10 free Mac apps you should be using
By Mark Rogers
They say the best things in life are free. And that’s certainly the case with many Mac apps. If you want the best you often don’t have to pay a cent.
This entire site is devoted to free Mac apps, but we’ve compiled a list of the 10 we think should be on every Mac user’s computer.
This funky little app puts an empty coffee cup in your menu bar. Click on Caffeine and it fills with steamy hot brew — potent enough to keep your Mac awake for as long as you want.
It’s hard to believe how frustrating it is to customize the day, date and time in the menu bar. But Day-O not only makes it simple, but also throws in a nifty drop-down calendar.
This is the easy way to share, sync and backup your files. Drop your stuff in folder and it’s available wherever you want it. The first two gigabytes at Dropbox are free, and for a lot of people that’s plenty.
A bunch of open windows can soon turn into a mess. But with Spectacle running, you can use keyboard shortcuts to zip them to the sides and corners so they line up nicely.
For everyday text editing, you can’t beat this amazing app. TextWrangler makes a great basic editor for coding a website, but can also be used to create documents of any kind.
TV schedules aren’t as regular as they used to be, so you may not know when new episode of your favourite shows are on. Keep TVShows running in the background and you’ll always be on top of the latest torrents.
It’s like having a personal news wire for your life. The great thing about the Twitter app is that it can site quietly in the corner, lighting up the bird icon in the menu bar as new tweets arrive — so you never miss a thing.
The built-in app that comes with your Mac can handle many compression formats, but sometimes it’s stumped. On the other hand, The Unarchiver works just as well and never fails.
Once this torrent client gets going, it’s a true champ — downloading files quickly and efficiently.
There’s an alphabet soup of video and audio formats available, but with VLC there is no need to worry. It handles every one of them without complaint.
Are there other free Mac apps that should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments.