Got a new Mac? Install these apps first.
Got a new Mac and starting fresh on a new installation? These are the applications and tools that you should be installing first. This list is composed of apps and tools that are used daily on my Mac (and I'm sure you will too), to make life easier and more productive.
Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they'll be instantly available on any of your other computers that also have Dropbox installed. Because copies of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.
You receive 2 GB of storage space for free, upon registration. You may earn up to 16GB of free storage space by referring new users to Dropbox, at 500 MB per referral.
A free web browser developed by Google from the open source Chromium project with a focus on speed and minimalism. Chrome offers fast start-up and web page loading, supports a minimalist user interface, automatically updates in the background, and offers syncing of browser bookmarks, extensions, passwords, and history between multiple computers by your Google account.
Additionally, Chrome has PDF support built into the browser for better speed and security.
Chrome Web Apps and Extensions are available on Chrome Web Store .
Available in more than 50 languages.
Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving.
The app allows users to create a "note" which can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note.
Notes can also have file attachments. Notebooks can be added to a stack while notes can be sorted into a notebook, tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched, and exported as part of a notebook.
Evernote Premium features:
Offline notes Your notes are available anywhere, anytime, even without an internet connection. Perfect for flights, international travel and working on the go.
Passcode lock Make sure only you can access your notes. Add a layer of security on mobile devices to protect your valuable information such as business plans, receipts, health information, and photographs.
Business card scanning Leave behind your stack of cards by scanning them using Evernote's camera. Capture and store all contact information, a photo of the card and choose to automatically pull additional profile details from LinkedIn.
Presentation mode Present directly from your notes in a full-screen layout for more collaborative, efficient meetings.
PDF annotation When a picture’s worth a thousand words, you can avoid lengthy email dialogue. There’s no quicker way to call attention to contract edits or design changes.
Context and Knowledge Discovery Context reveals notes with related content and documents, and Knowledge Discovery identifies co-workers who are experts on the topic or project you're working on.
Faster image recognition Find what you’re looking for, faster. We scan your images faster, so text within them is searchable sooner. Find text in handwritten notes, Post-it® Notes, whiteboard drawings and more.
Search in PDFs and Office docs Your files are easily searchable within Evernote. Quickly locate your Office and work documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs.
1Password creates strong, unique passwords for all of your sites and logs you in with a single tap (or click).
A single click opens your browser, opens a site, fills in your username and password, and logs you in. Our Strong Password Generator is your key to password liberation. One click creates a strong, unique password for each account, and our browser extension fills it into the website automatically.
Organize your vault
Mark your most important or frequently used items for quick access and sync this list among all your devices. Drag any mix of 1Password Logins, Secure Notes, and other items into folders for work, finances, social media, or any other grouping you need. Adding tags to 1Password items is a snap; focusing on them to get things done is even easier.
Our new service keeps you informed about your security. Watchtower securely checks your logins for known vulnerabilities and tells you which sites need new passwords.
Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.
Search and Browse
Launch applications and find files on your Mac or on the web. Alfred learns how you use your Mac and prioritises results. Save countless hours by using hotkeys, keywords and customising how you want to search your Mac and activity history. Jump in and browse, preview files and take action on them without lifting your fingers off the keyboard.
Type Less, Say More
With Alfred's Clipboard History and Snippets features, there's no need to type the same URLs or responses over and over. Use the Clipboard History to locate any text, image or file you copied earlier and paste it again. Create your own snippets and type a short abbreviation to auto-expand them into a full text snippet, saving yourself hours of typing in the long run!
Extend and Automate
With Alfred's Powerpack, use immensely powerful workflows to perform tasks more efficiently and cut down on repetitive manual tasks. Link hotkeys, keywords and actions together to create your own workflows; There's no need to write a single line of code to create a workflow. Import workflows from the thousands our community of creators have shared.
