Dr. Mac’s Rants & Raves
Episode #381
You’ve probably heard of Parallels Desktop, the Mac app that lets you run Windows on your Mac as a virtual machine (without rebooting). But chances are you haven’t (yet) heard of Parallels other cool Mac product, Parallels Toolbox, which includes more than 30 different tools for macOS and/or Windows 10.
Dozens of Utilities
The included tools are primarily single-purpose utilities that live in your Mac menu bar and do one useful thing, such as:
Clipboard History: I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—having multiple clipboards is ever so much better than macOS’s single clipboard. This utility automatically remembers every item you copy or cut for 3, 7, or 30 days. There’s even an option to have it remember things you’ve copied or cut to the clipboard of your iPhone or iPad!
- Hide Desktop: Hide files, folders, and other icons on your desktop while you’re doing a presentation, sharing or recording your screen, or making screenshots.
- Airplane Mode: Turn all wireless communication on your Mac (i.e., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) off or on with one click.
- Download Video: Download your favorite videos from Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and many more quickly and easily.
- Clean Drive: Scans, detects, and lets you choose which files to delete.
- Do Not Sleep: Ensure a task or presentation isn’t interrupted by your Mac going to sleep with one click.
- Energy Saver: Detects when you’re running on battery power and automatically hides inactive apps and puts them into App Nap mode; pauses non-essential system processes like Spotlight indexing and App Store update checking; ejects all external devices, and pauses Time Machine backups.
- Screenshot Page: Adds a button to your Safari toolbar that allows you to capture a screenshot of an entire webpage regardless of its length!
- Launch: Open any collection of apps, documents, or other files (all at once) with one click!
But Wait… There’s More!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Parallels Toolbox contains at least 20 more utilities to help with Mac tasks, including screen recording, switching display resolution, uninstalling apps properly, resizing images, making GIFs, and more.
At $19.99 a year, Parallels Toolbox costs less than many single-purpose utilities, so I consider it an excellent value. For what it’s worth, I’d gladly pay $20 for a superb Clipboard History app alone!
None of these utilities is lifechanging, but most of them are useful single-purpose timesavers. The more you use your Mac, the more uses you’ll find for these handy utilities.
I love having Parallels Toolbox installed on my Mac and estimate it saves me at least 10 or 15 minutes every day by helping me perform common tasks faster and easier than ever.
So download the free 7-day trial and discover the joy these little timesavers can bring.
Thanks for the article. Yet, Toolbox from Parallels it seems a subscription-only application. That is a deal breaker!