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The Best Mac Apps, Tools and Utilities
May 8, 2024
Article on Cult of Mac: https://www.cultofmac.com/854892/best-mac-apps/
AirBuddy: https://deals.cultofmac.com/sales/airbuddy-connect-airpods-to-your-mac?utm_source=cultofmac.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=airbuddy-connect-airpods-to-your-mac&utm_term=scsf-585760&utm_content=a0xRn0000004CyjIAE&scsonar=1
BBEdit: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bbedit/id404009241?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
Blip: https://blip.net/
Camo: https://reincubate.com/camo/
Forecast: https://overcast.fm/forecast
Front and Center: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/front-and-center/id1493996622?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
IINA: https://iina.io
Maccy: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/maccy/id1527619437?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
MacWhisper: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
MarsEdit: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/marsedit-5-blog-editor/id6444836021?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
Mimestream: https://mimestream.com
OpenEmu: https://openemu.org/
Pastel: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pastel/id413897608?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
Pixelmator Pro: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixelmator-pro/id1289583905?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
Rectangle: https://rectangleapp.com/
UTM Virtual Machines: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines/id1538878817?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
More Apple news: http://www.cultofmac.com
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0:00
Finding good apps can be hard, especially if you're new to the Mac
0:03
Luckily, we've put together a list of the 16 very best apps
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These cover all kinds of work, from writing, graphic design, video editing, to a few simple
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utilities that everyone can make use of. Jumping right in, AirBuddy is a much better way to manage your Bluetooth devices between
0:23
your Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, whatever else you might have. When you're playing music from your iPhone through your AirPods, you sit down at your
0:31
Mac, you just click the AirBuddy icon in the menu bar, and it'll yoink audio from your
0:36
iPhone to your computer. If you have both a work Mac and a personal Mac on your desk, you'll really like Magic Handoff
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Now Apple will let you share a keyboard, mouse, and trackpad between two Macs with their own
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feature called Continuity Keyboard, but AirBuddy takes it to the next level, giving you manual
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control of all of your Bluetooth devices. AirBuddy normally costs $10, but you can find it at just $8.99 through Cult of Mac deals
1:01
Next up is bbedit, an incredibly powerful text editor. It has been a top choice among Mac nerds for over 30 years
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It can handle projects of all sizes and code in all languages
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You can pull and commit projects directly to and from GitHub. You can open and save files over an FTP server
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Calling it an editor honestly sells it short. It has regular expression commands, AppleScript support, text transforms
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It is a word processing wonder. Or you can just keep it simple and write blog posts in Markdown
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You can subscribe to bbedit for $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, or a limited free version
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available in the Mac App Store. So the best way to transfer files between two Apple devices in the same room is with
1:48
AirDrop, but the best way to do it remotely over the internet is with Blip
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Blip is different from Dropbox and Google Drive because you don't have to upload your
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files to the cloud and then wait for somebody to download it on the other end
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Blip creates a direct peer-to-peer connection between two Macs and transfers them instantly
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You just click on someone's name in the menu bar, drag files into the window, and send
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it their way. You can do entire folders at a time, project files for Logic and Final Cut Pro, whatever
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you need. You can download it for free from blip.net. Next up is Camo
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Instead of using your crummy webcam built into your MacBook and the microphone on your
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AirPods, you can upgrade your video quality for live streaming, video conferences, using
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any modern USB camera, or even an iPhone, and a desktop microphone
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It's what I'm using to create this very video right now. There are a bunch of advanced features for picking which lens of the iPhone it's using
2:51
adding a custom watermark, adjusting image brightness and contrast, adding background blur effects, and more
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You can download Camo for $49.99 a year from reincubate. If you make a podcast, then Forecast is a must-have app
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It is the simplest utility for adding chapter markers to your show
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In Logic, you export your podcast as a wave, and you open it in Forecast to see all the chapters
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From there, you can add episode-specific metadata like the title, description, and you can add
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chapter-specific artwork and URLs. Then you just encode it as an MP3 from there
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Forecast is available for free from Overcast. Next up is a really simple window management utility that I consider an absolute must-have
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It's called Front and Center. It changes one little detail about your Mac
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Normally, when you click on a window, only that window comes to the front
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But when you have Front and Center enabled in Classic mode, when you click on a window
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all of the windows belonging to that app will come forward as well
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So if you have a bunch of Finder windows or a bunch of Safari windows open, clicking on
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any of them will bring all of them forward. This is already how it works when you click on an app icon in the dock, but now it'll
4:09
do this all the time. I use Safari and Finder as examples because usually I have between the two about 10 or
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15 windows open at any given time. And with Front and Center, I don't need to make sure all of them are visible on my screen
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because clicking on one of them will let me see all of them. If you like organized chaos like me, you will find it an absolutely indispensable tool
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It's only $4.99 from the Mac App Store. iINA is a free video player for the Mac that goes above and beyond what QuickTime can do
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It supports a bunch of extra file formats like MKV and AVI
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The user interface is modern and highly customizable to your preferences. I added a screenshot button to the video player that I can just click to take a PNG
4:52
image, and I use it every day. There's also a picture-in-picture mode to keep a video or a music playlist floating
4:59
above all your other windows. For movies and TV shows downloaded to your computer, you can instantly load subtitles
5:06
that it'll find and match online. You can even open YouTube videos
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Shift-Command-O, just paste in a URL, and you can watch YouTube from the video player
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on your Mac. iINA is free and open source. You can download it from the project website
5:22
