As Apple has tweaked and improved its Mac operating system, the need for third-party utilities just shifted—it never went away. A lot of the fiddly missing stuff we used to need an app for is built in, but Apple aims for the simplest experience for the most people, which leaves more advanced users or those that want a choice of how they carry out a task looking for alternatives. I’ve used many hundreds of Mac utilities over decades, and still rely on them to make my computing life better. Here’s the top 10 I recommend, a mix of free software, donationware, and inexpensive paid products. (I’ve cheated a little; I list more than 10 as I offer a couple of alternatives.) Some of the paid products might seem pricey on their own, and the price tag altogether may be too much for many people’s budget to buy all at once: it’s over $300 if you purchase all my main recommendations. Opt for alternative recommendations of utilities below and omit a couple you don’t need, like file-transfer software, and the price tag comes down closer to $100. (Always look for discounts on the more expensive products: some appear regularly in charity and seasonal bundles, and some Apple-oriented sites offer significant membership discounts on popular software.) However, I like to think of these utilities as having a return on investment, as I believe my time (as well as yours) has value.
Jan 27, 2017 - However, it's an essential part of Mac maintenance if your machine is. MacOS Sierra has a built-in utility to help you identify files that. Mac OS X Built In Utilities. Apple provides a slew of utilities as part of Mac OS X, many of which are useful for troubleshooting and maintenance.
Some apps estimate how much time you saved, and others reduce clutter and frustration, which can make you work more efficiently. In some cases, you have to purchase a tool, because there’s no alternative. I’m confident I’ve saved hundreds of hours over a decade across in sub-second and multi-second increments. Default Folder I can’t remember how long I’ve been using ($35), because it’s been a constant companion since I first discovered it years ago. Default Folder enhances every open and save dialog in macOS, as well as offering a system menubar item and options to add navigation in Finder windows.
Default Folder adds super-intelligence to navigation windows. You use Default Folder to navigate to standard macOS locations, frequently used directories, and recent folders without having to use an endless sequence of Command plus Up and Down arrows, Spotlight, or folder menu navigation. The app lets you more effectively organize items in folders, because you can so efficiently access those folders later. The utility wraps itself around open and save dialogs, and offers buttons with drop-down menus. You can click and access the top level of any mounted drive and common Home folder areas, favorites that you’ve set, any window open in the Finder, and folders that you’ve recently opened items from or saved items to.
Want to open the current view in a dialog as a Finder window? Press one keystroke. Another keystroke lets you rotate among recently used folders. Default Folder seemed like it might be a casualty of (SIP) introduced in El Capitan, but the developer wrote a complete overhaul of the app to work within Apple’s limits, and the new version now exceeds the previous one. (.) Whenever I have to use a Mac that doesn’t have Default Folder installed, I’m reminded of how frequently I use it and how much I rely on it.
It has a very shallow learning curve. TextExpander Computers are meant to reduce tedious repetition, and yet we often find ourselves acting like a computer in our work. Is a text-expansion utility, letting you type a few keystrokes and have them “expanded” to be something else. It turns the computer back into a repetition-avoiding machine. I can type two or three characters, and TextExpander drops in my email address, phone number, or mailing address. With wildcards and placeholders, you can also have TextExpander type out the current date and time, or use the clipboard’s contents alongside other manipulations, including a few keystrokes (like Tab and Escape) and cursor movements.
It also allows you to create forms with pop-up options for standard replies. With TextExpander, you let a computer handle the repetitive typing tasks.
TextExpander supports AppleScript and other system scripting integration, and includes a few scripts for things like turning the current contents of the clipboard into a bit.ly shortened URL. One of the app’s gimmicks is tracking estimated time saved. It’s apparently bought me 10 hours of my life back between July and December of this year. TextExpander when its maker switched from flat-rate pricing for version 5 to subscription pricing for version 6 (including software updates, cloud sync, and snippet sharing).
We have reviews of both. You can still purchase the, compatible with macOS Sierra, for a flat $45 or for $4.16 a month or $40 a year ($3.33 a month).
