Back when we first started using Macs, everybody was clear on what a utility was. You knew it was a small app, that it did one thing and that you used it alongside your regular work. So a calculator was definitely a utility, arguably a basic weather app was too. Now, though, utilities have stopped being like a single screwdriver and have become more like a whole hardware store. It's still the case that you don't tend to use them for your main work, that they are extras that help you out. These days, though, many utilities and each of the five we've picked here are powerhouses.

The 50 Best Mac Apps. Afloat is a free Mac utility that gives your OS X machine extra window-manipulating functionality not natively found in the operating system, but people who aren't. Please contact me if you have any suggestions for best Mac OS apps! I haven't included any of the default apps that come with Mac OS. I haven't included any of the default apps that come with Mac OS. All of these apps are actually used by me.

They do so much that you're unlikely to ever fully exploit them. Most importantly, though, these are the utilities that it would be worth buying a Mac to get.

Under the Send / Continue button is the More Options link. Clicking this link opens a windowed version of the Send page in the web application, exposing all the standard options that you would see in the application. How to add a signature in outlook for mac.

They are the ones that profoundly improve your work and your enjoyment of working at a Mac. We depend on all five of these and we depend on them in concert. So the ranking here is based entirely on just how often we actually use them. Hazel It's hard to define how often we use Hazel, though, because we probably haven't gone into it this year and it's possible we didn't last year either. Yet what we set up when were last in it has been working for us every minute of every day since. Hazel is a Mac utility that watches any folders on your computer that you tell it to. In our case we have it watching the Desktop.

If we leave a file on there for more than a few days, it will move it to a folder out of the way. If we save an invoice PDF file whose name begins with a certain series of letter's we've specified, then it copies it to our accountant, saves a duplicate into Evernote and opens an email ready for us to send the document out to a client.

Hazel keeps an eye on our Downloads folder too. Hp office jet pro 6968 software for mac. We're rubbish at clearing out that folder when we're done with a download so we soon end up with hundreds upon hundreds of files. We could tell Hazel to delete them after a while but instead we just get it to sort them into folders. So instead of one giant mess of download files, we have all the software disk images in one place, all the images in another. Or we have a Clients folder and if we create a new folder within that, Hazel sees it and creates a new project in our OmniFocus To Do app for that latest client. That does take some fiddling with AppleScript but we just found that script through reading forums where Hazel fans swap information.

Back out in the real world, occasionally someone will hear us mention that Hazel will do this or that for us and are compelled to ask: who is this amazing person and is she being enough paid to do all this? Hazel costs $32 and is from the developer, Noodlesoft. Keyboard Maestro Oh, where do you start? We would stand up in court and claim that we know Keyboard Maestro in depth —yet we keep learning of something else it does. There could be university courses on using Keyboard Maestro and there are dozens of YouTube videos about it. At the comparatively basic level we use it, then, Keyboard Maestro watches out for keystrokes. Rather than schlepping through the print dialog options to make a PDF, for instance, we'll be in Pages and will press Shift-Command-P and let Keyboard Maestro do the rest for us.

You could do that in macOS if you wanted: just go to System Preferences, choose Keyboard, then Shortcuts and add a keystroke to anything you like. However, Keyboard Maestro lets us say that a given keystroke only does this given thing we want when we're in a particular application. So when we're in Adobe Audition, for instance, we have a keystroke for inserting silence into an audio track. We have the keystroke because we do it so often that finding and choosing the feature in the menus is a pain. If we leave Audition and go to OmniOutliner, though, we can have that same keystroke do an entirely different job. In this case we use it to add a new column to the outline: again something we do often enough that it's handy to have a keystroke.

It's not all about keystrokes, either. When we plug a certain microphone into our Mac, it knows we're going to record in Audition so it opens that up for us. So it watches for what you type, it looks for hardware being connected to your Mac, it can change all your settings and launch different apps when you move from your home WiFi to your work one.