The Creative Cloud costs $50+/month, and if I were to get Illustrator by itself, it would cost me $20+/month. But running a small business and having to pay for everything myself, was just too expensive. I have used Affinity Designer for 4+ years to create all of the images you see on this blog, as well as my other sites. Affinity Designer (premium, M1 optimized)Īffinity Designer is a vector graphics program developed by Serif for macOS. If you prefer something local that’s not on the cloud I also recommend the free MacPass app. 😉 1Password 7 dark mode on Mac (Image source: 1Password) Many of us know how hard it is to get our parents to use best practices when it comes to online security. They also have a family plan available, which can be handy. Tip: One-time passwords, along with an authenticator app, are always safer than SMS.ġPassword’s personal plan costs $2.99 a month (billed annually). This is important to me as it means I spend less time grabbing my phone. It also supports one-time passwords, which means you can use it as a Google Authenticator alternative. The Mac App is beautiful, along with dark mode. I have used 1Password for years now and love it. And second, you should never use the same password twice, ever. Why is this important? First off, it helps to prevent from having to write them down anywhere. Most people these days are using some type of password manager. Some of these apps are also available for PC (Windows). Rosetta 2: Not optimized yet for Apple Silicon, but still runs via Rosetta 2. For those of you who don’t know, Apple takes a cut of the sale (30%) from developers when you use the App Store. This makes it super convenient to reinstall apps later down the road and saves a lot of time. While I always try to support developers where I can, I do prefer purchasing from the Mac App Store. The Mac apps below (listed in alphabetical order) consist of free and premium apps straight from the developer’s website and apps from the Mac App Store. So for most of my life, I’ve been knee-deep (more than most) in the Microsoft world of Active Directory, SharePoint, Exchange, etc. In 2013 I received the Microsoft MVP Award in the Windows Expert-IT Pro category. I switched to Macs back in 2018 after using PCs exclusively for over 20 years. Hopefully, you’ll find an awesome new Mac app or setting in this list that will help make your life easier! I’ve also included some of the tweaks and settings I change whenever I get a new Mac or reinstall macOS. So to keep from repeating myself over and over, I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the best Mac apps. The Verge does not provide a rating as such, but rates it highly in their review, while a roundup of similar software by AppleInsider stated 'MailPlane offers the best OS X experience of any third party mail application.Another reason for this post is that visitors, friends, and even family are always asking me which apps I use for specific tasks. Reception ĬNet awards it a five-of-five star rating, while Macworld gives it a 3.5 out of 5. Since June 6, 2021, Mailplane is no longer for sale due to Google considering their method of email access (using embedded browser) to be a security issue. Later versions (Version 4+) are approved by Google and will continue to operate. Since July 8, 2020, of Mailplane version 3 no longer has access to Gmail data, rendering it inoperable. It is written using Mac OS X's Cocoa and WebKit APIs. This gives the user a more application-like experience than using Gmail in a browser, including the ability to drag and drop files into attachments, use the OS X Address Book and Keychain, use spell checking, easily send images, and use Gmail as the outbound mailer when clicking on mailto links. Mailplane is an e-mail client for Mac OS X that 'wraps' the Gmail service as a site-specific browser.

Mailplane add on support