10 Apps You Didn't Know Were Already On Your Mac

Your Mac comes with many small apps in addition to the main ones you use every day. Take a look at 10 fun and useful apps to see if any of them can help you get the most from your Mac.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten apps that come with your Mac but you may not even know that they are there.
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So when you get a new Mac or do a fresh install of macOS there are certain apps that come preinstalled with the operating system. Things like Safari, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Calendar. They're all there by default. There are also whole bunch of other apps included with the operating system that you may not even know are there. 
Let's start off here in the Finder. If you want to go and look at your applications you could choose Go and then Applications or use Applications here in the sidebar. This is going to show your Applications folder which is going to be a mix of applications that you've installed and default system applications. However the system applications are actually in the System. These are just links to them. So, for instance, something like the Calculator isn't actually in the Applications folder. It's in the system. So we can go to the system and actually see the exact apps that you get with it. To do this we're going to Go to the computer level. Then we're going to go into the Macintosh hard drive level, System, and there's an Applications folder there. Now you'll see all the applications that are part of the system. You'll see a lot that you recognize. There's App Store, there's Automator, there's Mail. But there are plenty of things that you may have never even used. 
So let's start off here with one called Chess. Yes, your Mac comes with a Chess app built in. When you launch it actually gives you a 3D chess board and you can play chess against your Mac. It even calls out the moves. There is a log. There are hints. There are settings. You could choose different boards and piece types. You can set a difficulty level as well. 
You may already know that your Mac has a built in dictionary. You can use it to look up words on webpages or in documents that you're creating. But there's actually an app that you can go into and directly look up words. In this app you've got your Dictionary here and you can look up words and get definitions and all sorts of other information like even origins for words. But you could also switch to a Thesaurus. There's even a built in Apple dictionary with Apple terms. So you can look up things relative to Apple. You could even use it to browse the Wikipedia. In the Preferences you could even choose which dictionary you are using and there's a whole variety here. Some the dictionaries even have the front/back matter that you'll find if you get a real printed dictionary. Like here's the front matter for the Oxford dictionary. 
Next we have an app called Font Book. Now if you're a designer of any kind then you probably already know about this. But Font Book allows you to look at all the fonts installed in your Mac and see the fonts. Samples of them. Browse through the different characters and see what you've got. This is also how you add fonts to your Mac. If you download a font you simply drag it here into Font Book to install it. 
Next we've got Image Capture. Image Capture is a handy app because it can connect something like a camera an SD card reader or a phone. It will actually appear here and you can download images directly from your phone or camera. You don't have to go through the Photos app. It also connects to any scanners that you may attach to your Mac. So it's a handy app to be familiar with. 
Now if we look down here towards the bottom we've got Stickies. Stickies is a handy little app, I've talked about before, that allows you to put these notes that appear on your Desktop. It doesn't sync over iCloud or anything like that. It is just a kind of handy way to decorate the Desktop of your Mac with useful bits of information. 
Now a lot of apps that people don't know about are inside this Utilities Folder in either your main Applications Folder or here in the System Applications Folder your could find a folder called Utilities and if you go down into that you're going to find a whole bunch of other apps. So let's start off by looking at Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor is a useful way to troubleshoot your Mac. You can look at activity based on CPU use, Memory use, Energy use, Disk use, or Network use. So if your Mac is running slow or your Network connection is running slow you could always do something like go into Activity Monitor and look under CPU and look at percentage of CPU. We can sort here. For instance, I can see that most of my CPU time is taken up with the screen recording that I'm doing now which makes sense. 
Next we've got Digital Color Meter. Digital Color Meter allows you to see exactly what's underneath your cursor and the color that's there. So for instance I could go out here to the Desktop and you could see that blue there and you could see the exact hexadecimal value of that color. You can even increase the aperture size so you're actually grabbing a group of pixels and getting the average color. If you look under Color here you can copy the color as text or as an image using keyboard shortcuts. So if I wanted to grab a color I could use Shift Command C and I'll hover the cursor right there, do Shift Command C and it copies it and then I could paste it into an app, Command V, and you could see I've got that color.
So next we got Disk Utility. Disk Utility is an app that you can use to format disks. So if you get say a flash drive or an external drive or something like that then you want to go and use Disk Utility to set it to the format that you want. One tip I've got is always in Disk Utility immediately go to View and Show All Devices. This gives you the view of every drive you've got. Like here's my internal drive and here's two external drives. Without that turned on it could be really confusing to see what's here. So you may see a new external drive, like the flash drive you plugged in appear here. You can select it and then use Erase and format it for Mac because a lot of drives come formatted for Windows. 
There's also an app on your Mac called Grapher which is a Mac graphing app. So you can graph things. There's a bunch of examples here. So, for instance, we can do differential equations here and you can see the kind of things it can produce. Here's parametric curves. If you go through all the Help in the app and look at some of the examples you can actually create formulas that you need to graph what you want. You also have 3D graphs like that. So that whole things is created by simply using this formula up here. 
Now let's go back up to the Applications level for one last one. We've got Voice Memos. So Voice Memos has been around for awhile on the iPhone but you have it here on the Mac. You can simply launch this app, record something, and it records your voice. You can Pause, Resume, you can listen to it, you can click Done, and go back into it. The best thing about Voice Memos is it works with iCloud. So if you record Voice Memos on your iPhone you'll see them appear here on your Mac. So you can record something in your iPhone while you're on the go and then listen to it when you get back to your home or office on your Mac.
So you can see here the macOS comes with a whole bunch of small but useful apps in addition to the major ones that you're familiar with.

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Apps You Didn't Know Were Already On Your Mac”

Ken Jones

4 years ago

Gary, when you showed Activity Monitor (cool app!) your top line (the screen recorder, I think) was at more than one hundred percent usage. How's that possible?

Gary Rosenzweig

Ken: 100% of a CPU. Macs have multiple CPU cores.

John Russell

Time for me to get rid of some never-used apps from my dock and replace them with a few of these hidden gems! Thanks.

Comments Closed.

10 Apps You Didn't Know Were Already On Your Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Apps You Didn't Know Were Already On Your Mac”

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