Essential iPad apps: 11 paid favorites Our look at iPad apps that deserve a place on your device started out with the best apps money can buy— 11 essential iPad offerings that are among our. Sep 30, 2019 Google Drive is a compelling choice because it offers 15 GB of storage space, and best-in-class web apps, like Google Docs and Sheets for free. Dropbox (also free) is a good choice if you don’t need the attached web services and prefer a simpler, leaner (2 GB) cloud storage service.
30 free macOS apps every Mac user should have. Dropbox is an essential tool. But while its website is fine for quickly uploading small files, the Mac app turns the service from a simple digital. Jun 14, 2018 This is a free app. This list of essential MacBook apps includes everything from organizers to games. We have put this list together keeping in mind all the different requirements of our readers. With a rapidly expanding App Store, there is a chance that these apps may soon be replaced, but for now, the apps in this list are the best to do the job.
We’ve put together a list of some of the best Mac apps anywhere: if you’re looking for a new utility, web browser, or photo app, you’ll probably find what you need on this list.
Aug 06, 2014 Essential Mac Apps for New Macbook and iMac Apple introduced Mac App Store in OS X Mountain Lion changing the way Apps are downloaded and installed on Macbook and iMac computers. It is also possible to download and install apps from third party developers who offer apps.
Whether you’ve been using a Mac for a very long time, or you’re unboxing your very first MacBook, it’s always nice to see the sort of software and tools that other people use.
While we don’t include them in our official best Mac apps list, since they’re free and from Apple, new users should always check out Apple’s apps that come with every Mac purchase.
Best Mac Apps: Utilities
1Password
Price: $49.99 Link
1Password is the gold standard of password managers. With people cracking online accounts left and right these days, it’s more important than ever to use secure, complicated passwords – and never the same one twice. 1Password can keep track of all your passwords for you, and automatically enter them into your browser. The latest versions also keep track of sensitive data like insurance numbers, bank accounts, and credit card numbers, making it an important resource if your wallet or purse gets stolen. Apps are available for iPhone, iPad, and Android, making your data available wherever you are.
Caffeine
Price: free Link
Have you ever started uploading a video to YouTube, walked away, and returned only to find your computer had gone to sleep (and thus corrupted the upload)?
While OS X is supposed to be smart enough to not do that, it doesn’t always work – and now, Caffeine will guarantee it.
Duet Display
Price: Free (on OS X, but requires a $16 iOS app) Link
Built by a cadre of ex-Apple engineers, Duet Display lets you increase your screen space by taking advantage of your iPhone or iPad. With support for touch tracking and the full Retina display of your mobile device, Duet Display can be a godsend if you’re stuck editing on a cramped coffeeshop table.
There are a number of wireless iPad display options, but Duet Display is our top pick.
Dropbox
Price: Free (various premium service levels) Link
By now, you’re probably familiar with Dropbox, but if you aren’t, this is the company that made cloud storage famous. These guys make sharing and storing files easier than ever, and helps make all your data accessible on each of your devices.
Viscosity
Price: Free 30-day trial, then $9 Link
Viscosity is a great replacement for the built-in VPN tool in OS X. Designed to let you log on with just a couple of clicks, Viscosity will work with a number of VPN clients, whether you need to log into work, protect yourself at coffeeshops, or simply evade regional lockouts on media.
Chrome Remote Desktop
Price: Free Link
There have been a number of tools over the years that let you log into your computer when you’re not at home, and one-by-one, they’ve all turned to a non-free model. Not so with the Chrome Remote Desktop. As long as both your home and away PCs are on, you’ll be able to log in and control the remote PC without paying a dime.
Note: both PCs will also need to have the Chrome web browser installed and allowed to run in the background.
Crashplan
Price: Free to external drives, 30-day cloud storage; $60 per year for backing up one computer; $150 per year for backing up between 2 – 10 computers Link
Crashplan is backup made simple. If you don’t want to pay, the company will offer you free use of their backup software (if Time Machine is not to your liking) as well as 30 days worth of online backups.
Their paid plans are really compelling, however: $60 a year gets you unlimited online backups of your entire computer and network attached storage. You can retrieve individual files or, should emergency strike, pay to have a new hard drive with your backup overnighted to your house.
TextExpander
Price: Free trial, then $45 Link
TextExpander is kind of like autocorrect, but for your Mac. You can program snippets of text into the TE interface, and when you type them into nearly any program, TextExpander replaces them with your pre-chosen macro.
For example, you could type ‘soon5’ in a meeting email, and TextExpander would replace it with “I’m running late, but I should be there in five minutes.” The new version is easier than ever, and TE includes a fun chart that will show you how many hours you save, based on a specific typing speed.
Airfoil
Price: Free trial, then $29 Link
Airfoil lets you send any audio from your Mac to any Airplay source – speakers, Airports, AppleTVs, you name it. It offers granular, per-app control that the system option sorely lacks, and lets you send audio out to multiple sets of speakers.
