Best Apps For Macbook Free

Finding the best apps and utilities for your Apple laptop or desktop can be a daunting task. On top of testing each app for functionality and compatibility, you may have to ensure that your computer meets all system requirements before downloading.

Best Apps For Macbook Free

For a Better User Experience
Screenshot of Alfred search app for Mac
Alfred COURTESY OF ALFRED
BetterSnapTool ($3)
Yes, you can use Split View on MacOS to view two applications side by side, but it’s nowhere near as intuitive as it is on Microsoft’s Windows, where you can simply drag a window to a corner and have it snap into place. This app is worth the $3 if you don’t want to mess with resizing window borders constantly. Magnet ($8) is another good option, although now that they’ve raised the price from $3, BetterSnapTool is a better deal.

Amphetamine (Free)
If you’ve ever had to keep wiggling a finger on the trackpad during a movie or YouTube video to stop the screen from going to sleep over and over (or maybe during a particularly long download), you’ll appreciate an app that lets you keep the screen on for certain tasks. It even works with external displays. Sure, you can keep going into your system preferences to change the screensaver and hard disk shutdown settings, but that can get tiresome quickly.

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Tweetbot ($10)
Twitter can be an overwhelming hive stream of consciousness, and finding the tweets you want can feel like looking for a handful of needles in a big, international haystack. Tweetbot’s sidebar makes using Twitter more manageable by giving you one-click access to your timelines, saved searches, and DMs. You can also select from a list of filters to block out tweets you don’t want to see, such as spoilers, sponsored tweets, and specific keywords, users, and hashtags that you personally customize.

Alfred (Free)
The default search tool on MacOS isn’t bad, but there’s room for it to go deeper. Alfred is a supercharged alternative that lets you create custom shortcuts to programs and file folders, activate system commands by typing, create automated custom workflows that begin with the push of a button or a typed phrase, and, well, a lot more. It’s free, but you can purchase a version called Powerpack that has more features, such as contacts and app integrations. It costs 29 British pounds (around $38) for a single user license or 49 pounds (around $64) for a lifetime of free upgrades to subsequent versions of Alfred.

AdGuard ($30 per year)
AdGuard’s stand-alone MacOS app lets you choose from and custom-toggle a huge array of filters to block social media extensions, pop-up ads, URL redirects, and a whole lot more. It works not only on your browser but also on other apps you have installed. There’s a free two-week trial, but you’ll need to pay for a license to use it after the trial expires. For $2.49 a month, you get access to the service on three devices simultaneously.

For a Better Writing Experience
Screenshot of Ulysses writing app for Mac
Ulysses COURTESY OF ULYSSES
LibreOffice (Free)
Tired of paying for Microsoft Office, unimpressed with Apple’s default office suite, and unable or unwilling to switch entirely over to Google’s G Suite on the cloud for everything? Download LibreOffice, a full-featured suite that includes the usual applications, such as a word processor and spreadsheet editor. It’s completely compatible with all the usual Microsoft file types, including legacy formats such as .doc. It’s open source and costs nothing to use, even commercially. For goodwill, donate a few bucks if you end up liking it and using it a lot.

Microsoft 365 ($84 per year)
OK, OK, I know I just presented a very worthy, free alternative to Microsoft Office, but there are two features that make paying $7 a month for a Microsoft 365 subscription worth it, if you use them. First, Word’s included Editor feature, which scans for grammatical mistakes and makes suggestions, is as useful and easy to use as Grammarly. Second, Microsoft quietly rolled out free in-app voice transcription in Word, and it’s as accurate as any expensive stand-alone voice transcription software I’ve used.

Ulysses ($50 per year)
I love Ulysses’ plain text and clean interface for writing longer stories, but it’s also perfect for short stories, novels, poetry, and scripts. It strips away all the unnecessary icons, buttons, and settings and lets you focus on your work. You can get a free trial before committing to the subscription fee. (You can opt for $6 per month instead of the annual payment plan.) If you do shell out, the iOS app is bundled with the MacOS version.

