Best Programs For Mac

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.

• Best Programs For Mac 2018
• Best Programs For Machinima
• Best Programs For Macs

Banktivity 7 is a great alternative for dissatisfied Quicken for Mac users. This personal finance software has all the features competing Macintosh apps have and a few features typically available only on Quicken for Windows. However, you must have the latest edition of iOS in order to use this software.

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. 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.

Best Programs For Mac 2018

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. 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.

Best Programs For Machinima

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.

Best Programs For Macs

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.

Macs and video editing have long been up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Professionals were editing in Avid back in the late 1980s, and iMovie debuted in 1999 alongside the FireWire-enabled iMac DV. Today’s Macs are much more powerful than their ancestors, and that means even free apps are capable of doing some amazing things with video. It’s surprising how much you can do without spending any money: in some cases the only difference between free apps and their extremely expensive siblings is a handful of features only pro editors will need. That’s a smart business strategy; the tinkerers of today could be the pros of tomorrow.

There’s one video editor we’re disappointed not to include: (VLMC). It's based on the VLC video editor – one of our must-have apps – but it’s still in alpha, which means it’s not reliable enough or finished enough for prime time just yet.

Check out the: free and paid 1. Free editors don’t get better than this. Lightworks puts professional video editing tools within the reach of all Mac owners, regardless of budget might look a bit frightening if you’re not used to high-end editors.

And that’s about the only negative thing we can say about it, because Lightworks is one of the most powerful free video editors you can download. The same technology that’s been used in proper films like Pulp Fiction and 28 Days Later is completely free for home use.

Lightworks can be as light or as complex as you want: it’s as happy trimming a single clip to size as it is adding real-time effects, correcting colours or adding voiceovers. It’ll happily output in a format and resolution suitable for YouTube and Vimeo, but the highest quality options – 4K, 3D, Blu-Ray – and massive list of supported file formats are only for paying customers. TechRadar readers can get 40% off a monthly license using the voucher code TECHRADARLWPROMONTH2017. Apple’s own movie app is easy to master and ideal for simple video editing Apple's own video editor used to be free with new Macs and chargeable for everybody else, but these days it’s completely free for anyone who wants it (provided they have OS X 10.11.2 or later). It’s fairly simple to learn and packs a lot of useful features including audio editing and colour correction, and since last year it’s supported 4K video too. Don’t expect blisteringly fast 4K performance on a low-end Mac though, as it’s very demanding. IMovie isn't Final Cut Pro and it doesn’t pretend to be: it’s designed for home and small business users who want to make or edit videos and who don’t need complex, expensive apps, and it’s great for beginners.

Another professional video editor that's free to install on your Mac Here’s another app you’ll find in professional toolkits. Is a US$299 (£299, AU$499) app designed for post-production and packed with tools for adjusting, editing and correcting both audio and video.

The free version, is almost identical, with some limits you probably won’t notice. Its 4K tops out at UHD 3,840 x 2,160, whereas the paid product goes up to 4,096 x 2,160. Filters for film grain, lens flare and lens blur aren’t available to free users without watermarking; you don’t get the extensive collaboration and workflow tools of the Studio version, and the really complex audio and video filtering is greyed out. That sounds like a lot of omissions, but it really isn’t.

DaVinci Resolve delivers a serious set of pro tools for free. Perform quick edits and take total control over video and audio encoding is a handy app for simple editing tasks, so if you’re looking for something you can use to make quick edits and cuts this may well be the free video editor for you.

Unlike most video editors for Macs, there’s no timeline with multiple tracks to cut between and you don’t get any flashy wipes or transitions. What you do get is an exceptionally quick way to trim footage and rearrange sections. Avidemux also includes practical filters for removing noise and other irritants.

Its most useful feature is its superb exporter, which gives you total control over the video and audio encoding rather than just asking you to pick a file format. The audio options are particularly good.

Surprisingly powerful without being a pain to learn is an interesting alternative to better known video editing apps, and while it takes a bit of setting up (for example, to use animated titles you’ll need to install the free app too) it’s surprisingly powerful. OpenShot offers transitions with real-time previews, timeline-based editing, 3D titles and special effects, audio mixing and editing, and a range of visual effects including color correction and chroma key compositing. As is often the case with open source software, the interface isn't as slick as commercial alternatives, but don’t let that put you off. OpenShot is an excellent free video editor for macOS, and it’s really easy to get to grips with. Brilliant for beginners, but also powerful enough for more advanced users Some video apps put every single feature on screen at once, which is enough to make even experienced users feel a bit lost. Not – its interface stays out of the way, bringing up what you need when you need it without filling the screen with things you don’t want.

Shotcut covers all the essentials, but our favourite feature is its filtering. There are stacks of audio and video filters that you can layer to create interesting effects. There’s no preview before you apply your filter, but it’s non-destructive editing so you can easily roll back if it doesn’t do what you hoped. There are lots of export options, and while there aren’t presets for specific devices (something that’s handy if you’re making movies for mobile) it’s easy to fine tune settings and codecs. Much more than just rendering – Blender is also a capable free video editor We know what you’re thinking:? Isn’t that a 3D rendering app? Yes, it is, but it’s also a really good free video editor too.

It cuts, splices and masks, mixes audio and has up to 32 slots for adding items, masks and effects. There’s a good selection of file formats, with AVI, MPEG and QuickTime as well as the various 3D file formats.

The interface can be as simple or as complex as you like, and because the app is in constant development it’s constantly getting better and better. Blender might be overkill for basic home movies, but if you’re keen to learn new things it’s a fantastic tool for doing so.