Amazing FREE Mac Utilities You Must Download!

hi there I don't want to waste your time so let's just get right into it a app number one night owl Mac OS Mojave brings a highly requested feature and that is dark mode it really does an excellent job I'm really surprised by how nice it looks in pretty much every application and I hope they bring it to iOS soon the problem is is that I still enjoy using light mode during the day and switching back and forth really is in that convenience so I found myself just leaving it in light mode that is until I discovered night owl a free utility if you right-click this little menu bar item it immediately and automatically switches from light mode to dark mode you can also open up the menu here change it that way if you prefer but more interestingly you can schedule when it switches from light to dark mode based on a time or based on your locations sunrise and sunset which is pretty cool so at night it's in dark mode in the day it's in light mode you can also if you prefer dark mode and want to leave it on all the time but there are certain applications that you don't like in dark mode for example one that I know looks weird is TextEdit because you have to type white text on black now you can go into the View tab and change it to a white background but then that just I don't know it looks kind of honky so if you go in here choose to quit the application we go in here we scroll down to TextEdit and then we reopen any TextEdit check it out it's in light mode but the rest of the user interface and all my other apps remain in dark mode really really nice tip number two spectacle look I'm a pretty big mac OS fanboy but one thing I have to admit Windows just simply does better is window management hey maybe that's why it's called windows I digress anyway Mac OS just doesn't do a very good job at window management you have to drag the windows individually and resize them individually you can hold down the fullscreen button and then shift it into a half screen mode but then over here you have to have another full screen app running half screen edges it doesn't work and so there are a lot of third-party utilities out there the most popular one is magnet better snap tools another option but those are both paid now better touch tool is a free application but it's way more complex unnecessarily difficult for beginners and I think that spectacle just does the job simply it's also free and opensource which makes it pretty cool this just gives you the ability to basically align the window wherever you want now you can scroll through the menu items but there are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can program them any way you want but I think the defaults are really good they just take a couple of days to kind of get used to but you can justify it to the left half the right half top half bottom half you can also do the top right quarter left quarter bottom right quarter bottom left quarter what else can you do you can scroll through a number of options here into thirds and you can go throw it on the middle there one half there's just a lot of different options for you and it really works well it takes again a couple of days to learn the shortcuts but once you do it's just second nature and I really really think you should give it a shot app number three helium hi daddy Doug a couple of years ago so far we got a really cool feature that a lot of people still don't know about and I think it's because YouTube makes it difficult to access but if you right-click twice with your mouse you can click this enter a picture-in-picture button and it actually moves the video that you're watching to a dedicated floating picture in picture window you can resize it make it whatever size you want and it stays static it floats above the rest of your user interface so you can basically close this window navigate somewhere else and continue watching the video in the corner it's super awesome not very productive but it's super awesome the problem is is that it only works with YouTube and very few other video websites most notably it does not work with Netflix and Hulu and so you have to use basically with Netflix and Hulu an application that's been around forever it's not as elegant but it still does the job and it's called helium it's available for free it's actually available in the App Store just kind of surprising given how strange it seems to function but you can either press command L or click location and then open web URL the problem with this app is that you actually have to copy and paste the URL of the video that you're in it's not hyper elegant but it basically acts as a web browser so as far as you know Netflix is concerned you're just watching it inside of a browser now that video is not actually going to play back because Netflix knows that I'm using my screen recording software right now and for piracy efforts won't show the video but I assure you that it does work and it does a really good job it's the same it floats above the rest of the user interface you can move it wherever you want there are a couple of other neat features that this offers that the main picture and picture doesn't like translucency if you wanted to kind of stay a little see-through while you're working but helium is an excellent option I've been using it for years and years and years long before Safari picture-in-picture became a thing and I still use it because Safari apip really only works in YouTube app number four alfred think of alfred as spotlight on crack the problem with alfred is that like probably crack i don't know i've never tried it it's very addictive it basically takes over your entire workflow and anytime you move to a mac that doesn't have alfred installed you're like oh no i don't remember how to do anything because alfred is so powerful now the spotlight used to suck and it sucked for a long time spotlight has gotten very good over the last few years and it is copied a lot of the kind of features that alfred invented and so a lot of people think alfred is redundant that it doesn't serve much purpose anymore but they're wrong now it is true that alfred basically does most of what spotlight does it finds applications it finds files it does things a little better i think that spotlight so it doesn't show you a preview like spotlight does but you can't press shift and it opens the system quick look which i think is way better than spotlight shoddy little tiny thumbnail integration on the right it also does some really other cool things it does web searches so I can search I don't know diapers I don't know why I would need those I don't have a kid but if I did I could press command two and then it opens in an Amazon search or Wikipedia search instead of always searching Google which is kind of what spotlight does super great for searching the web it has a lot of features that spotlight has now like the calculator currency conversion that stuff isn't all that neat but it does do some things that spotlight doesn't that is amazing you can find words so spotlight does that but it I don't think it does as good of a job as Alfred the other thing that Alfred does and this is one thing that is indispensable I love it is it does spelling so if you type spell you can horribly botch the spelling of a word like what's diarrhea people always misspell that's not the right I didn't spell it but the system tells you how to spell it and then if you hit enter in actual copies to your clipboard super super I'm not gonna Google that super super great way to manage that and you can totally I mean look at this spell I'm gonna you can totally watch the spelling like alright and it still finds it it's really really good it also does system commands which spotlight doesn't so I can put the computer to sleep I can