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Welcome to the second of my yearly round of the “What’s New for Designers & Developers for 2021”.

Today’s post roundup will be showing you what were some of the best and greatest apps for both Apple and Windows operating systems that either got released or been updated during 2021.

Not every apps that been featured in each of my roundups will be featured in today’s post, as I feel that this list could be enormous. So let’s get in to it.

January’s Top Picks

Animation Desk – Mac/Windows App

Animation Desk

Animation Desk is a creative app for creating frame-to-frame animations and storyboards.

Price: Free

Sizey – Mac App

Sizey.app

Quickly and easily calculate aspect ratios with Sizey. Use this awesome little menu bar app with your favorite design tool and start effortlessly generating perfect aspect ratios.

Price: $3.99

Shotr – Mac App

Shotr

Screenshot tool for those, who care about pixels

Price: Free

February’s Top Picks

ReacType – Mac/Windows App

Reactype

ReacType is a prototyping tool that allows the user to visualize their application architecture dynamically, employing a drag-and-drop canvas display and a real-time component code preview.

The user can create components and drag instances of these components, as well as HTML elements, onto the canvas. This architecture can then be exported as TypeScript files to be used as a starter template for any repository.

Price: Free

Menu Bar Analytics – Mac App

Menu Bar Analytics

Menu Bar Analytics allows you to see Google Analytics data from your Mac’s menu bar.

Price: $4.99

Pika – Mac App

Pika

Pika is an easy to use, open-source, native colour picker for macOS. Pika makes it simple to quickly find colours onscreen, in the format you need, so you can get on with being a speedy, successful designer.

Price: Free

March’s Top Picks

DataCever – Mac App

Data Cever

DataCever allows you to monitor and control internet traffic , allowing you to know what consumes your data plan. DataCever helps you save data plans by specifiing quota for each app.

Price: $4.99

TextBuddy – Mac App

Textbuddy

TextBuddy is a Mac app for manipulating text. A Swiss Army knife for plain text that is there when you need it and hidden when you don’t. Faster than your IDE. Easier than the command line. Transform and extract text from images and audio, too.

Price: Free to $19.99 USD / One-time

Instatus Out – Mac, Linux, Windows App

Instatus Out

Monitor services in your menu bar.

Price: Free

April’s Top Picks

Tinkerun – Mac, Linux & Windows App

Tinkerun

An open-source cross-platform desktop application for Laravel Developers, it’s a new way of running Tinker. Simplify the Web Artisan’s workflow.

Price: Free

Time Zone Pro – Mac App

Time Zone Pro

What time is it there? Never ask that again. Quickly see the local time of your team, friends, and family.

Price: $4.99

Spearmint – Mac App

Spearmint

Spearmint helps developers generate tests for their applications through an intuitive, accessible no-code UI. Like always, Spearmint dynamically produces tests for React (+ Hooks), Redux, endpoints, and paint timing. Now, it can also create tests for accessibility!

Price: Free

May’s Top Picks

Framer – Mac & Window App

Framer

The all new Framer desktop app for Windows and Mac is here. And it’s completely free, with image exporting, real-time collaboration, and Smart Components. Get the prototyping power of the browser right on your desktop.

Price: Free

Dashboard – Mac & Windows App

Dashword

Dashword is by far the most convenient and user-friendly tool for creating any semantic network, be it your business idea, an abstract of a lecture on computer science, a script for a movie or a recipe for your favorite dish.

Price: Free

Buddymove – Mac App

Buddymove

The Buddymove app constantly analyses how long you’ve been working on your computer and chooses the perfect moment for you to take a break, during which it will show you a set of exercises to help you feel healthier at work.

Price: Free

June’s Top Picks

Tint – Mac App

Tint A Better Color Picker

Tint is a color tool designed to ease your work and boost your productivity.

Price: Free

Nucleo 3 – Mac & Windows App

Nucleo

Nucleo is a free icon manager for Mac and Windows. Use it to import, organize, and export all your icons. Optionally, you can purchase the Nucleo icons, a library of 30K icons that work seamlessly with the app.

Price: Free

WriteMapper 3 – Mac & Windows App

Writemapper 3

WriteMapper 3 is a writing app on macOS and Windows that’ll help you get from idea to final draft in no time, using mind maps.

Price: From $49.95 for Solo to $159.95 for licenses for 5 Computers

July’s Top Picks

Source Notify – Mac App

Source Notify

Source Notify is a software that allows you to manage your Pull Request status from Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket directly on your Desktop menu bar. Built with passion specially for those who work with Git Clients.

