Amazing FREE Mac Apps You Aren’t Using!

hey there cutie patooties today i'm going to show you some of the best mac apps that you are probably not using you might not have even heard of them and they're all free okay first up do you see these two safari windows well what if i told you that only one of them was a safari window this one yeah this window here on the left is an entirely different browser called orion now if this app looks like safari that's because it basically is it also renders web pages in webkit rather than chromium like every other browser if i go to my tab overview it looks the same if i hit the downloads button it looks the same if i open a new tab this looks and feels like safari heck even tab groups which were just introduced in the latest version of safari those are present in orion it is safari so then how is it different from safari it's different in two really big ways number one is that by default it is the most secure browser out there it disables tracking and ads by default from the minute you open the browser now you can modify those settings but that is the standard the other reason and the reason that i am so in love with it is this if i go to tools and then extensions and then manage look at this a couple of extensions that are what written in firefox or written for chrome that's right this web browser orion can use plugins from safari from chrome and from firefox as if it were nothing as if they were native it works remarkably well like super super well and i've been using this browser for a while it is fantastic it feels like safari it's just as fast as safari but it has the functionality of browsers that are not safari because safari is so picky about what it can choose to work with in the extension department it is fantastic now it's not a version 1.0 yet it's still in beta but you should definitely check it out it's certainly stable enough for day-to-day use i do keep a couple other browsers around but i can see a future where orion is my only go-to i love it unfortunately we're not yet in a world where we can just use a single browser or where one browser runs every web app perfectly it's just the reality of the world and that's where velga comes in velja is a little extension that sits in your menu bar and you actually use it as your default web browser but it's not a web browser all it does is decide where to push links that you open to for example if i click this youtube link it's going to open in firefox and that's because of a plugin that i like using and feel works the best in firefox called tubebuddy and so all my youtube links open in firefox but if i scroll down and open this link from where's the link right here from the verge it's going to open in orion because i want everything else to open in orion i can go even further with this if i hold down a modifier key and press the link that i want to open it actually asks me what browser i'd like to open that in orion safari a chrome firefox let's open it in safari and boom it will open in safari it's pretty amazing what this little simple thing can do and the reason why you might consider it if you're still not convinced yet is because of a lot of services that tend to perform better in their specific browsers so for example if you're sick of twitter links always opening in the twitter app you can choose to open them in a specific browser if you always want to open youtube links somewhere you can do that if you want to use certain web apps like google meet inside of google chrome because that's really the only browser it works super well in you can do that you can even set up rules so that you can say anytime i open this domain or this subdomain open it in this specific browser it's great for the reality of the world which is most of us use multiple browsers for multiple things and velja is free and it helps you do that picture this you've got a workflow going you've got a bunch of different apps open it no crap i have a zoom meeting in 30 seconds what am i going to do i've got to clear all this stuff off i got to save and make sure stuff no you don't have to worry about any of that thanks to a very cool utility called later it sits up here in your menu bar and all you have to do is click it and then press save windows for later it closes your entire session and holds it for when you're going to need it next you can then go and open your apps and everything that you need to do and then when you're ready to restore that user session you just go back up to the menu bar you press restore session and boom you can manage multiple sessions it can do more than one at a time and the other thing that is really great about it is if you're on a laptop you can say for example quit the apps instead of hiding them where they will relaunch and reopen to the same spot where they were it's a really cool utility if you need to just clear your desktop but you don't want to go through and hide everything or quit everything manually pretty neat alright so picture this you're trying to gather a bunch of things for a specific task you either have to open a bunch of finder windows and then move them all to the destination manually or you do what i do which is horrible i recognize this and i make like a folder called temp and i'm like oh i need this photo i'm going to drag this in here and then i just drag my photos over this is a stupid way to work and there is a free app that makes things much much better