This episode is about Wojciech and Patryk's favorite development tools—the less obvious ones they use regularly and genuinely enjoy in their day-to-day work. They share practical picks for screenshots and screen recording, Android device mirroring, network debugging, remote pair programming, file comparison, Xcode cleanup, security utilities, and React Native debugging, while explaining why each tool helps them work faster and more effectively.
Patryk and Wojciech share their favorite less-obvious developer tools they use regularly, focusing on tools that genuinely improve day-to-day work rather than the usual basics like terminals or password managers.
CleanShot X — their go-to app for screenshots and screen recordings, with strong annotation tools, scrolling capture, OCR, webcam overlays, and easy cloud sharing.
Clop — a handy companion for compressing and downsizing screenshots and videos, especially useful for keeping GitHub PR attachments under upload limits.
MonoLisa — a paid coding font they praise for readability, personality, and overall developer experience.
scrcpy — recommended for Android development because it mirrors and lets you control a real Android device from your desktop, making testing much more convenient than relying on an emulator.
Proxyman — their preferred proxy/network debugging tool for inspecting, modifying, and simulating API traffic in mobile apps.
Tuple — highlighted as a strong remote pair-programming tool because both people can interact directly with the shared machine, making reviews and collaborative debugging smoother.
Kaleidoscope — recommended for comparing text, code snippets, and images with a much nicer experience than older merge tools.
DevCleaner for Xcode — a useful Mac utility for reclaiming disk space by cleaning old Xcode caches, SDKs, and derived data.
Objective-See tools — especially LuLu, BlockBlock, and KnockKnock, recommended for monitoring outgoing connections, persistence attempts, and suspicious startup items on macOS.
Reactotron — a long-running favorite for React Native debugging, appreciated for stability in a tooling ecosystem that changes often.
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Hello beautiful people, I'm Patrick. And I'm Vojcie. And you are listening to Brains and Beards Show. Episode number 23, our favorite development tools. Enjoy.
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Hello, Feitek. Hello again. Ah yeah, because we said hello to the audience now. We say hello to each other. This is the classic host fake hello. Because we actually have been talking for the last couple of minutes.
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Well, you have to start somehow. Yeah, the magic of podcasting.
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What's the topic today? We want to talk a bit about tools that we use in our development jobs on a daily basis. Me personally, I find a lot of value when I listen to podcasts like that or watch videos. Because there's often something that I can pick up for myself.
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So in this spirit, I think we would focus on stuff that is a little less obvious.
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So maybe not a terminal.
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That you have to switch your default terminal Mac application. But something that is more things that gave us joy when we discovered it. Oh, that would be the threshold.
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Okay, and do we do one by one? Yeah, one by one. And let's limit them to five to keep it short and sweet as usual.
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And informative. Less than 10 minutes, like every other every podcast that we did. Exactly.
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Who is starting? Go ahead. Okay, so as Vojtek said, we're not gonna we don't want to talk about things which are too obvious. Like, I don't know, I'm using NVM and JJ and one password. Probably other people hear some laughs from other side. That's definitely something which brings me a joy, which I'm using every day. But it's, yeah, well, it's too obvious. I just wanted to make a comment that keeping in the spirit of a VM user, you managed to use the first sentence to mention that you're not going to mention VIM, but you are a VM user and it brings you joy. Exactly. So 100% fulfilled the obligations. Yes, yeah, we're gonna get some some karma for this later on in Reddit or something. Okay, so I will start with screenshot, which is a tool which I'm using every day. screenshot is a tool to make screenshots, but as well record the screen, or just a window.
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And, and that's one thing which is great because it gives you a nice way to select on a window or when you record a video, you can select proportions very easily and so on. But actually, the more fun is what happens after you make a screenshot is basically gives you a lot of very nice tools to annotate what you did, because you can do screenshots on the Mac, but later on you get I don't know this ugly arrows, which I like really cumbersome to to point to something and they are sometimes in the wrong color because they have just one color. And sometimes you want an arrow, red arrow on some darker backgrounds, and which makes it a little bit eligible, because not enough contrast. So what the people from screenshot did is like giving every arrow a background, you can specify the size very easily, you can repoint it very easy from one place to another, you can write text as well with background without background, it even gives you a nice fill out background to your screenshots. So if you want to just screenshot a window, it gives you a nice background around it. So it's nice to look at. And additional things which is pretty cool is when you, for example, you record a video, you can place as well automatically a face cam on it as well in many forms, and you can specify the corner, the shape of it and so on. So it's pretty cool for presenting a work or doing YouTube or something like that. And what is pretty amazing is that there is as well like a cloud support.