MacBook Air displaying Highland 2 app
Highland 2 PHOTOGRAPH: QUOTE-UNQUOTE APPS
Highland 2 (Free)
Highland is a plain text editor designed primarily for screenplays and stage plays, but there are templates for things like novel writing as well. What’s nice is that it’ll automatically configure exported scripts in industry-standard formats, and there’s a new gender analysis tool that’ll break down how many lines are spoken by your characters, categorized by gender. The basic version (which watermarks PDFs with the company logo) is free, but a one-time $50 purchase nets you upgrades and more features, and it gets rid of the intrusive watermark.

Day One ($35 per year)
Journaling is a meditative experience, but if you’re like me and your handwriting looks like an SOS message carved into a rock, you tend to avoid writing on paper. Day One is a great digital journaling experience that lets you insert photos, save voice recordings, and export your logs in various formats, like PDFs. Your journal entries are end-to-end encrypted, automatically backed up, and secured with a passcode or biometrics too. There’s a free version, but it’s severely limited, so you’re better off paying the $35 per year for the full suite of features. There’s a seven-day free trial available.

Dark Noise ($10)
Working in a noisy place—or a dead-quiet one—can be monumentally distracting. Dark Noise lets you custom-mix its 50 built-in sounds to create the perfect audio illusions, whether “perfect” to you is raindrops falling on a tent or a box fan thrumming away on a windowsill. Even if you’re not under audio attack, a smooth layer of background noise might boost your concentration.

For a Better Viewing Experience
Screenshot of VLC Media Player app for Mac
VLC Media Player COURTESY OF VIDEOLAN
ApolloOne ($12 per year)
If you need a heavy-duty image viewer that lets you edit and view metadata, batch-process catalogs of RAW image files, and set up automated processes to sort and classify photos for you, then step up to ApolloOne. This is a program for serious photographers—or at least people who take a lot of pictures and want to organize them. The 14-day free trial has limits on what you can do, but it’s a good way to see if you’ll want to pay $12 a year for the Standard Edition or $20 a year for the Pro Edition. (You can use the free trial past 14 days if you don’t mind the annoying pop-up reminders to subscribe.) Another alternative is XnView MP (free).

Xee³ ($4)
A lightweight image viewer, this app doesn’t come with all the options and clutter of more advanced programs, but it’s nicer to use if you don’t need all those features. Xee³ is clean, like MacOS’ default viewer, but it lets you browse through folders of images and move photographs more easily. For $4, it’s yours for life. It reminds me of Windows Photo Viewer—in a good way.

VLC Media Player (Free)
An oldie from 2001, this is a great video player that’s continually supported. It works with a ton of file formats and codecs, even allowing you to convert from one file type to another, and it gives you a range of audio and video compression methods for making smaller files out of raw or larger ones. If you download a lot of videos, it’s a no-brainer. It’s also an open source product, so be nice and donate a few bucks for the creator if you end up using it a lot.

Skitch (Free)
From the folks who brought us Evernote, Skitch one-ups MacOS’ built-in Screenshot app. Once you capture a screenshot of a program window, a portion of the screen, or the whole screen, you can edit and annotate it with arrows, shapes, textual callouts, and more. You can also pixelate (make fuzzy) portions of an image to obscure sensitive information, or to draw focus.

For Better Organization
Screenshot of Paprika Recipe Manager app for Mac
Paprika Recipe Manager COURTESY OF PAPRIKA APP
Hazel ($42)
Tidying up folders is a slog, and sorting all your files into place never ends because you have to keep doing it over and over as you continue using your computer. That’s where Hazel steps in. You tell it which folders to watch—say, your Downloads folder—and it’ll automatically move files to new destination folders and sort them by name, date, type, what site they came from, and more. Newly created or downloaded files are moved automatically. It’s a one-time purchase.

Shift (Free)
Instead of having to sign in to all your email, workflow, and social media accounts with individual browser tabs, you can link all of them into Shift. That means having just one app window open for all your work tasks. You can hook up Gmail, Slack, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Spotify, Google Docs, and more (plus Chrome extensions!). The Advanced tier unlocks everything you’ll want for, uh, $100 per year. Try the basic (and free) tier first.

Deliveries ($5 per year)
You’re drowning in packages. Keeping everything straight is a nightmare, and it’s stressful to know that if you miss an email or if a delivery date changes, a porch package thief might make off with your goods. This app gives you a clean, color-coded space (purple for FedEx, brown for UPS, etc.) to keep track of delivery statuses and due dates for all your packages, and you can upload tracking information through Amazon links too. It costs $5 per year or 99 cents per month.