it's called drop over and all you have to do is take a file inside of your finder and you just wiggle it and check this out a little drop zone pops open i can now move this wherever i want and it just holds things until i'm ready to act upon them so i can go into a different folder or the same folder drag stuff over they can be images they can be files they can be links they can be text snippets they can be urls or even images that i find from my browser and drag in you can put basically anything you want into a little drop over zone and once you've done that you can either dismiss it and come back to it later you can manage multiple drop zones at the same time or and this is where things get really neat you can pull up your shelves this is the one i have with two images and you just right click it and it gives you a bunch of options i can choose to open all of these files i can show them in the finder i can open them with quick look without actually launching the specific applications i can use anything inside of the ios share sheet or and this is where things get really cool i can upload them to a media hosting service be icloud it can be dropbox it can be google drive or even dropover's own hosting service i just click copy dropover link i can title it beans my password is beans and i'm going to leave it for three months there's a public link that's a web page or maybe i don't want a webpage i just want direct download let's do a web page i press share and it uploads and once that's done i open the link inside my browser it opens dropovers cloud i enter beans and boom those files that i wanted to share are shared just like that it is amazing that this is a free utility there is a pro option and basically all it does is it removes a slight limitation in the free version where after i think like a week you have to wait a couple seconds before dragging stuff into a zone it's one of those things where they're like we want this to be free how can we get people to pay for it you could totally get by without paying for it but you should throw a couple dollars to the developer's way because again you just pick it up you drag it and boom it's in a zone it is so so great for wrangling data before you need to act on it it's called drop zone dropover okay okay get off my back i've tried raycast raycast has been around for a couple years and it is by far the most popular app on this list but every time i make a mac video everyone's like you're going to talk about recast come on tell the people about recast i have been using raycast for a little while now and i do like it i've been using a different app called alfred that does very much the same thing or similar things that is and you can think of alfred and raycast as spotlight but on crack they are indispensable to mac power users and the reason raycast has been one that i've never really dived into much is it's very um how should i say this it's very intimidating relative to something like alfred and i've just been using alfred for years and years and years it's second nature i didn't want to try to learn something new but uh raycast does do some stuff that's pretty darn cool and i want to show you so on its very rudimentary level it does everything spotlight does right so i can launch an app like i don't know system preferences that's a fun one or i can do a conversion 40 euros to us dollars oh my gosh sucks to be in europe right now uh i can uh search for file so i'm gonna type rivien and i'm gonna go to file search and check it out here's all of the stls the 3d printed models that i am using for my rivian wireless charger there's a lot of stuff that you can do with raycast that spotlight can do but there is some advanced functionality for example i can go into my clipboard history this manages every url every piece of text or image that i have copied it holds it until i'm ready to act on it which is really pretty handy i can also do uh window management so if i've got uh tweetbot open i can go over here and say window top left quarter there you go it's now over there so it does a lot of things that other apps do you might not be that impressed yet and that's understandable this is what a lot of other similar apps can do but where raycast gets powerful is in its free plug-ins you can get via the store they call it the store but to my knowledge pretty much all of them are free let me just give you an example of a few things that i have been using raycast for so if i go down to search notion right here i can actually find any video that i have done so mac mini we made the mac mini actually mini if i go down to that item it will load that page that i have in notion it's got everything loaded up it's a fantastic way to go through my notion database without actually having to get into notion really pretty cool now okay you don't use notion because you're not a nerd what else could you do uh well let's say i go to today's list this is inside of things uh oh i have to confirm something with andrew once i'm done with that i can just press done and check it out it's completed i've never opened things my to-do app at all yet it's done that is pretty darn cool what else can you do i don't know you can go to youtube search okay i'm gonna type uh i don't know mkbhd oneplus there's gotta be a new one of those right what happened to oneplus oneplus 10 pro i press enter i can see when it was published i can see how many views and likes and comments