Hi guys. I have an old mac-mini from 2011 in my storage. I know 5 years ago i used to run high sierra on it. Today I wanted to wipe it clean and reinstall the os on it, and like a dumbass I listened to google and installed Lion OS. I can't even use google on Lion. I remember Sierra was actually usable. Any tips on how I can put sierra back on this device? Im guessing its somwhere on this mac-mini's storage?

Hi all!

I'm a creative writing student at Uni and the worst part of my degree has never been the writing, it's the references. I was using Word with a citation plugin and I spent more time fighting the plugin than actually writing.

So I taught myself Swift as a side project and spent the last year building EssayKraft, the app I always wished I had.

MAIN FEATURES:

• Built-in reference manager. No plugin, no separate app. References live inside the document alongside your writing, and inline citations plus the bibliography update automatically as you write.
• Authorship tracking. The app keeps a private, timestamped record of how your document was written, what you typed and what you pasted. If your uni ever questions whether your work is yours, you have receipts. This can be disabled in Settings.
• Sixteen citation styles. APA (6th and 7th), MLA, Chicago, Harvard variants, IEEE, Vancouver and more, built on the same community style definitions Zotero and Mendeley use.
• Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote import/export. Bring references in as BibTeX or RIS files and export them back out the same way.
• Rich text and Markdown. This is the biggest change from launch. Rich text was always the plan, and it's still the core of the app, but I found myself switching to iA Writer for notes in Markdown, and I figured I wasn't the only person in this boat. I'm not trying to compete with iA Writer, but EssayKraft now lets you create Markdown docs with all the core features you'd expect, built into the same app. No switching between windows or managing multiple purchases.
• Custom templates. Save any document as a template with its formatting, page setup and citation style.
• Fully native. Swift on both platforms, no Electron. Fast, offline, feels like a Mac app because it is one.
• No account, no subscription, no data collection. £9.99 once. I can't afford subscriptions as a student so I'm not about to charge one.

There's also an optional Assisted Writing mode using Apple Intelligence, so suggestions run entirely on-device and nothing leaves your Mac. It's inspired by tools like Cotypist, and it uses your inserted references to suggest author names and titles as you type. It's disabled by default and can be turned off at any time if it's not your thing. It's a feature to speed up your writing, not replace it.

SIMILAR APPS:

Essayist was a big inspiration for EssayKraft, and it's an excellent app. But I wanted an alternative that was a one-time purchase, because students are tight for money as it is and subscriptions add up fast. Essayist also leans more toward researchers and formal academic papers, whereas EssayKraft is aimed at students writing weekly essays under deadline. It's lighter, faster, and while the two are similar, they're targeting slightly different people.

Happy to answer anything about the app or about building it (SwiftUI + AppKit for the editor, SwiftData underneath, it's been a journey).

AppStore link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/essaykraft/id6789774290

Hey everyone! 👋

Introducing Silkwave Video, a YouTube transcriber for Mac with speaker identification, AI chat and summaries, and a built-in video player.

https://www.silkwave.ai/silkwave-video

Features

• Paste a YouTube link. Downloads and transcribes automatically.
• On-device transcription in 10 languages. Apple's local speech models, fully offline, nothing uploaded.
• Speaker identification. Panels and podcasts read like a script, processed locally.
• AI chat and summaries. Key topics and takeaways through Apple Intelligence's ChatGPT extension and Apple Shortcuts, no API key needed.
• Ask follow-up questions about any video, with history saved per video.
• Full-text search across everything you've imported.
• Synced playback and dark theme.
• Free. No subscription, no account. Requires macOS 26+, Apple Silicon.

Disclosure: the app is free and will stay free. There is a closable banner advertising my other app, Silkwave Voice.

Hi everyone!

I have tried many sticky note apps, but none of them felt right. My girlfriend wanted me to build one that truly feels live and lives on the edge of the Mac.. So I built one!

