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Five Essential Apps for Your Mac

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Apps designed for the Mac often don't get as much attention as apps for iOS, even though there are dozens of super useful, must-have Mac apps out there.

In our latest YouTube video, we took a look at five of the most useful Mac apps that may have gone under your radar. If you don't already own these apps for organizing and sharing files, they're well-worth checking out.


All of the Mac apps featured in our video are listed below, with prices and links.

Unclutter ($9.99) - As the name suggests, Unclutter is designed to clean up your desktop. It's an app that's designed to store notes, files, and everything copied to your clipboard. You can drag everything that's on your desktop into Unclutter for a neat, organized desktop that still offers easy access to all the temporary files and information you need.

DeskCover (Free) - If you often work with multiple windows open but dislike distraction, DeskCover is an app worth looking at. It automatically highlights the active app window while dimming everything else in the background, plus it allows you to hide everything stored on your desktop with a single mouse click.

Dropzone 3 ($9.99) - Dropzone makes it easier to copy, move, and share files with unique, customizable actions that let you organize your data with simple drag and drop gestures. Drag a file into an application listed in Dropzone and you can copy it, share it to a social network, AirDrop it, and do tons more.

Bartender 3 ($15) - Bartender 3 is a super popular Mac app that lets you rearrange and hide icons on the menu bar of your Mac. With Bartender, you can put the menu bar items you use most often front and center, while hiding all the rest behind the Bartender icon for a much more streamlined menu bar. Bartender 3 is the only app on our list that you'll need to download outside of the Mac App Store.

Magnet ($0.99) - Magnet is designed to let you rearrange all of your open app windows into an orderly layout for a clean, organized desktop. It's called Magnet because your app windows will snap right into place.

Do you have favorite must-have Mac apps that aren't in our video? Let us know what they are in the comments and we might feature them in a future video.

Article Link: Five Essential Apps for Your Mac
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/29/5-essential-apps-for-your-mac/
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-Ryan- said:
I’m a big fan of Magnet. Such a simple app, but for anyone who needs to have various documents or applications open side by side it is perfect.
Click to expand...
It's very useful - the one feature I wish Apple would just copy from Windows.

I use Rocket a lot day-to-day, which brings the Slack-esque method of typing emoji systemwide. I also use WiFi Signal to quickly see the network signal strength, among other information.

The actual app (as opposed to menu bar items or system tweak) I use most is Reeder, as I still use RSS feeds to get all my news. Works brilliantly.
 
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+1 for Magnet. It is how Apple should have implemented it and it takes a tiny fraction of the time to efficiently organise windows. Best money I’ve spent on a Mac app by far.
 
I found Screenie and Window Tidy very useful back in uni (the former for organising my screenshots and the latter for allowing me to 'split screen' apps I can't officially or didn't want to for different reasons).

Picked them up in some sale a while back.
 
Non one of these apps is essential. I've been us Macs since 1985, and I've never used any of these apps. I'm sure they are very helpful, if a user needs one. That said, not one is "essential"; which mean "absolutely necessary" or even "extremely important".

The only "essential" Mac program is an alternative browser to Safari, since some sites will not work with Safari.
 
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The word essential is a stretch with most of these since macOS already does most of these things, and some of those are overpriced, such as Bartender, for the money I think iStat Menu is way better and cheaper. I would also replace Unclutter with CloudClip Manager for the clipboard feature, plus it's free. Amphetamine is another great little free app to quickly keep your Mac from going to sleep with one click. And uhhh I would also throw in Mobile Mouse into my list for moments when you need to use your phone as a keyboard and mouse and there you go, that's my list FWIW.
 
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MacRumors said:
Magnet ($0.99) - Magnet is designed to let you rearrange all of your open app windows into an orderly layout for a clean, organized desktop. It's called Magnet because your app windows will snap right into place.
Click to expand...

Has anybody noticed that there's now a bit of "snap to" distance on Finder windows built into MacOS? It's like a few pixels at most, but try it: take one Finder window and drag it up next to another, slowly, until they touch. Notice it "snaps" up very gently to align with the other window. It's very subtle, like I said, just a few pixels. Is this new? I've never noticed it before, and never heard it mentioned anywhere. Works for moving and resizing windows that abut other windows.
 
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So some really good apps - iFlicks2 (add metadata to your video files and store in iTunes - i've not found anything close on any platform), Compress Files (by Apimac - just drag and drop files into box to compress and encrypt them. Great for emailing files to others. Use .7z encrypted to get AES-256 encrypton), Wunderlist (cross platform so not strickly mac), MAME OS X (play old arcade games on your Mac. Works in High Sierra if you set the 'Render Frames' option to 'OpenGL'.), OpenEmu - great old school retro games emulator. Transmission (one of the best Torrent clients out there). AppZapper (get rid of apps together with all the junk from your mac), Carbon Copy Cloner - for creating a bootable offline disk copy, 1Password (for password management), NordVPN (great little VPN client for when you have to connect to public wifi).
 
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curtoise said:
How is that different to Magnet? what do you mean by drawing on a grid?
Click to expand...

Check out the link.

Divvy1-thumb.png
 
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MacDawg said:
I don't think it is supported in the latest versions of macOS
But Amphetamine is
Click to expand...

I've had Caffeine for years and it still works for me even on High Sierra. Their icon is pixelated on a retina display because they apparently have not updated their app with a high resolution icon. But it definitely works.
 
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