5 Best Mac Apps
By Mike Agerbo
September 01, 2015
Product Discovery
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There’s no shortage of great Mac apps, ranging from useful to fun. That being said, I definitely have a few favourites that I think of as essential. Here they are:
f.lux
FREE
Staring at a computer screen for a long period of time can cause eyestrain and, as the day wears on, disrupt your sleep. The culprit that causes these issues is the blue light emitted by your computer screen. To combat eyestrain and sleep disruption, I recommend downloading f.lux. f.lux is a fantastic app that adapts the light emitted by your computer screen to the time of day. In the morning, the app will make your screen nice and bright but as the day wears on, the app will adapt the screen’s brightness to look more like indoor lighting cutting down on the blue light. It might take a bit to adjust to the change, but give it a chance—I think you’ll find that you’re glad you did.
Pixelmator
$34.99
If you’ve ever needed a tool to make small edits to images, you know that a lot of image editors can be complicated and pricey. If you’re not doing complicated editing, Pixelmator is just the tool for you. At $30, it’s a great app that will let you edit images, apply more than 160 effects, paint, and draw. It also uses Apple’s Handoff, allowing you to work on a file on your computer and pick up where you left off on your iPad.
VLC
FREE
VLC is an app that I recommend for ALL computer users, regardless of whether they’re using Mac OS or Windows. VLC is a media player that supports just about any media file type. Using VLC, you can watch or listen to all kinds of media without worrying about compatibility or file conversions. If you’ve run into issues watching or listening to media files with Mac’s built-in QuickTime, give VLC a try.
Microsoft Office 365
Starting at $6.99/month
Unless you’ve never used a computer, you’re probably already familiar with Microsoft Office. If you need word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation software this is still the gold standard. Recently, Microsoft has made some changes to this software suite and it’s now available as a monthly subscription called Office 365. This subscription gives you access to the software in the cloud, which means you can use Office and access your Office files from a number of devices, including your tablet. The subscription also means you get all the software updates as soon as they’re released, without having to download them.
Disk Doctor
$2.99
Over time, every computer gets a little jammed up with unnecessary files. Items such as application caches and logs and old email downloads can pile up over years and take up valuable disk space. Disk Doctor saves you from having to sift through these files manually by scanning your hard drive and providing you with a summary of the amount of disk space being take up by Application Caches, Application Logs, Downloads, Extra Languages, Mail Downloads, and Trash Can files. The app lets you mass delete all these unnecessary items, keep entire categories, or look through files and move them to a different folder so they’re not deleted.
Although this isn’t an exhaustive list of the great apps available for Mac, these are some of my favourites. Give them a try!
f.lux
FREE
Staring at a computer screen for a long period of time can cause eyestrain and, as the day wears on, disrupt your sleep. The culprit that causes these issues is the blue light emitted by your computer screen. To combat eyestrain and sleep disruption, I recommend downloading f.lux. f.lux is a fantastic app that adapts the light emitted by your computer screen to the time of day. In the morning, the app will make your screen nice and bright but as the day wears on, the app will adapt the screen’s brightness to look more like indoor lighting cutting down on the blue light. It might take a bit to adjust to the change, but give it a chance—I think you’ll find that you’re glad you did.
Pixelmator
$34.99
If you’ve ever needed a tool to make small edits to images, you know that a lot of image editors can be complicated and pricey. If you’re not doing complicated editing, Pixelmator is just the tool for you. At $30, it’s a great app that will let you edit images, apply more than 160 effects, paint, and draw. It also uses Apple’s Handoff, allowing you to work on a file on your computer and pick up where you left off on your iPad.
VLC
FREE
VLC is an app that I recommend for ALL computer users, regardless of whether they’re using Mac OS or Windows. VLC is a media player that supports just about any media file type. Using VLC, you can watch or listen to all kinds of media without worrying about compatibility or file conversions. If you’ve run into issues watching or listening to media files with Mac’s built-in QuickTime, give VLC a try.
Microsoft Office 365
Starting at $6.99/month
Unless you’ve never used a computer, you’re probably already familiar with Microsoft Office. If you need word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation software this is still the gold standard. Recently, Microsoft has made some changes to this software suite and it’s now available as a monthly subscription called Office 365. This subscription gives you access to the software in the cloud, which means you can use Office and access your Office files from a number of devices, including your tablet. The subscription also means you get all the software updates as soon as they’re released, without having to download them.
Disk Doctor
$2.99
Over time, every computer gets a little jammed up with unnecessary files. Items such as application caches and logs and old email downloads can pile up over years and take up valuable disk space. Disk Doctor saves you from having to sift through these files manually by scanning your hard drive and providing you with a summary of the amount of disk space being take up by Application Caches, Application Logs, Downloads, Extra Languages, Mail Downloads, and Trash Can files. The app lets you mass delete all these unnecessary items, keep entire categories, or look through files and move them to a different folder so they’re not deleted.
Although this isn’t an exhaustive list of the great apps available for Mac, these are some of my favourites. Give them a try!