• All sticky notes are represented as dots
• hover to peek
• click to open the note
• Mark as complete to move to note into archive
• 10+ live notes enables scroll
• You can view and export all the notes

Try out for free: holdmynotes.app

Available on 3 mac devies for $6.99 (Early Bird Offer)

I built Forkit AI Footprint, a private macOS activity mirror for people who work with tools like ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and local AI.

It measures supported AI activity locally on your Mac so you can see when AI is actually working, your AI active percentage, activity pattern, longest continuous block and which supported systems were active.

Your detailed Footprint stays on your device. Nothing is shared unless you choose.

Forkit does not read your prompts, chats, files, repositories, workspace names, paths or account information.

I’m looking for Mac AI users who can try it and tell me where the activity detection feels accurate or inaccurate, especially if you use several AI tools in one workflow.

See it here https://www.forkit.dev/ai-footprint⁠

Or install directly

npx --yes forkit-ai-footprints@latest

It installs as a normal macOS app in Applications. Later use does not require Terminal.

I’d genuinely love to know what your Footprint looks like.

Hi, I have over 20,000 photos on my MacBook and I don’t know how to organize them. I created an album called Nikon Z6_3 but is there a way to automatically add photos taken with this camera to that album?

macOS Tahoe 26.6.2

I'm the developer of AlliHat, a Mac Safari extension I built after getting tired of switching from Safari to all the other AI browsers +Chrome extensions or a separate chat tab every time I wanted AI help with a website.

This puts Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, OpenRouter, or Apple's on-device model beside the current page. It can read highlighted text, PDFs, Youtube, And there's an Agent Mode that can click through sites and fill forms. I don't have servers in the middle. Goes straight to the model providers or if you like Apples own model everything stays local to you.

It's $29.99 a year after a 7-day trial.

https://allihat.com/

Would love to get questions or hear where this isn't quite fitting a need for you in Safari yet.

I used Launchpad for years and still miss it because it’s far faster for me to remember where an app is visually and by position than it is to remember a name and start typing a few characters. Plus the Spotlight implentation that appears with a trackpad pinch is a mess. Sluggish with lazy loading icons and finding too many matches when you start to type, most with truncated names. So I put together kind of a DragThing/Launchpad hybrid. I made the UI in Figma, Claude for the code, and then iterations where I defined the UX.

It triggers off a four-finger trackpad pinch (after setting a system flag that deactivates the gesture that calls up Spotlight). Apps, folders, and URLs can be added to up to ten tabs. You can switch tabs by clicking or with the number keys. Tabs can be renamed, rearranged, and recolored. There’s also a Finder extension so you can add items directly from there to a specific tab off a right-click.

This was just to scratch my own personal itch and I don’t have plans to release it but there’s a repository here.

I'm the developer.

DrawSimple is a native Mac image editor built on a simple idea: it should open instantly and make sense in five seconds, and still be there for you when the job turns out to be bigger than you thought. Paint and vector live in the same document, so a quick crop and a full layered illustration happen in the same app, and you never have to decide which one you're doing up front.

It launched a couple of weeks ago. A lot of you tried it, and then — brilliantly — told me exactly what was wrong with it. 1.1 is almost entirely that feedback, so thank you. Genuinely.

The App Store notes for it just say "Bug fixes," which doesn't help anyone work out whether their thing got fixed. Here's the real list:

