to have a way of writing Markdown and then committing it to a Git repository, then finally pushing the changes up to GitHub. There were plenty of times where I’d be waiting for an appointment, or going somewhere on public transport, where I could’ve done some writing, but this process doesn’t lend itself well to a smartphone environment. It just wasn’t feasible.

I tried to get a workflow going using a really nice Markdown editor called iA Writer, which is a great bit of software, but I was still left with the problem of how to manage the Git side of things. Writing the posts was one thing, but getting them published via my Git workflow just wasn’t a great experience on the go.

Looking at alternatives

If something isn’t working right, try something different. There’s really no need to settle. I decided to look into my options.

I started with some research of various approaches. I wanted something flexible, but not complicated. I wanted something that had a nice editing experience, and good performance. I had also decided that my days of self-hosting were over, so I wanted something that provided a fully hosted version, so I could forget about managing anything, and just focus on writing.

I looked at what some of my friends were using. Things like Medium, or Substack seemed to have a slightly different aim, and I wasn’t sure about some of their policies. Eventually I found myself right back at WordPress. Many years had past since I last used this software, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how it had evolved, so I decided to take it for a whirl.

Gutenberg

The star of the latest version of WordPress has to be the new Gutenberg editor. This new way of creating your posts and pages relies on a range of different components called “blocks”, which you can move around the page as required, and it really gives you a huge amount of flexibility. There is an interactive demo of Gutenberg which you can explore for yourself to see what I mean.

Themes that support this type of editor are pretty customisable too, offering predefined areas on the page for you to edit, such as footer, sidebar, and header areas, giving you a remarkable amount of flexibility without needing to do any coding at all. You can also create reusable templates of common blocks to avoid having to edit them in multiple different places.

Initially I did find it a bit daunting, but I stuck at it, trying the various pieces out, and in the end I found that I quite liked it. I decided to bite the bullet and started the process of moving back to WordPress.

Migrating

I decided to migrate my previous posts manually rather than using a tool. This gave me the opportunity to re-work some of the posts I was less happy with, and after all we were only talking about a dozen posts, so I knew it wouldn’t take too long. This also gave me the chance to check the formatting, make sure hyperlinks worked, and to take advantage of the Gallery block to upload the full sized versions of any images I had used.

Migration was straightforward because in most cases I was able to copy and paste from the existing site into Gutenberg, and it correctly interpreted everything, including subheadings, code blocks, and even things like pull quotes; they were all converted correctly into the equivalent block type.

Finally, I decided I didn’t want to have to deal with comments on the posts, so I turned off the entire commenting feature. I figured people can always reach me on Mastodon to discuss things, and having to deal with the inevitable spam here didn’t appeal.

I checked everything looked good, checked the RSS feed was working properly, and hit the button to go live. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out, and I’m hoping this will encourage me to post more as well.

Here’s hoping!