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So I had to use many times because some of our clients were on some freemium plants. And so management tool had some, you know, like limited space. And when you try to post a video, we reached a quarter and nobody else could post any other video. But with the cloud support is very easy. You just one click, you get the link and you just post a link instead of video.
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And this way you can keep your clients happy on the freemium plants. So for me, it's a must have. I use it every day. I recommend it to everyone. It's an O-brain Alproab. You know it already. It was small a few years ago, and now it's pretty big brand, let's say. But yeah, totally recommend it to everybody if they want to have professional screenshots. Same here. I use it every day as well. And I think the reason I bought it in the first place was the possibility to capture a screenshot of a scrolling view. So like you have a website that does not fit on your screen and you don't want to make multiple screenshots, stitch them together. You just like start capturing a screenshot. You scroll the website when you're finished, you just click done and it's all like one huge image. And yeah, it's a lot of other features which we didn't mention, like O-stream. You can basically mark something and then copy text out of it. I know that macOS has no support for it as well, but something doesn't work. But the one screenshot usually works. And other things you can stitch as well as on the screenshots together. There is a lot of features now.
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So my pick is going to piggyback a bit on this one, because you mentioned that cloud support is cool for clients who use freemium plans. But it's not just that like if what we do a lot in our company is when you do a pull request in GitHub and your changes involve visual changes, it's customary to post a screenshot or a video of the process. Like if it's animation, it has to be a video. If it goes through a couple of screens or you want to see showed like a bug that has been solved, a lot of times you have to record a video and GitHub has a limit of 10 megabytes per attachment. And sometimes it's very hard to when you use clean shots to capture your simulator. I think like 20 seconds brings you over the 10 megabyte limit or even less. So I used to try to do my videos really short and was worrying about this until I found CLOP, I think is the pronunciation, which is very amusing for Polish people. It's spelled C-L-O-P. And it's an app that allows you to compress and downsize images and videos. So how it works wonderfully with clean shot is when you do a screenshot using clean shot, you have it kind of available as a little square on your bottom left hand corner, where you can click that you want to edit it, you can like drag it and drop it places. And one of the things where you can drop it is once you pick it up, dragging it, another square for CLOP is going to appear on the bottom right hand corner and you can just drop it there and it will take the video file created by clean shot and recompress it for space like size efficiency using CLOP. And then you can just drop it into GitHub and it often takes my files from like 50 megabytes down to I know 14. And then I just click one button to downsize it from 100% downsize it for like starting at 100% size of the resolution to 75. And now magically the file is like five megabytes, and I can usually drop it in GitHub. I don't have to really do anything other than drag and dropping. So this is very convenient. And it has like a generous free tier, I think.
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On one opening of the app, you can resize five images or something like this. It's like for a long time, I was able to just comfortably use the free tier and I did not mind. So I would recommend to pair those tools up. Because I think it's very nice to be able to drop the previews directly in GitHub in the pull request rather than drop a link that takes people outside and like forces them to open it externally. GreenShot has a function to reduce the recording as well. But you have to create something in the menus. It's not as nice as dropping into the CLOP. Also, from what I found experimenting with GreenShot, it's not as efficient. Like the file sizes I get from CLOP are much smaller. Okay, so my next one is not exactly a software but a font, which again is one of the first things I installed on my computer. It's Mona Lisa. It's the most beautiful font I found.
