Building apps with Xamarin.Mac is a great way to build powerful apps for macOS that harness the power of C#. In this blog post, we created a basic Pomodoro timer application for macOS. If you want to learn more about Xamarin.Mac, check out the Xamarin.Mac documentation and get involved in discussions on the forum! The free ClassDojo app is available for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. ClassDojo helps teachers, parents, and students build amazing classroom communities. Visit the App Store or the Google Play Store to get the free ClassDojo app!
Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.
But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.
1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)
Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.
2. Luminar (7 days trial)
Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. Macos mojave app nap. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.
Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.
Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.
3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)
Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.
All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?
Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!
4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)
As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.
Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.
Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.
5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days)
Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 (Trial link)
Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.
In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.
7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)
Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.
Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.
8. Google Photos
Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.
Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.
9. PhotoScape X (Free)
A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.
The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.
The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.
10. Gimp (Free)
Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.
Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.
Ahh, the freedom of freelancing. You set your own hours. You work on your own terms — within the scope of client deadlines and expectations, of course. You…
…You…
…Oops. Sorry — just had to check out the latest Grumpy Cat meme on Facebook. And sneak a peek at my email. Which actually reminds me, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile in a while…
Sound familiar?
While the Internet and all its glorious tools can make a freelancer’s work easier, it also provides so very many ways in which to avoid your work altogether and get lost in an abyss of never-ending stuff: some of it quasi-work-related (hey, LinkedIn’s a networking tool!), some of it just an excuse to procrastinate.
Luckily, you can get technology back on your side with a slew of super helpful concentration apps that help you focus, block out distractions and get to work. Here are some of the top ones: (Click to tweet this list)
1. Anti-Social
If you’re always lured from your projects by the siren call of Facebook and Twitter, this app’s for you. Anti-Social eliminates the temptation to update your status by blocking these sites altogether.
You can choose timed blocks from 15 minutes up to eight hours (if you’re feeling really determined), and the app “keeps you honest” by cleverly lacking a way to turn it off. That’s right — if you feel the itch and try to cheat, the only way to sneak around a timed block is by rebooting your computer altogether.
Anti-Social is made to block over 30 social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Hulu and Reddit. You can also add any other sites that tend to pull you away from your work. Are you a secret Amazon shopper? A fantasy football roster-checker? Add these sites to your blocked list to have them blocked as well.
Operating System: Mac and Windows
Cost: $15 (with a 90-day money-back guarantee)
2. Concentrate
Okay, let’s say that most of the time, Facebook and Twitter are a horrible distraction for you. But when you’re doing social media management for your blog, they’re kind of necessary. Concentrate allows you to select which applications and sites are allowed and which are off-limits based on the task you’re doing. It even goes the extra mile by opening up necessary applications for you.
Let’s say that when you write, you need to access Word, your favorite online thesaurus site (we all use them in a pinch), and Pandora for a little background music. So, when you launch your “writing” action (for whatever time limit you allocate), Concentrate will open a Word doc for you (either a new one or one you’ve already saved), open up your thesaurus site and launch Pandora for you. It can also block out everything else, set your chat status to “away” and give you special messages and alerts to keep you on task.
Operating System: Mac
Cost: 60-day free trial, then $29 (with money-back guarantee)
3. Focus Booster
This app is specifically based on the pomodoro technique, a time management system that breaks tasks down into timed blocks separated by short breaks. Since its creation in the ‘80s, the technique has been done most often with kitchen timers; Focus Booster is its digital extension.
According to the rules of the technique, the app breaks your tasks down into 25-minute sessions (“pomodoros”), each followed by a five-minute break. After four pomodoros, you take a longer, 15- to 20-minute break.
This technique aims to keep your mind refreshed and agile as you work. If you’re the type who would plug away for two straight hours until your eyes start to blur, this more regimented system could help provide you with a little more structure and rest time.
