Five free Mac apps to install first

The five are ordered from the one with the most moving parts to the one that does the least, and the video gives the first two roughly half its runtime. It was recorded in September 2021 on an M1 Mac, so what it shows is those builds; the segment on Rectangle is also where the channel compares an app to the one it had recommended before, Magnet.

Rectangle gets about a minute and is the only one demonstrated with a keyboard-shortcut table on screen. The claim being made is not that it splits windows — Magnet does that — but that the same result costs nothing. The preferences window in the video is the whole argument: a grid of halves and quarters, each one a key combination.

Itsycal is the longest segment and the one with a settings pane worth pausing on. It is a calendar that opens from the menu bar instead of a window, and the options shown are about what the menu-bar item itself displays: an outline icon, the month in the icon, the day of the week in the icon, and the event dots underneath. Clicking the date opens the month; double-clicking a time opens a New Event sheet with the same fields Calendar uses — title, all-day, start, end, repeat, alert, calendar — and the video’s point is that the event then appears in Calendar, because it is Calendar’s own store.

Encrypto is the one with a caveat the video states plainly: it writes an encrypted copy of the file and leaves the original in place. The demonstration is a drag onto the app, a password, and an output file with a lock icon; the creator’s framing is sending something private — photos, in the example — without trusting the channel it travels over.

NightOwl is about scheduling dark mode rather than toggling it. The menu in the video offers Light, Dark, a Sunrise/Sunset mode, a Scheduled mode with a separate light and dark time, and an “always stay light” switch. The part worth watching is the per-app list: the demonstration keeps Terminal in light mode while everything else has gone dark, which is the case a plain schedule cannot express.

Hidden Bar closes the video and is the shortest. It exists because the menu bar fills up — the creator’s own joke is that it is needed precisely because of apps recommended in episodes like this one. Holding Command reveals the hidden icons; the arrow at the end of the bar pins them open.

Only Itsycal has a page here. Rectangle, Encrypto, NightOwl and Hidden Bar have no entry on this site yet, so nothing above should be read as a statement about their current pricing, licensing or whether they still run on a current macOS — the video is four years older than this page.