Useful Apps for Mac

10 really useful apps for Mac

20.09.2012

In Product Reviews

To celebrate the release of iOS 6, Holly shares her 10 favourite Apps for the Mac

You might have heard that here at Resolve, we don't just fix PC's, but we also know a thing or two about Macs (and the Sega MegaDrive!) If you've ever used a Mac you will be familiar with the Mac App Store which was launched with version 10.6.6 on OS X. The Mac App Store has brought an influx of new and improved applications for the UNIX-based platform. Here I'm going to run through my favourite applications; a few of them are even free to download, so you have nothing to lose by trying them out!

Evernote

Price: Free

Evernote is digital scrapbook. It allows you to pull together snippets of information from text files, PDFs, websites, images and even audio and collate them all in digital documents. Evernote is available on multiple platforms and you can sync all Evernote files across all your devices.

Undock

Price: £0.69

A very useful application that will unmount all your attached devices and drives, it will even stop a time machine backup if it is in progress, allowing you to safely shutdown your Mac. Pretty useful for less than a pound!

SketchBook Pro

Price: £39.99

A great value drawing and painting application, specifically designed to be used with a tablet and stylus, but the possibilities really are endless. It is significantly less expensive than the Adobe products, but with some really excellent features.

You can also sync your documents to the cloud and edit on the move using the iPad version priced at £1.49. An excellent choice for a hobbyist.

Reeder

Price: £2.99

A handy little app for reading RSS feeds. It's simple and well designed, and is also available for iPad and iPhone and can be synched with Google Reader client

TextExpander

Price: £24.99

Text Expander is a little bit pricey, but you'll probably get that back in productivity. It's a multi-platform application that allows you to save snippets of text and then associate abbreviations to those snippets, making typing a lot more efficient.

It's also possible to sync your snippets with the iOS version, or the Windows using Dropbox or iCloud, making typing easier on all platforms.

Geek Tool

Price: Free

Geek Tool is a small application that displays useful stats in really gorgeous graphical ways on your desktop.

You will need to do a little scripting to get it to output your data but this can include things like Time, Date, CPU Usage, Memory Hoggers and SMART status.

Alfred

Price: Free

If you're familiar with Mac OSX, you're probably familiar with Spotlight. Alfred is Spotlight's stronger, better looking younger brother! It does everything you would expect from Spotlight, searching files and folders, emails, bookmarks on your Mac. Alfred can perform calculations and check spellings and definitions.

It also searches the web and launches favourite websites; Amazon, Maps, Wikipedia etc. Alfred can also run system commands, empty the trash, restart, shutdown or eject a drive.

Sorry Spotlight; you're no longer the favourite.

FileShredder

Price: £2.49

Once FileShredder has been installed, you have the option to 'Secure Shred' files when you right click them in Finder. You can choose in Preferences whether this is a 1-pass (fast) erase, 7 pass, or 35 (super-secure) erase. A really handy app for deleting individual files securely without having to empty the whole trash.

Yoink

Price: £1.99

Yoink adds a box to the side of your screen as a holding area, only appearing when you drag a file or an image to it.

The box allows you to 'store' your file; while you swipe between windows to find your application of choice, you can then drag that file into the app. An essential if you use multiple desktops with Lion or Mountain Lion. Great name too!

Fantastical

Price: £6.99

Fantastical is another app that will pay for itself in time saved. It turns plain text into calendar events with a reminder instantly, so 'Shopping on Saturday with Lucy at 12pm' becomes a calendar event.