Christina Warren is a writer, podcaster and self-described software nerd. She started writing for an Apple–focused website in college, which led to a career in tech and business journalism, often covering Apple. After stints at Microsoft and Google DeepMind, she’s now a developer advocate at GitHub and co-hosts the MacBreak Weekly podcast.

Fun facts

• First Mac: Used? A PowerPC in elementary school. Owned? A black Intel MacBook in college.
• Favourite Mac: iMac G4 – the most perfect computer to ever exist
• Favourite macOS feature: Quick Look (especially with Quick Look extensions)
• To-do app: A combination of OmniFocus and Obsidian
• Rainbow or solid Apple logo: Six colours forever!
• Productivity pro tip: Inbox zero is a scam. See what you see, miss what you miss, live your life.

We asked Warren to talk about some of her favourite apps for making the most of her time.

Fantastical
“I live and die by my calendars – and unfortunately I have a lot of them. Fantastical is the best way to handle them all: iCloud, Google, WebDAV and Microsoft 365. My favourite feature is still ‘natural language’ event creation, where you simply describe an event in normal language (‘lunch with Ali next Friday’). Fantastical has had it since before it was a buzzword, and I’m so used to it that I wind up creating events the ‘wrong’ way whenever I’m in a different calendar app or website.”

Pro tip: “I love Calendar Sets, which show specific groups of calendars – like only work, or the ones I most care about day to day. These keep my calendar view manageable while still letting me check a public holiday or a very specific work calendar. It’s great!”

Marked
“Whether for blog posts, notes, work reports or (these days) instructions for LLMs, much of my writing for the better part of two decades has been in Markdown, the simple markup language that lets you style text using plain-text characters, then easily convert that to HTML or other formats. Regardless of the app I use to write Markdown, I always have Marked open. It shows me a live preview of what my Markdown will look like – all configured to the style of my website or blog when rendered in HTML.”

Pro tip: “Marked can export a Markdown document to Microsoft Word format, but it also works the other way: I can convert a Word document to Markdown, edit the Markdown in the app of my choice and then export it back to .docx format for sharing. It’s awesome.”

SnippetsLab
“I create a lot of code demos, often reusing the same little code blocks. SnippetsLab is great for this. It lets me store and organise unlimited bits of code – as well as other snippets like shell commands, settings files or a little bit of SQL I want to remember – and easily find them later.”

Pro tip: “SnippetsLab can import from and save directly to GitHub gists – super useful if you ever need to access a snippet on the web or someone else’s computer.”

BBEdit
“I spend a lot of my time in text editors, and even when I’m writing elsewhere, I turn to BBEdit a few times a week. It’s a fantastic editor, and it can handle any kind of file of basically any size. When I need to open up a 20 MB text file (yes, they exist), BBEdit won’t choke. And for me, the regular-expression features, including Pattern Playground, are the best in the business: If I ever need to do something really weird with regex, BBEdit is my first stop.”

Pro tip: “It might sound weird, but read the manual! Documentation is lacking for so many apps, but the BBEdit crew has exhaustive documentation that is easy to read and can help you discover features in an app you’ve been using for nearly half your life!”

Screens
“I work on four Macs, two iPhones, an iPad Pro, two Windows PCs, assorted servers and a NAS – whew! Although there are plenty of ways for me to access those machines remotely, Screens is the easiest. With a couple clicks or taps, I can connect to my headless Mac mini or an older iMac from my MacBook Pro or my iPad (and vice versa). And if you ever find yourself as the tech-support person in your friend group or family, Screens is great for this too.”

Pro tip: “Install the Screens Assist app (available from the developer’s website) on computers you need to support remotely. I have it on my mom’s MacBook Air and my sister’s MacBook Air so I can pop in – from 2,500 miles away – if they need help.”

My hidden gem: HazeOver
“I’m lucky enough to work from two 32-inch 6K displays. (It’s incredible.) But with that much screen real estate, it can be hard to figure out which window is active. HazeOver dims everything except the active window, making it easier to find and focus on. You can choose how dim the background is, disable the effect for certain apps, and toggle HazeOver using a keyboard shortcut. I’ve been a HazeOver user so long that I have moments of confusion when using a Mac without it.”

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