Price: Free

Unfreeze – Mac App

Unfreeze

Tired of those screenshots of code you can’t paste into your IDE? Unfreeze is a simple macOS application that performs OCR on code snippet images.

Price: Name a fair price

August’s Top Picks

Wunderbucket – Mac App

Wunderbucket

Wunderbucket is for designers & developers who want fast, secure HTML websites without command lines or configs. It’s like Dropbox had a cute little static hosting service baby. It watches your Finder for changes and syncs them to cloud hosting.

Price: Free

Snowtrack – Linux, Mac & Windows App

Snowtrack

Snowtrack is a fast, intuitive and easy-to-use version control software for graphic designers and 2D/3D artists. Projects of any type go through many iterations and ideas as they evolve.

So Snowtrack creates versions of your project directories so you can roll back to former versions without ever loosing files. Think of it as a time machine for your projects.

With Snowtrack you finally get rid of files like “designfinal-final1.psd”.

Price: Free

SmartWindows – Windows App

Smart Windows

SmartWindows is a productivity Windows 10 app. Do you write, play games, code, illustrate or edit images on your computer?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could configure your windows in just the right places, and just the right sizes for each of these roles and then restore them at the click of a button?

That’s exactly what SmartWindows let’s you do! Switch between your optimal coding, gaming, writing and other layouts. Save yourself minutes of time and improve your productivity every day with SmartWindows.

Price: Free to $19.99 Annually

September’s Top Picks

Responsivize – Linux, Mac & Windows App

Responsivize

Responsivize is an open-source desktop app that you can use to develop responsive websites!
In the app, you can test your web apps on popular iPhones, Android phones, iPads, MacBooks, and you can even set custom dimension devices!

Price: Free

Novus – Windows App

Novus

Novus is an extremely fast package manager for Windows built using Rust.

Price: Free

Pop – Linux, Mac & Windows App

Pop

Blazing-fast screen sharing, multiplayer control, crystal-clear voice and high-quality video. Perfect for pair programming.

Price: Free to $25.00 per user/month

October’s Top Picks

SnippetsLab 2 – Mac App

Snippetslab

SnippetsLab 2.0 brings more than 20 new features and numerous other improvements and bug fixes. It also support for Apple Silicon Macs. You have the ability to customise themes and an option to automatically switch between either a light or a dark theme of your choice.

Price: $9.99

Decode – Mac App

Decode

This is a app that converts UI files (files with extensions xib and storyboard) to Swift source code. Supported platforms: iOS, tvOS, macOS. The main purpose is UI refactoring. When you need to convert a whole interface builder file, or some parts of it, to Swift code.

Price: $8.99

Noteship – Mac App

Noteship

Noteship combines notes, todos, and reminders and is based on simple files and folders. It takes a local-first approach, no servers or cloud is involved. Build your own personal knowledge base, journal etc.

Price: Free

November’s Top Picks

Neat – Mac App

Neat

Neat puts GitHub notifications in your menubar. It empowers high-performing teams to review, merge, and ship code with ease. Users can preview, triage, and jump to the browser without switching tabs.

Price: Free

DB Lens – Mac & Windows App

Db Lens

DB Lens is an opensource database client for Mac, Linux & Windows that helps developers to explore, observe & understand the database in a better way.

Price: Free

Simperate – Mac & Windows App

Simperate

The classic AWS-Console-Management platform gives engineers the ability to take control over a complex data-center which can be overwhelming for engineers who only want to perform just simple operations. Simperate allows engineers to use basic AWS operations easily and effectively with a reactive and operation-friendly environment.

Price:  $30.00

December’s Top Picks

Pichon – Mac App

Pichon

Tons of free high-quality icons, photos, and illustrations in a single desktop app. Get ever-growing curated collections at a click distance and forget about wasting hours searching for graphics. Keep your flow and save your time for creative tasks!

Price: Free

Hue – Mac App

Hue

Hue is a magical Mac app that displays the HEX, RGB, CMYK, HSB, and XYZ values underneath the cursor.

Price: 99c

Shortery – Mac App

Shortery

Shortery adds the missing automation tools to macOS Monterey.With Shortery you can run Shortcuts automatically, that you’ve created in the Shortcuts app using different triggers: App Launch / Quit, Time, Wake Up & Sleep, Login, Keyboard, Appearance, Power

Price: Free

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What’s New for Designers & Developers from 2021: Mac & Windows Apps