If you want to back up your files, share them with friends, collaborate with them, and access files across all your devices, is an absolute no-brainer. Setting up a Dropbox account is simple: Once you install the app and sign up for the service, it creates a private Dropbox folder for you and your files. Anything you put in that folder gets automatically uploaded to Dropbox's encrypted servers when there's an internet connection; work on a file inside your Dropbox, and it will save changes automatically. You'll get 2GB of online storage space free, and can upgrade your space to a whopping 1TB for $10/month. Best of all, your Dropbox folder also saves locally to your Mac, so when you're offline, you can still access and change those files and it will re-sync with the server when you return online.
Download macOS Server for macOS 10.14 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. Distribution of institution licensed apps and books purchased from the Volume Purchase Program. And up to about Mac OS server 10.6 it was amazingly good. Some apps are focused on creating clones of your hard drive and offer incremental backup as an extra feature. Others are focused solely on making backing up your Mac regularly as easy as as possible.
Your Twitter client of choice. May be weathering some rough seas at present, but it's still a must-have app for myself and my co-workers at Mobile Nations. It's the fastest way to keep in touch with our friends and colleagues, track news stories, respond to readers, and share. For me, there's only one option for Twitter on the desktop:, Tapbots's fanastically quirky Twitter app. Tapbots also offers an iOS version of Tweetbot, and both versions sync with each other, so you can browse on your iPhone or iPad and switch to your Mac without losing a beat.
's Mac client is also pretty great, and offers a slightly different style for your tweet viewing experience. If you don't have the cash to spend on a Twitter app, there's also always, but it's not nearly as full-featured as Tweetbot or Twitterrific. Google Chrome. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Apple's web browser, Safari, but it never hurts to have alternative options on your plate.
And when it comes to alternatives, tops the list. The Alphabet company's browser syncs with your Google account and offers access to a number of different plugins, and it's traditionally run Google Hangouts far better for me than Safari. And, as an added bonus: It comes with a local Flash install, so you never have to sully Safari with Flash if you don't want to.
Fantastical 2. The default Calendar app isn't bad, but if you need to take charge of your calendaring on your Mac you want the best in the business. Has pretty much everything you'd want in a high-powered calendar client: A shortcut to your calendar in your toolbar, a beautiful, easy-to-read layout, support for reminders, natural language support, time and geofenced-based alerts, time zone support, and customized calendar views.
Of all Fantastical's great features, it's the last one that I use the most — this lets me group all my work calendars and my personal calendars on separate views, so I don't have to see 10 events per day. Best of all, Fantastical offers a 21-day free trial, so you can give it a test-drive to see if it fits for your workflow. You need a password manager on your Mac.
The days of remembering all your passwords or using one password for everything are gone: It's simply not smart or safe to do these things, and you put your financial and personal security at risk. Luckily, encrypted programs like 1Password exist to store all your hard-to-remember passwords in one place. You need only remember one master password to unlock your vault; inside your vault, you can keep passwords for sites, credit card information, passport numbers, and more. Add a simple extension to Safari or Chrome, and you can auto-fill those passwords right into your web browser when you come across the appropriate site. I resisted 1Password for a long time, and last year, I finally took the plunge. I'm so glad I did: It got me off my stubborn 'I can remember 40 different 8-character passwords' high horse, and it saved my bacon when I had my passport card stolen and had to find the ID number to report it missing.
When you're setting up a new Mac, you almost never worry about disk space: A brand new hard drive feels like an opportunity for neverending file storage. But as time goes on, preference files and backups can fill your drive before you know it. Helps track down disk eating offenders and purge them from your Mac without a second thought. I've been using the app for four years since I stumbled upon it back in my Macworld days, and it's the easiest app I've ever used for eliminating unnecessary files. I love the way DaisyDisk color-codes your files for easier viewing, and you can easily view the offending files directly with a single mouse click. As you start to add apps and utilities to your Mac, you may notice an ever-increasing amount of tiny icons popping up in your right-side menu bar. While these can be super-useful shortcuts (as with Fantastical), too many of them can make your toolbar cluttered and hard to read.
Enter: The utility lets you rearrange menu bar icons in the order that most suits you, and lets you hide any unnecessary icons within Bartender's More button. The app is a life-saver on my 11-inch MacBook Air: Without it, I'd have enough icons to run into my left-side menu bar.
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Photo-editing software. When it comes to photo editing, everyone has their preferences and their favorites. Was king of my Mac's image mountain for a very long time before I switched to; others at Mobile Nations have a fond spot for. Which app appeals to you will largely depend on what you require of your image editing software. Photoshop is one of the largest, most full-featured, and best image-editors out there — but it can be overkill if you're just trying to repair some dark spots or edit your brightness; Acorn is great if you need something like Photoshop without the full power of Photoshop. I like Pixelmator for its easy-to-use Repair brush, color correction tools, and Handoff support between iOS and Mac. Your Mac offers two great text editors for rich text: TextEdit, and iWork's Pages.
But if you ever want to write in plain text (no bold or italics) or code, Bare Bones Software's will keep you comfy. TextWrangler is, in some ways, Lite: It lets you edit plain text easily, but doesn't offer many of the advanced features BBEdit boasts. If you're a pro, BBEdit's what you want; for everyone else, TextWrangler is a great free accessory to have in your app arsenal. Augment with your honorable mentions I can't do any top ten list without mentioning some apps that almost made my list.