While I’m a long-time TextExpander user, some people prefer ($36), which has text-expansion features like TextExpander, but also can directly manipulate the mouse and menus in macro sequences and has clipboard-history management. 1Password In these days of constant password breaches at major and minor websites, having unique strong passwords is a must.
Not only stores passwords, but creates them, and through browser plug-ins can create and drop them into a form and store them in just a few fluent clicks. Because 1Password has extensions or plug-ins for all the major browsers, you never have to switch to it to drop passwords into a form to login. And it can also store in a structured form all sorts of other things, like credit cards, bank accounts, and licenses. 1Password can fill in credit-card information into forms. You can also save all the entries in a form from a webpage, which is invaluable in inventing fake answers to security questions and storing them so you can remember them later.
(; it’s now up to 6.5.) (Tip: You can use 1Password to create unique random gibberish for questions like “What is your first pet’s name?”, and as long as you store it, a hijack of that site’s list of such questions doesn’t compromise your accounts elsewhere that would otherwise share security answers.) IDG 1Password lets you generate unique passwords within a browser, fill in credit cards, and manage it all with aplomb. I like that its creator, AgileBits, added a few months ago the ability to generate multi-word passwords. These are easier to remember and to type, and as long as they are sufficiently random and long enough, just as resistent to brute force as the most ridiculous looking password with an unnecessary mix of letters, numbers, punctuation, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
1Password this year that include continuous updates and a family version that allows secure sharing of passwords. It’s $36 a year for a single user or $60 a year for up to five users in a family. This price includes free use of clients in macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. The is $65; the complementary iOS version is free for everyone, but some not-critical Pro features cost $10 to unlock unless you’re subscriber, in which case they’re part of the subscription. Is a widely used alternative to 1Password, although LastPass stores passwords centrally., but the care with which they secured their database rendered that theft essentially useless to the attackers. That resiliency is a plus. I prefer, however, using 1Password either on storage I control or with AgileBits’ partitioned cryptographic approach, which stores your data centrally in a way that the company never directly handles your password.
LastPass’ key advantage? The standard version is free across platforms; it’s $1 a month for a premium flavor that includes family sharing and priority tech support.
Bartender My system menubar is a mess! I’ve tried scrubbing, I’ve tried washing, and nothing works! ($15), take me away!
Declutter an unusable system menubar with Bartender. If you’re anything like me, you have a slightly ridiculous number of drop-down and status menus in your system menubar from Apple and third-party apps and system components. Some of Apple’s items you can’t hide, even if you want to.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125400663/251222724.png)
Even on my wider of two displays, an app’s menu items often crowd out the leftmost menubar icons. (.) Bartender 2 brings a delightful and simple management approach. With this app, you can choose to leave a menubar item alone, hide it entirely, or drop it into a secondary dropdown Bartender menu. Even if you’re hiding the item, you can set Bartender to show it whenever the icon displays activity. The app was another one that people worried El Capitan’s SIP would render impossible to update, but the developer thoroughly revised it to work in the new model, and released a Sierra update in a timely fashion, too. LaunchBar I have many, many apps installed on my Mac, and my preferred way to launch them isn’t by invoking Spotlight and typing part of the name and selecting a result, or using Mission Control or the Applications folder. ($29) makes quick work: tap a keyboard command to bring it up and then type a few characters or use arrow keys to select from a set of options.
LaunchBar can be set to index all sorts of locations and all sorts of things, so it goes far beyond running apps. It can find system preference panes, contacts, AppleScripts, emoji, URL bookmarks, music tracks, and other items.
You can use it as a calculator, to expose file metadata, keep a scrapbook of items pasted to the clipboard, and interact with reminders and events. It run queries on search engines, too. (; it’s up to 6.7 now.) LaunchBar can open apps, find files, perform calculations, play music, and much more.
Add your document folders and enable some indexing rules that are turned off at installation, and you can pull up files in those locations by name, too, or see a list that matches however much of a name you want to type. For all that it’s a Swiss Army knife, you can turn off or leave disabled many features. Some people dive deeply into LaunchBar and use it constantly; others, like me, rely on it for a handful of very common uses.
It has a statistics window like TextExpander, and reports I’ve saved just over two hours in the last two and a half years. That’s too modest of the developers, though, because I can launch an app in LaunchBar in well under a second; it takes seconds to find and launch an app through any other built-in means. Several launcher alternatives have their adherents; in early 2015, including one that’s free.
