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 is a creative app for creating frame-to-frame animations and storyboards.
Price: Free
Sizey – Mac 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
Screenshot tool for those, who care about pixels
Price: Free
February’s Top Picks
ReacType – Mac/Windows App
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 allows you to see Google Analytics data from your Mac’s menu bar.
Price: $4.99
Pika – Mac App
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
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 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
Monitor services in your menu bar.
Price: Free
April’s Top Picks
Tinkerun – Mac, Linux & Windows App
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
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 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
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 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
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 is a color tool designed to ease your work and boost your productivity.
Price: Free
Nucleo 3 – Mac & Windows App
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 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 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
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 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 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
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 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 is an extremely fast package manager for Windows built using Rust.
Price: Free
Pop – Linux, Mac & Windows App
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 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
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 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 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 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
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
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 is a magical Mac app that displays the HEX, RGB, CMYK, HSB, and XYZ values underneath the cursor.
Price: 99c
Shortery – Mac App
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
