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Must-Have Mac Tools/Apps

Bartender 4

Bartender 4 is a program that will clean up your menu bar. Bartender is designed to hide the many small annoying icons in your Menu Bar. With the help of this useful program, you can decide for yourself which icons will continue to be displayed in the Menu Bar as usual and which ones will disappear into a small sub-menu called Bartender Bar. Especially with the new MacBook Pro models with notch, Bartender makes things a lot easier. I don’t want to use my Mac without this software anymore.

In addition, Bartender can address any icons of the Mac menu bar via keyboard shortcuts and can thus simulate a mouse click. How cool is that? So you can partially replace the mouse with a keyboard shortcut.

You can try Bartender 4 for 4 weeks for free, after that you have to pay about 17€. Personally, I already used Bartender 3 and have upgraded to the fourth version. I can really recommend Bartender to anyone who likes a clean desktop. You can find their Software here. For me, Bartender 4 is really a must-have! 

App Cleaner

Installing Mac apps is easy. A complete uninstallation including the removal of unused files is more difficult. If you just put the program you want to uninstall into the trash, the program is gone, but often there are still files in other directories. These files are often a few gigabytes in size and will clutter up your storage unnecessarily if you don’t remove them. For this purpose there is App Cleaner.

Once you have installed and started App Cleaner, uninstalling unwanted apps is very easy. All you have to do is drag and drop the program you want to uninstall into the App Cleaner interface. App Cleaner automatically finds the associated files and displays them in a list. You can choose which files and folders to delete and which to keep.

For me, this tool is a must-have, especially because it is free. Since memory is very expensive on MacBooks, it makes sense to be frugal. AppCleaner helps to keep your Mac tidy. Who already has the paid tool CleanMyMacX, does not need the tool of course, but CleanMyMacX is not free.

Notability

Notability is definitely one of the apps I use the most on my MacBook. At school, I often take notes on my iPad with Apple Pencil or Magic Keyboard. It’s really fun this way because you can insert PDF files or photos with just the click of a button and never have to carry notebooks, pads or books again. Notability also has a Mac app in addition to the iPad app, which is super structured and works very much like the iPad app. Thanks to iCloud (or any other cloud of your choice), data is synced between iPad, iPhone and MacBook in just seconds. In the app you can divide the notes into different topics and categories, for example category: school notes and topic: biology. You can really sort everything very efficiently and find everything again. It is also worth mentioning that Notability is recommended by Apple in the AppStore.

Unfortunately, Notability has introduced a subscription model at the end of 2021 instead of a one-time payment option of $10. Now Notability costs $11.99 per year for new users in the offer and $14.99 per year regularly. Probably the only benefit from the new subscription model is that there is a free version that is limited to the basic features. However, this is an option if you have a small budget :). Unfortunately, you don’t have cloud syncing and handwriting recognition in this model. With the version that costs $14.99 annually, you have all the features, such as handwriting recognition, cloud synchronization, automatic backups and new themes. It’s a pity that Notability has switched to a subscription model, but on the other hand I understand that new updates always cost money. In my opinion, 10$ one time was a fair price.