Welcome to the January 2021 edition of the Best Mac Apps blog. If you’re just jumping in, this is a monthly series of articles where we pick our favorite Mac apps/tweak and tell you why they are awesome. In this edition we will only recommend new apps from the month of December since it’s just too late for November.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Mac 2021
SPARK
Spark
Spark Image: Readdle Technologies
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.
Spark
Spark is one of the best 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.
FREE ON MAC APP STORE
TWEETBOT
Twitter’s official app exists and is free, but Tweetbot is infinitely better if you’re the kind of person that spends a lot of time on Twitter. The paid app has no ads or suggested tweets clogging up your timeline — instead, it just offers the revolutionary feature of showing all the tweets from the people you follow in the chronological order that they tweeted it. The app looks great, too, with a clean, simple interface that makes reading Twitter almost enjoyable.
Tweetbot
$10
Twitter’s official app is free, but Tweetbot is infinitely better if you’re the kind of person that spends a lot of time on Twitter.
$10 AT MAC APP STORE
$10 AT TAPBOTS
ALFRED 4 FOR MAC
Alfred 4 for Mac
Alfred 4 for Mac Image: Crayons
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.
Alfred 4 for Mac
Alfred is a lightning-fast search tool and app launcher that supports virtually endless customization.
FREE FROM ALFRED
DAISYDISK
DaisyDisk
DaisyDisk Image: Software Ambience
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.
DaisyDisk
$10
DaisyDisk scans your computer and shows you just how much storage you’re using, broken down by files and folders in neat, colorful rings.
$10 AT MAC APP STORE
1PASSWORD
1Password
1Password Image: 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.
1Password
$36
1Password generates ultra-secure passwords and keeps track of everything.
$36 AT IPASSWORD (ANNUALLY)
AUTHY DESKTOP
Authy
Authy Image: Twilio
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.
Authy
Authy is one of the better apps around for your two-factor setup, with cross-platform apps on iOS and Android.
FREE ON TWILIO
MONITORCONTROL
MonitorControl
MonitorControl Image: 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.
MonitorControl
MonitorControl is a nifty little menubar app that lets you control your external display’s brightness and volume using your Mac’s function keys.
FREE FROM GITHUB
HAND MIRROR
Hand Mirror
Hand Mirror Image: 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.
Hand Mirror
Hand Mirror is a simple app that lives in your Mac’s menubar that’s designed to help you look your best on calls.
FREE ON HAND MIRROR
DOZER
Dozer
Dozer Image: Mortennn
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 don’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.
Dozer
A free app that makes it easy to hide all the menubar icons for things you want open, but don’t necessarily need to have visible all the time.
FREE ON GITHUB
MEETER
Meeter
Meeter Image: Bardeen
Meeter is another menubar app that’s designed to help with one thing: wrangling all your different Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Teams, and other video calls into a single place, with one-click links to join whatever meetings you have scheduled. The free app links to your Mac’s built-in Calendar app and can pull in any video calls it sees, putting them in a handy drop-down menu, complete with notifications to remind you to join before your call starts.
Meeter
Meeter is designed to help with one thing: wrangling all your different Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Teams, and other video calls into a single place, with one-click links to join whatever meetings you have scheduled.
FREE FROM MEETER
VLC
VLC
VLC Image: VideoLan
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 a 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.
Best mac apps 2022
Best Mac apps you can download right now
BEST MAC PRODUCTIVITY APPS
The Rectangle app’s menu bar menu
(Image credit: Future)
Tom’s Guide’s own Henry T. Casey raves that Rectangle is the one Mac app he can’t go without, while global editor in chief Mark Spoonauer describes it as the best Mac app you’ve never heard of. And it’s actually free, too. Which, honestly, it should be: Rectangle helps you manage and organize all of your many windows, with a laundry list of keyboard shortcuts and the ability to snap windows to corners and sides of the screen. This is all the kind of stuff that Windows users get by default and have loved for years. While there’s a $10 Pro edition of Rectangle, the free version is definitely the one most should start with.
RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU…
Download Rectangle
Bear
Bear mac app screenshot
(Image credit: Shiny Frog Ltd)
Bear is a free note-taking app that’s versatile, encrypted and easy to use. While Apple continues to make meaningful improvements to its own free Notes app, Bear does a lot of what Notes does better, and with a bigger priority on your privacy. The free version of Bear lets you write notes and to-dos in portable Markdown, organize notes with nested tags, pull assets (like images or text) from web pages into your notes, and even draw or dictate notes using a stylus (for drawing) or Apple Watch (for dictation). If you subscribe to the upgraded Bear Pro version ($14.99/year) you get even more useful features, like the ability to sync notes between devices, encrypt individual notes with a password, or lock the Bear app with Face/Touch ID.
Download Bear
Fantastical
fantastical calendar view
(Image credit: Flexibits)
Sure, your Mac already has a built-in calendar, but Fantastical does it better. This award-winning app has long been a favorite of ours, and at least one Tom’s Guide editor swears by it as a productivity tool. The free version of Fantastical offers a slick, easy-to-use calendar that makes it easy to organize your tasks and see what’s coming up with a glance. If you’re willing to pay a monthly fee, you can subscribe to the upgraded version that offers more useful features, including cross-platform Fantastical access and syncing across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
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Download Fantastical
Spark
Spark email app screenshot
(Image credit: Readdle Technologies Limited)
You can do better than the default Mail app on macOS, and Spark is one of the best alternatives. This free email client offers a number of handy features the competition doesn’t, including a suite of tools that make it easy for multiple people to manage an inbox by doing things like assigning emails to each other or composing emails collaboratively in real time. It also offers excellent tools for organizing your inbox, scheduling emails, and finding exactly the message you’re looking for using a natural language search engine. You can also find stellar Spark clients on iOS and Android, making it a great tool for managing email across multiple devices.
Download Spark
BEST MAC UTILITY APPS
Alfred 4
Alfred 4 screenshot
(Image credit: Running with Crayons Ltd)
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Alfred 4 is the latest and greatest version of Alfred, a better way to search for files on your Mac and the web at large. But Alfred is more than a search tool: you can use it to launch apps, look up spelling and definitions, do quick calculations, and generally make the most of your new Mac. The best part? It’s free, though you can pay a one-time fee to buy a license and upgrade to a version with more powerful features, including the ability to play music from iTunes, create workflows and hotkeys, customize Alfred’s look, and more.
Download Alfred 4
Daisydisk
DaisyDisk screenshot
(Image credit: Software Ambience Corp)
DaisyDisk is one of the best disk space managers for Mac because it’s powerful, versatile and beautiful to look at. This $10 app will quickly scan your storage drive(s) to show you a gorgeous interactive map of how your Mac’s storage space is being used, and its drag-and-drop tools make it easy to quickly move files around and clear up some space. Plus, the latest version now supports scanning drives on cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and more.
Download DaisyDisk
Meeter
Meeter screenshot
(Image credit: Bardeen Inc)
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Meeter is a handy little app that sits in your Mac’s menu bar and organizes all your video calls in one place, whether they be on BlueJeans, FaceTime, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom or about thirty other video-conferencing platforms. In normal times Meeter is ideal for remote workers, but during the COVID-19 pandemic it’s a useful app for anyone who regularly hops on video calls with family and friends. The free version connects to your calendar and automatically pulls in details for your upcoming calls, making it easy to quickly see what you have coming up and join with a single click — no more rooting through your email to find the right meeting link.
Download Meeter
BEST MAC PHOTO/VIDEO EDITING APPS
CleanShot X
Cleanshot x screenshot
(Image credit: Make The Web)
CleanShot X is a turbocharged screen-capturing tool for Macs, and if you spend a lot of time capturing pics or video of your desktop it’s a real life-changer. The basic version costs $29 and gives you a more powerful suite of screen-capturing tools that make it easy to quickly snap a pic, edit or annotate it, combine it with other screenshots, and share it with whoever you need to via drag-and-drop. You can also record video of your screen (even while scrolling) with the option to capture your clicks, your keystrokes, or your webcam, then quickly upload that recording to the cloud or turn it into a GIF. Upgrade to the $8/month Pro version for unlimited cloud storage (the basic version gives you just 1GB), custom domain and branding options, and more.