and if i want to watch it i just push enter and it opens up in my browser there are so many extensions for almost any app or utility you can think of there is a raycast extension it gets really powerful it's free so there's no harm in checking it out and well if you've got a little bit of patience and a little bit of willingness to accept a learning curve it can be very very powerful check it out raycast everyone knows that the built-in screenshot tool in mac os is pretty good you press shift command 3 to grab the full screen or if you want a selection shift command 4 and then you drag or you can push space bar and then check it out you just grab this specific window right here you can draw on it you can add shapes bob's your uncle this is a pretty powerful tool and has gotten more powerful over the years but there are third party apps out there that do a lot more the most popular one is clean shot x but it's 30 which is quite a hard pill to swallow if you're not taking screenshots every day well there's a new kid on the block and it's free it's called shotter and you invoke it well basically the same way you would invoke the regular screenshot tool i press shift command 2 and now check it out i've got the same cursor i push the space bar i can grab this window bada boom bada bing and a now what gets even neater about this is that you can uh you know do a lot more powerful things of course all the rudimentary stuff like adding shapes and cropping in and you know all the stuff you're used to you can do that that hasn't changed at all but there are some cool new powerful tools some are really nerdy like this which is a ruler so if i push the number one button i can see that there's 220 points in between this uh top row and this bottom row or 384 here what about the space in between the icons i can go horizontal and 92 pixels 92 pixels uh isn't that set nine 90 pixels they gotta move that over a couple pixels this is great if you're doing graphic design work but okay it's for nerds i don't care about that what if i just want to grab something out of a screenshot well hold down the command key and push the thing you want to grab and it will automatically intelligently use an ai decide what to select let's say you want a little bit more control and you want to manually select stuff well you just hold down the option key and drag see this picture of my wife and i it's just slowly grabbing more and more and more as i drag over and now it's selected the name that i've selected but if i keep going further it still just selects that name until i get all the way over to the apple id and then it adds that too pretty darn neat but okay this is still nerdy i don't care you're boring me well check this out let's say i want to delete these two icons all you got to do is select them and you push delete that's it now you might be thinking ah big whoop who cares all you've done is just drag it it's used ai to add a gray box over the top but check this out you can actually do it over inconsistent patterns and colors so these are totally different kinds of gray but i push delete and they're all gone and you would never know look at that isn't that freaking awesome but things get even crazier yet let me push this blur tool right here and i can select the whole bottom row and now check it out it's all blurry okay that's kind of cool but so what well what if you just want to blur the text and leave the images intact done isn't that freaking awesome what if i don't want to erase it uh but i don't want to blur it i just want to get rid of the text all together done the text has erased or you can erase the whole thing it is so freaking cool what this app can do it can also get super nerdy with stuff if you're for example uh you want to use a counter because you're trying to do a multi-step tutorial you're like first click here and then click here it can do that too shotter is so powerful i have just barely scratched the surface on what it can do but it is amazing it is free and it feels like a native app and i don't know how much better praise i can give it than that this next app is one that if you showed it to someone you were on a date with she would probably leave the restaurant but if you showed it to your wife she would say you know this is the reason i'm in love with you it's called image optim and it is a nerdy little app that i've probably talked about before because i use it just all of the time but all you have to do is look at any time you've taken a photo and press command i you're going to see that there's a bunch of metadata there what camera it was taken with the focal length the f-stop number gps location and data device specific hashing there's a lot of crap contained inside of image files that we don't recognize and not only can this sometimes invade our privacy if we're distributing over the web but it also takes up space that's not needed online watch this if i drag this file into imageoptim it's just going to strip it of all of that unneeded metadata it has saved me 16 in my file size by just get ready getting rid of data it's done no lossy compression at all the image is exactly the same it's just removed all the other unneeded stuff if i press command i again check it out it's still there i don't know why uh oh there we go now it's gone that was a weird mac os bug see there you go you can do this to a bunch of different photos in batch you can also if you so choose do lossy