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Actually, somebody recommended it to me. And it's very nice. I mean, like if you're a font aficionado, then probably you know this font. You know, like this has really nice looking letters like the G1 is amazing and so on. It's very easy to read. It's a little bit wide, which I like. It gives you a little bit more of a breathing room for inside of your font. I love it. I have it everywhere. And I always use it. I think that the normal fonts, which you can find, they are kind of boring. And this is kind of playful. And yeah, I enjoy it so much. I highly recommend it to... Well, now it's a little bit more expensive. I bought it very, very long time ago for the half price. Now, I don't know what is it right now, but still you pay it once and you have it for as long as you want. So highly recommended from my set. Okay, my next pick would be screen copy. It's spelled S-C-R-C-P-Y. Like vowels or the other one. I know. Without some of the letters. Anyway, this is a common line tool that I think was developed by the Jenny Motion who back in the day, it used to be the go to emulator for Android. So when I'm working on React Native apps, usually I default to using the iOS simulator because it's faster and it's smoother to use because once you run at least once the Android emulator from Android Studio, you will notice like a huge gap in the comfort of usage. But this is actually caused by the fact that one of them is a simulator and one of them is an emulator where the difference is that the Android one tries to simulate the resources of the phone that it pretends to be. So if you're pretending to run a cheap phone, it will run slow and it will be annoying while the iOS is an emulator. So it uses all the resources that your machine has. So even if your app is underperforming and but your computer is strong enough to make it run fast anyway, you will not see it. Which might be a problem later for debugging performance, right? I used to prefer iOS until I learned about the screen copy because what it allows you to do is to connect, use a USB cable and I think it might work over Wi-Fi but it was just I never set it up this way. I always connect the USB cable to my Android phone, run the screen copy which gives me a window that basically mirrors what's going on on the phone. So when I'm testing my app, working with it, I don't have to pick up the phone and tap things on it. But I have a window on my desktop the same way I would have for the iOS simulator which makes it equally convenient but also it has all the benefits of running on the real device. So the animations are going to run at a normal speed. Well slower because I work in the development mode and so on. But you don't hit any of the limitations to oh this function does not work on the emulator but it works on a real phone. Like you're using a real phone but it's as convenient as the iOS emulator. So I would really recommend to anyone who finds testing or debugging Android stuff inconvenient, screen copy takes it to a completely different level. Nice. Okay now I can make beautiful screenshots of my beautiful fonts as I'm really happy but sometimes I cannot make a beautiful screenshot because something doesn't work. So my next tool which I recommend is Proximan which is Proximan which records all the traffic between two points.
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And what I'm using is basically for debugging mobile applications like seeing the APA traffic and seeing request responses and so on. And for me the Proximan is before that I was using Charles but it just proxy has taken some kind of Java software vibes and the Proximan is just nice. It looks nice, it's beautiful and the installation process is much easier.
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For the proxy to work you need to install some certificates and so on. And Proximan is basically one click and then you get a window with some options so you can pick and basically it works so it's pretty cool. And what you can see is what your app is doing and you can monitor the traffic see the requests and responses as I mentioned but as well what it allows you to do is to manipulate those things like you can simulate a batch traffic you can slow down the responses from the backend and see how your app reacts to it and as well you can modify the responses because sometimes some use cases are hard to achieve or hard to set up so you can tell the Proximan that the backend is returning a different response for requests and this way you can really fine tune how you test your application which is pretty cool and saves a lot of time. And what I'm using it as well for is like discovering what some other apps are doing because you can listen to traffic on your Mac and see what is going on which is pretty interesting eye-opening and if you like to dive into this kind of things into security and so on it's pretty cool. I highly recommend it as the other things I mentioned before of course.