Rogue Amoeba, developers of Airfoil, include a free copy of Airfoil Speakers with each purchase, which lets you receiveAirplay audio on your Mac (or iPhone / Android device).
One fun way to use both of these is to set up Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers on your Mac, then Airplay your iPhone audio to your Mac – this way you can send one phone’s audio out over multiple sets of Airplay speakers, something that is otherwise impossible to do.
F.Lux
Price: Free Link
F.lux is based on the idea that seeing blue light late at night is bad for your eyes, and impairs your quality of sleep. The app works by changing the color temperature of your display (computer displays are typically pretty “blue”) as the sun sets; by the time you’re ready to call it a night, things can be looking pretty orange.
It definitely reduces stress on your eyes; if you don’t believe us, try quitting F.lux after you’ve used it for an hour – you’ll be scrambling to re-enable it.
GrandPerspective
Price: Free Link
One of the most frustrating things about the Mac to this day (not that the PC is all that much better, frankly) is the inability to see your disk space. How much free space do you have, what folders and files are using it all, etc.
GrandPerspective is a free utility that gets rid of all that storage uncertainty by displaying information in an easy-to-read, blocky interface.
Little Snitch
Price: $35 Link
This is the best firewall you didn’t know you needed. Little Snitch not only monitors for inbound connections, but also outbound connections. It’s a great program for finding out what apps on your computer are calling home and transmitting information; you can block any of them at any time, just by tapping a button.
The devs recently released a companion product known as Micro Snitch; Micro Snitch has a similar philosophy to Little Snitch, except it explicitly monitors your webcam and microphone, so you can be sure nobody is using them to record you.
Malwarebytes
Price: Free Link
Worried about whether your Mac can catch a virus or worm? With the platform’s growing popularity, you probably should be.
Marlwarebytes is a trusted name in PC security, and with a recent acquisition, they’re bringing expertise over to the Mac.
The software itself is free, but you can sign up for premium service and support at a rate of just $25/year.
Capture Gif
Price: Free, or $6 Link
It may seem like a strange addition, but the ability to quickly record your screen and make GIFs can come in handy. You can keep it simple with basic text GIFs, or record yourself doing full-screen actions (take a look at our El Capitan Split View overview for an idea).
Capture Gif offers a free version with limited settings, but the $6 full copy is cheap and offers you the ability to change the framerate of the GIF as well as innovative mouse tracking features.
Best Mac Apps: Internet
GoogleChrome
Price: Free Link
Google’s internet browser has become the world’s most browser, and for good reason. Unfortunately, those reasons don’t really exist on the Mac – not only is Chrome slower than Safari, but it’s also a power hog and can drop your battery life by up to an hour!
Still, it has its uses. Chrome comes bundled with an always-updated version of Adobe Flash, so you’ll never need to worry about updating a version for the Mac. Need to check out a Flash-enabled site? Just spin up Chrome, check it out, and shut it down. Given how many vulnerabilities Flash tends to introduce, it’s worth keeping exposure as limited as possible.
Skype
Price: Free Link
You’re probably aware of Microsoft’s VoIP product by this point, but it’s worth pointing out. Despite competing alternatives, Skype’s sheer cross-platform connectivity and pervasiveness means that it’s always handy to have around if someone wants to call you.
Transmission
Price: Free Link
When it comes to BitTorrent, the cat is out of the bag, and it isn’t going back in. We like Transmission for an OS X torrent client, because it’s cross platform and open source, and also because it isn’t constantly trying to get you to download things you don’t want (ahem, μTorrent).
Bt yahoo mail app for mac. Download the My BT app. It's quick and easy to manage your BT account on the go - the My BT app is available for your smartphone, iPad or tablet. To download, text MyBT to 81192 for a link. Or get it from your app store.iPhone 4s or iPad2 and above on iOS 9.0 or later and Android smartphone or tablet on Android 6.0 or later.
Best Mac Apps: Music and Video
Spotify
Price: Free, or $10/month Premium tier Link
Spotify is one of the world’s largest music streaming services, with over 75 million users accessing either its free or pay tiers. The software itself is completely free, supporting your listening with advertising inserted into the streams.
If you don’t mind ponying up, however, you can snag unlimited ad-free music streaming for just $10/ month, with the ability to skip around to whatever music you like, and cache songs to your device for offline listening.
iOS and Android apps round out the experience.
VLC
Price: Free Link
If you keep any quantity of your own media, VLC will be well known. For everyone else, this app is the gold standard for watching videos from the internet. No nonsense codec downloads, nothing else to install, just download it, open, and play.
