Adobe Illustrator is mission-critical for my work so the monthly subscription to Creative Cloud – which costs $53 a month and also includes Photoshop, Acrobat, Premiere, Audition, and InDesign, all of which I use frequently – is worth it. The problem is a Creative Cloud subscription works on up to 2 computers at a time, and there are times when 3 or even 4 members of my family need to use it. So I bought this Mac app called Amadine, which is a very nice clone of Illustrator. One of my daughters uses it now and likes it just as much as Illustrator. I tried it and agree, it’s excellent, as are the tutorial videos for it.  It’s usually $20, but it’s on sale for $10. A great deal. — MF

Permute is a Macintosh desktop app that converts video, audio, and image files from one format to another. It’s versatile and has not failed me yet. I was able to use it to convert a video that was terribly jittery that no other application could fix, but Permute converted it to an mp4 and it came out perfect. It costs $15 from the developer and it also comes with Setapp’s large library of applications available by subscription for $10 a month, which is how I found it. You can try Setapp for 7 days for free. — MF

I recommended Dictanote a few weeks ago. It’s a Chrome-based application that converts speech to text. It’s faster and less buggy than my Mac’s built-in dictation. Recently, Dictanote released a Google Chrome extension that lets you use Dictanote within almost any website. Now I’m using it to answer emails in Gmail, which has been a big time saver. It doesn’t work with Google Docs, which is unfortunate, but for longer form speech-to-text writing I use Dictanote’s notebook and copy and paste the text (in fact, I’m using the notebook to write this recommendation). It’s $19, and because I’m such a terrible typist, it paid for itself within the first day or two. — MF

GPT-2 is an application that produces novel text based on a text prompt (Here’s how to install it). Most of what it generates hovers on the border of sense and nonsense. Here are four pieces of advice it has given to me.  — MF

• “If we cannot make sense of the present, we cannot plan for the future.”

• “The more we change to meet the challenges in our lives, not to stay where we are, the more successful we will be.”

• “If it is an animal you have seen, do you think it will be like you, too? This is the first statement of my doctrine, that all things are one thing. Do you want me to prove it, or to let it pass?” —Philosopher Epicurus (384-399 A.D.)

• “Your gut tells you it’s not right to continue investing in some idea–it’s too risky, because its consequences are hard to understand. Your gut is right about one thing, though: there is no way of knowing it’s not wrong to spend your energy making the best decision for yourself and your goals.”

I’ve been using TextExpander for at least 10 years and it has saved me hundreds of hours of typing. It’s a global utility that converts short snippets of text into canned text. For instance, when I type “mf” it changes it to “Mark Frauenfelder.” When I type “adr” it changes it to my home address. “Bio” spits out my biography and a link to my headshot photos. I have a lot of canned boilerplate for email responses that save me a ton of time. It can also add anything that’s saved in my clipboard to a chunk of boilerplate. It also corrects frequently misspelled words. The Mac OS has snippet expansion but lacks many of the features and the snap of TextExpander. I can’t stand using other people’s computers to write or do email because not having TextExpander slows me way down. — MF

Setapp is a subscription service for Mac applications. I pay $10 a month for over 180 useful applications. I don’t use all of them, but the ones I use are indispensable throughout my day. I use Meeter to quickly enter scheduled Zoom meetings. I use Mosaic to move and place windows on my desktop. CleanMyMac X has a bunch of useful utilities to free up disk space and delete apps and large files. IM+ puts my Google chats and Slack groups into one convenient place. Downie makes it easy to download YouTube videos. Forecast bar is a great menu bar weather application. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Setapp also adds new applications into their offerings frequently, and I’m always eager to check them out. If you have a Mac and are interested in design, productivity, and utilities, this is a no-brainer. (I’ve mentioned Setapp on Recomendo before but they’ve added so many useful apps to their collection that it was  time for an update.) — MF

I had a spare MacBook Air that was running the Linux OS. My daughter suddenly needed a laptop to replace her recently broken one, and so I had to reinstall the Mac OS on the Air. I had difficulty figuring out how to do it until I came across this Apple website that explained how to create a bootable installer for MacOS on a flash drive. Now I have an emergency USB drive and I’m sure will come in handy again. — MF

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been teaching myself to touch-type, but my progress has been slow and frustrating. I tried Apple’s built-in speech-to-text feature, but it has a bad habit of shutting off while I’m speaking. I recently discovered Dictanote (which runs in Google Chrome), and I really like its accuracy and the way it doesn’t shut off while I’m using it. It has a number of other features too, such as custom voice commands, which will paste text snippets triggered by a spoken phrase. I use it to write blog posts, reports, a novel I’m working on, and this newsletter. I now consider it to be a mission-critical tool. A lifetime subscription to Dictanote is $19. — MF

You can’t have too many backups. You need at least one off-site online backup of your work. I previously recommended Crashplan but they have fallen behind in user interface, speed, and price. I am now a happy user of Backblaze, which has an unlimited plan for $60 a year. I back up 5 Terabytes (!!) of photos and videos (from more than one disk), and Backblaze was quick uploading and is super easy to manage. — KK

I’ve been using a utility called CleanMyMac X for a number of years. I use it to completely undelete applications (and all their associated files), locate and delete space-wasting unneeded files, and scan for malware. It has a lot of other features, all of which are presented in a simple interface. — MF