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Okay my next recommendation is gonna be Tuple T-U-P-L-E it's a tool for pair programming remotely what I think sets it up from other ways of doing it so the the absolute worst way of programming remotely is to make a zoom call and one person shoots the screen because you cannot even point at things. I think you can but it's like wow you have to find this option if most people don't know that you can't that you can do it. You remember Slack used to have an option you can draw on somebody else's screen back in the day if you've been around long enough you might remember there used to be a tool called ScreenHero that basically allowed you to share a screen with somebody then Slack bought it and killed it and incorporated some of its features into the Slack screen sharing and Tuple is like the old ScreenHero except now it's maintained still exists and has nice experience. The way this works is you can control the other persons like you can type things on other person's computer you can click windows and so on so it makes it very easy to mimic this possibility of showing something to your colleague in an office like you would be behind somebody's bag and he's doing something stupid on the computer I don't know using spotlight to launch well spotlight is not so bad anymore but yeah you want to show them another way of doing things and a lot of times it's much easier to show than to explain remotely with other tools you're limited to explaining and here you say no just let me do it and you do it on their screen they see what's happening and it makes it great for sharing tips like for example how screen copy works or it's great for per programming we don't do a lot of programming in Brains and Beards but sometimes for example if you have a complicated pull request that you don't want to ping-pong in the comments it's much easier to just like have a call and go through the comments one by one solve them together work on the code together you can type together of course though it still doesn't get around the problem that the other person might be using vim and then you're stuck using their editor and you cannot type but other than that it works great like nothing's gonna solve the vim problem right or the vim benefit i'm not gonna i'm not gonna react you're not gonna i'm just making fun of it actually like vim personally but i know patrick loves it i'm long enough in this world so you know like it's okay it's okay i don't have to react yeah so tuple tuple is great for if you want to per program ever a lot or occasionally i think it's a great tool um okay my next one is kaleidoscope like i think in the past it was a tool to compare images and it's still a great tool for it for me it replaced the p4 merge p4 merge is a tool from uh what's the name mercurial p4s uh version control system basically it's a tool for visualizing freeways mergers and the kaleidoscope has it as well but it looks really nice not like because the p4 merge looks like a not like a java application but like a qt application i don't know if it's better how it works it's really bad but it was useful and i was recommending it in the past the kaleidoscope is much nicer tool to do it and as well gives you some other things like has a jj support and it has a very nice algorithm to compare images but as well it's very nice to compare snippets it can compare it with a content of the clipboard which is not that easy to do from cli from terminal because i don't know you would have to i guess pipe in the content of the clipboard or save it in some temporary file and then compare it which is much more cumbersome than doing that in kaleidoscope so yeah it's a tool which i like because of the ux and ui i like when the things are looking nice on my screen awesome uh my next step is gonna be dev cleaner you can get it on the mac app store it's a drive cleaning tool for developers who use xcode because it solves two problems that compound one is when you're buying a machine from apple then the drives to get the big drive it's ridiculously expensive so a lot of people me included compromise between like how much space am i actually gonna need and if you're like me you're gonna underestimate how much you're gonna need because when you use xcode you need a lot so the xcode is big the ios and desktop and apple vision and all the sdks are pretty big and it's easy if you run an installation of xcode to have a lot of old files that you don't need anymore lying around taking like 50 or 100 gigabytes of your space and what dev cleaner does it looks through those hiding spots so for example it will tell you hey you have 40 gigabytes of derived data so this would be let's say cached cached data for old builds of the apps that you might not even work on anymore so for example when you're recruiting people we give them an exercise to do and they send us an app and every app like unless i manually clean this data it's gonna stay there forever and it could be per app like four or five gigabytes and it usually runs up it also helps you remove old ios sdks so for example like you need to have if you connect your physical phone to xcode you would have to have the sdk that matches the actual version on the phone every time you update the xcode for example you will update the sdk from 26.0 to 26.1 and then 26.2 and you would have all those old ones lying around and instead of rummaging through xcode to find this and remove it dev cleaner just usually gives you an interface to check what you want cleaned and remove those i think it's very useful if you find yourself using xcode and running out of disk space