If you need an excellent calculator app beyond what the standard Calculator app can offer you, you should check out ($9.99). If you need to record audio, you can't go wrong with Rogue Amoeba's ($19). Like to do a lot of cooking? ($19.99) is the recipe manager of your dreams. If you want to make copies of DVDs you own — or burn something on your computer to a disk — (free) is the best app in the business. Own a Sonos speaker or two?
Make sure you pick up the (free) app for your Mac to upload your iTunes library and control your queue. What are your must-install Mac apps, iMore readers? Let me know below — I'd love to discover a great new app or two. This post may contain affiliate links. See our for more details.
Since the popularity of tablets, and subsequently large-screen smartphones, digital book reading has gone mobile. But, reading on a computer is still a popular past time, and for some, it's the best way to digest the classics, bestsellers, and undiscovered gems. If you have a folder full of eBooks and want to know which reader is perfect for your needs, you'll find what you're looking for right now. I'd like to take a moment to clarify that this list is for apps that you can download onto your Mac.
There are some great e-readers that are web-based, but I've decided not to include them on this list. If you have a favorite web browser e-reader, please feel free to add it to the comments section so others can find out about it. Every Mac comes with iBooks installed. It is perfectly designed to work, not only on your computer but also across all of your mobile devices. So, you can read a chapter or two on your Mac, and pick up on your iPad or iPhone without missing a beat.
There is a quick-access button that lets you browse the iBooks Store, where you can download content to iCloud and access on all your supported Apple devices. You can also drag-and-drop PDFs to iTunes from your Mac, so if you've got a great book that isn't in ePub form, you can still read it in iBooks. As for the features, iBooks on the Mac has most of the same tools and themes as iBooks on iPhone and iPad, like color options, text size and style customizations, highlighting tools, dictionary lookup, notes, sharing, illustration rendering, voice over, and more.
If you are knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, iBooks is the best e-reader on your Mac. You'll love the ability to sync your eBooks and audiobooks across all of your devices. The Kindle reader on Mac is ideal for people that purchase, rent or borrow books from Amazon, which supplies the largest digital book collection. When you sign in to your Amazon account, you can access all Amazon books in your library. You can't browse the Amazon books store from the Kindle app, but when you buy a book on Amazon, it will be added to your collection, which you can access from all your devices, whether they are Apple, Android, or Windows. Amazon supports borrowing books, renting textbooks, sampling books, and more. It is especially beneficial to Prime subscribers.
Prime reading offers hundreds of free ebooks, magazines, and more. Kindle Unlimited, which is a subscription-based service, lets you read about a million titles (including magazines and newspapers) for a monthly price. Kindle on the Mac has plenty of customization features, too. You can change the theme to white, sepia, or black, and adjust the font size and style to tailor your reading experience. You can also add highlights and notes. One of my favorite features is the ability to browse through popular highlights from others that have also read the book.
If you have a collection of ebooks you've purchased from Amazon, or if you are a Prime subscriber, use Kindle for the Mac to read and sync your books across all of your devices. Free - OverDrive Read. OverDrive is the number one app for borrowing digital content from your local public library.
All you need is an active library card and a PIN. Just like borrowing physical books, you can browse your library's entire collection of digital content and check out multiple titles at the same time. When you borrow an ebook or another item, you can download it on your Mac and access it as much as you want during your loan period.
When your ebook is due, you don't have to worry about returning it to the library on time, it will automatically be removed from your Mac when your time is up. The OverDrive Read app on Mac is actually a web browser supported software program, but it's on this list because it is the officially supported app for borrowing books from public libraries. Although you have to access the OverDrive Read on Mac from a web browser, you can download content for offline reading, listening, or watching. You'll need to bookmark the page so you can access it without an internet connection, but if you remember to download the content while you're online, you can continue reading while offline. OverDrive Read includes tools for changing the color, adjusting the size and style of font, adding notes, highlighting, and voice over for some titles.
It also supports fixed-layout digital books (like comics and magazines) so your favorite illustrated content doesn't look weird on your Mac. If you want to read digital books, but prefer borrowing from your local library, OverDrive Read is your go-to app for accessing your loans on Mac.
Free - Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is an ePub reader that makes it super easy to read digital books on your Mac without having to drag them into an app or upload them to a cloud server. Once ADE is on your Mac, you can select it as the reader for any ePub file, so you can get started reading right away.
I use ADE for ebooks that I get from HumbleBundle. I occasionally use it for ebooks I download from my public library, too. It supports all ePub formats and PDF files. You can add a bookmark and highlight text. You can also add notes to pages and passages. Searching a book for a specific word or phrase is as easy as using the Find feature on your Mac.
If you download and store a lot of ePub files, and don't want to upload them to iCloud for reading in iBooks, ADE is the next best thing. Free - BookReader.
BookReader is the e-reader for all files. It supports EPUB, MOBI, PRC, AZW, FB2, Microsoft DOC, RTF, RTFd, xHTML, Webarchive and TXT. No matter what type of ebook you have on file, you can read it on BookReader. It only supports DRM-free files, though, so make sure your digital books don't have digital rights protections before you try to use it. You can store all of your books in one bookshelf for easy access.
It also has a few features that make book reading on the Mac a pleasant experience, like realistic page flipping, hypertext support, Text to Speech, and a fully customizable color option. You can make the font, background, and book border any color available on the spectrum.
If you tend to download a lot of different types of eBook files, you'll be happy with the level of support BookReader has. You can download a free, to decide whether you want to invest further. $9.99 - Your favorites? Do you use a specific e-reader as your go-to app on Mac? Let us know what it is in the comments and tell us why it's your favorite.
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