This is a best productivity app for webmasters and for people who deal with plenty of online accounts. You can find some discounts for agilebits 1Password 5 for Mac OS X and Windows at our coupons section. Best productivity apps for Mac OS. Clockify is a time tracker with a native Mac OS app that also boosts your productivity by helping you identify wasted time, and making your daily scheduling easier and faster. Alfred is a productivity app and an application launcher. It keeps all of your most used processes, most visited websites, etc, in a.
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- Boost Your Productivity On Mac With These Apps. These 15 apps are, in our opinion, the best apps to boost your productivity on the Mac. Now go, try them out, see how they can help you and let us know about your experience in the comments section below.
- Best Productivity Apps For Mac. I have a demanding job as a sales executive, a family with two kids, I’m a blogger, and I workout 4-5x a week. Doing all that requires dedication and brutal efficiency.
- Using a list or note taking app is a great way to improve your mac productivity. Apps can help you take and organize your lists and notes. Here are some of the best apps for lists and notes: 13. Evernote allows you to store information you want to remember. Use it to create lists, take notes, scan documents, and even add photos.
There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap. For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and/or open source Mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer. We’re covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on what’s important: create.
You may also want to take a look at the following related posts:
1. aLunch
aLunch is a very lightweight but powerful application that does what it is supposed to do and nothing more: a handy launcher that runs from within the menu bar. The application was written back in 2007, and two years later it still proves to be a strong contender.
aLunch helps you get all your apps organized and get an uncluttered dock. You can customize a hot key combination so a launcher window shows and let’s you choose either a Launcher window or go to the Launcher Menu. You can use this application with a Mac running OSX 10.4 or higher. If you have an earlier OS X such as 10.3, you need to update to version 10.3.9 to use an earlier version of the application.
2. Adobe Kuler
Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 applications – Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Fireworks and Flash – have an Extension panel that connects directly to Kuler, the web-hosted application for generating color themes. Not many designers take advantage of a powerful tool like this one. Logging into Kuler.com with your Adobe ID, you can create color swatches themes from a color, share, rate and search the community color schemes, and upload or use a Flickr image to extract color themes so you can download them as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file that’s compatible with Adobe applications.
But you can also access the Kuler site from its own standalone application to get more flexibility. Also there is a Dashboard widget to help you browse through your color schemes and the communities. To install Kuler Desktop you need to have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.4 and up, with Adobe Air and Flash Player installed.
3. Name Changer
Name Changer is a very straightforward and simple tool that will help you rename batches of files without the hassle of Automator or Photoshop batch change – the latter can get a little too technical for some users.
This application saves you the time of naming each file manually. Name Changer gives you a wide variety of options that go from select text replacement to fully customizable text replacement. Designed for OSX 10.5, NameChanger is a Universal Binary, so it runs on both Intel and PowerPC macs. If you have a OSX 10.3 or 10.4 Mac, there’s a version that you can use too, so those Macs with earlier OS can still use the application.
4. YemuZip
YemuZip is a more powerful Zip-archive application that with a simple drag and drop interface, makes creating zip files an easy task. YemuZip lets you choose between a PC-compatible format and a Mac format that preserve all the Mac-specific metadata.
The tool lets you choose the destination of your zip file (same as source, Desktop or Documents) and can attach the file to an email message for easy sending. Runs on OS X 10.4 or later and it is an Universal Binary.
5. Dateline
A subtle replacement for having the date shown on the Menu bar, Dateline gives you a linear calendar on your desktop within a transparent window. One very useful feature is that it has direct access to iCal when double clicking on a day.
The background and text colors are fully customizable along with transparency to make it blend seamlessly with your current desktop. This application requires Mac OS X 10.5 and higher.
6. DropBox
DropBox is by far the easiest way to share files if you are on a low budget and do not want to be bothered with server side issues when sharing files with clients. Since it’s an application that runs in the background, you can leave it running and it does the file updates on the machines seamlessly. You have a 2GB limit for the free accounts, 50GB for the Pro account at $99.00 per year or a 100GB for the Premium account at US$199 per year.
Another useful aspect of this app is that you can sign in and access your files from any browser, not necessarily from your Mac. The file sharing is done over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage, so they are safe. From the visual side, a blue sync mark shows when the files are syncing and a green check mark appears when it’s done. What’s best, it’s that it’s not just for Mac, it’s compatible with Windows and Linux.
Every time you update a file, Dropbox transfers what was updated from the original uploaded file, so working with large Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign documents is a breeze. If you need to share files with users that don’t have Dropbox, you can use your Public folder and all the files in that folder will be given a unique link so you can send that for a direct download. And if you accidentally delete a file, you can “undelete it” from the web interface. Overall, it’s a time saving application when you want a fast way to share files with clients or co-workers.
