Parallels Toolbox is like a Swiss Army knife for your Mac
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.
The included tools are primarily single-purpose utilities that live in your Mac menu bar and do one useful thing, such as:
Clipboard History: Having multiple clipboards is much better than macOS’ single clipboard. This utility automatically remembers every item you copy or cut for three, seven 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.
Clean Drive: Scans, detects and lets you choose which files to delete.
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 off and on all wireless communication on your Mac (i.e., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) with one click.
Download Video: Download your favorite videos from Facebook, YouTube, and others quickly and easily.
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 nonessential system processes such as 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.
And Parallels Toolbox contains at least 20 more utilities to help with Mac tasks, including screen recording, switching display resolution, uninstalling apps properly, resizing images and making GIFs.
At $19.99 a year, Parallels Toolbox costs less than many single-purpose utilities, so I consider it an excellent value.
None of these utilities is life-changing, but most of them are useful singlepurpose time-savers.
The more you use your Mac, the more uses you’ll find for these handy utilities.
So download the free seven-day trial and discover the joy these little time-savers can bring.
Parallels Toolbox. Parallels International GmbH. $19.99 per year with a free seven-day trial. (Also included with Parallels Desktop, from $99). www.parallels.com/ products/toolbox.