New Mac for Christmas? 3 Free Apps You Shouldn’t Be Without

I’m certain there’s a ton of new Macs warming up for the first time this Christmas. The way Apple is growing the platform, there’s probably more Macs given as gifts than any time before and lots of these new Macs went to first-timers. I bought my first Mac in 2006 and haven’t bought a Windows PC since. It’s hard to remember those early Mac days, but while I do remember how I instantly fell in love with my new 17” MacBook Pro, I often forget the challenges I faced as a noob to the platform. If you’re one of those using a Mac for the first time I have one simple piece of advice that I wish I’d heard way back in ’06: DONT OVERTHINK IT!

If you’ve just ventured away from the world of Windows, you have a ton of mental garbage to forget. Just remember, if you’re not sure how to do something on your Mac, just try the simplest, most logical approach and nine times out of ten you’ll be right. There may be things you need to re-learn, but believe me, you’ve just walked from the dark into the light. So, let’s get you started with a few free apps that will make your life simpler and easier than the Mac already does.

1.) Evernote 

This app is always near the top of my list of “Apps to install on my new Mac”. It is the one app I very nearly cannot live without. As an IT consultant I have a great need for a central repository for information about my clients’ networks, servers, login’s, etc. Evernote is the best solution I’ve found for recording, categorizing and searching this type of data. With it’s multi-browser capable web clipper it is also great for storing research and solutions I find on the web. It is what its name implies, notes everywhere. It is one of the most ubiquitous apps out there with apps for Mac, iOS, Android and Windows and they all sync with evernote.com which is as good a web app as can be found anywhere. I can take notes on my iPhone or iPad and they are instantly available on my Mac and vise-versa.

Evernote also includes very powerful tools for organizing and searching the information you’ve captured or stored. By logically creating notebooks (as many as you like) and tagging individual notes, it’s easy to find just what you’re looking for. You can even take screen grabs or use your iPhone or iPad’s camera to take a picture of something and the text within the picture becomes instantly searchable. You can also use your phone’s camera for easily capturing business cards and adding that person to your Contacts.

There’s a ton of other features I won’t go into here. Suffice to say there is hardly a day that goes by without Evernote playing a huge part.

2.) Dropbox 

The simplest explanation of Dropbox is: “Dropbox is to files what Evernote is to notes”. There are lots of free cloud storage solutions out there. Most offer more free storage than the 2 gigs Dropbox includes with its free offering, but for my money (I haven’t given Dropbox a dime yet) Dropbox beats them all hands down. For certain, Dropbox was “The firstest with the mostest”. I’ve had a Dropbox account since the public beta in early 2008 and I haven’t found a compelling reason to switch yet. There are excellent apps for all platforms and more third-party iOS and Android app developers integrate Dropbox as their file storage solution than all others combined. Dropbox makes sharing files over the web simple and easy with Mac add-ins to Finder and Windows Explorer requiring only a right-click (or CTRL + click) to copy a public files’s URL to the clipboard for sharing via email or text.

For me, one of Dropbox’s most endearing features is its ability to utilize my home network to sync all my computers and devices. This spares me a gob of Internet bandwidth I can put to better use elsewhere. I keep all my critical data files in my Dropbox folder. Aside from making them almost instantly available everywhere, it gives me peace of mind knowing they’re backed up on multiple machines including Dropbox’s servers. Like Evernote, Dropbox is something I use every day, usually multiple times.

3.) SuperDuper! 

Continuing with the backup theme, I find Apple’s Time Machine to be severely lacking. While it’s great for retrieving accidentally deleted and/or previous versions of files, I have never been able to use it to restore a Mac from a corrupted or crashed boot drive. Admittedly, I’ve only tried this on two occasions (on two separate Macs), but both times I tried it, it failed. You may ask how likely is a Mac’s hard drive to fail. My answer is 100%. It may take several years and the Mac may be long-since passed on to someone else, but all hard drives fail eventually. If your Mac is equipped with an SSD or the newer on-board flash storage, the jury seems to still be out, but they do appear to be heartier than their spinning-platter equivalents. In either case, why take a chance when backup solutions are so inexpensive, especially compared to what you have to lose? For less than $100 you can protect your entire hard disk by creating a SuperDuper! clone on a USB hard drive. The $100 is the cost of a 2 TB USB disk. SuperDuper! is free. Once you’ve downloaded and installed SuperDuper! you simply connect a USB hard drive to your Mac, launch SuperDuper! and tell it to copy your boot disk (named Macintosh HD by default) to the USB disk. When it’s finished you have an exact copy of everything on your Mac and you can even boot your Mac from the copy by pressing and holding the <option> key when booting and selecting the USB drive as your boot device. There’s no better peace-of-mind than knowing you’re not in trouble even if your Mac’s hard drive fails completely.

To be fair, all the above-mentioned free apps have some limited capability compared to their paid counterparts, but the extra functionality may be something you don’t need. I pay for Evernote Premium to get the collaborative features and bought a copy of SuperDuper! so I could schedule backups automatically, but I’ve never found the need to pay for Dropbox. I’ve increased my on-line storage from 2 to 9 gigs by taking advantage of the many bonuses they offer for recommending the service to others and using other apps with Dropbox. Still, I only use about 2 ½ gigs of storage after over six years of use. It’s easy to keep your storage low if you avoid saving media (especially video) to your Dropbox folder.

In any case, all three of these apps come with a wealth of free features and are very useful as-is. At worst, you’re out a little hard drive space and some time. I’m willing to bet if you give them a try you’ll find them as indispensable as I do.

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