Best Mac Apps: Productivity
AirMail
Price: $10 Link
Running just $10 in the Mac App Store, AirMail builds upon the basic functionality in the Mail app and adds some pretty nice integration and power user features (superior keyboard shortcuts, snoozing an email like Gmail’s Inbox does). You can import files directly from services like Dropbox or Google Drive, or send attachments that are too large to email by using Droplr. One of the best features over Mail, however, is how AirMail has worked to integrate itself into the best known third-party productivity apps – so if you use software like Wunderlist, Fantastical, and Evernote, you should take a look at AirMail.
Clear
Price: $10 Link
Clear, like Mailbox, made waves for introducing powerful features paired with an extremely simple and intuitive user interface. Mailbox was for, well, email, but Clear is for keeping you focused at the tasks on hand. It works best when you pair it with the iPhone and iPad apps (which together cost a $5 one-time fee); there’s also an app for the Apple Watch
Fantastical
Price: $40 Link
OS X’s Calendar isn’t bad, but it’s also not very useful if you need to track more than the very occasional event. Fantastical (now actually Fantastical 2) is extremely powerful, with a natural language engine that lets you remember events just by typing them out. It comes with a free trial if you don’t feel the need to shell out $40 quite just yet.
Microsoft Office
Price: $70 / year for 1 PC or Mac, $100/yr for 5 PCs or Macs, $150 one-time purchase for 1 computer Link
Essential Mac Apps 2020
There may be the free Google Docs and Apple iWork suites, but nothing can beat the powerhouse that is Microsoft Office. Aside from the fact that its omnipresence nearly requires you to use it (so that your files can all be shared between jobs), new versions for iOS and Android make it very easy to work on your projects on the go. While Microsoft’s attempts to send Office into the cloud with a monthly or yearly subscription, they do still offer standalone installations.
Essential Free Mac Apps 2015 2017
Best Mac Apps: Graphics and Photo Editing
Pixelmator
Price: Free 30-day trial, then $30 Link
Adobe’s Photoshop CC might reign supreme at the top of the image editing heap, but if you’re not a professional, or very serious amateur designer or photographer, it probably doesn’t make much sense to shell out for it. For the price of less than one month of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription, you can get a permanent standalone copy of Pixelmator. There are definitely Mac photo editing apps out there that can do more than Pixelmator, but few can match it on a features-per-dollar basis.
Best Mac Apps: Programming
Textmate 2.0 (beta)
Price: Free Link
If you’re a programmer, you know that your choice of environment not only says a lot about you but can impact your workflow in drastic and unforeseen ways. Should Vim be getting you down, take a look at Textmate’s most recent version, a product of Macromates.
Textmate offers an easy way to work on a project’s many files at once without getting lost, and features powerful plug-in architecture should you need a tool that it lacks.
Best Mac Apps: Emulators
Andy Android Emulator
Best Free Mac Apps
Price: Free Link
If you’re on a Mac, chances are you probably prefer to use iOS over Android. Thinking about seeing how things work on the other side? The Andy Android emulator works extremely well to give you a virtual Android tablet. For the most part, this virtual model works exactly like you’d expect.
The only downside is that the most recent release – which came out in November – only goes up to Android 4.2.2, so some apps and features might not work. Hopefully, we’ll see an update to Android M or N before too long. If you just want to try things out, however, it’s more than good enough.
Disagree with the titles we’ve put on the best Mac apps list? Sound out in the comments with some of your favorite apps or tools that you think are the must-haves for any Mac user.
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Did you just pick up a shiny new 13-inch MacBook Pro? Apple mac mail app sending legit files to junk online. Or even a 16-inch MacBook Pro, maybe a MacBook Air, perhaps an iMac? No matter your Mac of choice, there are some Mac apps out there that are just so good that they should be one of the first apps that you download and install on your new machine right away! Here are our favorites.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you easily backup important documents, files, photos, video, and other things. While your stuff is stored in Dropbox, you can access it across any other device, as long as you're logged in to the same account. Any changes to your files get saved automatically, though you can also check older versions on the web interface if needed. Everything you upload into Dropbox is encrypted, and there are also collaborative features that make it easy to share files with others. One thing I absolutely love about Dropbox is how it integrates with pretty much any other app I need, so my stuff is accessible from anywhere and in anything.
A free account gives you 2GB for free (and the chance to get more space with referrals), but they have plans that start at around $11.99 for 2TB.
Dropbox
Online backup for all of your files, with integrations in almost every app.
Source: iMore
I'm on Twitter pretty much all day, every day. My app of choice is Tweetbot from Tapbots. The reason I use Tweetbot over every other Twitter app is because I love the interface, as it's easy to use, and it provides plenty of powerful features. You can quickly search for topics that interest you, filter and mute hashtags and people that are annoying you temporarily (or permanently, it's up to you), create lists, and there is support for a multi-column view. I've been using Tweetbot on my iOS and Mac devices for years — there's no other app that I would rather use. Plus, you don't see promoted ad tweets.