compression from inside of here so i can minify my images i enable lossy modification i can choose what the jpeg quality i want is how much i'm willing to sacrifice in terms of image fidelity and then i do the same thing i just drag the images in it does its thing and you will be blown away by the quantity of file size reduction that it can get away with in lossy minification this again is great for the web i mean this image is 104 kilobytes it wasn't a good picture anyway there you go 1.4 megabytes it still looks fantastic and it's half the size that it used to be but i mostly just use it for stripping metadata it's called imageoptum and if you want your life wife to love you again now download this app earlier i showed you that raycast and alfred both do clipboard management that is to say you can copy multiple things and then have a paste history over time there's a lot of apps that do this some are free some are paid some are beautiful some are not i think one of the best is one of the simplest it's called copy clip check it out it's this little paper clip in your menu bar icon it's not gorgeous it doesn't try to be it just keeps track of everything you've copied and when you want to recopy it you click it and there you go check it out it's on your clipboard that's all you got to do that's copy clip it's free i don't know why you would need anything else it's fantastic if you're not interested in one of the crazy power tools that does clipboard management as well copy clip is the best option it's in the mac app store it's free just go get it next up the astute amongst you might have noticed that throughout the course of this video i've been clicking this cute little chevron that's revealing stuff in my menu bar this is thanks to an app called hidden bar there are a lot of apps that do this bartender is paid it's by far the most famous vanilla is a freemium app hidden bar is completely free and that's why i like it and choose to use it it's open source and it's awesome and it's super super simple so this is how it works everything that is right of this little tiny line here is visible all the time i can still drag my menu bar stuff like i always could but everything to the right of this is always visible now everything to the left of this little line is only visible once i click that chevron so it collapses and expands if i'm sick of seeing cardhop i just drag it to the left of that i that little line and boom it's gone now there's sometimes some apps that you never ever ever want to see creative cloud i am talking to you if we right click the chevron it will reveal some of these apps that i never ever want to look at ever again let's say that this thing i don't like this i want to drag this over go away forever if i drag it to the left of this little transparent line when i re-collapse the menu check it out it's gone it's still up there it's still running it's still functioning poor little creative cloud doesn't know we can't see it but we can't and that's the way things should be it's uh it's very very awesome it's called a hidden bar and it's free and go get it i like it as much as any other option on the market have you ever wanted to just check yourself out or maybe you want to make sure that you don't have a boogie or that no one's coming up behind you with a knife to stab you in the back well a lot of people just use their iphone selfie camera for this and that works but there's a better way to do it it's called hand mirror check it out just here up in my menu bar if i click it it turns my webcam on and if i click it again it turns my webcam off if i click it it turns my webcam on and if i click it off it turns my webcam off that's all it does but it's a super great way to just check yourself maybe before you go on a zoom meeting or whatever it's way better than opening up like photo booth which is what i think a lot of other people do it's called hand mirror it's free it's cute it's awesome look at yourself you're beautiful appreciate what you've got okay i think you're fantastic ah my screen's a little dim i'm just gonna come in here and boost it up yeah well guess what not everyone's a rich little piece of crap that can afford a studio display or a pro display xdr and sometimes people don't just want to use the built-in brightness control in their macbook pro or their imac because they're using an external monitor if you are one of those people there is a very cool little app that does basically the same thing with some wizardry involved it is called quickshade and it is a brightness control for your mac but not in the way that you would traditionally think it doesn't actually change the brightness on your third-party monitor all it does is it dims the output signal of the hdmi or displayport link that you are sending to that monitor it's a weird way to get around things but it does work if you're working at night and you don't want to blind yourself in the eyes you should try out quickshade it's a it's a pretty cool little app it's free and it works really well if you're not on an apple display do you know what pisses me off all these new apps many of them paid that are like oh we clean your disk we have cleared everything up your ram is free they suck they don't do anything they don't ask for admin privileges and so they're very limited in what they can do they're garbage okay there's an app that's been around forever called onyx literally forever 20 plus years and the