Twelve free apps your Mac is missing

None of the picks are apps that appear in every other list, and several are recent enough that the reason to watch is not “what does it do” but “does it work”. That is why the length is justified rather than padded: unfamiliar software needs a minute or two of proof before a name means anything.

The framing is honest about why they exist. The opening chapter is called “it’s sloppy out there” — the agentic coding wave has produced a great deal of low-quality software alongside a few genuinely good utilities, and the video’s job is sorting one from the other. That is a more useful premise than a round-up, because it explains why a list of twelve free apps from 2026 looks nothing like one from 2022.

DockDoor at 7:30 is the most immediately legible pick: it puts window previews in the Dock, which is what Windows has done for twenty years and macOS still does not. Shottr at 26:33 is the same argument applied to screenshots — annotation, scrolling capture, text extraction — and it is the one app here most people will already have heard of.

The two that close the video are the ones worth staying for. MiddleDrag at 29:42 and LinearMouse at 30:44 are both about the pointer, and both exist because macOS handles mice differently from trackpads in ways that surprise anyone who plugs one in. LinearMouse in particular fixes acceleration and per-device scroll direction, which is a setting the system does not expose.

The middle is a mix of the clever and the narrow: a local text autocomplete, an on-device dictation app that competes with paid ones, a Caps Lock remapped into a modifier, a scratch pad, a markdown viewer and a focus tool that dims the windows behind the one you are using. Watch it for the three or four that fit how you work; the rest are evidence for the argument.