The long-running app also has its staunch users and defenders, but it hasn’t had an overhaul in some time, and its developer hasn’t announced plans beyond the current compatibility updates and bug fixes that keep it working.
Update: We've added a video of the best tips and tricks for speeding up your Mac How to speed up a Mac is one of the most common requests, not least with Macs which are more than a few years old. Slow performance is one of the most irritating things to happen to any user. The good news is that Apple tests upgrades to against older machines and makes sure they're capable of running everything correctly, so if you are experiencing slowdown it's usually fixable.
Having said that, was a significant operating system upgrade from, with plenty of additional features, and now OS X 10.11 El Capitan is out and continues to add new features. We've collected the best tips for speeding up your Mac in our video below, so make sure you try them all before giving up on your Mac or MacBook - you'll be surprised just how much speed you can gain with a bit of spring cleaning. It's easy to check available disk space in Finder, yet DaisyDisk does a much better job at helping you clear out old files Before you even start to examine your disk space, get rid of any unwanted files. Items stored in Trash are taking up valuable disk space, so right-click it and choose Empty Trash Now to purge them from your Mac. Check the available disk space by clicking Go Computer from the Finder menu bar, selecting the icon for your main hard disk and choosing File Get Info (Command +I).
Available space is listed in the status bar (you might need to choose Show Status Bar). If you don't have at least 10GB free, it's time to delete or archive your old files.
Good places to look are your Movies, Downloads and Documents folders. Can help you find space-hogging files. Applications tend to take up a lot of space. You can drag apps you no longer use to the Trash or use an app like to get rid of them. Creating a backup with Time Machine is a good idea before you start to trash files.
Connect an unused or new external drive with sufficient space, and go to System Preferences Time Machine to use it for backups. Backing up to a directly connected hard drive is faster than using a drive such as the Time Capsule, which backs up over Wi-Fi. If you do have a Time Capsule, it's a good idea to connect to it using an Ethernet cable for the first backup. Even so, backing up several gigabytes of data will take an hour or two and will impact your Mac's ability to perform other tasks.
After the initial run, only incremental changes will need to be backed up, so it's worth gritting your teeth and getting the first, full backup out the way. Then you can delete older, less critical files and folders, which should have the effect of making your Mac a little more sprightly. On Macs of a very low specification, disabling Yosemite's extensive use of transparency effects should improve your experience Turn off features If you've freed up some hard drive space and are still experiencing slow performance, then it might be time to try disabling some features. To begin, go to System Preferences Extensions All and deselect any extensions you aren't using. Open System Preferences Energy Saver. On some older MacBooks, you may see a Better Battery Life and Higher Performance options. Choose the latter, then restart your Mac.
This turns on the discrete graphics card, but it will drain the battery faster. A good trick for older Macs is to uninstall Flash using the. It's a resource hog and drains your battery. Of course, you won't be able to access Flash-based web content, but many sites have moved to a more modern HTM5 implementation now.
In your web browser, remember to close down tabs and windows you no longer need as these are a drain on resources. Quit some apps App Nap is a built-in feature that slows down apps that are obscured by other windows and not currently doing something. If an inactive app is using valuable memory, recent versions of OS X will compress the data it has in memory. That isn't always possible, in which case the OS will write incompressible data to disk to free up space for another app. You can tell OS X the memory used by those apps can be used right away by other things by quitting them. If you find it hard to know which apps are open, in System Preferences Dock make sure 'Show indicators' is enabled. To prevent napping apps reappearing after a restart, go to Log Out and deselect 'Reopen windows when logging back in'.
Turning off visual effects such as transparency, can deliver incremental but important performance gains. In System Preferences Accessibility, turn on Reduce transparency. Even if text doesn't seem blurry, go to System Preferences General and toggle 'Use LCD font smoothing' to check its appearance before and after. MacBooks that start up slowly may not have been fully shut down the last time. This can happen if you closed the lid of your MacBook before the shutdown process finished, so don't be too hasty when powering down for the day.
After following these tips, you should find OS X runs much faster than before.