Setting up a new Mac or just want yours to learn some new tricks? These are my must-have Mac apps and Safari extensions that make my Mac feel like it’s mine.
After growing up on Windows, I’ve been using a Mac since I was old enough to live on my own and make wiser decisions for myself. More than a decade later, I’ve established some preferences for how a Mac works. Each of these tools is necessary to achieve this.
Top 3 Mac Apps
fantastic
You don’t need to attend daily meetings to benefit from a great calendar app. In fact, a well-designed calendar for your Mac might encourage you to seek out the benefits of scheduling. Apple’s built-in calendar (formerly known as iCal) doesn’t inspire the calendar, but it’s an undisputed heavyweight in the Mac calendar space.
Fantastical is a stellar calendar for Mac that started life as a simple menu bar app. Natural language typing made creating events super simple, and a streamlined list view made finding upcoming events just as easy.
Apple’s Calendar app has had a name change and a facelift, but it still doesn’t match Fantastical’s core functionality. These core features carry over into Fantastical today, and years of advancements have transformed the Mac app into something extremely functional compared to the built-in calendar.
Flexibits, the creators of Fantastical, used the same approach with a contacts app called cardhop. Both apps are so functional and easy to use that you’ll never touch the built-in apps again.
Pixelmateur Pro
Of course, I ran a cracked version of Photoshop on my PC in high school. Who is asking ? Hope Adobe isn’t reading this… Either way, Pixelmator Pro is perfect for photo editors and casual graphics producers who can’t justify the cost of something like Creative Cloud. That’s just one reason to watch Pixelmator Pro. The app is also an incredible citizen of the Mac. Pixelmator Pro is constantly introducing useful new features and taking full advantage of machine learning and more. Essential, must-have, go get it now type of app.
iA writer
I’ll keep it simple – iA Writer is a really nice text editor. Apple includes TextEdit in macOS, but I can’t tell you how pretty it is.
I like iA Writer because it allows me to write without everything the chrome that something like Pages includes. iA Writer is also available on iPhone and iPad, which is good. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m told that iA Writer is used for many other functional things beyond simple text input, but I’m a simple user.
Top 3 Safari Extensions
stop the madness makes the modern web navigable without all those mindless interruptions that haunt us all. I also use it to never autoplay videos and automatically use the highest resolution option on YouTube videos.
PiPifier lets you play any picture-in-picture Safari video. macOS supports system-wide PiP, but let’s just say that not all video players on the web are compatible. PiPifier fixes this. True story: I assumed Hulu offered PiP on the Mac until last week when I created one from scratch. No, it was PiPifier. You know an app is great when it’s running in the background without you realizing you’re using it!
Black is my new best friend. I love dark mode, especially after sunset. Many websites support dark mode, but not all. Black is doing a really good job of fixing that. Even the 9to5Mac the backend (WordPress) has a dark mode thanks to Noir! I can’t believe how late I am for Noir.
Everything else
Listed in alphabetical order, these apps are equally important to me and worth trying if you’ve slept on any of them:
- Audio diversion This is how I record any audio podcast and save it in the right place, and still learn what it’s capable of on the Mac.
- Emissions this is how I listen to Relay FM shows and accidental podcast live streams on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, CarPlay and even the Apple Watch without iPhone (plug in this address for Relay and this address for ATP).
- keep you awake is a simple menu bar toggle to shut down or allow your screen to sleep (and replaced with caffeine for me when this app didn’t reach Retina resolution).
- KeyboardCleanTool is an app to clean up your Mac keyboard without accidentally typing anywhere or deleting a bunch of files.
- mactracker is an amazing Apple hardware benchmark app that every enthusiast should have.
- motivation brings back the photo book service that was part of iPhoto and Photos on Mac.
- Bulk photo lets you format image names, resize photos, and add watermarks in a single pass.
- Redacted is a lightweight tool for blacking out, blurring or pixelating things in photos (drawing over something with Markup doesn’t really do the job).
- Reeder is my favorite RSS reader app with iCloud as the syncing solution.
- Hush is a virtual mute button for my microphone while podcasting or trying to limit background noise from screaming kids during Zoom calls.
- Lift is what you get when you cross a text editor with a calculator.
- TextExpander to instantly and reliably turn a few characters into much longer text instead of repeatedly throwing the same sentences.
- Tweeter replaced TweetDeck on Mac when Twitter randomly destroyed it before Space Karen took over the company.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of the best Mac apps of our time, but each of these apps has to live on my Mac for it to look like. my Mac. The machine just feels broken otherwise.
Do you have your own favourites? Share yours with everyone below!
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