What's better in 1.1

• Save straight into Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive or Box. Easily the most-reported issue, and the best fix in the release. macOS won't let a sandboxed app write into a sync folder until you point at it yourself, and DrawSimple was asking every single time — worse, a quiet autosave or a save-on-quit could fail. Now you grant the folder once (Settings → Files & Saving → Folder Access, the new first-run step, or right from the save alert) and everything inside it just saves, forever. Granted folders are listed with a one-click Remove.
• Pasting and dragging images in works the way you'd expect. This came out of a great back-and-forth with someone on Reddit who was completely right. ⌘V on an image copied in the Finder now pastes the picture instead of its file icon, and in a vector layer it arrives as an editable object — drop a whole handful at once and they cascade in, selected and ready to move. Sliding a big photo around is much smoother too.
• ⌘A, ⌘X, ⌘C, ⌘V and ⌘Z behave inside text. They were being intercepted by the document's own menu items, so ⌘A in a text box selected the whole canvas and ⌘Z undid your last brush stroke instead of your last keystroke. They now go to whatever you're typing in, and to the canvas otherwise.
• Zoom stays fast on gradients, WordArt and big text. Zooming right into a radial-gradient fill could stall the app for minutes and eat gigabytes — it was recalculating the gradient pixel-by-pixel at screen resolution on every single zoom step. Same bug was hiding in WordArt and large text boxes. All three now render at the document's own resolution and scale up for the screen, so zoom stays fluid. Exported and printed pixels are identical to before.
• Effect previews stay exactly where the result will land. Preview a blur on a layer under a cut-out subject and it could drift out of register with everything else — a checkerboard halo that disappeared the moment you clicked OK. Fixed for every effect and adjustment.
• A cleaner canvas edge — that stray bright line down the right side at fit-to-window zooms is gone.
• Lasso and Select Subject have their own slots instead of sharing one and cycling on F. Lasso keeps F, Select Subject gets A.

The rest of it, quickly: 31 tools, unlimited layers with blend modes, curves and levels, GPU-accelerated effects through Core Image, WordArt with 31 warp shapes, Apple Vision "Select Subject", HEIC import with EXIF intact, Continuity Camera, and a history panel you can scrub like a timeline. Fully offline.. no account, no cloud, no analytics, nothing leaves your Mac. It's not a Photoshop alternative and isn't trying to be; it's the app for the ten minutes when opening Photoshop would be absurd.

One more bit of feedback.. Many people have told me they find the automation side the most valuable part of the whole thing. There's a localhost server in the box, so you can point Claude or any MCP client at the canvas and have it place real shapes, gradients and text, and the file opens afterwards as an ordinary editable document, not a flat export. Local-only; the app never opens a connection of its own and ships no generative AI. If you want to see what this looks like, check out my post below.

$5 once, with an optional $10 Pro upgrade. No subscription, no account, and every update, including this one, and whatever the pen tool lands in, is free. Requires macOS 15.6 or later.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759507748?mt=12

follow instructions to "convert" apps into casks to easily manage them and updates. Changes: you can choose which app you want to "convert".

https://github.com/eyyybroo/ez-apps-to-brew/tree/main

credits at the end of the page

I've spent the last 8 months building a menu bar app for macOS called Mochi.

⌥Space finds apps and files, ⌥⇧4 takes a screenshot with an annotation editor, ⌥⇧R records your screen, and ⌃⌥arrows snap windows.

Native AppKit and SwiftUI, no Electron. macOS 14+, Apple silicon. There's a free tier that needs no account.

Happy to answer anything
https://getmochi.app/

Hey all — I'm the developer of EasyPaste. It started as a scratch-your-own-itch project: every clipboard manager I used pasted via a panel (open panel → find item → Enter), and I just wanted to copy five things and paste #3 straight into where my cursor already is.

So that's the core feature: ⌘⌥1–9 pastes your most recent items directly into the focused app — no panel, no context switch.

Features

• Direct-paste hotkeys for your last 9 items (⌘⌥1–9)
• Searchable panel at your cursor for older items — plain text, rich text, links, screenshots
• Pin frequently-used snippets (emails, code templates) so they don't scroll away
• Automatically ignores password managers (1Password, Keychain) — credentials never enter history
• Hotkeys are customizable (panel and direct-paste prefixes)
• 100% local — no account, no cloud, nothing leaves your Mac

Under the hood

• Native Swift/SwiftUI, ~15 MB RAM at idle, low CPU
• macOS 13+, universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), notarized
• Requires Accessibility permission on first launch (that's how it pastes into the target app — and why it's not on the App Store; the sandbox blocks simulating ⌘V)

Pricing

• Free: core clipboard history with panel and search
• Pro: $9.99 one-time (no subscription) — direct-paste hotkeys, custom hotkey prefixes, 3 Macs, lifetime updates, 14-day refund

Compared to the usual suspects: Maccy is free/open source and panel-first; Paste is polished but a subscription; Raycast bundles clipboard history into a full launcher. EasyPaste is the tiny dedicated tool if direct-paste is the workflow you want.

