Mac apps - page 16

If you sit in front of an iPad typing up Apple-related how-tos all day long, then working from home is no problem. In fact, it’s simply the next step up from “working from bed.” But for some professions, like musicians, working from home is difficult if not impossible. You might have a home studio, but you still need to get the band together to record them.

Or do you? ConnectionOpen is an app that lets musicians play together over the internet. The wild thing is, it’s a standard plugin for Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools and other audio-editing apps. And now, it’s also available for the iPad.

On Tuesday, we looked at five great iOS apps for working from home. While all of those (apart from the game, perhaps) work on the Mac, let’s take a look at five Mac apps that will help you be more productive behind your front door.

ViDL is a YouTube download app for Mac. It comes from Ole Moritz, developer of the amazing Pythonista and Editorial iOS apps. ViDL is a simple wrapper for the youtube-dl command-line tool, so if you already use that, you don’t need this. But the app is far easier to use than a command-line tools. Plus, it offers a built-in browser, in case you need to log in to a site to get access to the target videos. There’s even a ViDL Safari extension.

Whether your Mac is new or well into its useful life, you can breathe fresh life into it when you add the right apps. This massive bundle from Cult of Mac Deals comes with nine Mac apps, so there’s something for anyone.

The 2020 Mac Productivity Essentials Bundle comes with apps for PDFs, graphics, productivity, VPN protection and more. And you can get them all for just $26 if you use our special promo code.

This week we “watch” our to-dos with Things, read the news really, really fast with NetNewsWire, make Keynote-style presentations with Markdown, and more.

The Cult of Mac Store is full of so many deals that some must leave for others to come in. Among our outgoing deals you will find deep discounts on language lessons, cloud backup, six-month phone plans and intuitive website-building tools.

Slideas is a new Mac app that turns Markdown text into fancy, stylish presentations. It’s like Keynote, only entirely driven by typed text. And like Keynote and PowerPoint, you can add videos, charts, images and more. How does it work?

Like everything else, Macs get cluttered over time. With our houses and cars, clutter can cause trouble finding stuff or embarrassment when a visitor drops by. With our computers, it costs performance, so it’s extra-useful to keep a clean machine.

Nerds of a certain age will have a warm place in their dorky hearts for NetNewsWire. First released in 2002, for years it was the best RSS newsreader on the Mac. At some point, a terrible version turned up on iOS, then withered and died. Now, original developer Brent Simmons is back in charge, and a new, free iOS version of NetNewsWire just launched for iPhone and iPad.

This week we check our grammar with Antidote, turn tweets into email newsletters with Mailbrew and much more.

A brand-new Facebook Messenger app has finally landed on Mac. It gives users the ability to more easily keep on top of their conversations across different devices, and it supports a whole host of useful Messenger features — including group video chat.

You might not be able to download it where you live just yet, however.

This week we read the news with NewsBlur and Unread 2, shoot faux 8mm footage with Rtro, and spend $20 on Tot, a notes app with just seven pages.

Here at Cult of Mac, we’re big fans of VPNs. That’s because they not only keep us secure and private online, they also bypass annoying location-based content restrictions, so you can stream your favorite content anywhere you go. With this great deal, you can get VPN protection on all your devices for three whole years.

This week we keep old folks safe, brew perfectly measured coffee, celebrate Photoshop’s 30th anniversary, and complain about SoundCloud.

Macs are powerful machines, but the right software can vastly expand their capabilities. This bundle of apps offers a bunch of new media-related abilities, from music management to video conversion and ringtone creation.

Twitter is rolling out a new “continue thread” feature that lets you easily publish follow-ups to previous tweets. Simply pull down in the compose window to see recent posts in one place.

There’s also a new update for the official Twitter app on Mac that fixes an annoying notifications bug.

Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt Red is one of the most anticipated games of 2020, and thanks to Nvidia GeForce Now, you’ll be able to play it on your Mac the same day it launches.

Making videos on Mac is easy, if you have the right tools. But subscriptions to creative software suites are expensive, and can take up a lot of space. Often, they’re too complicated for casual users.

Not so with Filmage Screen, a single app that offers a one-stop shop for all your HD video needs.

Lockdown, the open-source firewall app for iOS, is now available on the Mac. And just like the iOS version, it blocks all kinds of connections to trackers and other unwanted snoop-ware.

Mac users already enjoy good options when it comes to privacy apps, so how does Lockdown match up?

This week we dock apps with SwitchGlass, convert photos from Aperture to Lightroom with Avalanche, rip music to shreds with Scatterbrain, and more.

This Presidents Day, instead of thinking about presidents, why not upgrade the apps in your iOS and Mac devices? We’ve rounded up some awesome deals on great software, from half off to as much as 94% off of VPNs, website builders, task managers and more.

SwitchGlass is a handy new Mac app from John Siracusa. It’s like a superpowered dock, conceptually honed from the regular macOS dock by removing some annoyances, and adding some extra subtleties. It’s certainly not the most powerful dock-replacement app out there, but if your needs align with Siracusa’s, then you’re going to love it.

StatusBuddy is a brand-new app for macOS that lets you quickly check on the status of various Apple services in just one click.

The app sits in your Mac’s menu bar where it’s always accessible and displays a red badge when an Apple service is running into issues. It pulls information from Apple’s official status pages so you don’t have to go hunting for it.

Do you still have all your photos stuck in an Aperture library? Aperture won’t even launch in macOS Catalina, so you’re going to have to do something about that. The long-time answer has been to move to Adobe’s Lightroom, but then all your carefully crafted RAW edits are lost, or at least frozen into JPGs, never to be reversed.

Avalanche is a new Mac app that can convert your old Aperture library into a Lightroom library. What’s more, it uses machine learning to reverse-engineer your edits, and then does its best to redo those edits in Lightroom. It seems amazing. And because it doesn’t need the Aperture app installed on your Mac at all, you can use it even if you’ve already upgraded to Catalina.

One Switch isn’t a new app, but it does look like one of the handiest Mac apps for anyone who follows our Cult of Mac how-tos. The app puts a drop-down list in your Mac’s menu bar, offering instant access to all kinds of great hacks and tweaks, from toggling Dark Mode to connecting AirPods.