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Dec 18, 2018 - Best Mac apps: the best macOS apps for your Apple computer. Get it from: App Store. Get it from: App Store. Parallels Desktop 13. Get it from: Parallels. Get it from: App Store. Get it from: Atom. Get it from: App Store. Get it from: App Store.
+ + 15 of the Best Menu Bar Extras for macOS Sierra Posted on May 12th, 2017 by, the macOS menu bar is tremendously useful. This article concentrates on the bit at the right-hand-side, where you can stash menu extras (also known as status menus) – little apps whose icons you click to access handy controls (and more).
You might have a few there already, since Apple provides some with macOS, but we’re delving into third-party utilities here; the aim is to utilize all that otherwise empty menu-bar space, in order to make you more productive on your Mac. Amphetamine Energy Saver is great, apart from when you really don’t want your Mac dozing off. Amphetamine provides control over your Mac’s sleeping habits beyond what Apple offers itself. The app can be triggered to keep your Mac awake for a set period of time, or even indefinitely. But delve into the preferences and you can define triggers based on specific apps, and auto-deactivate Amphetamine if your battery’s running low.
Bartender 2 This one’s an organizational tool for those people with a few too many menu bar extras. On installing the app, you can stash whatever you like in Bartender’s own menu. But there’s more: items can be hidden completely, and apps can temporarily reappear for a few seconds when they update. You can also search within the Bartender menu, to quickly filter your menu extras. Default Folder This much-loved utility is primarily designed as a radical overhaul for Open and Save dialogs, adding all kinds of handy goodies. But it also comes with a superb menu extra.
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Click it and you can access Finder windows, recent folders, and recent files. You can also rapidly navigate through your entire Mac’s drive structure, from various starting points (such as Home, iCloud, and Documents). Dropzone The idea behind Dropzone is to make it faster and easier to move, copy, and manipulate files. You drag a file in Finder to the Dropzone icon, whereupon an actions grid opens.
This can contain app and folder shortcuts, social media actions, file actions (such as to create a ZIP from a dragged folder), and shortcuts to online servers (FTP, Amazon S3, and Google Drive). Endurance If you find your Mac’s always running out of power, Endurance might give it the boost you need. You create a trigger for when the app’s features kick in (such as when your Mac’s battery hits 50 per cent power). You then determine what Endurance does, such as dimming the screen, and quitting greedy apps. On a typical Mac notebook, this can help your Mac run for 20 per cent longer. Fantastical This is an interesting one, because it started out as a menu bar extra before evolving into a full-fledged calendar app.
The latter bit mirrors Apple’s own calendar, but has a handy day ticker sidebar. The menu bar bit, though, is great if you need fast access to your events, and it also enables you to build new events ‘live’ by using natural language input. Forecast Bar There have been plenty of apps that stick a weather forecast in your menu bar, and Forecast Bar is the best of them. Allow it to use your location and you’ll get a little icon showing current conditions, along with a temperature readout. But click the icon and you gain access to an extended forecast, and hourly predictions for temperature and rainfall. (Should you want to access forecasts for elsewhere, you can add further locations, too.) HazeOver Apple would have people use full-screen mode in order to focus, but that can be a jarring interface, not least when you need to switch between quite a few apps.
HazeOver provides an alternative – a kind of dimmer switch that reduces distractions by fading out background windows. Neatly, the amount of fade is controlled by two-finger swiping up or down on the menu bar icon, which turns its little dial.
IBetterCharge If you’ve ever picked up an iOS device to find it mysteriously dead, before very quickly realizing you’d not actually plugged it in, iBetterCharge is an essential app. Assuming your devices are set up to use Wi-Fi sync in iTunes, iBetterCharge tracks their power. When they hit a specific battery capacity (or are fully charged up when plugged in), the app will let you know. IStat Menus You won’t find a better system monitor than iStat Menus – nor a more convenient one.
Whether you want to track CPU or memory usage, disk capacities, network and fan speeds, or how your batteries are doing, iStat Menus provides tiny graphs in the menu bar. Click them and they expand into a wealth of info to satisfy even the geekiest user. The app also bundles the best world clock you’ll ever see on the Mac. Itsycal If you like the idea of a menu bar calendar, but don’t fancy spending cash on Fantastical, Itsycal is a smart, free alternative. It sits in the menu bar, displaying the current date (and, optionally, day); click and you’ll see the current month’s calendar.
