The 5 Must-Have Utilities for macOS Catalina. I’ve used many masses of mac utilities over many years and nevertheless, rely on them to make my computing lifestyles higher. Right here’s the top 10 I recommend, a combination of loose software, donationware, and cheaper paid products. 30 best free Mac programs to download. By Ben Harvell (MacFormat Issue 231) 06 March 2011. Top free software for OS X, iPad and iPhone. A must-have install to alleviate format folly. Mac veterans have been singing Alfred's praises for years, but some of Apple’s newer users might not have heard about the mighty app launcher. Free to all but the most serious professionals. Think of Alfred as Spotlight with a dash of Siri. It’s an application launcher, but it can do a lot more than just that. With Alfred, you can quickly perform calculations, execute web searches, and find word definitions, among many other functions. A Software Installation Manager: Homebrew. Unarguably, Homebrew should be the first application you need to have on your Mac. Basically, its a package manager that lets you install software tools.
Mac applications make the world go around! And although Mavericks gets much of the glory for its elegant design and power, you can’t really do much, productivity-wise, from your Desktop without a snappy application.
Read on to get acquainted with ten iMac applications you can’t do without. Even if you don’t use one or two of these great tools now, you’ll likely realize that you need and want them in the future.
Some of these applications are built in to OS X — read that as free — whilst others you must buy. You’ll see here which is which, along with a ballpark price for the commercial stuff.
DVDs and CDs on your iMac
If your iMac has an internal SuperDrive (or you’ve added an external USB optical drive to your iMac), come explore the best two DVD applications around for your Mavericks machine.
Watching DVD movies with aplomb
Face it — that gorgeous widescreen 21.5” or 27” flat-panel monitor on your iMac is perfect for watching DVD movies. Thanks to the good people in Cupertino, you’ll find that the Mavericks DVD Player does a great job at screening all your favorite DVD films:
- You can display your movie in a window or use the entire screen (especially nice for widescreen titles).
- If your movie includes different audio tracks, subtitles, and camera angles, you can control them all from the spiffy remote control that appears onscreen whenever you move your mouse.
- You can step through the video frame by frame or in slow motion to see the martial arts action that you missed in the theater.
By default, DVD Player runs automatically when you load a DVD, including those that you create yourself.
There’s even a feature that remembers whether you viewed a disc already and also gives you the opportunity to restart the film where you left off.
Yes, they really named it Toast
Need to record audio and data CDs or DVD-Vs on your iMac? The Cadillac of recording software for the Mac was, is, and will likely always be the unlikely named Toast, from Roxio. The latest version is Toast 11 Titanium, available online for about $80.
The built-in audio recording features in iTunes are certainly fine, and the discs that it produces are compatible with any audio CD player or DVD player that you’re likely to find. You can also burn files to data CDs and DVDs without a separate application. However, you’ll need Toast to record specialized formats like
- Video CDs
- Super Video CDs
- Mac volumes
- Hybrid PC/Mac discs
- ISO 9660 discs
- Multisession discs
- CD Extra discs
Management and communication with an iMac
Both Calendar and Apple Mail are mighty applications, bent on organizing things: your time, calendar, and/or your Internet e-mail traffic. (They do a great job, too.) Apple provides both in OS X, so you can keep your credit card in your pocket or purse.
Staying on top of things with Calendar
Calendar is one of those oddities in the computer world. Unlike iTunes or iMovie, it’s not particularly sexy (in a multimedia way), and it doesn’t get oodles of coverage in the glossy Macintosh magazines. Still, everybody eventually ends up using it. Sooner or later, every Mac owner appreciates Calendar as an unsung hero. (And a free unsung hero to boot.)
Unfortunately, Calendar can’t enter events for you. The Data Elves aren’t going to show up and magically type for you, so you have to create events manually. After they’re in the Calendar database, however, you can
- Set alarms for specific events.
- Add notes for each event.
- Print a calendar.
- Import some data automatically from other Mavericks applications.
- Set repeating events on a regular schedule.
By default, Calendar includes two calendars — Home and Work — but you can set up as many separate calendars as you like, for scheduling everything from soccer seasons to DVD releases.
One doggone good e-mail application
Ask yourself this question: “Am I taking my e-mail application for granted?” Sure, e-mail might not take center stage in the computer magazines these days, but consider what your life would be like with a substandard, whip-and-buggy e-mail application — almost as bad as no e-mail at all.
