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Roundups
The moment you boot up your Mac, a variety of things pry for your attention. Email, social networks, reminders, and all sorts of distractions eventually trap you in the middle of a tug-of-war, making it almost impossible to focus on a single activity.
As a result, you lose track of what you’re supposed to do. You might just find yourself looking up, wondering where the sun went all of the sudden.
Here’s the good news though: there are apps that can help you solve this productivity problem. In this round-up, I’ll share 15 Mac apps that help you focus, whether it’s dimming the screen, blocking social networking sites, closing inactive applications, or working in time bursts. You can use one or mix a couple of these apps to fit the way you work.
This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on May 17th, 2011.
The “utility” software niche is one that is extremely active in the Mac application community. There is an abundance of fantastic utilities currently available, and that list is ever changing. We love this type of software at AppStorm, regularly reviewing different apps that let you tweak and tune your computer.
With the area changing so fast, we decided to take a look at some of the best and most useful Mac OS X utilities that are available right now. What you’ll see here is by no means an all-encompassing list, but rather a collection of utilities broken up into some basic groups that I found to be very useful to a lot of people.
I hope you discover some applications that will be helpful for you!
There are so many options out there – freeware and shareware – that it’s often hard to find the quality applications. Some applications luck into a great deal of publicity, but too often great apps do not get the attention that they deserve.
This article has five utility apps that I use just about every day but haven’t ever read or heard much about. The apps range from a screenshot application to a great touchpad tool that I love. Read on to learn about five of my favorite free apps that you should check out today.
There’s one more great finance app that our readers keep recommending: You Need a Budget (YNAB). We reviewed it, and it turned out to be such a good app we gave it a 10/10 rating. Be sure to check out our review of You Need a Budget!
Thanks to personal finance applications, managing and tracking budgets, expenses, cash flows, and potential savings is easier than ever and far less time-consuming. We’ve covered quite a few finance apps for the Mac in the past few months, which shows a growing interest in this category.
We did a round-up of 7 finance software for the Mac two years ago, so I thought it would be interesting to refresh things and take a look at today’s choices for personal finance software. If you’re wondering what’s new, popular, and consistent in the money management category, check out the apps below!
Today, our computers and mobile devices house many stunning icons that often influence our desire to use a certain application or open a folder. The icons in our machines are practically part of our lives as we see them almost everyday. It is never a bad idea to customize these icons in order to make them even more appealing than they already are.
The icons below are only a few of the many beautiful design pieces people have created for your enjoyment. Replacing application or folder icons is amazingly easy to do, so don’t hesitate to use any of these free and sexy looking icons.
PDF has become a worldwide document type standard and you no doubt deal with these documents fairly regularly. Because the file tpye is so common there is a plethora of applications available to work with them.
It can be a bit tricky to wade through the large number of choices though, so I’ve attempted to pull out ten of the most useful apps for performing various functions. Everything from simply managing your PDF files to editing, extracting and more.
Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Apple’s family of mouses (mice?) have come a long way since the dreaded Hockey Puck, and provide a dramatically different experience than almost any other mouse on the market. The entire line up of peripherals feature multi-touch gesture support, which can be modified (along with tracking behavior) quite extensively from the preference pane built in to OS X.
But why should it stop there? The mouse is the primary medium through which we interact with our computers, so it stands to reason that it should be an implement with almost limitless power. I’ve wrangled up seven great apps that extend the functionality of your mouse, whether you’re using a Magic Mouse, the external Magic Trackpad, or the built in trackpad. Heck, most of these even work with third party mice.
Podcasting is all of rage these days. Podcasts are professional and fun, and have become easier to create with the right apps. The Mac has always been a creative tool and with the apps in this roundup, it can become your own radio headquarters and production studio.
To make the process as easy as possible, we recommend taking a look at these five apps, which perform all kinds of tasks from recording audio and screencasts to adding live sound effects. So get ready and read on because, your’re on the air!
I was very reluctant to adopt Final Cut X and Motion 5 due to a number of reasons, one of the biggest of which was my favorite plugins working with the new software. I am very happy to say after many months, plugins are now available and coming out strong.
Let’s go on a little video lover’s escapade into the world of digital video and check some cool plugins! I even threw in a plugin for those who have not switched over to FCP X.
This post is part of a three-part series of roundups dedicated to finding apps for your home and family life. Today, in part two, we’ll focus on fun and useful apps that your grandparents might enjoy. Reread part one here.
Switching to a Mac-centric household can be hard on certain members of your family, particularly the ones who might tend to be a little more traditional in their technology usage: your grandparents. Fear not, though, for today we present you with a list of 10 apps, both useful and entertaining in variety, that may be just the thing you need to ease any old-fashioned users of any age into using your fancy new computer. Hit the jump to read on!