Once you install a Clipboard Manager on your Mac, you'll never know how it was possible
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to live without one. You go to copy one thing that's really important, but then you accidentally copy something else
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and oh no, it's gone forever. You gotta go back and find it again
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No more. Thanks to Mackie, you have a new keyboard shortcut on your Mac
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Shift-Command-C will bring up this pop-up menu that lets you instantly paste things
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out of your clipboard history. You can just hit Command-2 to paste the second most recent thing you copied
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Mackie will keep paragraphs of text, images, files, all sorts of things
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You can customize the size of the clipboard history to contain hundreds of items
6:01
And you can buy it for $9.99 from the Mac App Store. MacWhisper is an app that creates highly accurate transcripts out of video and audio files
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Just drag it in and it'll instantly start transcribing. You can edit the transcript and export it in a bunch of different formats
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A plain text file, a subtitle file for a video, a nicely formatted HTML page, a PDF, and more
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All the core functionality is available in the free version, which comes with the small
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transcription model. It's a bit of a misnomer because even small does an unbelievably accurate job at creating transcripts
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If you pay for pro, you get the larger models, which do take up more space and run slower, but create more accurate transcriptions
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You also get cloud transcriptions. And you can create transcriptions of audio on your Mac if you want to create a transcript
6:50
out of a meeting that you're having, for example. It's available for $30 from Gunroad
6:55
If you're a writer with a WordPress blog, then MarsEdit is a much nicer place to start
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your writing. You don't have to worry about losing your internet connection, your web browser bugging
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out and quitting, another author on the site taking over your draft and losing your work
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or any of the other many problems you've probably experienced before. MarsEdit is a reliable, native Mac app that lets you build an offline collection of drafts
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that you can send to your site or publish directly. MarsEdit syncs with WordPress to pull in your existing categories, tags, authors, post history
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You can even upload new images and videos to your media library, even if you have a
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gigantic ancient backlog like we do at Cult of Mac. It only offers mixed support for the new Gutenberg block editor, but honestly that's
7:44
more of a feature than anything. MarsEdit is available with a 14-day free trial for $59.99 from the Mac App Store
7:52
Apple Mail, or really most mail apps, don't do Gmail justice. Gmail has a bunch of extra features that other mail services don't have
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Instead of having folders, Gmail has tags. Instead of having a singular inbox, Gmail has specific categories for starred, social
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promotions, updates, and more. And Gmail plays really nicely with Google Calendar with one-click responses from the
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web app. Mimestream is the desktop app that's been designed to play nice with all of Gmail's
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awesome features. The developer is actually an ex-Apple employee who used to work on Apple Mail and Apple Notes
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And that really shines through because Mimestream looks and feels as if Apple themselves made
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a desktop Gmail client. It's so nice to use. It supports simultaneously using a bunch of different Gmail accounts if you juggle between
8:44
a few different ones. It's available for $49.99 a year from Neil Javeri's website
8:49
OpenEMU is the all-in-one game emulator for Mac. Just like Delta on the iPhone, it couldn't be simpler to use
8:57
To download your ROM files online, or legally copy them from your game cartridges, drag
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the files into the app and it'll add them to your library. It supports Bluetooth game controllers with customized controls, save states, you can
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even turn on filters to make it look like you're playing the game on an old CRT television
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or a pixelated LCD display. It supports dozens of game consoles from the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sony PlayStation
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even the obscure ones like the Vectrex and the ColecoVision. It's available for free from the project website
9:34
If you do any kind of graphic design, especially if you do marketing or branding for multiple
9:38
different clients, then you need Pastel. Pastel lets you create custom color palettes and swatches, give them names, organize them
9:48
into folders. You can just click and drag a color out of a palette to drop it in your graphic design
9:53
app to add it in, or you can right click on a color to copy its RGB or hex values
9:59
or even as code in SwiftUI or Objective-C. You can export a color palette as a wallpaper using a bunch of these different generators
10:08
and on an iPhone, you can import a palette from a picture
10:12
Pastel is available for $9.99 from the Mac App Store. Pixelmator Pro is a modern graphic design app made just for Mac
10:20
Compared to the established names in the game, Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo
10:25
Pixelmator Pro could not be easier to pick up and use. All the basic features you regularly use are put front and center
10:32
Cutting a subject out of a background? That's done in just two clicks
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It's very rare that I find myself reaching for a more powerful app. It even supports vector formats like SVG and superimposing graphics on top of video
10:46
It's available for $49.99 from the Mac App Store. If you're a PC switcher, you might miss the window snapping features that Windows
10:53
has had for years. Well, Rectangle brings that to the Mac. You just grab a window and throw it to the side to fill half the screen, or to the top
11:02
to maximize, or in a corner to fill a quarter of the screen
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But of course, all of these gestures are highly customizable, and you can even add custom
11:11
keyboard shortcuts to tile windows exactly how you want. Even if you don't care much for window snapping, I still use Rectangle for the Command-Control-C
11:21
keyboard shortcut, which perfectly centers a window on my screen. If you have multiple displays, you also might like Control-Option-Command-Left or Right
11:30
which jumps a window between your two displays. Rectangle is available for free with the basic features, or $9.99 for the full feature set
11:39
from the developer's website. UTM Virtual Machines is the easiest way to emulate or virtualize other operating systems
11:46
on your Mac. Unlike VirtualBox, adding new machines is incredibly easy. You just click the plus button, and you can download a pre-made machine from the UTM gallery
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UTM can even virtualize modern operating systems like Windows 11 for the few PC programs you
12:02
might need to run. And you can use all flavors of Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and more
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For your app development, you can install multiple versions of macOS, so you don't
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have to keep a pile of old Macs around. Like I do
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UTM is available for $9.99 in the Mac App Store. So that is my list of the best Mac apps
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For even more, you can click here to check out the awesome apps series that we have on
12:26
Cult of Mac. You can also check out my video on the best games on Apple Arcade
12:32
Remember to like and subscribe. I'm Geographer Jones with Cult of Mac. See you next time. Bye
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