The Mac utilities that I can’t live without as a designer in 2021
We are arguably living in a golden age of Apps. With so many to choose from, which will help you achieve your goals faster and which will end up slowing you down?
I often ask myself that question. Over the years I’ve tested dozens of apps, a few of which I still use regularly.
Here is a list of 18 utility apps (in no particular order). Some are free, some are paid. I hope you will find something that helps you be a more effective Mac user 😁
Sip
All your colour needs taken care of with one click: pick colours, check contrast, save themes and more.
Sip is very powerful and one of my all-time favourite apps.
You can use it to pick colours anywhere on your screen and on any app. It as a handy colour contrast tool so you can make sure your designs are AA+ accessible. You can also save your most used colours and paste custom values depending on the app you are using (e.i HEX in Figma and RGBA on VSCode).
What I love most is that it doesn’t interrupt my workflow, thanks to its keyboard shortcuts I can find, copy and paste any colour in less than 3 secs.
Price: $10 for a year of updates.
Usefulness rating: 5 of 5
ImageOptim
Compress any image super quickly.
A super simple, lightweight, open-source app that can quickly compress any JPEG or PNG image. I personally like to keep it pinned to my doc and just drag and drop a file in. Easy 😁
Price: Free
Grammarly
A smarter spellcheck.
Spelling mistakes are embarrassing, and as a dyslexic, non-English speaker, I need all the help I can get. That’s why I love Grammarly. Grammarly checks for spelling, punctuation, conciseness, context and more. I also find that its suggestions are a lot better than any other spell-check.
For example, I sometimes mix up it’s and its. Grammarly is great pointing these mistakes out that most other spellcheckers would miss.
I’ve paid for the premium, but, to be honest, the free version is plenty powerful for most people.
Price: Free
Paste
Manage your clipboard like a pro.
Paste is great. It has 3 main features I love:
- It saves anything you copy (like magic) so you can go back to it at any point. Why like magic? Because it remembers exactly what you copy so, for example, I can copy any Figma or Sketch component and paste it hours or days later, with all its sub-components and styles intact. It’s incredible.
- You can favourite and search snippets, for example, I have saved my email addresses as well as some lorem ipsum text so I can quickly search for those and paste them anywhere.
- It has a great feature which allows you to copy multiple items and paste them in order super quickly.
Price: $14.99
Shortcut Bar
Browse your favourite files super-fast!
Shortcut bar lives on the menubar and gives you super-fast access to those folders, files and apps you use all the time. It’s way faster than using Finder.
Price: $8.99
Bartender
Clean up your Mac menu bar
Bartender lets you organise your menu bar and hide items under a modal. This keeps my menu looking clean while keeping all the functionality at hand.
Price: $15
Alfred
Searching your mac, supercharged.
A whole article could be written about Bartender only. Is another app with very simple core functionality, but, if you dive into the settings, you realise it’s like a swiss army knife of features.
Price:$15
Better touch tool
Make the Touchbar useful
The Touchbar has been a controversial addition to Mac. Personally, I think it’s neat, but still, I haven’t found a good use for it.
Better Touch Tool has made me like my trackpad again. It allows you to customize anything about it and add custom widgets like weather or calendar.
Price: $8.99
TextSniper
Copy text from images into your clipboard
To use TextSniper, simply select any area on your screen. It will recognize text and copy it to your clipboard. Really useful to use on images and other non-selectable text.
Price: $6.99
CleanShot X
Take better screenshots on your mac
If you take a lot of screenshots, you will like this one. It replaces the default Mac screenshot tool and adds extra functionality like record videos and scroll-capture.
The best thing is that similarly to how screenshots on an iPhone work, with CleanShot you can easily choose what to do with each screenshot: save, annotate, copy to your clipboard or simply delete it.
I personally use the copy to clipboard the most.
Price: $29
Automute
Kill your Mac’s sound when your Bluetooth headphones get disconnected.
Have you ever turned your Bluetooth headphones off, or walked out of range, to have the music you were listening to blearing out of your Mac’s speakers? This tiny utility saves you from that by automatically muting your Mac when your Bluetooth headphones get disconnected. Pretty useful.
Price: $2.99
Numi
A better calculator I didn't know I needed until I tried it.
Numi it’s like a calculator and much more.
You can use natural language to calculate percentages (25% of 1854), do unit conversions (5 inches in cm), currency conversions ($9 in Euro), timezone conversions (time in London), CSS conversions (1.2 em in px) and more.
You can even insert variables and functions, it’s just crazy 🤯
What makes me love it (even more), is that Numi doesn’t delete any of your calculations, so you can quickly make changes or go back if need be.
Price: Free
Amphetamine
Keep your Mac from going to sleep with one click
Amphetamine is a light-weight app that prevents your Mac from going to sleep. Great for when you are downloading a large file.
Price: Free
Unclutter
It’s like a second desktop for your Mac
Unclutter is a Mac utility that gives you a second desktop, and a notepad, one swipe away.
You can always access Unclutter by swiping down with two fingers from the top of the screen. On the left, there is a space where you can drop any files you need handy but you don’t want cluttering your desktop. On the right side there is a note pad. I use it to keep links and text snippets I want to keep handy like links to social media, my emails, links to work stuff…
Price: $19.99
LastPass
It’s 2021, we don’t have to deal with passwords anymore.
I’m no cybersecurity expert, but I like to be as safe as possible online without complicating my life too much, especially at work.
People can only remember a couple of passwords so we tend to re-use them on different accounts. This can be dangerous when one password gets compromised, it can be used to access many accounts.
The solution is to use unique passwords for each account.
Here is where LastPass comes in. It’s a free password manager that safely stores and remembers all your passwords. It can be set up on all your devices and with a single click, it will fill in your email and password on any account or app.
I’ve been using it for years and can’t go back. Logging into website on any device and have my email and password filled in with one tap is just amazing.
Price: Free
Authy
2-Step Verification across all your devices.
2-step verification greatly increases the security of your accounts. You should really think about doing this on your most important accounts like your email, password manager and even social media.
Authy is based on open-source software, so it works with your favourite apps and it’s super easy to use. Here is how it works:
After setting Authy up with, for example, your Gmail, Authy will generate a 6-digit security codes that refresh every 30 seconds. Next time you log in into your account from an unknown device, you will be asked for this code. Simply open the Authy app and looked at the current code.
This ensures that even if your password was hacked, no one would be able to get into your account as they would need this code too.
This functionality is totally open source and there are a bunch of apps that work exactly the same way, including ones by Google and Microsoft. I prefer Authy because it synchronises my keys across all my devices, so I can access my Authy account on my laptop, my phone or my tablet.
P.S. Because the code it’s tied to the time on your device, this works anywhere on the world, even offline.
That’s it, I really hope you found something useful! 🎉
Is there anything I miss? Let me know in the comments down below 👇👇👇