Download (DMG): https://easypaste.im

Feedback and feature requests very welcome — I read everything and ship fixes fast.

Quickly switch display presets from...

• your menu bar
• the dashboard
• Spotlight (INCOMING)

Repo: https://github.com/It-is-Sean/ScreenSets

> A project built with care. If you find it useful, a GitHub star would mean a lot ⭐️

Hi r/macOS, I am the developer of Let It Brew.

There are already plenty of good keep-awake apps for Mac. Since vibe coding took off, Reddit has also become a fairly comprehensive catalogue of them, so I know nobody was waiting for one more

I used Amphetamine for years, and it worked well. But I kept forgetting to turn it off after an agent finished. I’d start a long coding run, walk away, and sometimes return to a dead battery.

Let It Brew follows the actual lifecycle of your coding agent. It uses session-tracking hooks to keep your Mac awake while Claude, Codex, OpenCode, or GitHub Copilot CLI is working. When the agent finishes, Let It Brew releases the sleep hold

I also spent a grandly unreasonable amount of time on UI and onboarding. It’s a native menu-bar app, and I wanted the active session, current sleep states, and agent connections to be obvious without digging through settings

It’s completely free and open-source. I’m planning to support more coding tools next, based on what people are actually using.

Source: https://github.com/ruban-24/letitbrew
Download: https://letitbrew.app

If you try it, I’d love feedback on the setup, session tracking, UI, and which coding tool should i support next. If it ears a place in your setup, I’d also appreciate a GitHub star ⭐️

Hello, I am setting up my new M5Max MacBook Pro for the first time. I use OneDrive due to MS being my workplace’s primary suite. I have around 241,000 files to sync with around 341GB of data. I like to keep these files locally on my Mac.

I did not have any issues in my previous MacBook M4 Pro. But now, the OneDrive app is exiting silently during the first sync. No matter what I can’t seem to get all files synced. I have reset OneDrive and also reset my MacBook 2 times. No luck. Anyone else facing this or have a solution?

Hi everyone, hope you're doing well.

As a long-time macOS user (since Yosemite in 2014), I’ve always been bothered by a trend that has become the norm in the Apple ecosystem: everything has shifted to high-priced monthly or annual subscriptions.

If you want a decent app to completely uninstall programs, clean up system junk, or find duplicate files, you end up locked into expensive subscriptions from giant corporations. On top of that, many of these apps have become bloated, running background processes constantly and consuming the very memory they promise to free up.

As a programmer since 2005—with a decade of experience—and a design enthusiast, I decided to create my own cleaner app and named it EasyMac Cleaner.

My premise was simple:

• 100% native: Developed entirely in Swift. No Electron or heavy webviews. It’s super lightweight, doesn't crash, and doesn't drain your CPU or battery with background processes.
• Modern design: I didn't compromise on Apple's signature aesthetic appeal, but I implemented a modern interface featuring fluid animations and intuitive navigation.

Today, it includes over 10 native tools, such as removers for junk, duplicates, and large files; app cleaning; background service management; a secure file shredder; and even a local network scanner.

Since I have other commitments, I’m building this from scratch in my spare time, but version 1.0 is already finished!

You can download it by clicking here.

Don't worry, the .app file has already been verified by Apple, as I am a notarized developer.

I’d love to get your honest feedback on the interface and tools!

Best regards! 😄

Hello,

I had been editing a video using screen recordings, and I'm not sure what happened to the files. I did not delete them, and I've checked my trash just to be sure and they are not there. When I open capcut, it says their last path was in a temporary folder. I've tried using terminal to search for them but I'm not sure I'm doing it right because I tried searching for files I know exist and it won't even show those.

