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Sunday, 25 December 2016

The best apps for your new Mac

So you got a new Mac, huh? Lucky! I've been using a Mac as my primary computer on and off for about 20 years. I have a PC for games, but nothing beats a Mac yet for the modern media professional. Here are a few apps I use to get the job done.

We've rounded up our favorite and most-used apps and utilities for the technology we use every day. Check out our other picks for iPhones, Android phones, PCs, and Macs. We've also listed our favorite games for iOS and Android from this year.

 Gify Capture
This is the most straightforward way to make GIFs from video clips or whatever is happening on your screen. For more advanced GIF creation I use GIFBrewery, but for quick-and-dirty stuff GIPHY CAPTURE is a real treasure.

 4k Video Downloader
Maybe this is a niche thing, I'm not sure, but I frequently find myself wanting to download a YouTube video, and 4K Video Downloader makes it really easy. The app publisher also makes a tool called 4K Stogram for downloading photos from Instagram, and 4K YouTube to MP3 that does what it says on the tin.

 WMail
I use Google Inbox instead of vanilla Gmail. There are a lot of mail clients and browser shells to turn Gmail into a desktop app, but I've never found a good desktop client for Inbox until WMail.

Notational Velocity 

I'm a writer, and Notational Velocity makes it really easy to create, find, and sync my notes. Unlike a lot of apps, Notational Velocity has an option to both sync with Simplenote, and store notes as plain text files. I keep my notes folder in iCloud Drive (Dropbox or Google Drive work just as well) so they're accessible from anywhere and from any app. Sadly, Notational Velocity is basically abandonware — it's open source, but not actively maintained — and I fear the day when it will stop working. I'll keep using it until it does.

 Byword
One reason I like to keep my notes as plain text files is so I can edit them in my text editor of choice. When I'm doing longer-form writing and I want a pretty, distraction-free editor, I open up Byword. I've also used Byword's Markdown preview to print invoices when I was a freelancer, because I'll do just about anything to avoid traditional word processors like Pages and Word.

 

 

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