Desks and Chairs for a Sweet Setup, Vivaldi Web Browser, and More

July 15, 2022

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Elements of a Sweet Setup: Desks and Chairs »

Raise your hand if you’ve spent hours scrolling the amazing setups in r/macsetups or r/battlestations. Some setups are insane. Others quirky. Undoubtedly though, each setup provides inspiration for new ways to setup your own workstation.

There’s a lot of hype around building out a home office right now given the dramatic shift toward work-from-home or hybrid remote work. There are so many accessories and so many ways to build your setup — it can be overwhelming. And it’s important, right? You’re spending 8-plus hours in your workspace every day, so you want the space to be inspiring, healthy, and productive.

Well, we’re here to help with that overwhelm. Below you will find the different areas and categories to consider when building your ultimate work setup. Whether you’re working from a downtown corporate office or your own cozy spot in the basement of your home, we’re hoping you find some inspiration in these categories.

Apps We’re Trying: Vivaldi Web Browser »

One of the good things about modern operating systems, whether you’re on iOS, macOS, Windows, or Android, is that the default browser is actually pretty good in every single case. Most people will be well-served by Safari, Edge, or Chrome, and that’s great! If you’ve been following tech for several decades, you know this is very much not a given (looks intensely at Internet Explorer), so it’s nice that we’re currently in a pretty good place.

But there are myriad reasons not to use the default browser, and the more of a nerd you are, the more likely you are to poke around and see what else is out there. Maybe you want something with better or more configurable privacy settings, or maybe you want something you can theme to your preferences. Maybe you even want things like RSS reading built in! No matter what you’re looking for, the odds are you can find something that fits your needs, and Vivaldi is a browser that can fly under the radar, but absolutely deserves a look.

A Review of the Opal C1 – A $300 DSLR-Like Webcam »

When everyone was forced to start working from home in 2020, it was made painfully obvious just how bad most webcams really were. That left virtual workers with a couple of unattractive options:

Stick with the convenient option and make do with a crappy webcam
Spend a bunch of time and money figuring out how to make a fancy camera setup work

The Opal C1 tries to give you the best of both worlds: DSLR-like quality without the complexity at a fraction of the price.

Our First Look at PDF Expert 3 for Mac’s New OCR Features, New Design, and More »

Apple’s Preview PDF app does a good job for most PDF uses, offering catch-all support, a nice array of annotation tools, strong searching features, and reasonably good export and resizing features.

But for those who need more PDF features — such as the ability to edit a PDF, to apply OCR, to import or export from/to Word or Excel file formats, or to create a table of contents within the PDF — you’ll have to go looking for something more powerful than Preview.

Way, way back, we named PDFpen for Mac the best PDF app for when Preview didn’t fit the bill. Lots has changed since then, though — PDF Expert didn’t even make the top of our contenders list. Today, PDF Expert is likely the best option for power PDF users.

PDF Expert recently received a major update to version 3, bringing with it a new design, OCR support, and new ways to export PDFs. Here’s a quick first look at PDF Expert 3’s major new features and how the team is nicely combining the best PDF features from PDF Expert on the iPad with PDF Expert on the Mac.

Is your productivity busted?

If you feel like you could use a tuneup for how you manage your tasks and your time, get access to our Productivity Workshop.

Shawn Blanc (founder of The Sweet Setup) covers:

1. The four most common symptoms of a busted productivity workflow
2. What you can do to overcome them
3. How to improve your approach to managing and organizing your tasks.

You’ll also get the downloadable templates and cheatsheets.

GET ACCESS

Is your productivity busted?

Interesting Links From Our Friends and Around the Web »