Here’s a list of the best 10 FREE apps for Mac OS X that I’ve been using for the last years and I couldn’t live without them. You may also find other apps that have the same functionality, I have chosen these ones precisely because they are the smallest in size and simplest to use out there.
I have ordered them by the ones you should try first:
- Spectacle
- JumpCut
- F.lux
- Caffeine
- Disk Inventory X
- ImageOptim
- 4K Video Downloader
- All2MP3
- App Cleaner
- The Unarchiver
Spectacle is one of those apps that have made my day-to-day experience in Mac way much better. It allows you to resize windows and move them across the screen so that you can work more comfortably with two or more windows being shown at the same time side by side.
JumpCut is a really simple app that creates a history for your clipboard. Has it ever happened to you that you copied something and then you accidentally copied something else and you lost what you had in the clipboard in the first place? That sucks, and JumpCut is the best solution since it saves everything in a quickly accessible list.
Flux is a really popular app that helps people working at night get better sleep as well as avoid tiring their eyes by looking at bright screens. How it works is that it detects when the sunset is and it tints the screen slightly red so that the blue tones are not as harsh to the eyes.
Caffeine keeps your computer from sleeping which is great when you are downloading a large file or performing any activity that would get interrupted if the computer went to sleep.
Disk Inventory X shows you a detailed chart on where your disk space is being used most. This is an essential app for people with small hard drives or that are always running out of space, it even helps clear up some space from Dropbox or Google Drive. Thanks to this app I’ve been able to find huge files I didn’t need anymore and save tons of gigabytes in my Macbook Air.
ImageOptim is a small app that compresses images a lot (sometimes up to 80%), saving you space while keeping the quality of the image intact. As a web developer I use this tool every day.
4K Video Downloader downloads any video on the Internet from popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. It can also download only the audio so you can download any song you want.
All2MP3 convert any audio file to MP3 by just drag and dropping the files (quick note: Super quality is 320kbps @ 48kHz = 10-20MB per song; Good quality is 256kbps @ 48kHz).
App Cleaner makes sure to uninstall Apps fully by searching for extra files placed by the app around the computer.
The Unarchiver adds nice extra functionality to the default file compressor in OSX.
Have you got any other OSX desktop app you can’t live without? Please let me know in the comments, I would love to hear about it :)
One comment
Jose Hernandez says:
Really awesome, thanks. I’d add the open source mail client N1 by https://www.nylas.com/n1