The best e-mail applications (like Apple Mail) have powerful, trainable spam filters that improve automatically as you manually check your junk mail. A first-class performer (like Apple Mail) offers fully automated scripting for common tasks, snazzy backgrounds, fonts and colors, and the ability to create HTML-format messages with embedded images and objects. Are you seeing a pattern here?
One great feature in Apple Mail is the ability to organize your messages by threads. (In plain English, a thread groups replies so that they can be read as an actual discussion.) Anyone who frequents Usenet newsgroups or web discussion sites recognizes a threaded view as easier to read than a traditional sequential display, especially when your mail is heavy on replies and includes ongoing conversations with several folks involved.
It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s fashionable — go, Apple Mail, go!
iMacs and productivity
Sooner or later, you’re going to need the ability to create flashy, professional-looking documents from your iMac, or you might need to run an absolutely-gotta-have-it application that’s not available for Macs. This section covers two productivity applications — Parallels Desktop and iWork — and the serious stuff they can do.
Windows 7 or 8 on your iMac without rebooting
Okay, there are fewer applications available to Macs than PCs running Windows, and practically every Mac owner on the planet has one or two PC programs that make life easier. Sure, you can use the Mavericks Boot Camp feature to set up a Windows system on your iMac, but you have to reboot to use Windows, and it’s very difficult to share Mac data with your Windows applications (even though they’re actually on the same computer).
More information on Boot Camp is always available from the OS X Help system, but you can start the ball rolling by double-clicking the Boot Camp Assistant icon in your Utilities folder (which is tucked inside your Applications folder). The Assistant provides step-by-step onscreen instructions. Just make sure that you have your Windows 7 or Windows 8 installation discs handy.
What if you don’t want to reboot, and you want to share data easily between your Mac and Windows applications? Luckily, Parallels offers a solution: Parallels Desktop for Mac. The program sells for about $80, but this doesn’t include a licensed copy of Windows. (Yeah, you have to provide your own.) However, this nifty program can easily run virtually all Windows XP, Vista, and Seven programs — without rebooting your iMac — complete with support for external USB devices, Ethernet networks, the Internet, and your iMac printer.
Parallels Desktop simulates everything necessary for you to get the full functionality out of Windows. For example, this jewel automatically (and transparently) handles your Windows Internet connection, network tasks, and CD and DVD access. You can run full screen or run Windows in a window (pun joyfully intended).
As if that weren’t enough, you can also run multiple operating systems. So if you need Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu, or Windows 2000 along with your Windows 8 system, no problem — all it takes is the install disc for those operating systems and the hard drive space to hold’em. Outstanding!
Naturally, performance is an issue — and, to be honest, Parallels Desktop isn’t for the PC gamer, even with the newest Macs and their super-duper GeForce and Radeon video cards. Because today’s most demanding PC games push an actual PC to the limit, they just run too sluggishly on a Mac emulating a PC — they do run, just slowly. (Also, virtually all of today’s blockbuster PC games are also being ported to OS X, so why not just run the Mac version?)
If you must run a Windows game on your iMac, consider using Boot Camp to boot directly into Windows, which will allows your system to devote all its resources to the game at hand.
The more memory installed in your iMac, the better Parallels Desktop will run!
You can install
- More than one version of Windows
- Almost any other operating system that’s ever been produced for the PC
Parallels Desktop for Mac makes it easy to shut down a simulated computer — akin to a laptop computer going into hibernation — while keeping your open documents intact. When you reload your “virtual” Windows machine, you’re right back at the exact same point when you shut down.
iWork Suite
Some say that the Macintosh version of Office should be an automatic purchase at the moment you buy your computer — it’s that indispensable to every Mac owner. The applications that make up Office may be superb, but every owner of a brand-new iMac should try the three free iWork suite applications before jumping onto the Microsoft productivity bandwagon. (Note that owners of older iMacs will still have to buy the iWork applications from the App Store.)
Most computer owners simply don’t use or need all the features and hoo-hah that’s built into the Mac Office applications! For example, if all you produce on paper are simple letters, typical schoolwork, or brochures for your home business, Word might be an expensive case of overkill. Plus, the three iWork applications produce documents that are as good-looking as anything from the Office suite!
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You can exchange Word documents with others who use the Pages word processing application, which is part of the iWork suite. The same goes for Excel and PowerPoint. Respectively, Numbers and Keynote are powerful alternatives to their Microsoft counterparts. In fact, all iWork applications offer the same ease-of-use and simplicity you’ve come to expect from OS X Mavericks and iLife favorites such as iPhoto, iTunes, and GarageBand.
iWork applications offer templates and assistants that are similar to those in Office, so creating all sorts of specialized business and personal documents is easy. New templates and clip art are always available online as well.
