Free today,
paid tomorrow.

It records system audio and the microphone at the same time, and writes to disk while it records, so a crash costs the last second rather than the whole take. The floating teleprompter is rare in a recorder and saves reaching for a second app.

The Region mode splits an image along its real edges and fills each region with its own representative colour, which is how a photograph survives tracing instead of collapsing into a flat poster. Output drops straight into Illustrator, CorelDRAW or a cutting machine.

Two unrelated skills, one loop: you type the word to shoot it. The dictionary builder is what makes it usable at home — a parent can build the word list instead of accepting the bundled one, which is the difference between a toy and a lesson.

Live syntax highlighting and an HTML preview in the same window, with sync between your own devices rather than to an account. It is a one-time purchase, which in a category that has moved almost entirely to subscriptions is now the exception.

Three controls and no account. The resolution field is the point: a code headed for print has to be exported larger than the one you checked on screen, and most free generators fix the size for you.

Built for the pile of files that QuickTime refuses: MPEG-2, VOB, RM, RMVB, WMV, ASF, TS. If your library came off a disc or a download from a decade ago, this is the one that opens it.

It uses every voice macOS already has, including the ones you downloaded yourself, and sorts them by language so you are not hunting through a list of ninety. The export turns a document into a file you can listen to on the way to work.

One format, one font, no styles — and a window that stays on top with ⌘T, so the note you are copying from never disappears behind the app you are copying into. It opens files saved in any Windows encoding, which is more than TextEdit manages without complaint.

Three Quick Look extensions, one idea: see what is inside before you open it. Select a folder, press space, and get the tree, the total size and thumbnails of the images in it — and the same for a ZIP or a Markdown file.

Written for the case where a long-running job — a build, an agent, a render — dies because the machine went to sleep. Two switches in the menu bar, sleep and display, and nothing else to configure.

Three colour wheels for three kinds of work, plus the tools that usually live in separate apps: palettes for flat design, seasonal colour cards, a picker that reads colours out of a photograph, and a value simplifier that breaks an image into light and dark shapes.

A ruler-level strategy game rather than a battle game: the map is the point, and each city differs in terrain and output while each officer differs in what they can be trusted with. Long, slow and dense, which is what the genre is for.

It puts translation under the selected text using Apple’s on-device engine, so nothing you highlight is sent anywhere. Two target languages at once is useful when you are reading in a third language rather than your own.

A read-only viewer for the DBF files that Clipper and FoxPro applications still leave behind. You need to see three columns of a table twice a year, and this is cheaper than a client that wants a licence for it.