Like cars, computers in general have a very limited life time, but also as cars some are crafted to last. And that is what happened with the Mac Pro 2008 on, it's was crafted like an Aston or a Rolls, to last (for ever) making less noise that any new offering from any manufacturer including Apple (with the exemption of the current Mac Pro), more expandable than any, with real Xeon Pro processors the finest server grade processor of its day.
Got a suggestion? Or want to add your product?! Please if you have any suggestions for best Mac OS apps! I haven't included any of the default apps that come with Mac OS. All of these apps are actually used by me.
Whenever I get a new machine I actually come to this page and download everything! And every so often I go through my apps and see if I regularly use anything that isn't on this list and I update it. Please email me with your suggestions - but I tend to stick with the apps that I have and already use! BTW, as of Sept 2018 I have never accepted any payment for any app that was included on this list, and I've not used any affiliate links. There are a couple of Google ads on here but that is just to cover the tiny hosting and domain fees. Highly Recommended!
The Unarchiver is a small and easy to use program that can unarchive many different kinds of archive files. It will open common formats such as Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip, and Bzip2. It will also open many older formats, such as StuffIt, DiskDoubler, LZH, ARJ, and ARC.
It will even open other kinds of files, like ISO and BIN disc images, some Windows.EXE installers. The list is actually much longer - see the program homepage for the full list. The Unarchiver also tries to detect and correctly handle the filename encoding in the archives it opens, allowing you to open files from every part of the world without getting garbled filenames. The Unarchiver aims to be the only unarchiving program you will ever need and to stay out of your way.
I use this app most days - it sits at the top of your screen, you click its icon and you can see a full month's calendar. Don't let the name trick you: it doesn't add an extra day to the year. I've actually been using it since the previous version, however that isn't available on the Mac App Store anymore. If you often finding yourself wanting a quick overview of the current month then this is useful - just click the icon at the top of your screen and a calendar (along with your events) appear. It is a bit pricey at $15 on the Mac App store but it gets quite a bit of usage from me.
It is also available for sale on their website. Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow? Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen? During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun.
But, at 9 PM, 10 PM, or 3 AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun. F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better. A simple Mac app designed to make uploading images and screenshots to Imgur quick and effortless, as recommended by someone on Reddit.
The application will listen for new screenshots taken by the built-in screenshot functionality of OS X. In addition, images can be uploaded manually by either dragging and dropping an image on the status bar icon or clicking the 'Select images' option in the status bar menu. As soon as an image is uploaded, the link is copied to your clipboard and a notification pops up. Over 14 million people use Pocket to easily save articles, videos and more for later.
With Pocket, all of your content goes to one place, so you can view it anytime, on any device. You can even read articles offline, making Pocket indispensable for subway commutes, flights, or anywhere else you find yourself without mobile data or Wi-Fi.
Save articles, videos, recipes, and web pages you find online or from your favorite apps. If it’s in Pocket, it’s on your phone, tablet or computer, even when you’re offline.
Perfect for commutes, traveling, and curling up on your couch. Curb is designed to facilitate emptying the trash from removable media such as USB Keys. When files are deleted on removable media, it is stored in a special trash folder on the media. These files take up room, robbing your drive of free space. Ordinarily to remove these files the user must empty their own trash, which includes files you’ve deleted on the local system.
This is not always desirable. With Curb, emptying trash from a USB key becomes as easy as drag and drop.
Drop any number of mounted USB keys onto Curb and each one will have the trash removed, all without losing your local trash. Getting your laptop or your phone stolen sucks, but there is something you can do about it. Prey is a lightweight theft protection software that lets you keep an eye over them whether in town or abroad, and helps you recover them if ever lost or stolen.
After installing the software on your laptop, tablet or phone, Prey will sleep silently in the background awaiting your command. Once remotely triggered from your Prey account, your device will gather and deliver detailed evidence back to you, including a picture of who's using it – often the crucial piece of data that police officers need to take action. Simplenote is an easy way to keep notes, lists, ideas and more. Your notes stay in sync with all your devices for free. The Simplenote experience is all about speed and efficiency. Open it, write some thoughts, and you're done.
As your collection of notes grows, you can search them instantly and keep them organized with tags and pins. You can also share notes and publish them for other people. The best way to learn about Simplenote is to try it.
You'll be asked to create an account. This allows your notes to be backed up online and synchronized automatically. The #1 Desktop Blog Editor for the Mac - The best way to write, preview, and publish your blog. Works with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type and dozens more through standard MetaWeblog and AtomPub interfaces. Work offline with local drafts on your Mac, preview the formatting and content of your posts, and publish when you're ready to share with the world.