System stuff to consider with your iMac
The utilities in this section help keep your hardware, software, and files in tip-top shape.
Maintenance
The following two applications are indispensable utility tools that every Mac owner should master (no matter what type of Mac you’re using).
If you’re not already using Disk Utility, you should. On a regular basis. Really.
Most Mac owners think of Disk Utility only for checking internal and external hard drives. But don’t forget the most important function that Disk Utility offers: the ability to fix file and folder permission problems. Launch Disk Utility and check your OS X startup drive on a weekly basis. Permission problems can cause your applications to act like they’re on mind-altering drugs or even lock you out of using those applications altogether!
Of course, there’s more to Disk Utility, but you’re not likely to use heavy-duty functions very often, such as partitioning or RAID management. These are advanced features that one typically uses only when initializing a new hard drive.
Protecting your iMac from viral infection should be a top priority. Get yourself an antivirus application — one that automatically checks the discs that you load as well as the stuff that you download. Check out VirusBarrier 2013 or the excellent freeware application ClamXav 2. Set your antivirus application to automatically download the latest virus definition files from the Internet and scan your entire system once monthly.
Files
Care to compress a folder full of files to save space on your hard drive or maybe send them via e-mail? Perhaps you’d like to use the keyboard and the power of Unix to perform file manipulation miracles that are practically impossible by using the mouse. Either way, the following applications have you covered.
In the Windows universe, the WinZip archive file is king, followed by WinRAR and a host of other archiving formats. Mavericks has built-in support for compressing and decompressing Zip archives.
Mavericks can unarchive a Zip file when necessary — just double-click the archive icon — and you can right-click a file or folder and then choose Compress from the menu to create a Zip archive.
However, there is another archive format that’s popular among the Mac set — the Stuffit format, which is handled StuffIt Deluxe, from Smith Micro Software. The application will set you back $50, but it’s worth every penny for the convenience and flexibility that archives bring to your Desktop:
- Smaller archive file sizes than comparable Zip archives
- Industrial-strength data encryption to secure your archives
- Support for files that normally don’t compress well, like JPEG images
- Archive browsing without actually expanding (a real timesaver)
- Direct burn of archived data to CD or DVD
If you’re interested in doing the command-lines dance, know how this must-have application is a little different from the others: You have to type your commands manually, and there are no icons or fancy graphics. You’re in the character-based Twilight Zone, and only the bravest of Mac novices will venture there.
However, when you launch the Terminal application, you open a window into the Unix core that lies underneath OS X. Suddenly you can do wondrous things that you can’t do from the Finder menu:
- You can manipulate hidden and hard-to-reach files, like preference files.
- You can work with Unix applications such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Apache Web server.
- If you’re familiar with wildcards and the command-line hieroglyphics that make up Unix, you can manage your files with a speed that no graphical user interface (GUI) can match.
Windows10's market share is increasing slowly but steadily over time. This December ittouched 33% which means that over one-third of world's computers now arerunning Windows 10.
Beit the fluent design, multiple desktops or return of the Start Menu, Windows 10has taken many right steps, but, also few wrong ones in areas of privacy andupdates. One area where Microsoft has done a commendable job is improving thenative apps.
Edge is now way better than IE, there is native PDF support through Edge, support for Multiple desktopsand the list goes on.
Now nobody has to hunt for an alternative app like a PDFreader or image editor as the built-in apps are more than enough for such basictasks.
However, there are still some parts of Windows 10 where we need improvement. Aspects of the OS with which users interact daily such as Windows Explorer, file operations(move/copy/rename), installing/uninstalling apps are still somewhat the same as before.
So, today we will talk about fifteen apps that will improve your Windows experience and help you in accomplishing daily tasks in a much quicker way.
1. Clover
![Programs Must Have For Mac Programs Must Have For Mac](/uploads/1/1/8/9/118933903/195924962.jpg)
Windows Explorer has got a design upgrade in Windows 10, but, functionality wise it's still the same. Clover is an app which adds the much-needed features to Windows Explorer. Tabs, Bookmarks, enhanced keyboard shortcuts are some of the highlights of the long list of features this app has.
Plus, it integrates seamlessly with Windows, so you will not notice any out of the place visual changes.
