Business & Document Apps for Mac, iPhone & iPad

Why on-device matters more for work documents than for anything else

Most people meet these tasks through a free web tool: a site that converts an image to PDF, merges two files, or blurs a photo. It works, and it means uploading the document to a server owned by someone you have never heard of.

For a holiday photo that is a fair trade. For work it usually is not, because of what the files actually contain:

• An invoice carries a client's name, address, and often your bank details.
• A scanned contract or ID carries the whole thing, in full resolution.
• A photo of a shop, a site, or an event carries identifiable faces and plates, including people who never agreed to appear anywhere.

Every app in this category does its work locally. There is no upload step, no account, and no copy of the file left behind on someone else's disk.

A small-business paper workflow

The three apps line up in the order the work usually happens.

Capture. PDF Maker scans a paper document with the camera, finds the edges, and produces a straight, cropped PDF rather than a photo of a page at an angle. It also merges, compresses, flattens and rotates, which covers the awkward jobs that normally send people to a web converter - scanning documents with your phone and merging PDF files on a Mac go through both.

Bill. Invoice Maker turns a job into an invoice, estimate or receipt as a PDF, with nine templates, taxes, recurring billing, and over 150 currencies for clients abroad. If you are writing your first one, how to write an invoice as a freelancer covers what has to be on it - and chasing a late invoice covers what happens when it is ignored.

Publish. Face Blur AI finds faces, licence plates and other identifying detail in photos and video and blurs them before anything goes out. See blurring faces before posting photos.

Material you make for other people to watch

The other half of this work is not paperwork at all: the demo you record for a client, the training video for a new hire, the walkthrough you screen-share on a call. It is the same job - producing something someone else will look at - and it has the same privacy problem.

GlowKeys draws every keystroke and shortcut on screen as you type, which is the difference between a viewer following along and a viewer asking what you just pressed. Six themes, optional typing sounds and click ripples, and it renders locally rather than through a capture service - showing keystrokes on screen and recording your Mac screen cover the setup.

It pairs with Face Blur AI more often than people expect. A screen recording of real software tends to contain real data - a customer list, a name in a sidebar, a face in a video call - and Face Blur works on video as well as stills, so the recording can be cleaned before it is sent out rather than re-shot with dummy data.

Turning what was said into something written

Voice to Text is the fourth kind of work document: the one that starts as speech. A meeting, a client call, a lecture, an interview - all of them have to become text before they are any use, and the usual route is uploading the audio to a transcription service.

That is a worse trade than it looks. A recording of a client call is not a file you want sitting in a queue on someone else's hardware, and it is exactly the kind of material people are contractually or ethically not allowed to hand over. Here the models run on the device, so the audio never leaves it and there is nothing metered by the minute.

Practically it does three separate jobs: record here, import a file someone else recorded, or dictate straight into the app you are already writing in. Transcripts come back with speakers named and timestamps you can jump to, and export as plain text and Markdown for notes, or SRT and WebVTT when the same audio needs subtitles. If the result needs reshaping afterwards, TextLab handles that end.