However long you’ve been a Mac user, the following 10 apps are going to make your time spent on the OS X that much more interesting, fun and useful in at least 10 different ways.
CREATIVITY
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4
Adobe Photoshop has come out with yet another great piece of photo editing software. All the classical features are included along with a number of fantastic extras that let you adjust all sorts of new photo settings, work with maps and perform basic video editing too.
Apple Final Cut Pro
A truly excellent digital video editing package is what you get with Final Cut Pro. The latest incarnation offers all sorts of organization, tagging, face analysis and video stabilization tools. These come in addition to a pile of regular video editing and cutting features. The 64 bit multicore code behind final cut creates a powerful tool that works much faster than previous versions.
Pixelmator
For a budget photo editing app that only costs a fraction of Photoshop’s hefty price tag, try Pixelmator. It includes a large number of basic photo manipulation, color editing and other features that give more than enough usability for most regular applications. It’s a pretty good deal at such a small price tag.
STAYING PRODUCTIVE
Adobe Formscentral
Adobe Formscentral is another wonderful piece of software from the people at Adobe Labs. In this case, a package that lets you create and edit all sorts of extremely professional business forms easily and quickly. Built in Business Intelligence abilities also let you analyze the data from your forms. Form embedding in web pages, Facebook posts, twitter and email announcements is another useful ability.
Alfred
This is a desktop productivity app that lets you access all your most frequently used programs, files, documents and images while you’re using the keyboard and without needing to grab the mouse and move it around. Alfred learns from your previous searches and tries to intuit what you’ll be looking for while also giving you online and hard drive search capacity.
Dragon Dictate for Mac
If you’re willing to budget the $160 price tag and have time to train the software into understanding your speech patterns, then Dragon Dictate is for you. If you’re a writer or someone who needs to transcribe a lot of spoken audio, then this program will cause your productivity to explode.
BROWSERS AND DESKTOP WIDGETS
Evernote for Mac
Evernote has become a must-have app for many people, whether they use it on their smart phones, tablets, PC’s or Macs. This application lets you make random notes to yourself and others while on the go; its clipping abilities let you copy web pages, pieces of web pages or pieces of text and visuals from all over the web or your own computer. Evernote also synchs, so you can enjoy a coordinated experience across all your devices when you’re not at your Mac.
Google Chrome
The Chrome browser offers a light, fast and very well organized online navigating experience. Chrome is nowhere near as prone to crashes as the recently more cumbersome Firefox and it has also been rated by many digital security providers as the most secure of the three major browser applications.
Skype for Mac
Got friends and family scattered across the world? Then why spend money on long distance phone calls or suffer the slowness of written chat and email. Download the free Skype application and enjoy unlimited free face to face conversation with anyone you like over your Mac. Skype also offers very reasonable long distance calling rates for those situations when you’d like to call a landline or mobile phone from your Skype Desktop application.
ENTERTAINMENT
Apple iTunes
Where would your Mac based music experience be without iTunes on your desktop? iTunes includes iTunes in the Cloud, Home Sharing and access to the world’s largest digital media library. Download movies, songs, TV shows and even documentaries right to your desktop through your iTunes application. You can also use this fantastic media application to store all your non-iTunes music in one easy to navigate space.
About the author: When Tom isn’t providing excellent reviews on storage facilities in Illinois, he is busy at work at his day job; an experienced tech writer with over two decades of experience.