Qttabbar is another alternative app for Clover. It is much more powerful and offers a hugenumber of options to customize it as per your needs.
2. Unchecky
Our next app keeps a vigilant look at all the programs we install on our computers. Many of the freeware or shareware type programs often contain sneaky little tick boxes during installation which silently install the advertiser's app or make changes to your system like changing the default homepage, adding a toolbar or even changing the default browser.
Programs Must Have For Mac Catalina
While most such additional programs are just annoying and can be uninstalled easily, there are some potentially harmful ones too which can install a rootkit or keylogger. Unchecky saves you all this hassle by alerting you whenever any programs try to pull such a stunt and automatically unchecks any such check-boxes.
And it's simple to use. Just install it and let it run in the background. No need to mess with any settings.
3. Ditto
Ditto is an awesome clipboard manager for Windows 10 which supercharges the clipboard functionality. A clipboard manager is particularly useful for someone who works with a lot of text and documents.
It has happened to me many times, I copy a draft of an article from one app, close it, only to find out that it hasn't been copied after pressing Ctrl+V. And the real horror is realizing I haven't saved the draft anywhere.
Clipboard manager like Ditto saves all your copied text as Historyso one can easily find any particular bit of info even if they have overwritten or lost it. Other useful features include the ability to sync clipboards of two different PCs, a stats meter and of-course, keyboard shortcuts.
4. Everything Search
One of the parts of Windows 10 that has taken a nosedive compared to the previous version is the Search function. It's hit-and-miss for many users as it doesn't return the results expected and most of the time resort to web search through, yes, you guessed it, Bing. Very helpful indeed.
While you can fix the Search, Everything Search is a better app for this. Its response time to a search query is nearly instant and the results are pretty accurate as well. Plus you can run it without installation and has some really cool additional features.
It can search an external FTP server, you can exclude specific folders from search and even search a remote PC over the web.
5. Jdownloader 2
It's known to everyone that Windows doesn't have its own downloader app and the de-facto alternative to it is Internet Download Manager(IDM), which is a paid.The free alternative is Jdownloader 2, which performs same as IDM, has morefeatures and is open-source.
One unique feature of Jdownloader is the supportfor plugins which can do various things such as controlling it remotely over Web and solving captchas on its own.
It also supports premium accounts of many file-sharing sites so you can download without any limits. If you have time and patience to learn, you can automate JDownloader through Javascript too.
6. TreeSize
Ever wondered what is hogging storage space on your PC? You don't download a ton of things still you are running out of disk space. To solve this Windows 10 has Storage Sense feature is which frees up disk space periodically by deleting temporary and old files.
You can tweak what it does by going to Settings>System>Storage>Storage Sense.
While the Modern Storage setting does visually show which folder is taking up the maximum space, you can't see individual files or do any operations. TreeSize shows you this info in much more detail including the number of files and sub-folders.
Plus, the directory-style menu is easier to understand than that of Windows 10. Finally, there are plentyof options to customize and filter how you want to view the storage data.
7. AnyDesk
Remote connection to a computer may not fare on the list of tasks an average user does often. However, it can be very useful in times when you need to help or get help for a problem. For remote connections, Windows Remote Desktop protocol is thesuperior to other solutions out there.
Though, it has a major limitation that it's available only on Pro edition of Windows. Plus to use it you need to fiddle with the IP addresses and host-names.
AnyDesk is the free app which comes close to the performance of Windows RDP and is simple to use like TeamViewer. It also has iOS, Android and Linux apps and even works cross-platform.
Feb 04, 2009 AutoCollage is an application for automatically creating collages from your images. Pick a folder, press a button, and in mere moments AutoCollage presents you with a unique memento to print or to e-mail to your family and friends. Microsoft research autocollage.
8. Speccy
If you have ever felt ill-informed when someone asks how much RAM your PC has or what processor it has, you can go to Control Panel>System and Security>System and find out.
However, if they ask what frequency you RAM isrunning or what GPU it has, you will again go back to being ill-informed.
Knowing your PC's hardware helps in troubleshooting as well as gauging its capability for running certain apps and games. This way you don't go on sending angry emails to tech support stating that your new Dell AIO can't run PUBG on 4K because you don't know it has GT 1030.
Speccy provides detailed info of each component of your PC and also shows the temperatures of critical parts like CPU and GPU. Finally, you can also share the specs of your PC in text or INI format for genuine help with a problem or bragging rights.
