Scrimpy's Picks
Totally biased and subjective choices for best of the free Mac apps at thriftmac.
Free Mac apps
thriftmac
- Audio
- Backup
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Clipboards
- Compression
- Converters
- Deletion
- Drawing
- Education
- File Sharing
- Finance
- FTP
- Functionality
- Graphics Tools
- Health
- iTunes
- Journals
- Launchers
- Maintenance
- Markdown
- Media Hubs
- Media Players
- Menu Bar
- Messaging
- Miscellaneous
- News
- Notes
- Outliners
- Painting
- Photo Editing
- Screenshots
- Search
- Security
- System Monitors
- Terminal
- Text Editors
- Text Tools
- Three Dimensional
- Timers
- To-Do
- Utilities Misc
- Video
- Web Browsing
- Window Management
- Word Processors
1Piece
Multi-functional app includes many options for display and management of windows, some of which are quite innovative.
Amphetamine
An alternative to the dearly departed Caffeine, this menu bar app overrides energy saver settings to keep your Mac awake. This one has a boat load of features and is being actively developed.
AppCleaner
Delete not only the app, but also all those pesky files that are associated with it.
Bitwarden
Open source password manager has a nice interface, easy search, and plenty of ways to organize your items.
espanso
Type a keyword with a colon in front (or whatever you like!), and it expands. Includes special triggers for dates, emojis and shell commands, plus several expansion packages. Can also create templates.
Firefox
The non-profit open source effort from Mozilla, often updated, with a huge collection of add-ons. Fast, private and secure.
Free Ruler
Handy little utility for those times when you want to measure something on your screen. Over 20 years old!
ImageOptim
Drag and drop .jpeg, .png and .gif images and see them instantly slim down. This open source app works by finding the best compression parameters and removing unnecessary comments and colour profiles. Which is just what you want to make websites load faster.
Itsycal
Easy access from the menu bar to a calendar for the current month and a listing of appointments and events imported from the Calendar app that comes with your Mac. Unpinning allows you to move it around the screen.
NetNewsWire
The revered RSS feed reader is back with an open source version by Brent Simmons as his contribution to the open web. Features include a Safari extension for feed-adding, direct feed-downloading, and syncing via Feedbin.
Poolsuite
Listen to upbeat, uninterrupted music on five different channels: default, Indie Summer, Hangover Club, Tokyo Disco and Friday Nite Heat. Also available are the latest 20 tracks, and a spot for your favourites.
Pure Paste
It can be super annoying to paste some text into, say, an email message, only to find that a bunch of formatting came along for the ride. This app makes sure you can have nothing but plain text.
System Color Picker
A nice app version of the color picker that comes with your Mac. It can be invoked from the menu bar or record your own shortcut. It gives values in hex, hsl and rgb.
Tot
This tiny scrapbook with a gorgeous interface can live either in the dock or the menu bar. It’s a handy place to keep seven pages of temporary notes, and no more. Syncs with iCloud.
Visual Studio Code
Open source, cross-platform text editor from Microsoft has thousands of extensions, IntelliSense completions and built-in support for Git.