Most Beautiful Mac Apps
Just bought my first MacBook a few months ago, and I've already tried a bunch of apps. Some of them are so beautifully designed that they immediately caught my eye Here are my favorites so far: • Craft – The most beautiful Mac app I've used. Even their website is stunning • Dropover – Makes file management incredibly simple and feels like something Apple could have made • Liqoria – A gorgeous music widget that feels completely native to macOS • CleanMyMac – I love the unique interface, and it's genuinely useful too • GoodLinks – One of the cleanest app designs I've ever seen. • Klack – Makes typing much more satisfying, and the settings panel (especially the keyboard shortcut is beautifully designed) • Things 3 – Clean, simple, and incredibly polished. Easily one of the best designed productivity apps on the Mac • Raycast – I don't think this app needs an introduction. It's beautifully designed and incredibly usefu • Paste - A beautifully designed clipboard manager with a clean, intuitive interface • DynamicLake - Cool Liquid Glass Dynamic Island • Portal – Beautiful immersive environments with a calm, minimal interface that perfectly matches the experience
Collected discussion
Alcove and Droppy as well
Alcove is really well designed. I haven't tried Droppy yet, though
Bear and LookAway are also stunning.
I forgot about LookAway it's such a beautiful app
Craft vs Things? What do you use one for, what the other one?
I'm using Things 3 for my tasks. I haven't been using Craft much lately, but I still think it's one of the most beautifully designed apps
I would add Alcove , Lookaway and Raycast as well.
Any reason for picking DynamicLake over Alcove?
Vorssaint is the best one imo, like SO MUCH features from different apps: from swiftquit, appcleaner, dropover, alttab, dockdoor, stats, amphetamine, pika, keyboard cleaner, middle click, clean my mac. it remembers clipboard history... it's just peak https://github.com/vorssaint/vorssaint-utils
I'm with you on Vorssaint. It's killer.
How well does it do at each thing? I’ve tried some of these all in one apps and while most aren’t bad, each tool is noticeably worse than the app the function was inspired from.
I find that Things is highly overrated in both design as function. I also do find that Mac apps are the best apps as they follow Apple's design instructions. I once used Windows and all those horrible interfaces made me crazy.
Somewhere deep in the docs for .NET there is a set of guidelines for making Windows UI that is very good. Similar to the Apple style and design guidelines. The problem is nobody follows them because the rest of Windows is a scattershot mess and you have to put loads of work in to make the app feel "native". EDIT: While I'm defending the indefensible, I'll also say that Visual Studio is marvelous. I don't do much .NET dev anymore but when I did I loved it. Apple provide better frameworks but MS are the king of IDEs!
Paste has an annual subscription of $29.99. For a glorified clipboard manager. Wow.
DaisyDisk has a really good UX for finding what takes up disk space.
Do not buy PASTE. The developers are awful. They ripped many of us off when we bought the app, thought we had it for life, and it went subscription. Want something better than PASTE? Go for AWESOME COPY. It costs under $10 for a lifetime license.
Klack feels like an electric car playing internal combustion sounds
I would add: Bear Dot calendar (menu bar calendar for Apple Calendar and now Reminders too) NetNewsWire (RSS) Cartero (API testing) Subscription Day (subscription tracking)
Alternative für CleanmyMac = Mole via Terminal, gibt es sogar inzwischen eine App für.
Nice list! I do think Things 3 is a candidate for style over substance in 2026. I used it for 4 years and finally abandoned it last year. There is a fine line between elegant and crude software, and I feel that Things' lack of workflow improvements over time pushed it to the wrong side of that line. It felt clunky to use due to the 'minimalism'. No natural language input, bulk task entry was horribly slow, you can't mark recurring tasks as complete ahead of time, it doesn't automatically delete accidentally created blank tasks etc....
iA writer if it counts
Craft seems highly overrated. the UI is not intuitive.
iA Writer is a pleasure to use.
Good lord, Portal is not an app I'd heard of until today and I have to agree that it is probably one of the most gorgeous apps I've ever seen. Not sure if the nature ambience is my thing, but I really appreciate how well its designed.
Paste is not only well designed is a very practical app. Those always make the best ones.