Apps created for the Mac don't receive as much attention as apps made for iOS devices, so we have a bi-monthly series here at MacRumors that's designed to highlight useful and interesting Mac apps that are worth checking out and potentially investing in.
This week's picks include apps for streamlining your email, focusing on tasks, checking the weather, cleaning up your Mac, and managing all of your messaging services. Many of our highlighted apps this week were chosen by MacRumors forum members.
- Focus (Free with in-app purchases) - Focus is a time management app and monitoring service that's designed to help you keep track of your time so you can stay on task. It encourages users to work in focus sessions, which are 25 minute blocks of time for working accompanied by a 15 to 20 minute break. There's an included task manager so you can stay on top of tasks, along with detailed statistics so you can see how you've spent your day. Focus is free to download, but it costs $4.99 per month or $39.99 for year to use across all of your devices.
- Carrot Weather ($11.99) - Carrot Weather is a well-known weather app that delivers weather information with a little bit of attitude to make checking outdoor conditions more fun. It has different dialogue and graphics for various weather conditions, and what comes up is always a surprise. Carrot Weather uses data from Dark Sky so it's super accurate and it offers up tons of data like 7-day forecasts, rain and snow predictions, weather maps, and a time machine so you can see past weather conditions.
- Dr. Cleaner (Free) - Dr. Cleaner from TrendMicro is an app that offers a Disk Clean Map so you can see what's taking up space on your Mac, a memory cleanup feature for freeing up memory, a scanner for large files, and a junk file cleaner that's designed to get rid of temporary files, trash, and other unwanted items taking up disk space. Dr. Cleaner is free from the Mac App Store, but there is a $19.99 Pro version that finds and eliminates duplicate files, shreds deleted files, and uninstalls apps.
- Canary Mail ($19.99) - Those who previously used the now-eliminated Newton Mail might be looking for a new mail app, and Canary could fit the bill. Canary Mail offers one-click encryption, natural language search, smart filters, read notifications, snooze options, email templates, one-click unsubscribe, and more.
- All-in-One Messenger (Free) - This is technically a Chrome extension rather than a Mac app, so it's limited to Chrome users. All-in-One Messenger is designed to combine all of your chat and messenger services into one convenient web app so you can keep up with all of your chats in a single spot. It works with a wide range of messaging apps, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Hangouts, and more.
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.