7. Quicksilver
Quicksilver is a powerful application launcher, an application that will create catalogs of your frequently used apps, folders and documents. What’s interesting is that the search grows and adapts from what you do everyday. One very useful feature, If you have all your contacts in Address Book is that you can search within Quicksilver the contact name and when you hit enter on the telephone number, it shows on big type over the screen, so it’s a quick way of looking at a phone number without launching Address Book itself. An alternative: Namely.
You can enhance Quicksilver with plugins to do more powerful things, like uploading files using applications as Transmit, Queue albums on iTunes, emailing files or even moving the file’s location without doing it from the Finder. To run Quicksilver, you need a Mac with OS X 10.4 or higher.
8. iClockr
This is a small application that tracks your work time. You can set up different projects, and tasks for each project, and associate them to a client. The concept around iClockr is to have actions timed, for that you create tasks to be timed and those tasks add up to create a project. Each task is timed with a stopwatch, even the application’s dock icon changes to a stopwatch.
You can edit the task durations for better and more exact timing. iClockr also offers two modes to manage your times: Flat Rate or Range based. You can match each project with customers (within the application’s Preferences pane). iClockr is a Mac Universal application that runs on Leopard only.
9. Caffeine
When video chatting or having a voice-only-call with a client, Caffeine has proved its place on Macs. Caffeine prevents your mac of going to sleep, dimming the screen and avoids the screen savers to start.
To get to the application’s preferences, hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu. Lightheads’ website doesn’t specify if Caffeine works with other OS versions different than Leopard.
10. iTool
iTool is a free application that offers a complete system maintenance and cleaning. It has a friendly user interface that guides you to complete the needed maitenance task.
Also, hidden on the Application menu (not found on the application’s main window), you can reach other options to tweak the look of the Dock (2D or 3D) or the Finder among others. This application is Leopard only.
11. The Unarchiver
For those short on budget, there’s a very light and powerfull free app called The Unarchiver. It allows you to extract many more file formats besides the .zip, such as .tar-gzip, .tar-bzip2, .rar, 7-zip, .lhA and stuffIt. Also it better handles filenames from foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems.
The installation is very simple: copy the applications into your Applications folder and start using the application. The Unarchiver requires Mac OS X 10.3.9.
12. Paparazzi!
Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of web-pages. Paparazzi! allows you to define minimum size and capture size, so you can capture the best screenshot according to your needs. You can choose between saving the resulting picture as .jpeg, .pdf, .png or .tiff, also adding a thumbnail and thumbnail icon. Its current version, 0.4.3 works on Mac OS X 10.3 or later, and their 0.5 beta is Leopard only.
13. AllBookmarks
AllBookmarks is a small menu bar item that provides you with a quick access to your browser’s bookmarks. It grabs Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks and also gives you access to 1Password 1Click bookmarks so you can navigate, fill a form and submit it with ease. The tool is a Universal Binary application which means that it works on Intel or PowerPC Macs, running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
14. DockSpaces
DockSpaces is a small application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks, and swap them from the menu bar. You can also link a Dock with a Leopard’s Spaces so you can redefine your productivity. With Growl notification, you know which dock you are using. You can change the configuration for each dock for a more personalized usage. This application is a Universal Binary and Leopard only.
15. TaskMate
TaskMate is a very simple and light task management application. Create a task, check it off when completed and it disappears from your list. The completed tasks are visible on the sidebar that you can toggle on and off. TaskMate runs on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and it is a Universal Binary Application.
16. Symbol Caddy
The Symbol Caddy Dashboard widget keeps a bunch of common special characters at your fingertips. Keyboard mode copies the special character and HTML mode copies the HTML entity code. Mac OS X 10.5.0 or higher is required. CharacterPal does the same and is also freeware.
17. iZoom
iZoom is a simple application designed to allow you to easily resize and crop your photos for optimized display on your iPod photo, on the web, or in email messages to friends. Built using Java, iZoom is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Currently, JPEG is the only supported image format.
18. JumpCut
Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history. The application is available as a Universal Binary that requires OS X 10.3.9 or later. Users running earlier versions of OS X should try Jumpcut 0.54, which should work with OS X 10.1 and later. Source code is also available. Jumpcut is open sourced under the MIT License.
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19. Name Mangler
Name Mangler is a batch file renamer that supports all common renaming tasks: Find and Replace (including support for regular expressions); Number Sequentially; Change Case; Set Extension; Add Prefix/Suffix; Remove/Insert Characters. You can combine all of these using the Advanced renaming mode, which even comes with some extra features, such as conditional statements, nested counters etc. Name Mangler 2.0 runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
20. CyberDuck
Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP-client and also a WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. The outline view of the browser allows to browse large folder structures efficiently and you can quickly preview files with Quick Look. To edit files, a seamless integration with several external editors makes it easy to change content quickly. An alternative: Filezilla.