Easily browse for a photo from your iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom libraries, and embed it for automatic upload with your blog post. Perfect for professional bloggers and casual writers who don't want to mess around with clunky web-based interfaces. If you're lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful or more elegant than MarsEdit. Enhance and perfect your photography anywhere.
With Lightroom, your photography goes where you go. Organize, edit and share your photos from anywhere. Your photos don’t always match the scene the way you remember it.
But with Lightroom, you have all the tools you need to bring out the best in your photography. Punch up colors, make dull-looking shots vibrant, remove distracting objects and straighten skewed shots. Plus, the latest release includes powerful new ways to adjust atmospheric haze, create incredible HDR images and panoramas, import and edit faster and so much more. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities.
It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.
The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. With Spotify, it’s easy to find the right music for every moment – on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more. There are millions of tracks on Spotify. So whether you’re working out, partying or relaxing, the right music is always at your fingertips. Choose what you want to listen to, or let Spotify surprise you. You can also browse through the music collections of friends, artists and celebrities, or create a radio station and just sit back. Soundtrack your life with Spotify.
Subscribe or listen for free. Xee is a streamlined and convenient image viewer and browser. It is similar to Mac OS X's Preview.app, but lets you easily browse the entire contents of folders and archives, move and copy image files quickly, and supports many more image formats. It also shows animation for formats which support this. It is designed to take full advantage of touch controls, allowing you to swipe through images in a folder one by one.
You can of course also zoom and rotate files using multi-touch gestures. Xee can also display huge amounts of metadata from image files. Loading images directly from archive files is also possible, and Xee works very well as a comic book reader. BTW you can find the older, open source versions on Github. BBEdit a professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh.
Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML markup tools.
For a long time, Mac Pro users looked at their towers—with their dated external designs and lagging technical specs—and asked themselves, “When will Apple update its professional desktop line?” The days of this Mac Pro tower design are numbered. The wait is nearly over: Apple. Instead of being a step behind the technological times, the upcoming Mac Pro will offer users a look into the future as the first system to offer the new Thunderbolt 2 connection.
It will also have dual graphics cards (standard), USB 3, and a sleek case design. Though no one in the general public has seen benchmark results for the new Mac Pro, Apple claims it will deliver “state-of-the-art performance across the board.” But the new high-end Mac will be a when they think “Mac Pro.” It’s not the hulking beast of a machine that we’re all familiar with, but a model of compactness. The main concern about the new Mac Pro is its lack of internal expansion and customization options. Instead of having four internal hard drive bays, it will use built-in flash storage; additional drives will need to be connected externally. Same with PCI cards: An external expansion chassis, connected via Thunderbolt 2, will be required to house and connect the cards that many users have invested in heavily. The new 2013 Mac Pro comes with six Thunderbolt 2 ports to connect external storage devices and PCI expansion cards that are housed in an external chassis. Wait for the new Mac Pro and buy it along with the expansion chassis and external drives that you'll need to make it comparable to the old model?
Or stick it out with your current towers, making do with those outdated technologies for a few years more? Ah, but there is a third option, one that gives you up-to-date technology and competitive performance, at a cost that's considerably less than the 2012 Mac Pro: Build your own computer, using off-the-shelf PC hardware, that runs Mac OS X. But for one very, very big reason, we can't recommend that path: It violates the OS X end-user license agreement. Still, out of purely academic interest, we in the Macworld Lab set out to discover how hard it is to build that kind of forbidden machine and see how it would compare with the current models. This isn’t the first time Macworld has done so;. So it seemed appropriate to call this new machine the Bride of Frankenmac. Users of the Mac Pro love its ability to hold four drives and house PCI cards.
Building the Bride of Frankenmac What we found is that the process of building your own computer isn't for the average Mac user. It helped that we were able to call on folks like PCWorld Lab Manager Tony Leung, who has years of experience assembling PCs from scratch.
We also took advantage of the many online forums devoted to this kind of activity. Resources like and are very helpful, and the knowledgeable and supportive users of their forums offer help to anyone stuck during the process.
Users in these forums have been able to create Haswell-based computers running Mavericks. Is also a good resource, as it keeps an updated list of known working components and has a list of DIY resources. Michael Hominick Inside the Bride of Frankenmac. Speedmark 8.
Bride of Frankenmac (1TB HD) 246. Bride of Frankenmac (240GB SSD) 278. 2012 Mac Pro 12-core (1TB HDD) 215. 2012 Mac Pro 12-core (240GB SSD) 249. 2012 Mac Pro quad-core (1TB HD) 200 Higher results/longer bars are better.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Albert Filice, and Jeff Sandstoe Our custom-built OS X computer was faster than the $2499 Mac Pro in all 15 of the individual tests that make up Speedmark 8: Overall, it was 23 percent faster than the Mac Pro. A few of the tests were close; exporting an iMovie project was only 4 percent faster on the Bride of Frankenmac than on the Mac Pro.