If you like, the app will also list your appointments over the coming days. Resolutionator Apple inexplicably stopped enabling you to switch display resolutions from the menu bar a while ago, presumably because it reckons every display should use its most optimal settings. If you need to regularly switch resolutions, Resolutionator does the business. And if you’ve multiple screens, you can change each one’s resolution from within its own sub-menu. Time Out It’s easy to get into bad habits when using a Mac. Perhaps you spend time playing games, or get sucked into social networks. Time Out aims to help you focus by cycling work sprints and breaks, along with ‘micro breaks’ for stretching every so often.
The app itself is free, but you’ll need to subscribe ($0.99 monthly) to use the menu bar component. Vanilla A simpler alternative to Bartender, Vanilla simply has you place within it the menu extras you don’t need permanently displayed. On doing so, Vanilla collapses, hiding the relevant icons. If you pay for pro, you can set specific icons to never appear, automatically hide icons after five seconds, and always have Vanilla start at login. Witch This utility’s catchphrase is ‘Command-Tab everything’.
It’s essentially a replacement for Apple’s app switcher, also enabling you to quickly switch to individual windows. It’s all very configurable, and you can define multiple switchers (for example, if you want one akin to Apple’s, and another specifically for windows).
The menu bar component conveniently lists all of the apps you have open, and on selecting a window from one of them will immediately bring it to the front. Are you new to Mac? Want to get the most out of your new MacBook, iMac or other Apple computer? Whether this is your first laptop or you’ve just switched from Windows, there are a few things you should know about your new Mac, like basic keyboard shortcuts or how to use the various features macOS has to offer.
Learn more about what your Mac computer can do for you at the Intego New Mac User Center: About Craig Grannell Craig Grannell is a technology writer, mostly specialising in Macs, iOS, apps, and games. He’s been immersed in all things Apple for over 20 years, and enamoured with computers since getting his hands on a VIC-20 as a kid. He also has a Korg Gadget addiction. Or alternatively, visit his website, and follow him on Twitter at. This entry was posted in, and tagged,. Bookmark the.
The newest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra, was launched on September 25. It’s not a huge release in terms of new features, but there are a few things that can make your life easier. These are the best 17 features, tips, and tricks for macOS High Sierra.
Let's discover. What are the new features in macOS High Sierra? The biggest changes in High Sierra aren’t even user-facing features. But while you may not notice these changes, they should, which can save you battery life as well as speed up tasks. APFS, a new file system If your Mac has all-flash storage (an iMac with an SSD, or any recent Apple laptop), High Sierra will bring with it a new file system called APFS, or Apple File System.
It’s a 64-bit architecture with built-in encryption and designed to speed up common tasks like copying big files. If your Mac has a Fusion drive or a traditional spinning hard drive, you won’t get APFS right away. This is a pretty under-the-hood improvement that most users probably won’t notice. HEVC video encoding With iOS 11, iPhones and iPads are saving videos in HEVC format, or High Efficiency Video Codec, also known as H.265, since it’s the successor to H.264. HEVC support comes to macOS High Sierra as well. That way, videos you shoot with your iPhone stay in HEVC format when you transfer them to a Mac, which keeps HEVC’s superior compression intact. HEVC compresses video files up to 40 percent more without losing quality, which is a big deal considering how many devices shoot in 4K these days.
Still, this is also an under-the-hood improvement that won’t Photos for Mac Apple’s Photos application gets a big overhaul in High Sierra. For example, the new always-on sidebar making it much easier to find what you’re looking for. But aside from handy interface tweaks, Photos has some very useful new features too. New editing features It’s also got a new Curves feature in the editing panel, which is a lot more intuitive than the Curves feature in Photoshop. A new Selective Color feature lets you saturate just one color, if you want to make your subject’s eyes or lipstick, for example, really pop. Live Photo effects When you take Live Photos with an iPhone, the camera captures three seconds of video. Starting in iOS 11, the Photos app can convert those into three new Live Photo types: Bounce is kind of like Instagram’s Boomerang, showing the same action backwards and forwards.