people that actually need to verify their file system the people that actually need to find lost files the people that actually need to you know clean and maintain their disk they use onyx and you know onyx is good because you literally cannot open the app without using your admin password it's fantastic because it actually goes to the disk level to do functions it's ugly okay this is literally the home page this is not a bug they're just like home and then there's nothing below this bar it's ridiculous but it does work really well i spend most of my time in this maintenance tab and not only can you verify your file structure's system and integrity and delete apfs snapshots which is very very handy but you can also rebuild a lot of stuff that's been corrupted like for example if spotlight is acting up you can force a re-spotlight index you can rebuild your mailboxes inside of the mail app just don't use the mail app anyway it's a disaster or you can go in and clean specific areas of your disk your system your applications you can get rid of cash items and multi-language packs and your junk items applications is a fantastic one particularly because a lot of times people just delete the app and then trash it out but there's leftover p list files and weird straight this gets rid of all of them it's a fantastic little app and i love it but it does a lot more than just disk maintenance you can go into the utilities section and spend a lot of time working with apfs snapshots and making sure that you can verify your file system structure if something's weird is going on i've had a couple times where stuff is just like not working and it's slow and i'm like i don't know what's going on i come in here and i check it and it's like we found a thing here's and we fixed it you're like oh okay great this is admittedly used less in newer versions of mac os but back in the day i was in here all the time because you'd install weird crap and screw stuff up onyx would fix it but i do use onyx for a couple of other reasons still today number one is files this is a really cool tab you can choose to hide specific folders files and disks if you don't want them to have visibility inside of your of your file system but you can also do checks on verification if you download an operating system or a raspberry pi installation image from the web and you want to make sure that it's integral before you write it to disk onyx can do that it does a lot of other cool stuff too it can do secure deleting and multi-pass deletion if you throw something in your trash can and just trash the can out inside of mac os you can still recover that if it really comes down to it this makes sure that the stuff that you need deleted stays deleted forever apple doubles have you ever opened it like an x fat drive or a drive that's fat32 and there's a bunch of like weird dot slash trash dot slash apple those are called apple doubles and it's not a big problem for most modern systems but sometimes particularly if you work with pcs and you're updating bios files they hate apple double files it freaks them out so you can come in here and make sure those are all deleted you can do tons of other cool stuff in onyx too one of them and i've used this i use this about once a year and it's a nightmare every time i need to use it i hate it but it does find stuff when i need them to be found mdfind is what spotlight uses it's the spotlight index of what's on your disk and mdfind does a pretty good job most of the time but sometimes you've really lost something you have no idea where it is spotlight can't find it you can't find it in the finder not all hope is lost if you come in here you have to rebuild the database and it takes like a good while but it's it scans every single byte on your computer and then you can find based on uh the name of the file or the type of the file or the date of creation it works really really well when things have all gone down the pooper and you can't find files then we go into the parameter section this enables a lot of settings that are not available in mac os things that are typically only enabled via the command line you can do that right here inside of the parameter section for example if i want to get rid of window zooming in the finder there we go i've pressed it it's done it just there you go onyx can do a lot of cool stuff it comes in handy all the time and i really recommend you check it out it's free it's been around for 20 years what more could you want all right before i let you go i do have one more thing it's called one thing it's up here in my menu bar receive cheese car if you don't follow me on twitter you don't know what that means that's why you should follow me on twitter but if i click this i can change this text to whatever i want it is a great way to put in a reminder or a task or a to-do item or an inspirational quote to make you feel good or i can say like this video i push enter and there you go it's up there in my menu bar and it stays there until i change it so listen to it it's one thing i've only asked you one thing just do it thank you so much for watching and as always stay snazzy [Music] you

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 838,742

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, Mac apps, Mac, Free apps, Best free Mac apps, Mac utilities, Macintosh, Computer, Tutorial, Apps

Id: FxUk8gxzHI8

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022