Unzipping a large file archive was 9 percent faster, and running our Photoshop action script was 10 percent faster. Our Portal 2 test was 22 percent faster on the Bride of Frankenmac, and Cinebench’s OpenGL test was 15 percent faster. When we upped the resolution on the Portal 2 test and maxed out the settings, the Bride of Frankenmac was 65 percent faster than the Mac Pro. We also swapped the graphics cards between the two systems to see how that would affect results.
Our standard Portal 2 test results were the same, regardless of the card, which indicates that the GPU didn’t have a problem with the test and that the bottleneck was the CPU. When we cranked up the resolution and settings, we found that the results followed the card: The Nvidia card that originated in the Bride of Frankenmac was much faster than the ATI card that is standard with the $2499 Mac Pro, regardless of what system it was installed in. The Cinebench OpenGL test was a bit faster on the ATI card than the Nvidia, but both cards were faster in this test when installed in the Bride of Frankenmac than when installed on the Mac Pro. Michael Hominick The Bride of Frankenmac (right) isn't much of a looker, but its performance makes up for its appearance. We then compared our creation to a high-end 12-core Mac Pro—the $3799 version with two 2.4GHz 6-core Intel Xeon processors, 12GB of RAM, and the same 1TB hard drive and ATI Radeon card as the $2499 Mac Pro. Once again the Bride came out on top; it was 14 percent faster overall than the Mac Pro. At least this time the Mac Pro was faster in a few tests, mainly those that can take advantage of the 12 processing cores found in the $3799 Mac Pro.
Mathematicamark 7, for example, was 25 percent faster on the Mac Pro than on the Bride of Frankenmac. Cinebench’s OpenGL test was 41 percent faster on the Mac Pro, while file unzipping and iMovie importing were both 6 percent faster on the Mac Pro.
For kicks, we installed a Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/240G SSD in both the Bride of Frankenmac and the 12-core Mac Pro and reran the Speedmark tests. While the SSD-equipped Mac Pro and Bride of Frankenmac were 16 and 13 percent faster, respectively, than their hard drive–equipped selves, the SSD Bride of Frankenmac was still 12 percent faster overall than the SSD Mac Pro. (See.) Hurdles to overcome Getting to all that speedy performance wasn't simple. For example, the ATI card didn’t work right away. The system would start up but couldn't get past the BIOS.
It turned out that the bootloader we used didn't support this particular video card. We were able to find a solution online, but it wasn't elegant: It required booting onto a USB stick with a different bootloader installed. Once we booted from the USB drive, the system would start up, but the screen would go black.
Hitting the power button twice (once to put the system to sleep and then again to wake up the system) would bring the screen back to life. The same trick was required each time we rebooted. Such quirks can hit other DIY systems, as a couple of colleagues in our video department have found. One could not get the motherboard audio to work and finally purchased a USB audio adapter. He also had problems getting two monitors to work—he had to shut down and flip the rear power switch off and unplug the power cord from the wall, and then plug everything back in and start back up in order to see both displays.
Another colleague's system would intermittently unmount FireWire drives, and his rear USB ports don't work at all. Getting Blackmagic Design’s Intensity Pro video editing card to work in the Bride of Frankenmac did not require any of the workarounds necessary for the ATI card. That’s something of note for current Mac Pro users with PCI cards who want to continue using such cards inside a computer case instead of externally in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis with the upcoming Mac Pro.
Michael Hominick It lives: The Bride of Frakenmac was made using parts in our lab. It’s worth mentioning that, unlike an Apple-built computer, our Bride of Frankenmac is not covered by an umbrella warranty. If the power supply conks out, we’ll need to take that up with Antec. The same goes for all of the components.
![Last Mac Tower For Editing Last Mac Tower For Editing](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125613891/400329091.jpg)
If anything breaks or stops working, it'll be up to us to deal with the individual component manufacturers. Future OS X updates could also prove problematic to our custom setup. Apple, of course, does copious amounts of internal testing to make sure that software updates don’t cause problems with its systems, but it could never test (or want to test) each update against every possible combination of components, especially components the company doesn’t officially support. If you were to go down this unsanctioned path, whenever Apple released an OS update, you'd want to wait a few days before upgrading, then spend some time monitoring the forums to see if other folks are running into problems with their custom systems. Next page: Complete test results. Editor's note: Updated at 4 p.m. PT to rectify a case design error regarding the 2013 Mac Pro and added video.
Updated on 9/11/13 to correct the graphics card identified in the Bride of Frankenmac.