21. TextWrangler
TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. Essentially, it is a free version of BBEdit (see below). It offers a broad range of support for different programming languages, and fantastic find and replace functionality. A reliable and powerful tool, especially considering its freeware status. (via appstorm.net). Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Alternatives: eMacs, Smultron, TextEdit (native Mac-app).
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22. Growl
Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. Growl offers you complete control over which notifications are shown and how they are displayed. You will not receive any notifications that you do not want, because you can easily turn notifications (specific ones or all of them) off. Growl requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
23. Gmail Notifr
Gmail Notifr sends you notifications about the received e-mails and other events in your Google account. It supports multiple accounts, checks mail at a specified interval, has Growl and sound notifications and has no background daemon processes installed as Google’s official notifier. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5+ (Leopard).
24. MAMP
MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer, be it PowerBook or iMac. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files.
25. And so many more!
Our friends from Appstorm.net have recently published The Ultimate Mac Setup For Web Designers: 60 Apps and 60 Open Source and Free Mac Apps which cover dozens of extremely useful and powerful applications that you can download and use for free. You can also check out the list of open source Mac applications on OpenSourceMac.org.
We missed some really cool open source Mac-application? Please let us know in the comments to this post!
Download Mac Apps
Reference Links
All the links mentioned in the article.
- aLunch A very handy launcher that runs from your Mac’s menu bar.
- Kuler Color themes generator.
- Name Changer A powerful batch name changer.
- YemuZip Creating Zip files has never been so easy.
- Dateline Linear calendar for your desktop.
- DropBox Online file sharing system.
- Quicksilver Adaptive appliction launcher.
- Transmit Powerful FTP client software.
- iTunes Digital media player from Apple.
- iClockr Timing application for multiple projects.
- Caffeine Keep your mac from sleep.
- iTool Complete System Maintenance, cleaning and customizing the look of Leopard.
- The Unarchiver Unarchive with power.
- Paparazzi! Grab stunning screenshots of webpages.
- AllBookmarks Bookmarks from your menu bar.
- TaskMate Task management made easy with a OS X feel.
- Symbol Caddy Keeps a bunch of common special characters at your fingertips.
- iZoom Allows you to easily resize and crop your photos for optimized display.
- JumpCut Provides “clipboard buffering” – access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else.
- Name Mangler A batch file renamer that supports all common renaming tasks.
- CyberDuck An open source FTP, SFTP-client.
- TextWrangler The powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool.
- Growl A notification system for Mac OS X.
- Gmail Notifr Sends you notifications about the received e-mails and other events in your Google account.
- MAMP Installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer.
Other apps only make to-do lists.
Slash slices through them by helping you focus and stay in flow.
Focus
Repeat
Finish website design
0:00Nice job!
Next task: Send beta invites
or take a breakThe powerful Science of Focus
50% more productive
50% more free time
Features
Focus Mode
Your current task stays pinned on screen with a timer so you are constantly aware of what you're doing, and how long you've been doing it for.
Stay in Flow
Complete task after task without searching for what to do next. Constant flow state.
Nice job! Your next task is:
Feed the cat
or take a breakSeamless Sync
Need to keep using another app? No problem. Sync your tasks from Trello & Todoist. More apps coming soon.
Self-Tracking
Dig into your productivity and watch your progress with our dashboard.
Any Platform
Add tasks on the go from iOS or Android, then Slash through them on Mac or Windows. Linux coming soon!
Hyper-Customizable
Slash provides every possible setting to make it flexible to your perfect workflow
More features to keep you focused.
Pomodoros
The technique of working for 25 minutes intervals with 5 minute breaks.
Time Tracking
Automatically track the time you spend on each task, and see work time totals for each day.
Time-Driven Tasks
Mac Apps For Productivity
A task titled 'Emails for 20 minutes' will start with a 20 min timer.
Eisenhower Matrix
A special tool to mark tasks as urgent and/or important to automatically prioritize.
Global Task Entry
Easily add tasks from any app without interrupting your flow.
Task Notes
Save links, comments and other details for each task.
Best Macos Apps 2020
Keyboard Shortcuts
16 and counting. Do it all at light-speed with no mouse.
Auto-Link Opening
Any web links in the task notes open in browser when you start the task.
Satisfying Sounds
Choose from a library of ultra-satisying sound effects for completing a task.
Why? Todo lists are broken.
1Manually choosing your next task causes friction and wastes precious decision-making energy
2Humans tend to choose the easiest task next, rather than the most important + urgent
3They do nothing to keep you focused on the current task
The result is tasks continually rolling over to the next day, a cycle of inefficiency.