Mac: When you’re jamming to some background music while browsing the web, getting work done, or chatting with friends, a song might pop up on one of your playlists that you absolutely love. The more this happens throughout the day, the more distracted and disjointed your work is going to feel — and you’ll never be able to focus on studying, making money, or your MMO raid if you’re constantly jumping back to iTunes or Spotify to see what’s playing.

Mac: Your Mac’s Night Shift and True Tone modes are great and all, but they can be fussy at times, and they might not work (or work very well) with an externally connected display. Separately, it’s also annoying to have to tap buttons and fumble through on-screen displays just to adjust your monitor’s brightness and contrast to your liking.

Windows, Mac: There’s something delightful about the old LucasArts ScummVM games: The beautiful environments, the crafty puzzles and the incredible voice-overs (for the games that weren’t just text captions over moving mouths).

Windows, Mac: You probably have a few websites that you use all the time — perhaps a special CMS you need for work, a time-tracking site you use to track and bill hours for clients, or a web game you just can’t get enough of. If you’re tired of pulling up your browser each time you need to access it, you have an alternative: Transform it into an app.

Mac/iOS: I recently checked out clipboard management app Paste 2. While it’s a bit pricey — $22.99 for the full version — it has some compelling features, and a free trial, that make it worth considering.

Windows/Mac: There are plenty of apps you can use to put on a little light show in your house (or geek den) if you’ve bought into Philips’ Hue ecosystem. My room is full of the company’s expensive colour-changing LED bulbs, and I’ve checked out a few of these apps, but generally don’t need to make my room look like an exploding volcano on a regular basis. These kinds of apps are fun for parties, but not all that practical for everyday use.

Mac: Sometimes an app doesn't have to do a lot to be incredibly useful. And that's exactly why I like Simple Recorder. As its name implies, it allows you to turn your Mac into a miniature sound-recording machine, whether you're looking to capture the noise blasting out of your speakers or the sounds of wherever it is you happen to be using your laptop (or desktop, I suppose).

Mac: It makes us sad that Apple has basically abandoned the App Store on macOS. Just take a look at the experience you get on your smartphone or tablet compared to the one you get on your laptop - it's night and day. That's OK, though; we're more than happy to provide recommendations for amazing macOS apps even if Apple doesn't want to do it itself.

Mac: Just because we love symbolic links on Windows so much - thanks, Steam Mover - we're going to show you a handy macOS app that lets you set up symbolic links on Apple's operating system as well.

Mac: Widgets? Old and busted. Filling your Notification Center full of apps and services? The more stuffed it gets, the less useful it is. At least, I don't like having to scroll up and down through pages' worth of items if I need a quick glance at my most meaningful data.

Mac: Of all the days to (finally) launch a version of its app for macOS, Houseparty picked yesterday - the start of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference - to make a big (themed) splash onto Apple desktops and laptops. And while Apple's announcement of FaceTime group hangouts probably took a little wind out of Houseparty's sails, the app is still makes it incredibly easy to chat with a bunch of your friends at once.

Mac: It's been a few years since we've seen AgileBits release a major update to its killer password management app, 1Password, which is why everyone's so excited about last week's debut of 1Password 7. This app should pretty much be a household name at this point, as it's one of the major password managers we recommend to create and store super-secure passwords and passphrases.

It happens at least once a day, always when I'm right in the middle of working on something important: I accidentally brush the Command+Q combination instead of Command+W to close a browser tab, quitting me out of Chrome. Sigh.