restart it I can enter the screensaver I can lock it it is a really really really good job with all of that stuff and that's all available in the free version but they do have a pro version called the power pack the power pack if you are ever going to buy a piece of mac software by the alfred power pack it is incredible it has a complete clipboard history so it saves everything you copied your clipboard files as well as text and they're available at any time so you can copy multiple stuff and paste paste paste paste there are applications standalone apps that do this but why get those when you can just used alfred another thing that it does which is really awesome let me open a text at a document here it has sniffing expansion so if i type for example SSS it says stay snazzy cuz that's a phrase that i type a lot saves me some time i can also type d date that types the date or tea time and that does the time so there are a lot of really awesome functionalities available in the pro version of alfred that i think are just amazing one actually really good example if we let me show you a real-world issue here so let's go to the clipboard copy that netflix link that i just used in helium and i'll copy it to my clipboard and instead of opening helium you can use one of many workflows available in alfred for the community so you can type h : and now it'll open this link in helium super super cool i don't have to open helium i don't have to do it's amazing so I'm now showing you tips for the other tips that I've showed you in this video Alfred is incredible it has multiple file selection I need to shut up because I can go on about Alfred forever so you can scroll down this list and you can add oops sorry botched that you can add multiple files into a hopper and then when you get all the files you want you can go to the next page you can move all of these files to another folder you can drag and drop you can email them directly from Alfred it's it's incredible Alfred is amazing just download it even the free verse worth a shot and if you download the powerpack the paid version you will never look back it is the singular Mac utility that I physically cannot use them back without it is incredible app number five plug hype machine is an amazing website that so few people know about and it hurts my heart because it's been around forever and I use it all the time a lot of people ask me where I find all of this amazing music that no one knows about the answer 90% of the time is hype machine it is a website that basically is a fancy RSS reader it scripes scrapes hundreds of music blogs and indie music blogs and basically every genre and then once it finds all of the songs all the new music that's being listed on these blogs it finds the mp3 files on soundcloud or on Bandcamp etc and then allows you to play them inside of a browser window you can choose to like songs and the more that the community likes the songs the higher they rise up in the rankings and you can find some truly incredible music that only a few thousand people know about hype machine is amazing the problem is is that the UI is not very good I don't find the web player very good at all and because there's such a really awesome community behind this website there are third-party apps available for both Mac and Windows my favorite is plug plug is superb in every way shape and form because it looks and feels like a map and you log into your plug account and it will show you all of the popular music hype machine has a lot of remixes so you can choose to omit those from the search if you want I leave remixes enabled because they're pretty cool and you can go through the music that you've liked in the past you can look at upcoming music you can search through RSS feeds of yourself and Friends you can search specifically by genre you have your friends list here you can look at what your friends are listening to and what they've liked if they use hype machine your friend should be using it you can search new songs and add them to your favorites list directly from this app it is amazing and music plays through here generally it's pretty high bitrate quality it always fetches the highest available quality on Bandcamp and SoundCloud SoundCloud is usually not great but Bandcamp can be pretty good it is a fantastic way to find fantastic new music for any genre give hype machine a shot and get plug a shot it's free it's awesome and there's no reason not to last but certainly not least we have number six and crypto and crypto is an app that's been around for quite a while it's developed by Mac paw they make some of the best Mac software around most of their apps are shareware they're paid but this is actually a freeware application that's available for both Mac OS and Windows I think it's the only app they make for Windows and you'll know why here in a second but what it allows you to do is encrypt and send files with AES 256-bit encryption you can also save them to your own Drive maybe you have sensitive documents that you don't want sitting on your drive if someone knows the password to your computer or maybe you want to send something to someone over email you don't want to use Dropbox or Google Drive but you need a way to send it to them securely and if it gets intercepted in transit to make sure that I have strong encryption well in crypto is is what you need you just basically take any file you want let's do this PSD this Photoshop file you drag it into side the app and then really all you have to do is set a password and an optional hint so let's do password and there you go let's do hi dummy neither of those are helpful it's not a good password it's not a good hint then if you click encrypt and it uses security top security AES 256-bit encryption and you can either save it to your own hard drive it does not delete the original so that's good in a way but it's also bad in the sense that if you are hoping to encrypt your files you'll need to encrypt them first and then delete the originals but you can save as to your own drive to do with whatever you want later or you can use the share sheet directly in Mac OS to send them over messages over email or over slack whatever you want and then once you've done that it's awesome because it's encrypted and so let's save this file let's call it sure some now save it to the desktop and it saves in a dot crypto extension and that is the good and the bad thing about this app the good thing is it's super easy and seamless the bad thing is that it only opens inside of encrypt oh the application so it uses an encryption that's not parsable natively inside of either windows or mac OS but at the same time there's really no easy way to do it from within windows and mac OS that's native least reported that doesn't use the command line and doesn't have cross-platform compatibility I've tried a lot of options and I've ended up just sticking with encrypted because it just is simple it's robust it works I highly recommend it and that's all for me if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't that YouTube rewind button seems to work okay to get subscribe for more awesome tech videos like these but most importantly and as always stay snazzy

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 1,794,470

Rating: 4.9350152 out of 5

Keywords: best mac apps, mac apps, mac apps 2018, mac apps for college, mac apps for students, mac apps free, mac apps store, mac apps you should be using, free mac apps, must have mac apps, top 10 mac apps, top 5 mac apps, top mac apps, mac tips, mac tips and tricks 2018, mac tools, mac utilities, free apps, imac apps, macbook apps, macbook pro apps, useful apps, free app, macbook air, macbook pro, macos mojave, snazzy labs

Id: cqjpa8-Cp-s

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019