With Apple’s fancy new MacBook Pros, its various new iMacs, and of course, 2020’s and 2021 still-excellent M1 MacBook Air all offering inconceivable performance and battery life, it’s no way been a better time to give (or admit) a new Mac.
1. Pixelmator Pro
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| Credits: Pixelmator Pro |
Adobe Photoshop is a crucial tool for image and print editing, but it’s super precious, thanks to its yearly$9.99 subscription. Pixelmator Pro, on the other hand, has a one-time figure of$19.99 while still offering tons of important tools for editing your prints. The rearmost update added a host of useful new features, including the capability to incontinently remove the background from an image and bettered masking and selection tools.
2. Spark
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| Credit: Spark |
Spark is one of my favorite email apps for mobile, and the company’s Mac app is just as great, offering a fast UI, helpful automated sorting, and tons of customization for power users. And it supports Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, Exchange, and more, along with integrations for popular work services like Trello, Asana, Zoom, and GoToMeeting. No one likes having to deal with email, but Spark makes it a little easier to get it done.
3. DaisyDisk
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| Credit: DaisyDisk |
It happens to everyone sooner or later: after a few years of accumulating photos, videos, music, and other random documents, you start to get the dreaded notifications that you’re running out of room on your hard drive. DaisyDisk is meant to help — it scans your computer and shows you just how much storage you’re using, broken down by files and folders in neat, colorful rings that make it simple to dial down to the junk that’s taking up all your space and clear out your computer.
4. MonitorControl
As more people shift towards working remotely, there’s been a big uptick in building out home offices and using an external monitor. MonitorControl is a nifty little menubar app that lets you control your external display’s brightness and volume (if it has built-in speakers) using your Mac’s function keys, just like on Apple’s own hardware.
5. Hand Mirror
Video calls are a bigger part of the day-to-day workplace than ever before. Hand Mirror is a simple app that lives in your Mac’s menubar and is designed to help you look your best on calls: a single click, and it launches a quick window that shows what the current view from your webcam is, letting you double-check that you’ve moved all the workout gear or messy laundry from your background or that your hair is neat before you start your Zoom call.
6. 1Password
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| Credit: 1Password |
Your passwords probably aren’t secure enough. 1Password will help you fix that, generating ultra-secure passwords and keeping track of everything. With deep integration into both Safari and Chrome, a clean UI, and tons of useful added features for protecting not just passwords but credit cards, documents, and more, it’s a one-stop-shop for securing your digital life. An individual subscription is $36 per year, but if you have more than one person in your household, you’re probably better off with the five-person family subscription for $60 per year that adds the option to share passwords, too.
7. Dozer
Managing your menubar apps can get out of hand pretty quickly (especially if you just installed any of the ones that we’re recommending here). And it’s only become a bigger problem thanks to Apple’s new MacBook Pro models, which eat up a big chunk of your menubar real estate with a hefty webcam notch. Well, Dozer is here to help. It’s a free app that makes it easy to hide all the menubar icons for things you want open but doesn’t necessarily need to have visible all the time. If you prefer a little more flash, there’s also Bartender, which costs $15 but offers a fancier design
8. VLC
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| Credit: VLC |
Local media playback isn’t the critical function it once was, thanks to the rise of streaming as the main way of consuming movies, TV shows, and music. But for those times that you do need to play local audio or video file, there’s still no better app than VLC, which can handle virtually any file format or codec you’ve ever heard of and quite a few that you haven’t. Plus, it’s completely free.
9. Authy Desktop
If you’re not using two-factor authentication for your important passwords and log-ins, go do that now. Authy is one of the better apps around for your two-factor setup, with cross-platform apps on iOS and Android. The Mac app does exactly what the mobile versions do: it gets you your 2FA codes when you need to log in. But it’s far more helpful, due to its being on the computer that you’re probably trying to log into something on.
10. Alfred 4 for Mac
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| Credit: Alfred 4 |
Like many apps on this list, Alfred does something that one of Apple’s built-in apps already does — in this case, search your computer. But Alfred is way better: a lightning-fast search tool and app launcher that supports virtually endless customization, including automated workflows, bespoke Google searches, or whatever else you can think of. Once you use it for a few days, you’ll never be able to go back to Spotlight again.
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This is really helpful!
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