Stephen Robles has a passion for helping others make the most of their technology. After studying trumpet performance and classical music, he worked as a choral director, travel photographer, website coder and live-event producer. He now explains tech, reviews products and talks about productivity as an independent video and podcast creator.

Fun facts

• First Mac: PowerBook G4 12-inch
• Favourite Mac: Mac Studio with M4 Max – all the ports I need, incredibly powerful and conveniently compact
• Favourite macOS feature: Shortcuts
• To-do app: Reminders for personal tasks and video planning, Things for work
• Rainbow or solid Apple logo: I long preferred solid, but the beautiful 50th anniversary logo converted me to rainbow.
• Productivity pro tip: Do the most creatively intense work when you’re at your best – for me that’s early morning. (The most demanding task I have is recording a video; to facilitate doing that well and first, I make sure the information I need to film is ready the night before.)

We asked Robles to talk about the apps he uses to be productive on his projects.

Bear
“Bear has been my default notes app for years – I store everything there, from video outlines to podcast episode notes. It’s lightning fast and flexible, it has great Markdown and formatting tools and syncing across devices is rock solid. I also love that I can give it HTML, Markdown or rich text and it can handle all of it.”

Pro tip: “Bear has lots of great Shortcuts actions – many of my Bear notes are created by powerful shortcuts I’ve created for work tasks. I can even add text to the beginning or end of an existing note using a shortcut.”

Shareshot
“I share a lot of screenshots, and I want them to be as visually attractive as they are informative. Shareshot is a great app that frames screenshots with the device (Mac, iPhone, etc.) they were captured on, then lets me adjust the background colour, gradient and lighting. It’s also available on iPhone and iPad, where I can frame the most recent screenshot with a tap in Control Centre.”

Pro tip: “Shareshot has great Shortcuts actions as well. I’ve created one that allows me to frame multiple screenshots and save them to my desktop with a single click.”

Apple Creator Studio
“I learned to edit video in iMovie on a PowerBook G4; I later upgraded to Final Cut Express HD, and I now work in Final Cut Pro. But video production requires multiple apps, and Apple Creator Studio gives me all the tools I need to be productive in one place. I use Compressor to export, create every thumbnail with Pixelmator Pro and have used Keynote for years to prepare for speaking engagements. As an independent creator, it also helped me streamline my app subscriptions.”

Pro tip: “Compressor lets you create a group of export presets; drag it onto a video to export using each of the presets. For example, I have a group that quickly exports an MP3 file of a video’s audio, then exports the full video, so I can transcribe the audio while the video renders.”

Transcriptionist
“There are lots of apps that can transcribe audio – you can even do it with Shortcuts – but I love Transcriptionist for the ability to choose which AI model to use (each model has a different balance of speed versus accuracy) and to automatically detect and label different speakers. It’s also available on iPad and iPhone, and it can export transcripts to many different text formats.”

Pro tip: “Create custom keyboard shortcuts for the export formats you use most often. I export every transcription to SRT for YouTube subtitles and TXT to share with AI and ask for ideas. With keyboard shortcuts, I don’t have to dig through menus every time.”

Capture
“I often need to quickly capture ideas, social posts and links, and Capture is perfect for this task: Any time I want to save a URL or file in a browser, a post in a social media client, or content in any app, I just click Share Sheet and choose Capture. I can optionally choose a collection to add to and add a note to provide some context. Capture syncs across all my devices, can record quick voice notes on Apple Watch, and even has an Apple Vision Pro app.”

Pro tip: “Go to Settings > Preferences > Share Sheet to choose how long the share sheet stays open when capturing – make it auto-save faster, or slow it down so you have more time to add a note.”

My hidden gem: Creator’s Best Friend
“Chapters are important in my videos and podcast episodes, and Creator’s Best Friend integrates with Final Cut Pro to make creating them easier. As I’m editing a project in Final Cut Pro, I drop in markers and chapter labels; while the video is exporting, Creator’s Best Friend generates all the chapter timestamps and titles, ready to paste into a YouTube video description.”

Some titles may not be available to download on all devices or in all regions.

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