Loop is like a GIF that plays over and over forever. And Long Exposure is good for nature shots and landscapes, smoothing out any moving parts like a rushing river or a highway full of cars. The same Live Photo effects are supported in High Sierra on the Mac, and they’re nondestructive, so you can try out an effect on any Live Photo without altering the original. Live Photo editing You can also edit a live photo to trim off any unwanted parts, and select the key frame from any frame of the video.
This is great if you take Live Photos of people—if, for example, someone has her eyes closed in the key frame chosen by default, you can drag the selector box around to find a frame where everyone is actually looking at the camera. Third-party editing High Sierra makes it easier to use Photos to organize your photo collection, but still send them off to another app for editing. You can right-click a photo in Photos and choose Edit With from the contextual menu to open that photo in another editor like Photoshop and Pixelmator—or even Setapp apps like.
Third-party services Photos always had Apple’s own print products like books and cards, but in High Sierra, you can also create new projects with third-party services like Shutterfly, WhiteWall, iFolor, Wix.com, Mpix, and Mimeo, from right inside the Photos app. This will give you more choices and different projects, like framed prints, wall decals, websites, and more. Upgrades to Safari Apple’s own web browser works even harder in High Sierra to keep annoying ads and autoplay videos from driving you bananas. Intelligent Tracking Prevention You know how after you shop for something online, you keep seeing that same thing advertised everywhere else you go? Safari will use machine learning to keep advertisers from tracking your behavior, while letting useful cookies stick around. You can turn this off in Safari’s preferences if you like, but it might be nice to not have the things you buy online haunt you for weeks on end. Auto-play videos only on your terms Everyone who browses the web has been annoyed by an auto-playing video.
You’re trying to read an article, and then boom, all of a sudden there’s a commercial blaring in the sidebar, and it ruins the experience. Then again, when you visit sites that make good videos, you might not mind. In High Sierra, you can block auto-play videos by default but still white-list your favorite sites.
I can never get enough of those recipe videos, myself. Personalize the settings per site Safari for High Sierra also lets you enable content blocking pkug-ins per site, or have a site default to Reader mode to make it easier to see.
If one of your favorite blogs uses a really small font, you can even zoom its pages by default. If your local newspaper’s site is always pestering you to share your location, you can disable that for the site too.
Just right-click the site’s name in the URL bar and choose Settings for This Website to customize it all. The little things There are more bells and whistles around macOS High Sierra too, such as Better Siri Siri gets a more natural speaking voice in High Sierra. It also uses machine learning to learn what kind of music you like to listen to—try asking for something to fit your mood. With the HomePod coming this holiday season, Apple is putting a big emphasis on Siri’s musical knowledge across macOS and iOS too. Top Hits in Mail Mail in High Sierra gets a Top Hits feature that surfaces your most important mail based on how often the sender emails you, how often you read that person’s email, and if you’ve marked them as a favorite or VIP.
Track flights with Spotlight You know how you can Google a flight number and find out information about its departure time, on-time status, and so on? Now Spotlight in macOS High Sierra can tell you that too.
Type Command-Space to open Spotlight, or paste the flight number into Safari’s URL bar. FaceTime snapshots You can take a picture during a FaceTime chat in High Sierra, but your partner will get a notification that you did. ICloud sync for Messages Messages are now synced between iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra using iCloud. That way if you have to restore your Mac or your iPhone you won’t lose your Messages history, plus read/unread status will match across all your devices. Pinned notes and tables in Notes Apple’s Notes app got a little more useful with the addition of tables, and the ability to pin important notes to the top of your list. Notes already syncs perfectly with iOS via iCloud, and you can add webpages and photos to Notes easily from the Share menu all around macOS and iOS.
Share iCloud storage Before High Sierra, you had to pay for separate iCloud storage space for every member of your family who wanted it. Now you can get a 200GB or 2TB plan and share it among everyone in your iCloud Family Sharing group. Enjoy new macOS and be among the first ones who get the new exciting features. These might also interest you:.