Systems: Mac and Windows. An online version is also available if you work across multiple computers or don’t want to download an app.
Cost: Free (for now). They‘re currently crowdfunding on Pozible to keep the app free as they add new features.
4. FocusWriter![]()
Eliminate all the sidebars and notifications that tug at the periphery of your vision and really immerse yourself in your writing with this app, which turns your computer screen into the simplest, most distraction-free blank page possible.
You can choose various themes, from a totally gray screen with black writing, to a screen over a soothing background image, to a retro green-type-on-black look. Everything else, including the app’s own user interface, which you can access by mousing over the edge of the screen, is whisked out of sight and out of mind.
Features include timers and alarms, daily goals and (my personal favorite) genuine typewriter sound effects, if that helps get your inspiration flowing.
Systems: Mac, Windows and Linux
Cost: Free (with the option to donate if you so choose)
5. SelfControl
If you lack it yourself, SelfControl has it for you. Unlike other apps, this one will not allow you to get out of your predetermined timed sessions — not even by rebooting your computer or deleting the application itself. If hardcore discipline is called for, this is about as strict as it gets.
Systems: Mac, Windows and Linux
Cost: Free (with option to donate)
6. StayFocused
Aimed at websites only, but highly customizable within that area, StayFocused limits the amount of time you can spend on certain sites. You decide how many minutes per day you’re allowed to access your guilty pleasure sites, and once you’ve hit your limit, the site is blocked for the rest of the day.
Not only can you block websites, you can also block subdomains, specific pages on certain sites, distracting in-page content like videos and images or the entire Internet itself. Better yet? If you try sneaking back on (you know, just to make sure the app is working), you’ll be guilt-tripped by a message asking, “Shouldn’t you be working?”
System: Google Chrome extension
Cost: Free (with option to donate)
7. Time Out and 8. SmartBreak
For those on the opposite side of the focus spectrum — workaholics who work too much for too long — these apps will remind you to take a break once in awhile.
Time Out reminds you by gently dimming the screen and showing you a message. You can take normal breaks (10 minutes after 50 minutes of work) or micro breaks (short pauses of 10 seconds every 10 minutes if you’re really doing something stressful). Once the break is over, your screen fades back in, and you can get back to work.
SmartBreak is aimed more at the ergonomic benefits of break-taking. Rather than using set break periods, it actually monitors the amount of work you’re doing (are you typing away like a fiend, or just pecking?) and reminds you to take a break based on when it thinks you need it. While this could get disruptive if you’re just looking to take breaks now and then, it’s great if you suffer from the repetitive stress injuries, back and neck pain, and eye strain that come from long hours in front of a computer. How to remove downloaded apps from mac.
Systems: Mac (Time Out); Windows (SmartBreak)
Download Concentrate App Mac Download
Cost: Free (Time Out) (with option to donate) ; $19.95 (SmartBreak) ($5 discount if you share or tweet about the app)
9. Sound Curtain and 10. White Noise
These are both mobile apps, but the idea behind them is a great one. While other apps focus on blocking out visual distractions and computer applications that can drain your focus, these smartphone apps help block out the distractions of a noisy work environment. It’s best if you have a headset to really get the full effect. https://mwjeeg.weebly.com/blog/xcode-swift-mac-app-tutorial.
Sound Curtain masks noise with white noise and harmonic sounds — and if you have a mic on your headset, it will automatically adjust its volume, pitch and tone according to the level of noise around you.
White Noise mimics the sound of an untuned TV from back in the day when we still had static channels — not so jarringly that it’s a distraction in itself, but more as a means of absorbing ambient noise and “insulating” your mind.
Systems: iPhone (Sound Curtain); Android (White Noise) Note agenda app mac.
Download Concentrate App Mac Free
Cost: $4.99 (Sound Curtain); Free (White Noise)
Download Concentrate App Mac Pro
Did we miss any good ones? Share your favorites in the comments!
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