Control Your Music
You're the boss. Boost your productivity by controlling your Mac using Alfred's deep integration with macOS. Swiftly take action on files and contacts, control your music player and dispatch System commands. Add some fun to your day; Turn your iPhone or iPad into a command centre for your Mac with Alfred Remote for iOS. Alternatively, take a look at the many workflows for other music services like Spotify.
TextExpander boosts team productivity by cutting the repetitive typing that creeps into every task. A quick shortcode while typing drops in the necessary language to send to clients and customers. In the words of your best writer, gather the knowledge of your most experienced staff in a quick-access knowledge base of reusable emails, prose, and messaging. TextExpander keeps your whole team communicating consistently and accurately.
Ulysses is a text editor for creative writers. Used by bloggers, poets, students and published novelists all over the world, it offers an integrated environment to brainstorm, draft, revise and even submit text on a professional level.
Based around the concept of non-linear, semantic text editing, Ulysses provides a truly distraction-free and fully focused experience, without sacrificing any advanced features.
It’s got everything you expect from a modern text editor – and then some:
- Tabbed, single-window interface
- Semantic text editing
- True separation of presentation and content
- Console mode (aka “distraction-free writing environment”)
- Extensible export (PDF, DOC, RTF, TXT, HTML, ePub)
- Project-wide, term-centric search & replace
- Multiple document and project notes
- Excerpts
- Counters for characters, words & pages
- Configurable metadata (Status, Label, Dates)
- Integrated backup
- Filters, groups and document collections
- Coherent document previews
- Text trash
- Typewriter scrolling
- Bookmarks and style-jumpers
- Project templates
- English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian and Czech localizations
Bartender lets you organize your Menu Bar Apps, by hiding them, rearranging them, or moving them to the Bartenders Bar. You can display the full menu bar, set options to have Menu Bar Apps show in the menu bar when they are updating, or have them always visible in the Bartenders Bar.
Automated organization for your Mac.
Automatically Organize
Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site it came from and much more. Automatically sort your movies or file your bills. Keep your files off the desktop and put them where they belong.
More Than Just Filing
Hazel can open, archive, tag and even upload. You can have Hazel rename your files or sort them into subfolders based on name, date or whatever combination of attributes you choose. Coupled with Hazel’s powerful pattern matching, you can create workflows to process your files, your way.
Taking Out The Trash
Have Hazel keep your trash in check, deleting files that are too old or clearing things out when the trash gets too big. Also, when you delete applications, they can leave behind support files that never get cleaned up. With Hazel’s App Sweep, Hazel will detect when you throw an application away, search for its support files and offer to throw those away as well.
Total Support
Spotlight integration. Photos, Music & TV importing. Notifications. Tags. AppleScript & Automator. Hazel provides deep support for macOS technologies, leveraging everything your system has to offer.
Save your files effortlessly and open your folders instantly. Default Folder X makes Mac OS X's Open and Save dialogs work as quickly as you do. Custom keyboard shortcuts put your favorite and recent folders at your fingertips. Pop-up menus let you navigate your folders and open Finder windows.
A new way to get apps for your Mac. Over 70 top-tier applications for a single subscription. No ads or in-app purchases. Get on board! 🚀
Your very own secure file sharing tool! Dropshare is a menu bar application for Drag&Drop upload files, screenshots and even directories to your own server, Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. Sharing files with friends, customers, colleagues or anyone else has never been so professional!
Dropshare is a secure alternative to cloud hosted file sharing. Instead of sharing your files via a cloud hosted service with no control and monthly financial commitments, just use your own server: Dropshare natively supports Secure Copy (SCP over SSH), a secure industry standard protocol for file transfers.
Additionally - in case you don’t have an own server or SSH account at your disposal - Dropshare supports uploads to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Rackspace Cloud Files, which both are low-priced file hosting services in the cloud. Compared to other cloud hosted file sharing services, Dropshare directly connects to your very own Amazon S3 bucket or Rackspace Cloud Files container, so there is no third-party involved at all.
Dropshare supports Multiple Connections: You can set up different upload destinations at the same time and switch between them using user-defined keyboard shortcuts!
The best apps and tools that you should install first on your new Mac.