More free mac apps

3 min read

There are plenty more completely gratis options to choose from

IINA

FROM ALSO ON Mac only If you don’t like the popular VLC media player — and your Mac is recent enough — IINA is a great, also–free alternative. Like VLC, it can play pretty much any video file you throw at it, but unlike its main rival, it has a sleek, minimalist interface that looks right at home on the Mac.

It has some great features that VLC lacks too, such as a native

Picture in Picture mode and Touch Bar support. Plus, IINA’s customizable interface is a joy to use. You can change the aspect ratio, crop the video you’re viewing and if it’s not the right way up, rotate it too. If the audio isn’t in sync you can adjust it, you can change the playback speed, and there’s even a graphic equalizer in there for you to tweak. It’s a great alternative to VLC.

ENCRYPTO

If you’re worried about security when emailing or otherwise sharing documents, or simply want to password– protect them while they’re on your Mac or portable drive, download Encrypto. You can drop a file onto the Encrypto app, set a password and have it protected by AES–256 encryption. Ideal if you regularly carry sensitive files on a flash drive.

TINKERTOOL FROM bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html ALSO ON Mac only Here’s one you’ll never see on the Mac App Store. TinkerTool lets you get under the hood, changing settings and preferences you aren’t supposed to see. You can show hidden files, disable sound effects, dim icons for hidden apps in the Dock (why on earth isn’t this offered in System Settings?), change the Mac’s default fonts, customize the Dark Mode and exclude specific apps from it, and more.

THE UNARCHIVER FROM https://theunarchiver.com ALSO ON Mac only It’s amazing how many archiving formats there have been over the years. Remember Stuffit? PK Zip? RAR? Chances are you have archived files in some of these formats tucked away on a backup drive somewhere, but how do you open them on a modern Mac? Simple — download The Unarchiver. It can unarchive almost any compressed file you can throw at it. It can even unpack legacy Amiga formats.

TEXTPAL FROM www.textpal.app ALSO ON Mac only Download TextPal for any amount of money you want (including nothing at all, if you want it for free), and you can access a simple emoji picker by tapping a trigger key and then typing the name of an emoji. You don’t have to type the whole name — a single letter will do. You can then choose your emoji from the list that appears. For emojis that offer a skin tone, you can set a default too.

CALIBRE

It’s ugly and not very Mac–like, but Calibre does a great job of managing your ebooks. If you regularly download out–of–copyright publications from sites such as