13 Essentials Apps For Your Mac

4 min readJul 10, 2015

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FLASHLIGHT (Free)

If you always thought, what could Spotlight do more? Then Flashlight is your answer. It’s spotlight in the right direction. Flashlight is a lot like the free version of Alfred, the difference is, it works with Spotlight instead in place of it.

You can download and add Flashlight plugins in pretty much 3 clicks and even create your own.

UPDATE: Flashlight doesn’t work on El Capitan. Alfred 3 is a great and more powerful alternative.

GIF Brewery ($5.00)

GIF Brewery brings clean, effective GIF making for everyone. Just import your video clip, trim to the ideal loop, crop for size, add captions, manage frames and delays and achieve fame. It’s 2016, so yeah, GIF’s are kinda imperative.

Example of a gif made from GIF brewery, Source: The Graham Nortan Show

UPDATE: GIFY CAPTURE

is lightweight, free and does the job well too.

TEXTMATE (Free)

Sure there are a lot of MAC text editors and they are great but TextMate does the job it is intended to do and does it pretty good. Also, it’s free!

UPDATE: VISUAL STUDIO CODE (FREE)

As suggested by PiwwowPants on Reddit, Visual Studio Code is great alternative to TextMate. It has a much better code navigation system and better git control. Give it a try.

UPDATE: ATOM

Atom is hands down the best text-editor there is right for mac.

FLUX (Free)

It automatically dims the brightness of your screen based on the time of the day — warm at night, bright during the day — so your eyes feel less strain. Works wonder if you work late at night, of course you do.

CAFFEINE (Free)

It prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep or diming the screen while watching videos. Nothing more, nothing less.

NO SLEEP (Free)

Your Macbook goes to sleep as soon you close the lid. The NoSleep extension will keep the screen awake even when the lid is closed so you can continue downloading files over the network.

UPDATE: INSOMNIAX (Free)

Again suggested by PiwwowPants on reddit, InsomniaX is basically Caffeine x No Sleep.

ADAPTER (Free)

Adapter, deserves a lot more attention than it gets. It can convert all your movies, encode audio, and change the format of your images and it’s fast. If you have any type of media to convert be sure to check it out. It’s like HandBrake without all the hassle and more options.