9. Odrive
With Windows 8, Microsoft gave a lot of thrust to promoting OneDrive by integrating it natively with Windows and even offering the now-defunct unlimited cloud storage plan. OneDrive, as a cloud service is comparatively good, though there are many who use other cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox.
However, adding a desktop app for each cloud service you use becomes cumbersome and Odrive is the app which solves this problem. An all-in-one universal sync client which supports over 20+ cloud services and allows you to finely control how and what files get synced.
10. ShareX
Taking a screenshot of Windows has long been done by the humble PrtScr button or the Snipping Tool which was introduced in Windows Vista. Recently, in the Windows 10 Creators Update, a new shortcut got added, Win+Shift+S.
Third party apps for taking screenshots are dime a dozen, however, ShareX is our favorite pick. The reason being, it's free, feature rich and can be useful to both a newbie or a pro user. Plus the automation features built in are really awesome. Want to add today's date to screenshot, have it numbered and upload to Gdrive?
You can do it. Want to add a black border and watermark to screenshot, upload it to Imgur and generate a short URL? You can do that too. Need I say more!
11. Smooth Video Playback
![Programs must have for mac osx Programs must have for mac osx](/uploads/1/1/8/9/118933903/367066482.jpg)
VLC is the undisputed king for video playback on Windows. It's simple to use, has plenty features and plays almost all video formats out there. Still, if you are a movie buff or like binge-watching your favorite TV shows, you will love SVP.
Smooth Video Playback or SVP 4 converts any video to 60 FPS and higher in real time. This makes the video appear more smooth and fluid, especially ones which involve a lot of action. Sadly, the free version of SVP 4 doesn't work with VLC and you will need to use(How-To) either MPC-BE or MPC-HC player.
However, if you fork out $15 for pro version, you get support for online videos, streaming over Chromecast and a bunch of other features.
12. X-Mouse Button Control
Windows settings for configuring mouse are limited to just switching mouse buttons and at best changing how the cursor looks like. If you yearn for more customization to match your Hotkey Game, XBMC(not to be confused with the media player) will give your mouse buttons multitasking superpowers.
With XBMC, you can configure what the mouse buttons and scroll wheel does in an application and add up to 10 layers to each app, which can be switched by a hotkey.
To put that into perspective, you can configure a three-button mouse to do 300 different things per application. And that's not counting scroll wheel!
13. BleachBit
Windows 10 has gotten a lot better at housekeeping by cleaning up after itself to prevent junk build up. Disk Clean-up does the job effectively by deleting all the temp and old files.
CCleaner has long been the alternative go-to app for this job, but, recently it was discovered to riddled with a malware which affected millions of users.
BleachBit is an open-source alternative which does the same thing and even overwrites the empty space so nothing can be recovered. It is also useful for cleaning files of a specific app like your browser, as opposed to Disk Clean-up which deletes everything.
14. Sizer
Windows 10 allows you to arrange open apps either side-by-side or stacked by right-clicking on Taskbar. Or you can resize them freely to arrange them as per your liking.
Sizer a free app which allows you to set custom sizes for each open windows(apps) and bind them to a hotkey. This way you can effectively divide your screen space, pixel-wise to arrange multiple apps like I have shown in the image above.
Programs Must Have For Mac Computers
15. Teracopy
Initially, I wasn't going to include Teracopy to this list, as I always felt it didn't offer that much of an advantage over Windows copy. But, that changed when I gave the upgraded version a try on Windows 10.
While copying 37 GB of game files to my NAS server took Windows over 10 mins, Teracopy did it in under 8 mins.
Must Have Mac Products
Of course, how quickly files are copied and written is heavily dependent on a variety of factors like disk type, system load, network link etc, Teracopy speeds it up most of the times and doesn't hang if you cancel or pause the task. Further, it can also check the integrity of copied files by checking their checksums.
A Word About Contributions
Almost all the apps that are on the list have a portable version available, which makes it easier to test the app without installing it. And many of them are made by few small independent developers in their free time.
So, if you find any of the above apps particularly useful, consider donating or purchasing the pro version.
Because while drafting the list, I came across many other useful apps like ShapeShifter, PC-Decrapifier, and FileBot, which have been abandoned or gone completely paid due to lack of donations and time from the developer.
With that said, if you know or use any other such apps do share them through comments.
See Next: How to Post Instagram Stories Longer Than 15 Seconds on Android and iPhoneThe above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Also See#windows 10
Did You Know
Windows 10 is the last Windows since Microsoft is changing the approach of building and delivering OS.