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i mean you can the newest xcode versions allows you to do it as well from the xcode but you know there again dev cleaner is just one button which is much nicer yeah also as a react native developer so we don't run xcode directly so much and it's much faster to run dev cleaner and delete it from there than to open up xcode and delete it from there because just the opening time is much faster okay my last points are some security applications again one of the first things installed on my computer it's a set of applications from patrick vardo and his objective c foundation it's spared objective c like 2c and it contains a lot of applications the ones which i usually have running on my computer it's lulu block block and knock knock and what they are doing is like they are tiny tiny applications which is really cool so lulu is like little snitch which monitors what your computer is accessing in internet but you know like in little speech is very powerful you can set up a lot of things there visualize the connections and so on the lulu is more about it comes with some defaults like the apple applications are allowed and so on and then it asks you just once basically per software if you allow it to run it so it's not about kind of fine tuning what an application is allowed to connect to it's more about spotting if there is an app which you didn't expect on your computer and the app starts to want an internet access is about more like a shoot ring about that's something which you don't know is trying to connect to internet we're talking about malware or viruses and this kind of things and the other ones are more about persisting so when an application wants to persist itself on the disk in the way that it starts automatically when you log in or when you power up your computer it's gonna communicate it to you and tells you all this and this wants to have automatic start do you want to allow it which is as well about finding out that you'd get an malware and react to it and prevent it from from restarting or running and the other one is the last one i think which i have it is like knock knock which basically scans all the places where the application can write themselves to be somehow available on your system like you can think about services which is if you make a right click on the mac you get like a services manual there are applications which can enter themselves inside of this there are a lot of places where an application can can persist itself as well to to start they are like i don't know kernel additions extensions they are like launch demons entries and so on so it's like really cool from time to time to go through your computer and see what's going on there if there are maybe too many entries maybe you have too many things inside which you don't need anymore like you can think about the logitech there's a lot of entries for every mouse you bought from logitech because for some reason one mouse has one driver and the other one has another driver even if it's from the same company which doesn't make any sense you can clean up your mac it can run faster it can perhaps be less laggy or has less issues if you keep your installation clean it's really cool there are more things inside there are things like preventing the app without permission to record audio or prevents to record video i mean like i start the camera and so many other things it's like really a lot of tools in the spirit of unix the tools are tiny and you can combine them together and so on so it's not like one huge thing which you start but a nice tiny utilities which doesn't take much space or memory or cpu on your computer
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okay and that was my last one my last one is reactatron this is a tool that has been with me since basically the beginning of my react native journey almost 10 years ago in the world of changing react native debuggers which seem to go through a revolution every two or so years reacton is the only one that stays around and what's extremely annoying all those react native debuggers seem to be named to react native debugger or react experimental debugger or react native new debugger and there is no way to tell them apart except for two of my favorites flipper rest in peace and reactor drum so yeah joking aside it's actually been great not to have to learn a new debugger every two years and while i had a short stint where i switched to flipper because it offered the possibility to see the network traffic coming from the native parts which none of the javascript debuggers can do then after flipper got kicked out i was back to reactor turn again and it's great to be able to use the same tool it offers all that i need on a daily basis it does not look great but it looks interesting like the way you complained about charles or before they look like default applications right and reactor turn has its own look which might be rough and let's say developer designed but it grew on me at least it's it has its own charm and and flavor so so yeah if you're annoyed by the debugger ecosystem you might want to give it a try and stay with it for the next 10 years yeah my problem with that was that it didn't have the support for maybe that still doesn't have support for for redux it does yes okay yeah there is a plugin they have a plugin system you just have to other separately nice but it works nicely maybe now i think with the latest react native we have a new debugger we have rosenite for writing plugins and i'm hoping it's gonna settle somehow yeah but the old ones were good as well and then they stopped working i mean like they stopped working because they dropped it for something else for something new and there is a period of a time where you're one of the most important tools for your daily job is not performing or not available and i don't know it's crazy yeah yeah i did definitely but yeah i had part of the of the job living on the javascript roller coaster up and down okay good then i think we are through the lists and this time yeah i'm looking i don't know i think it's a short episode i don't think it's a short one so we aim for 10 minutes go to half an hour let's see sweet as usual exactly okay awesome thank you
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thank you and thank you you're our wonderful audience and hope to catch you in the next episode i mean like if you have something some other tools which you want to share with us you can drop us an email i know we don't have any comments and so on but we do get from time to time emails from the listeners and we are we do read them so if you have something interesting to mention here please drop us a line we sometimes will respond okay thank you thank you and have a great day night whatever bye bye thank you for listening to the episode please subscribe if you haven't yet and if you like our show consider sharing it with your friends you will find notes to this episode on our page brainsenbeards.com slash podcast where you can as well give us feedback or suggest a topic for the future episodes we would be very happy hearing back from you stay safe and curious till the next one bye