Download CleanShot X
Pixelmator Pro
pixelmator pro screenshot
(Image credit: Pixelmator Team)
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With a $40 asking price, Pixelmator Pro isn’t the cheapest photo editing app on the App Store, but it’s certainly one of the best. As of this writing it offers more than 50 image editing tools (including a full set of vector tools), including some pretty neat options like photo editing tools that tap into the power of machine learning. It’s a strong competitor to Adobe Photoshop, with the added bonus that you only have to pay for Pixelmator Pro once, whereas Adobe wants to charge you a monthly subscription fee to use its best photo editing tools.
Download Pixelmator Pro
iMovie
iMovie screenshot
(Image credit: Apple)
Apple’s own iMovie isn’t the most robust or professional video editor on the market (those honors go to expensive software like Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro), but it’s one of the easiest to use. More importantly, it’s free, whereas most full-featured video editors will cost you $100 or more. Since iMovie is Apple software it may well already be installed on your Mac, but if not, you can easily grab it from the App Store to do some quick video editing at up to 4K resolution.
Download iMovie
BEST MAC SOCIAL MEDIA APPS
Grids
Grids screenshot
(Image credit: ThinkTime Creations LLC)
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Sure, you can log into Instagram via your web browser of choice, but it’s not exactly the most ideal way to browse the image-sharing service. Enter Grids, a free app that makes browsing Instagram on your Mac a much more enjoyable experience. It has a nice clean interface that loads quickly, and you can use it to view Instagram photos and videos in a variety of layouts. There’s also a handy enlarged view mode for when you want to zoom in. The only downside is that some of the standard features of Instagram (like being able to direct message other users or watch their Stories) are only available in Grids if you subscribe to the Pro version, which is $2.50/month on a month-to-month basis or $1/month if you buy a yearly subscription.
Download Grids
Tweetbot
Tweetbot for Mac screenshot
(Image credit: Tapbots)
If you use Twitter frequently, Tweetbot is a must-have app for Mac. This $10 app makes the experience of using Twitter much more enjoyable by giving you access to a powerful suite of filters that can help you block out spoilers, sponsored tweets, and more. It has a slick user interface with that makes it easy to track hashtags, switch between accounts, and jot down notes on user profiles that only you can see.
Download Tweetbot
BEST MAC ENTERTAINMENT APPS
Spotify
Spotify desktop client screenshot
(Image credit: Spotify)
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If you’re not already using Apple Music to kick out the jams, chances are good you’re a Spotify user. Even if you aren’t yet, Spotify makes it easy to set up a free account and start listening to your favorite artists, and the macOS desktop app gives you more control over your playlists than the web app in a slick, easy-to-navigate design.
Download Spotify
Steam
Steam for Mac promo image
(Image credit: Steam)
If you want to play games on your Mac, it’s a good idea to download Steam. Launched by Valve nearly two decades ago, Steam has grown to become one of the biggest PC game platforms in the world. Not every game on Steam is compatible with macOS, but Steam makes it easy to filter through its 50,000+ games to see which ones run on Macs. There are lots of amazing options too, including everything from Sid Meier’s Civilization VI and Stardew Valley to Cuphead, Hades, Disco Elysium and more. Plus, you can connect a compatible Bluetooth controller for some old-fashioned gamepad gaming on your new Mac.
Download Steam
VLC
When you absolutely, positively must play a video file and you’re not sure Apple’s QuickTime player will support it, VLC is the first media player you should download. It’s one of the best media players on the market because it supports so many different types of multimedia, including DVDs, audio/video CDs, and file formats like Xvid, DivX, Real Video, and more — including Ogg Vorbis, a personal favorite. The best part? It’s free, open-source, and available across multiple platforms, including iOS.
Conclusion
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