Free Mac apps
Now retired, and with a very reduced monthly income, my spending has to be tightly monitored! Over the years I’ve managed to find some free apps or programs for Mac that I use on a regular basis and now, couldn’t do without, so I thought I’d list the most used ones here.
Audacity (for audio editing) has to be one of the programs it’s still hard to believe is totally free of all charges and costs, it’s cross platform, can edit audio, record audio, convert audio, create podcasts and use a huge range of free plugins.
BetterDisplay is a relatively new addition to my arsenal of apps, there’s a free and a paid version, I use the free version. You can control display configuration and screen resolution, brightness, contrast and colour, create and manage virtual screens, have picture-in-picture and many other tweaks to your display.
These days there’s a move away from physical disk media, but I’m still asked for DVD’s and CD’s. Burn, an open source app can author a DVD Video (UDF) disk from different types of avi, mpg and mov video files. It can also produce an audio CD or Data disk and copy non-protected DVD’s and CD’s.
ClipGrab could be regarded as controversial, it makes downloading any video from YouTube easy, so why would you want to download from YouTube? The obvious reason would be to watch content offline, for example on a long journey or flight. YouTube does allow ‘remixing’ (unless ‘Do not allow’ is checked) so content could be downloaded and re-edited or different audio added, I’m sure you can think of other reasons to download from YouTube.....
Image editing is currently in the news along with AI and image manipulation. FreeScaler, while not directly an image manipulation program can be used to increase the resolution and size / scale of an image without quality loss. Upscayl is another free app I use and I don’t see much of a difference between the two, they both work incredibly well.
This article was originally drafted and produced in Growly Write. Microsoft Word has many features most people never use, the app included with MacOS, TextEdit can be a little basic for some tasks so, if you want a ‘word processing’ type app that fills the gap between the two, Growly Write is that app for free.
For as long as I can remember, Handbrake has been a ‘go to’ program for producing and compressing video for delivery. Handbrake can do virtually anything the Apple Compressor app can, for free.
If you want a video app with more functionality than Handbrake, take a look at Shutter Encoder. I’m still finding stuff I can use this ‘Swiss army type knife’ app for and I’ve produced a short blog item previously on this app HERE.
In a world where speed in everything seems to be the norm, a fast loading website is a must and images can still slow a website down, even with fast broadband, or more importantly, Countries or areas with limited download speed. This is where I’ll use Image Shrinker, it’ll take a jpg image and reduce it to a fraction of the original file size with no noticeable loss of quality.
Another very recent find is Initiator, I wish I’d had this little app many years earlier! I often use Apple/Shift/4 to grab a section of a web page, graphic or document on screen. Initiator sits in the menu bar with a user definable ‘hot key’ and will grab a section of screen as an image......but then it also produces an OCR file of any text in a graphic that can be copied and pasted, that might sound useless...until you need it. There is a free version or a paid version for the hugely expensive cost of £4.99 UK.
Before I used Shutter Encoder, one app I used for cutting MP4 videos down in size or ‘topping and tailing’ a video to make it shorter, was LosslessCut which does ‘exactly what it says on the tin’.
One program I consider essential is Onyx, an optimisation and ‘cleaning’ program. There are other apps that offer to remove junk and ‘clean up’ a Mac but, over the years many forum posts have advised against using them, Onyx just gets on and does the job, I’ve been using it since around 2003 and never once had a problem, my Mac’s do seem to run better if I use Onyx around once a month.
I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention two web based free apps I now use almost daily, ChatGPT (free version) and Gemini (formerly BARD). These have totally changed the way many people use computers or mobile devices. I barely take advantage of all the possibilities they offer but I do use them to aid with descriptions and keywords for YouTube videos. I’ve also used Gemini to suggest an alternate version or rewrite for articles or emails I’ve written.
I’ve owned Final Cut Pro since 2015 when I paid £299 for it and nothing more since and still get free updates (ATM!), so while I understand software developers are more and more moving to the subscription model, I’m a strong believer against it and try to avoid it wherever possible.
I don’t have an Adobe subscription but I do have an Adobe account (from buying Adobe Production Studio years ago!), that gives me access to Adobe Express which has free options (at the moment) that are worth considering, like their excellent background removal tool.
Along with all the apps and programs I’ve mentioned, I’ve managed to build a large library of free assets (backgrounds, images, video clips, fonts, plugins etc) to use within paid programs I use on a regular basis, like Davinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro and Rapidweaver. If you do look for free assets to use in your projects, make sure they allow for commercial use as well as personal use if you intend to use them for client material.
Lastly, if you download free assets or plugins, respect the developers wishes for attribution if required, some developers offering free assets or plugins have a ‘Buy me a coffee’ or ‘Pay what you can’ button on their download page, if you can afford it, please consider donating to help with costs.
