Recommendation of macOS Apps

In this post, I’m going to introduce some macOS apps that I’m using. All of them are free of charge.

FOSSs (Free and Open Source Softwares) are marked by ⭐.

MacPorts ⭐

This is a package manager, something like a third-party App Store, but in command line.

Many people may prefer homebrew, but I would say even if MacPorts is not to your taste, don’t use homebrew.

IT IS UNSAFE!

Check my previous post: Don’t Use Homebrew

Btw, I made a macports repository of my own, check it out if you are interested: https://repo.sainnhe.dev/macports

NetNewsWire ⭐

This is a RSS reader, written in Swift.

It supports import from OPML, and can also connect to some online services.

DevTools-X ⭐

Alternative to DevToys that helps in daily tasks like formatting JSON, comparing text, testing RegExp. No need to use many untruthful websites to do simple tasks with your data.

OnyX

A must-have app that can run miscellaneous maintenance and cleaning tasks, configure hidden system settings, etc.

LuLu ⭐

An open source firewall. Some malicious binaries may run in the background and send your data somewhere, and this is what LuLu is trying to eliminate. It filters the network traffic and finds out those malwares.

AppCleaner

If you drag the app icon to the Bin to uninstall an application, you just delete the application executables, libraries and resources. But most of apps will distribute some small files like caches and preference files throughout your system, they will not be cleaned using this method.

But with AppCleaner, you’ll be able to clean these files while uninstall an app.

UninstallPKG

If you have ever installed apps via clicking *.pkg files but now want to completely uninstall them, you can use this app to complete this task.

This app will not automatically clean cache files generated by apps, so I’d recommend you to use AppCleaner to remove cache files first.

Note that if you directly drag this app to Finder, you may not be able to see it in the Launchpad. This is a known bug of macOS, a temporary solution can be found in FAQ.

Motrix ⭐

This is a full featured download manager, basically a wrapper of aria2, it supports multi-threaded download, BitTorrent & Magnet, mock user-agent and more.

HandBrake ⭐

This is a video convertor, basically a wrapper of ffmpeg, it can convert video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

MouseCape ⭐

Do you know that you can change cursor theme in macOS? This sweet tool can help you do this!

MiddleClick ⭐

A very important feature that macOS is missing is emulating “middle click” with three-finger tap. This touchpad gesture is very useful for closing tabs in browser and other apps.

There are some non-free apps that can add support for this feature, but now we have an open source alternative.

BTW, the finger in the picture is not mine.

TopNotch

Geting disgusted of the notch? Try this app.

Before:

After:

Karabiner Elements ⭐

This is a keyboard customizer, you can define a lot of complex rules, for example system-wide vim-like keybinding.

There are many predefined rules by community, you can found them here: https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org

Just Focus

This is a simple, clean Pomodoro timer to help you stay healthy and regain your focus.

Maccy ⭐

Clipboard manager.

Easydict ⭐

Full-featured translator, supports tons of translation engines, clicking to translate, OCR, etc.

Ice ⭐

Hide your menu bar icons.

Stats ⭐

Full featured system monitor in your menu bar. Compared to other system monitors, it can precisely monitor some components like temperature and GPU.

Übersicht ⭐

Customize desktop widgets. You can add widgets like clock, weather, system monitor to your desktop.

MacZip

Full-featured archiver, supports more than 20 archive formats, can be integrated with Finder.

YouTube Music ⭐

This is the best youtube music client for macOS I can find. Although it’s written in electron, but it’s full-featured. It supports account login, ad blocking and downloading. It’s bundled with many plugins that you can enable via a single click.

Moreover, it support macOS native controllers like touch bar, pause button, notifications and so on.

Spotube ⭐

The best spotify client for macOS I can find. It’s also full-featured.

MochiDiffusion ⭐

Run Stable Diffusion on macOS natively. This app is written in Swift and runs well on all Apple Silicon Macs by fully utilizing Neural Engine.

Orion

A native macOS web browser written in Swift, based on WebKit browser engine.

The most interesting thing about it is that it supports both chrome and firefox extensions.

UTM ⭐

This is an open source virtual machine for macOS, basically a wrapper of qemu. It supports both Intel chips and Apple Silicon chips.

I ran some Geekbench CPU benchmarks on Windows 11 for Arm and the results show that the performance of UTM is almost the same as Parallels Desktop. I didn’t save the urls of benchmark results, but found another guy’s results: UTM vs Parallels

Now I have fully migrated from Parallels Desktop to UTM.

Whisky ⭐

This app can run Windows games and applications on macOS. It’s basically a GUI wrapper of Wine and apple game porting toolkit.

Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems. Unlike virtual machines which emulate a hardware environment to run a complete operating system, Wine runs Windows applications by providing a compatibility layer that translate POSIX APIs to Windows APIs, causing less resources to be consumed compared to virtual machines.

Apple game porting toolkit combines Wine with Apple’s own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 11 and 12, thus unlocks the ability to play many DirectX games.

Both wine and apple game porting toolkit may not be user-friendly for end users, and this is what Whisky wants to solve. It’s a GUI wrapper of Wine and apple game porting toolkit, enabling users to play many Windows games on Mac. In my test, it can also run many Windows applications because it’s based on Wine.

OrbStack

This is an alternative for Docker Desktop, and is the macOS’s version of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which allows you to run linux commands seamlessly in your terminal.

Unlike Docker Desktop and Lima VM which use QEMU as backend, OrbStack uses native AVF (Apple Virtualization Framework) as backend. Its performance is much better than the previous two. See benchmarks

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Here, I’m also going to recommend some Safari extensions.

AdGuard ⭐

This is the only ad blocking & anti tracking extension I’ll recommend in Safari. Don’t use stuffs like “AdBlock Plus” or “uBlock” (not uBlockOrigin), see here for discussion.

Btw, if you are using Chrome and Firefox, uBlockOrigin + Privacy Badger might be a better choice.

uBlacklist ⭐

Block sites from search engine results. You can use this to block ads & copycat sites.

Bitwarden ⭐

Cross-platform full-featured password manager. The biggest reason I choose this over Apple Keychain is that Bitwarden is cross-platform, because I also use Windows and Linux for development.

Stay

Free alternative to Tampermonkey and Dark Reader. It supports the following features:

• User scripts. User script manager is a kind of must-have extension on any web browser. You can find many useful scripts on Greasy Fork and other user scripts sites. Btw, if you are using Chrome or Firefox, Violentmonkey might be a better choice over Tampermonkey because Tampermonkey is no longer open source while Violentmonkey is an actively maintained FOSS.
• Dark mode. This extension can darken any websites.
• Ad blocking.
• Video downloading.