Apps developed for the Mac often don't receive as much attention as apps made for iOS devices, so we've been doing a monthly series here at MacRumors that highlights useful, interesting Mac apps that are worth checking out and investing in.
This month's picks include apps for revamping your dock, finding duplicate files, keeping track of your copy paste history, tweeting quickly from the desktop, and more. Many of our highlighted apps this week were chosen by MacRumors forum members.
- uBar ($30) - uBar is a dock replacement, app manager, and window organizer that's designed for the Mac. You can configure the uBar as a dock, with apps of your choice, or as a task bar for doing things like quickly accessing Finder options. Apps in the dock will let you know how many windows are open, and you can enable features like window previews. uBar is expandable, re-positionable, resizable, and supports multiple monitors. The app is $30, but a free 14 day trial is available.
- Gemini 2 ($19.99) - Gemini 2 is an app from MacPaw that's designed to help you find and manage all duplicate and similar files on your machine. It is ideal for cleaning up your music library and your photo library to clear up space on your Mac. A free trial is available.
- Paste ($14.99) - Paste is a copy paste manager that keeps track of and organizes all of the files, photos, website URLs, and text snippets that you've copied and pasted on your Mac and other devices. Paste is described as a sort of Time Machine for your clipboard, because it saves everything and offers robust search capabilities so you can always find what you're looking for. Pinboards give you access to things you copy and paste often, while custom shortcuts make it easier to copy and paste. Paste is a Mac App Store app, but a free trial is also available on the Paste website.
- Tweetfast ($1.99) - Tweetfast is a Twitter for Mac client that's gives you a menu bar widget for quickly composing and sharing tweets on the social network without having to switch to a full Twitter client or the Twitter website. It's simple, quick, and has a dark mode so it's macOS Mojave ready.
- Infinity Dashboard ($14.99) - Infinity Dashboard is a smart little app that's designed to let you track and monitor anything, from your wife's birthday to the weather at your upcoming vacation spot to the current price of Bitcoin. There are 35 built-in modules for tracking weather, travel times, website stacks, stock prices, social network metrics, and more, and you can also write your own custom modules. Some modules, like price trackers, support notifications, and there are several design themes to choose from. A free trial is available.
If you have a favorite must-have Mac app that we haven't highlighted yet, let us know in the comments, and we might feature it in a future video. Many of this month's app picks came directly from recommendations from our forum members, and it's these recommendations that have helped make this series useful.
For more of our Mac app picks, make sure to check out our Mac app archives.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)How about something like...
* Scrivener that helps writers compose books & articles;
* Acorn that helps designers create icons for their apps;
* Aseprite for helping spriters create pixel art;
* Blocs for building websites WYSIWYG;
* Transmit for moving content to remote servers;
* PaintCode 3 for crafting animations and then translating them to code?
Focus on the creators for once, instead of more consumer crap. God forbid the world needing people to tweet faster... The world won't benefit from one more tweet, there is enough noise and chatter without it. >_>
A: "When did you two meet?"
Also, how can an anniversary be more than 12 months away?B: "Here! Log into my web dashboard and you can track it in real-time!"
[A backs away slowly]
* Infinity Dashboard ('https://fiplab.com/apps/infinity-dashboard-for-mac') ($14.99) - Infinity Dashboard is a smart little app that's designed to let you track and monitor anything, from your wife's birthday to the weather at your upcoming vacation spot to the current price of Bitcoin. There are 35 built-in modules for tracking weather, travel times, website stacks, stock prices, social network metrics, and more, and you can also write your own custom modules. Some modules, like price trackers, support notifications, and there are several design themes to choose from. A free trial ('https://fiplab.com/apps/infinity-dashboard-for-mac') is available.
A: "When did you two meet?"B: "Here! Log into my web dashboard and you can track it in real-time!"
A: [backs away slowly]
UBar appears to be $30 dollars rather than $15. $15 dollars is the upgrade price.
... and there's no way I'm paying even a single dollar to make my Mac look more like Windows with its Task Bar! :pApple/Cook must be disappointed.
I feel like there are a few things going on. The 1980s heralded desktop publishing. Then there was the Web age which came around the same time as the multimedia CD-ROM age. Then there were apps for MP3s (eventually iTunes), and apps for creating media (iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand) along with the apps for organizing/managing your devices (iTunes, iSync, iPhoto). But all those devices are now self-servicing. And all multi-media stuff can easily be consumed on the web, or can be shared/edited from the same mobile devices from which it's captured. Web-page creation is sort of now only for pros or it's done through blogging template sites (oh how I miss GoLive--one of my favorite apps of all time). There's no real big "era" of software right now filling a need on the desktop.
When I have had to send my MBP in for repairs, I've used a Chromebook and been able to play my music from Spotify, watch Netflix, and edit documents in Google Docs. The MBP is certainly nicer for those things, but the Web being so capable has probably made native applications less necessary than they used to be. In some cases even with media, I find the Web superior. For example, scrubbing video in QuickTime is a pain. I can more easily scrub video in YouTube. And selecting clips to trim in QuickTime is also bafflingly difficult (why doesn't the playhead remain in place when you drag the yellow sliders?).
Anyhow, after being so dreary about apps, my favorites are: Chrome (bloated but works well), Spotify (love the UI), EvoCam (simple to use, unfortunately no longer supported), Sleepytime (turns off music/sound in various apps after a certain time when you're going to bed), F.lux for my sensitive pupils, Chroma (for controlling my Philips Hue lights), OneDrive (my current online storage of choice--to be honest, Google Drive, OneDrive, and DropBox seem identical to me--just using this now because I have 1 TB free through my dad's subscription to Office), Microsoft Word (it's still the best for word processing), Pages (the best for page layout--I make pretty elaborate invitations, etc., with this--but it is wretched for word processing), Pixelmator (I generally use this for making titles in iMovie), iMovie (which I actually really don't like anymore--iMovie 6 HD was the last version I really enjoyed, but it's what I still use in spite of it seeming much less user friendly than it used to), DaisyDisk (for finding what is mysteriously taking up disk space), and Tidepool Uploader (an app that interfaces with tidepool.org and lets you upload data from various blood glucose monitors and continuous glucose monitors and has an infinitely better interface than ones included with the products--if you have diabetes you should give it a try).