Evernote (Free)
If you need more from your note-taking app than bread-and-butter checklists and wish you could scribble in your own handwriting, upload pictures, and scan documents, Evernote is your app. To sync across more than two devices, have access offline, and upload more than 60 megabytes a month, you have to pay $8 a month for the Personal tier or $10 a month for the Professional tier.

Paprika Recipe Manager ($30)
Save recipe web pages and Paprika automatically formats them into a uniform design. All your recipes are organized in folders, and you can use the app’s interactive features to check off ingredients as you cook and scale up or down the ingredients needed for different serving sizes. There’s an iOS app and an Android app, but you have to buy each separately for $5. It’s also available on Windows for $30, so you can sync recipes across multiple platforms.

Best free mac apps for students

  1. Manuscripts
    This app is a word processor designed specifically for academic papers creation. This means that developers made editing footnotes, annotations, and references unbelievably easy. The features are more or less the same as in standard text editors (that is, more than enough for an average student). The layout, however, is very intuitive. All the key features required to meet style guide requirements are only a click away, so editing and restructuring are fairly painless.

Manuscripts facilitates the process of academic writing and leaves students one less reason to procrastinate.

  1. iStudiez Pro
    This is an organizer app that was designed specifically for students. Assignments, essay deadlines, exams dates, homework, class schedules, and grades – everything is tracked easily. What is more important for teenagers today, everything is synced across all the devices (iPhone, iPad, or both).

The interface is clean and intuitive, so nothing will distract you from the actual content of the app. Still, it is elegant enough, so working with it is pleasant.

  1. MacFly Pro
    MacFly Pro is a maintenance app that clears the useless files from the disk. Students are notorious for their untidiness. Their laptops are no exception. They tend to have all kinds of duplicate files littering the disk – essay drafts, academic paper copies, discarded apps, innumerable photos.

This cleaner is a great tool to detect and delete duplicate files on Mac, system junk, large files – everything that can be safely removed to free up some additional space. The last point is particularly useful, as students usually have base Mac models with modest disk capacity, so they run out of space far too quickly.

  1. Paste
    Paste is clipboard manager. It is useful for students, as they have to deal with various subjects and multiple sources of information on a daily basis. This can be quite overwhelming, so a simple and intuitive organizing tool can help a lot. With Paste, everything they copy is never lost, so it is easy to return to the copied information later. Moreover, the clippings are stored on an array of pinboards that user can organize by theme, file type, time, or any other attribute.

This tool is particularly helpful during revision week and while writing research papers – in fact, whenever students have to process big volumes of material.

  1. Giphy Capture
    Giphy Capture is an app for creating gifs from videos, pictures, or anything that is happening on the screen. This easy-to-use tool looks like fun, but what’s its value for the education?

The illustrative power of gifs is undisputable. How-tos, guides, tutorials – everything that is easier to show in one moving picture than to describe in thousand words. While you can have both in video format, making a video is a complex and time-consuming process. With gifs, you can bring across the same clear message with minimum effort, plus incorporate instructions as text, which is even more beneficial for visual learners.

This app is great for both teachers and students to show off their projects and share knowledge with the class in an engaging and entertaining way.

  1. Evernote
    No list like this one can ignore the elephant in the room. This cloud-based note-taking app enjoys wide popularity, so I will discover nothing new by reciting Evernote’s features. However, students tend to ignore it. They prefer playing around with desktop stickers, messages to themselves, and a mess of text files instead of the civilized way of keeping records.

Therefore, I decided to put it on the list anyway. You can save text note, doodles, iSight notes, voice messages, and entire webpages – practically anything in any format. This is your digital “random stuff” box that you can always have on you and that does not rattle as you go.

  1. Alfred
    Alfred is something in between the succinct Spotlight and the chatty Siri. It can find anything and it understands what you seek so well it’s almost eerie. Simply hit the keyboard shortcut and in the window that appears, start typing in the name of the app you want to run.

Alfred is the fastest way to fish out any file and app from your vast collection without having them on the desktop. This saves a lot of time and effort that students can instead invest in actual learning.

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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