Looking for inspiring creative tools? These apps let you do it all: turn video into feature movies, social media reels or share-worthy GIFs. Write a novel, blog post or screenplay. Easily edit photos and work with RAW images. Design logos, illustrations and mockups. Learn to play your favourite music tracks.

Best of all, each of these standout apps is offering discounted pricing for a limited time.

DaVinci Resolve Studio
This App Store Award finalist and film-maker fave lets you juggle colour corrections, visual effects, audio editing and more. Edit multilayered projects with 3840 x 2160 video at 60 fps with little to no lag. Take advantage of powerful features such as Magic Mask (an AI-powered tool that automatically identifies objects, people and landscapes), colour grading and audio retiming. And use the app’s collaboration features to work simultaneously with others, wherever they’re located.

Ulysses
This Editors’ Choice writing app combines the simplicity of a distraction-free Markdown text editor with powerful features for managing sprawling projects. Folders and keywords make everything easy to categorise and browse, while Projects let you organise chapters, images, notes and other related content. You can export to Word, PDF, EPUB or HTML, or publish directly to Medium, WordPress and more, making Ulysses your everything writing tool.

A long-time indie favourite for image and vector editing, Acorn has always been affordable and especially easy to use, but it’s grown to include pro-level features such as AI-powered masking, support for lookup tables and much more. We especially love specialised tools such as perspective repair, screenshots that capture every item on the screen as a separate layer and Data Merge, which lets you automatIcally create personalised images such as name badges or invitations.

Leveraging the RAW engine built into macOS, Nitro Photo gives you precise control over how RAW image data is converted into the pixels you see. It also lets you perform edits more effectively made on RAW data than a developed image, such as reducing moiré patterns. Batch processing and lens-specific corrections make quick work of fine-tuning your photos.

Linearity Curve
This powerful vector-design app is perfect for drawing a graphic novel, sketching interface mock-ups and much more. Newcomers will love its clean, easy-to-use layout and online tutorials that ease you in; pros get features they rely on, such as support for layers and text on paths, symbol libraries and powerful export options. The app’s Apple Intelligence–powered features let you generate colour palettes from natural-language prompts and translate all the text elements in your design without affecting layout.

Riveo
This all-in-one video editor turns everyday clips into cinematic moments using stunning special effects, versatile templates and intuitive gesture-based controls. The suite of motion effects tools brings a touch of movie magic to every edit: add flames shooting from your subject’s hands, adjust the firepower and use keyframes and masks for precise animation – the effects respond to the movement of the video.

Capo
Learn to play songs by ear with this Editors’ Choice music app: simply drag an unprotected music file into Capo’s window to see a waveform of the audio with chords, keys and beats clearly labelled. It’s easy to isolate a particular instrument or transpose keys, and if you specify your instrument (guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele or banjo) and tuning, Capo will even display the tablature. Use foot pedals, control surfaces or a keyboard controller to pause and rewind – you can even slow playback without changing pitch.

Logoist
This versatile design app makes vector graphics approachable, even if you’ve never heard of a Bezier curve. Get started with predefined shapes and templates or use AI to generate vector images from a description; then apply gorgeous, nondestructive effects with a few clicks. Veterans can speed through sketches, craft and adjust designs using LiveShapes, fill letters and other forms with custom objects and use Boolean operations to combine shapes. The Showroom lets you view your designs on 3D objects such as shirts, mugs, hats and vehicles – great for seeing how a logo or other graphic will look in the real world.

Writing a screenplay? What better app to use than one created by a screenwriter: Highland Pro, the brainchild of writer John August, lets you focus on writing by doing the busy work for you. Type a character’s name in uppercase; subsequent text is formatted as dialogue. Use common industry abbreviations such as “cut to”, “int” and “ext”, and the app makes them sections with headers. As you write, Highland Pro auto-completes character and location names and automatically indents sections to match industry-standard formatting.

Claquette
This affordable and easy-to-use screencasting app simultaneously records your Mac’s screen, microphone, camera and audio – including connected cameras and mics. Screencast-focused editing tools let you precisely crop, trim and resize, and you can export your final version as video, audio only or animated GIF, with a slew of options for format, frame rate, compression and more. (The app is also handy for quickly editing and converting existing video and audio files.) Need advanced editing tools? Export as Final Cut Pro or Motion projects with separate lanes for windows, the cursor and overlays.

Linearity Move
Create logos that blaze, special-offer stickers that wiggle and GIFs that stand out on social media: this unique app turns illustrations and photos into eye-catching animations – no experience required. Simply use Linearity Curve (above) to create beginning, mid and end points, then import your document into Move; Auto Animate will generate a smooth animation. (Making those steps in Curve is a snap too: just put the items in a single artboard, then duplicate the artboard for each step.) You can even add music, voiceovers and sound effects.