Jan 28, 2018 Android Windows Internet iOS Gadgets Mac Buying Guides Top 15 Must-Have Windows 10 Apps for an Amazing Experience. Ajinkya Bhamburkar 28 Jan 2018. Sep 30, 2019 These apps should make the time you spend on your Mac more pleasant and productive. And some of them might become so indispensable, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to get by without them. But no list of software is ever complete, so we invite you to share your favorite, must-have Mac apps in the comments.
Mac apps have been around for decades. They've included the giants of the industry like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the best of the best of indie software developers like Bungie and Omni Group, and of course Apple's own apps like iWork and iLife, and pro apps like Final Cut, Logic, and Aperture. Traditionally they were sold on floppy disks and later CDs and DVDs. Now we're in the age of downloads. Traditionally they were sold on a company by company basis. Now we're in the age of the Mac App Store. All that history, all that diversity, all that power can make Mac apps even more complicated to choose between. There aren't as many Mac apps as there are iOS apps, but there's just as much variety and maybe more. If you're new to the Mac, how do you figure out which OS X apps you need to download immediately? If you're a seasoned Mac pro but are looking for something specific for work or for play, for school or for fun, how do you know which app is the very best?
In short — you look here. Based on years of experience and countless tests and comparisons, these are the apps and games we consider must-haves and recommend you download now. These are the best apps for the Mac.
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More Must-Have Mac OS X Apps
The rest of the must-have Mac OS X Apps
These next set of apps are really great to haves depending on how you use your Mac and the work that you do with it. I’ve decided not to put it up as top apps as not everyone needs to use these apps if there’s no need for it. Read on to find out more about them and see if you too have a need for them as I do.
6. Scroll Reverser
If you use both a mouse with a scroll wheel and the TrackPad with OS X’s natural scrolling direction, Scroll Reverser is the tool for you. The screenshot below shows the exact settings I’m using, specifically to keep using natural scrolling on the trackpad and maintain the expected scrolling direction for mouse’s scroll wheel.
Link: Scroll Reverser7. PathFinder 7
If you find OS X’s Finder lacking, consider trying out PathFinder 7. I’ve written a pretty comprehensive review of PathFinder 7 here in comparison to OS X Yosemite’s Finder. But even when compared with Finder in OS X El Capitan, the points I made in the review is still valid and I continue to use PathFinder 7 today.
I won’t go deep into the features of PathFinder that makes it my choice of Finder replacement here on this article but here’s a summary of it.
- File Operations Queue
- Dual-pane view
- Bookmarks and Favourites
- Configurable Shelves
- Highly customisable and a whole bunch of features like…
- Calculate file checksums with MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA224, SHA-256, SHA384, and SHA-512
- Built-in hex editor
- Built-in image editor
- Archive files and folders with zip, gzip, bzip, dmg, Stuff, tar, and more
- Ability to quickly get the dimensions of an image file and copy the dimensions into the clipboard as the following text: width=”###” height=”###”
- Built in terminal console module
- Git or subversion integrations
- Ability to securely delete a file
- and more!
Link: Path Finder ($39.95)
8. Affinity Photo
If you need a good photo editor that has all the key features you look out for in Adobe Photoshop, but does not really need something as powerful as Photoshop, then Affinity Photo is the editor for you. First thing first, Affinity Photo is REALLY fast. It really is something that you have to use to believe how fluid the controls are. But more importantly, Affinity Photo provides most of the familiar features and capabilities as Photoshop, the industry benchmark for a professional photo editor app.
Affinity Photo also includes a pretty powerful RAW Processing capabilities as well which is very similar to Adobe’s Lightroom. I’ve not yer personally explored the RAW Persona deeply as I continue to use Adobe’s Lightroom for RAW development. But in my limited use of it, I find it as functional as one would expect from a RAW processing app. However, it does lack the rich support for camera color profiles and lens profiles as Adobe has. And because of that, I would likely continue to use Lightroom to develop my RAW files and then edit them in Affinity for post-processing.
10 Must Have Mac Apps 2015 2017
Link: Affinity Photo ($49.99 on the Mac App Store)9. DaisyDisk
If you have MacBook with limited SSD storage space, that means you’re more likely to fill it up faster as well. This is where an app like DaisyDisk is really handy.
As you can see form the screenshot, DaisyDisk presents your storage usage in a beautiful flower-like graph which acts as the intuitive visual map of your disk. It also doubles up as an interactive interface where you can discover what’s taking up all that storage space while allowing you to also select and remote the files within the app itself.
So if you find yourself to be running out of space on your Mac, DaisyDisk is the app to use to figure out what you can remove to gain back the space you need.
Link: DaisyDisk ($9.99 on the Mac App Store)
10. Gemini
Just as my recommendation for DaisyDisk, If you use a Mac with limited SSD storage space, any apps that helps you figure out how you can free up files that you don’t need anymore would be very helpful. And with Gemini, it does exactly that by searching your storage for duplicate files.
Gemini does it really fast and elegantly. Due to my highly collaborating work environment where I share a lot of files with my colleagues, there’s bound to be files that are duplicated pretty much all over my MacBook’s storage. Gemini has been a really great tool in helping me find all those duplicated files and allowing me to decide if I would want to delete them. I’ve so far been able to remove about 10+GB worth of storage wastage.
Link: Gemini: The Duplicate Finder ($9.99 on the Mac App Store)
11. iTerm 2
If you use the terminal and work on the command line a lot, then I highly recommend using iTerm 2 as the replacement of OS X’s Terminal. Just check out this list of advanced features of iTerm 2 here and you’ll never go back to Terminal. Trust me.
12. Little Snitch
For all the paranoid in you, Little Snitch is a great app that helps you protect your Mac from the outside world. How it works is quite interesting as it essentially is an anti-firewall, protecting not what’s incoming to your Mac, but what’s going out from your Mac to the Internet. And in some ways, this protects you better than just using a firewall as Little Snitch will prompt you every time an app requires to sent anything out to the Internet, unless you’ve already allowed it to do so permanently.
You can find out more about Little Snitch here. But if you are as paranoid as I am about what’s getting out of your Mac, Little Snitch is a great tool to help you keep that in check.
Must Have Mac Programs
Link: Little Snitch (€ 29.95)
This article is an adaptation of the original article on my blog post here.
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