Tweetbot
Tweetbot has plenty of powerful features that make it the best Twitter app on Mac.
Source: iMore
While I use Safari as my default browser on my Mac, it's always good to have an alternative, especially since some things don't always work properly in Safari. For my alternative, I use Google Chrome. It syncs with your Google account, has numerous plugins and extensions to enhance the browser experience, and it works better with certain Google apps than Safari, like Meet.
Google Chrome
Chrome is a great alternative browser that syncs with your Google account and has a ton of plugins and extensions.
Source: iMore
I have a lot going on daily, so my schedule gets really hectic at times. That's why I need a calendar, and I continue to use Fantastical on my Mac. Fantastical has a beautiful interface that is easy to use, and you have several different views on how to look at your calendar. It integrates with your iCloud, Google, Exchange, or even local calendar, so any changes are saved and sync automatically. The agenda list view is a great way to see what's coming up in your schedule, and it's easy to create events with the natural language input support. Fantastical also integrates with Reminders, so you have your calendar and tasks in one place.
Fantastical
Fantastical provides a beautiful interface for your schedule, and natural language input makes it easy to schedule events and reminders.
Source: iMore
One of the most important things you can do to protect yourself online is to have secure passwords. For this, you're going to want a good password manager, which can track your passwords and other sensitive data, while also helping you generate randomized passwords to use. With 1Password, you can create different vaults for personal and work accounts (or whatever else you need), sync your data across multiple devices (it's available on everything), and even store things like bank info, credit card numbers, and other things that need extra security. 1Password encrypts everything so that it's safe, and you can't even get in without a master password. I've been using 1Password for years, and it's one app that I cannot live without.
1Password
Generate safe and secure randomized passwords, track all of your passwords and other sensitive data, and sync everything on all of your devices.
Source: iMore
Need to do a bit of hard drive cleanup? DaisyDisk is a must have. This app lets you easily see what is cluttering up your hard drive thanks to bright and colorful blocks, so you can see what's taking up the most space. You can delete stuff directly from DaisyDisk to free up space, and it's all done in an intuitive interface that's a joy to use. Decluttering has never been prettier.
DaisyDisk
DaisyDisk lets you easily visualize what's on your hard drive, and you can delete useless files directly through DaisyDisk's intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Source: iMore
Once you start installing a lot of apps, you may find your Menubar cluttered with a bunch of icons. Bartender is an app that helps you tidy up that Menubar by tucking away unwanted icons into a kind of sub-Menubar. With Bartender, you can choose to rearrange your icons into an order that makes more sense to you, as well as choosing what is shown in the main Menubar, and what to hide in a secondary Menubar. Or, you can hide some items completely, because they're unnecessary — it's up to you.
Bartender
Tidy up your Menubar by rearranging and hiding app's Menubar icons as you see fit.
Source: iMore
The Spotlight Search in macOS is alright, but you can do so much more with Alfred. Alfred is essentially Spotlight on steroids. You can do your basic search functionality, but you can also create workflows to make your life easier, access your clipboard history at anytime, view contact info, have app integrations, text expansion, search the web, and more.
Alfred 4
Boost your productivity like never before with Alfred and it's many magical wonders with the keyboard.
Source: Pixelmator Team
Whether you're an amateur or professional, you may end up having to do some photo editing at some point. Pixelmator Pro is one of our favorite apps to get the job done. It's a powerful photo editor that will have all of the tools you need, but it's intuitive and easy to use, unlike Photoshop, which some may find intimidating. With Pixelmator Pro, you have many professional and non-destructive editing tools, allowing you to bring the best out of your photographs. And the image editing is enhanced by Pixelmator's machine learning, so you get the absolute best looking photos with ease. Plus, the price is reasonable and affordable.
Pixelmator Pro
Pixelmator Pro brings professional-grade tools in a simple and easy-to-use interface for everyone.
Source: Bare Bones Software, Inc.
If you're looking for a professional text, code, and markup editor, then you should download BBEdit. It's used often by web application developers, writers, and software developers who need powerful tools for editing, searching, and manipulation of text, code, and HTML/XML markup. Some features of BBEdit include grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for a wide variety of source code languages, code folding, and more.
Unsure if BBEdit is what you're looking for? The app has a 30-day trial for you to put the app through its paces, and then you can decide whether or not to purchase the full package, which has even more advanced features. But you can continue to use the free version of BBEdit too.
BBEdit
BBEdit is one of the best go-to apps out there for text, code, and markup editing.
What are your favorite apps?
These are just a few of our favorite must-have apps for a new Mac. Do you have any recommendations of your own? Let us know in the comments!
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HackedMacbook Essential Apps
Breaking: More Twitter account features disable due to crypto hack
Verified and non-verified Twitter accounts are having some features disabled, including the ability to tweet. Twitter is recommending resetting your password.