5 Free Third-Party Mac Apps Worth Getting

While many apps come with your Mac, and Apple provides others for free, you can also find great third-party apps that don't cost anything. Take a look at five: a video player and converter, an audio editor, an image editor, a text editor and a full office suite.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you five free third party apps that are worth getting for your Mac.
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So while your Mac comes with a lot of great apps and Apple provides even more apps for free there are some third party apps that you can get that do some great things. Let's start off with the app VLC. You can find it at videolan.org. VLC is basically a video player. If you drag and drop a video file into the initial VLC window it will play it. But you could also create a playlist of videos. But that's not why it's so cool! You can convert videos with it. So if you go to File you can do Convert/Stream and then you get this window here. You can drag and drop a video file into it. Now VLC will actually read more file type than QuickTime Player does. So occasionally if you run into a file, say, from an older camera or something you download online and QuickTime Player won't play it and iMovie won't import it, you could still play it in VLC. That means you could use this conversion process to take that file and then convert it to a more standard format like basic H264. Then you could even customize beyond that so you have a lot of options here. Typically you need to pay for an app like Apple's Compressor in order to convert videos. But with VLC you can do most of those things for free.
Next we've got Audacity. You can find it at audacityteam.org. This app has been around for a long time just like VLC. It's an audio file editor. So with Audacity you can record audio and in fact it starts you off right here with a window and you can record right from your microphone. But you could also open an audio file. So, for instance, I'll open up this MP3 file with Audacity. It will open it up and you could see how I can see both stereo tracks. I can select, edit, trim. There's even a whole ton of different effects. It's pretty pro-level when it comes to audio editing. GarageBand will do a lot of this too. Audacity is a little easier to deal with if you just want to take a piece of an audio track and save it out as file or some quick editing or applying an effect. You can also export out as a variety of different formats. It makes it a good converter as well. 
Now here's a graphics app. Seashore is a completely free image editor. You can get it in the Mac App Store. With Seashore you could do a lot more than you could do just in Photos or in Preview because you could actually start off by creating a completely new image and then draw in it just like you would expect in a paint app. But you could also edit photos with it. As a matter of fact you can use it directly from the Photos App if you go to Image, and then Edit With, Seashore is one of the options that you'll get. It will open up the image inside of Seashore and, of course, you can use all of these drawing tools on it. But also it has some of the basic stuff that you may find in PhotoShop and other apps, for instance. I can go in here and do Color Adjustments, Color Effects, Enhancements, Stylize things, you know apply cool effects like this. So while it is pretty basic it will probably cover like 95% of most people's needs as far as editing images and photos. 
Here's another app in the Mac App Store and it's COT or CotEditor. This is a text editing tool and it's quite a bit more advanced than just using TextEdit. It's super fast and super easy to edit even large text files and if you're a coder it has all of these different programing language modes. It just contains a lot of advanced text functions that you could see here in the Menu and in Preferences. So it's kind of similar, in a lot of ways, to what you'll find in expensive text editors like BBEdit but being totally free it's a no brainer to just get it and use it. I started using it a few years ago and I pretty much use it as my main text editor now.
Next we have LibreOffice which is a whole suite of apps in one that basically is similar to Microsoft Office. You can get it a LibreOffice.org. So unlike Microsoft Office everything is bundled into one app. So you can start a word processing document or a spreadsheet or presentation all from inside the same app. Now it looks different than Word but it's very similar in what it offers. When you go to save a file it will go to use the ODF text document format. But you can specify that you want to use the Microsoft Word format. When you do that you'll get a Word format file. But the best thing is you can continue to work on this document in LibreOffice while it's in Word format. In fact you can do the same with any Word document somebody gives you. So I can go to Open With here, choose LibreOffice, and edit this Word document while keeping it in Word format. Pages will only let you import in Word and then Export out as Word again. So this is a much easier way of working. It's the same thing if you use Excel. You can create a spreadsheet in here and you could save it but as Excel format and then edit this file, as well as any other Excel file, directly in LibreOffice without having to convert it back and forth. So it's really worth having on your Mac just for that alone. But it's also useful for people that really like how Microsoft Office works as opposed to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote but you don't want to pay for Microsoft Office. Instead you can use LibreOffice for free and the apps kind of work in the way you're familiar with.
So these are five free apps you should consider getting for your Mac. One bonus thing here though. Is you should also consider getting a Clipboard Manager. There are a variety of different ones to choose from, many of them free. So just go to the Mac App Store and search for Clipboard Manager and look for one of the ones that are free and doesn't have any in-app purchases. I use this one here, CloudClip Manager, and you could see it up here and it has all of my recent clipboard items. I can easily recall the last few things that I copied. But there are a lot of other great ones too. I pretty much love them all. Flycut is one that I used for years and still love. There are plenty more. My main recommendation is not for a specific clipboard manager but to just get one. They are so useful. It's so much better when your Mac remembers the last ten or one hundred things that you copied instead of just the very last copy that you did.
So those are some of my favorite free third party Mac apps. I'm sure you've got some as well. Share them in the comments below.

Comments: 9 Responses to “5 Free Third-Party Mac Apps Worth Getting”

Soizic

2 years ago

I like to use Grand Perspective. This is a cool visual representation of your files by size, and it tells you where to get them. Great when you want to sort out your overloaded hard drive.
Thanks for your videos.

Fred

Nice video. I use Clipy which can be found here: https://github.com/Clipy/Clipy and https://clipy-app.com/

Just wondering, I noticed on your Excel screen shot that you had purple borders for the active cell. How did you do that? I can't seem to get it to work on my Excel. I've even changed the System Preference. Maybe I need to reinstall MS Office.

Gary Rosenzweig

Fred: I don't think I show Excel in this video. I show LibreOffice, but I don't see purple borders. At what time in the video do you mean?

My error, it was indeed Libre, and it looked purple on my phone. I'm trying to find that "just right" setting visually in Excel as I use it often. I will give Libre a try as well since they are straight forward spreadsheets. Thanks!

Jean-Claude

Duplicate Detective is a handy little app to find duplicate files. If finds duplicates quickly, even those with different file names. Paste Plain Text is also nice to have if you do a lot of copy/paste.

James

Great video. I would also recommend Stellarium as a free astronomical app for the Mac (the iOS version costs). I also find Zotero an excellent free research aid for keeping track of books & articles etc

Peter

Is the LibreOffice truly a free app ?
My AppStore offers it for £8.99 (as I'm in GB)
Best regards.

Peter: That's a different app from another company based on the same code. Get it from the official website like I show.

Comments Closed.

5 Free Third-Party Mac Apps Worth Getting

Comments: 9 Responses to “5 Free Third-Party Mac Apps Worth Getting”

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