Top 5 problem-solving Mac apps

Mac users, end your frustrations with some of the most useful apps you will ever encounter.

MacOS becomes more refined with every generation; however, there are some things that third parties do better than Apple. Below are five great apps for solving annoying Mac problems.

Top problem-solving apps for Mac users

Witch

Witch lets you regain control over all of your open windows. Witch also lets you assign a keyboard shortcut that allows you to cycle through the windows and apps you have open — it even has the option of letting you cycle through the tabs you have open in an individual app. Witch costs $14, but you can try it out for free.

Magnet

Let’s say you like everything to appear very neatly on your screen: Maybe you have a web browser and a spreadsheet running because you’re working on a project. You want those two apps side by side and each at 50% of your screen’s width. You can manually try to resize everything, but Magnet lets you perfectly size things to your screen.

You want that 50-50 split? Done. You want three apps to each take up one-third of the screen? Sure. You want one window to be one-third of the space and the other to take up two-thirds? You got it. Magnet also gives you the option of snapping together windows so there’s no overlap. The amount of time you’ll save by using this app is absurd. You can find Magnet in the App Store for $8.

Amphetamine

Sometimes your Mac decides to turn off the screen, turn on the screen saver or decide to take a nap when you don’t want it to. Yes, you can go into System Preferences to manually adjust these settings, but this process is easier with Amphetamine. It’s listed as a “powerful keep-awake utility,” and that’s exactly what it is.

When you install the Amphetamine app, you’ll see a little pill icon in the Menu Bar. If you click that, you can quickly choose how long your Mac will stay fully awake. This is tremendously useful when you really, really need your Mac to not fall asleep. Let’s say you’re live streaming or downloading something — Amphetamine will make sure your Mac is awake. This app will cost you a cool $0.

NTFS for Mac

MacOS lets you read the contents of NTFS hard drives, but it does not let you write to it. Luckily, the NTFS for Mac app gives you full read-write access. For $20, you never need to worry about what file system an external hard drive is: Your Mac will be able to read it if you have this app.

Onyx

And lastly, we’ve got Onyx. This is like a Swiss Army Knife for Mac. It verifies the structure of your file system, rebuilds indexes and runs maintenance scripts: And those are just things in the maintenance tab of the app. Onyx also lets you customize the Dock and Finder so you can quickly hit a checkbox to show hidden files and folders. And if you’ve got a really, really old Mac, you’re covered. The makers of Onyx keep old versions of the software available so you can fix a Mac that’s still running MacOS 10.2, Jaguar. That’s a 20-year old operating system. Onyx is free.