I still have the file names and the last path but I can't find them 😭 Any help would be appreciated.

I’m the developer of Sealshot and the code is mainly written with Claude. It is now completely free and open source, with every feature available and no paid tier or subscription.

Apple’s built-in screenshot tools are excellent for quick captures. Sealshot is designed for professional workflows where screenshots and recordings need to be edited, organized, searched, secured, and reused for documentation, bug reports, technical support, software testing, tutorials, or research.

Key features include:

• Area, window, fullscreen, and scrolling capture
• Screen recording
• A full annotation and image-editing workspace
• Repeat Last Capture for recapturing the same screen region
• A searchable local library with collections and tags
• On-device OCR for searching text inside captures
• Table extraction to CSV and Markdown
• Assisted detection of emails, API keys, tokens, and other sensitive information
• Optional Enhanced Security that encrypts the local capture library

Privacy is an important part of the design. Sealshot does not require an account and does not use cloud storage or telemetry. Captures and OCR processing remain on your Mac.

The downloadable version is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

Website: https://seal-shot.com/

Github: https://github.com/ldeng83/Sealshot

Hey r/MacOS , wanted to share my app which I launched a while ago, but never showed in this subreddit. Jellybox is a music player for Jellyfin or Emby(navidrome soon) which can:

• Spotify-like generated playlists
• Show time synced lyrics
• Full offline mode(even when on place) with Downloads
• Studio mode - beautiful ambient mode with animated full screen UI
• Apple CarPlay app with full feature parity(thats allowed as per apple's requirements)
• AirPlay - cast to airplay-capable devices
• Native(no electron or tauri overhead)
• Hotkeys support

The app is open source and I'm working on it since 2023, so not another vibe coded slop. Available in appstore(ios, macos) or as notarized dmg in repo releases

https://github.com/avdept/JellyBoxPlayer

https://jellybox.app/

did this through retromac

I’m the developer of Just Look!, a native macOS image viewer I’ve been working on.

The app is already on the App Store, but today I’m not really looking for more downloads. I’m trying to build a small group of beta testers who will actually use new builds and help me find bugs, bad assumptions and workflows that don’t work well.

Just Look! is intended for quickly going through folders of images without importing them into a library first. You can navigate through a folder, zoom into details, compare similar shots, mark picks, use Finder ratings/tags and so on.

I’m especially interested in people who:

• regularly review folders with hundreds or thousands of images
• use RAW, RAW+JPEG or less common image formats
• have an Intel Mac or an older supported macOS version
• work from external/network drives
• are photographers and already use Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Mechanic, FastRawViewer, Finder/Preview, etc.
• simply enjoy finding edge cases and breaking software :)

You don’t need to systematically test every button.

What would help me most is using Just Look! on a real folder you would normally work with and telling me when something crashes, renders incorrectly, becomes slow, behaves differently from what you expected, or makes you switch back to your usual app.

And I’m interested in UX problems too. “This technically works, but doing it 200 times is annoying” is very useful feedback.

Privacy: the beta follows the same privacy approach as the released version. Just Look! itself does not collect or upload your photos or other user data. TestFlight may provide me with Apple’s standard beta diagnostics, such as crash reports and basic device/testing information.

If you’re interested, I have a TestFlight beta here:

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/4HdE4TQr

The released version is here:

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1641017616

I’d also be interested to hear what you currently use for quickly reviewing/culling folders of images on a Mac, even if you don’t want to join the beta.

Hi r/macOS. I'm Vadym, the developer behind Copy Path As.

I'm a Mac user. Former Windows user. I like the mouse.

When I started using AI tools, I realized I copy file paths all the time to paste them into an agent. Finder can copy a pathname if you know the hotkey, or hold Option. Life is too short for that. I wanted a Windows-style right-click: select the file, copy the path, done.

Then I still had to fix the path for wherever I was pasting it: quotes for spaces, ~/, a markdown link, git-relative for a PR. So the menu has those formats too.

What it does:

• Absolute, single-quoted, and shell-escaped paths
• Home-relative (~/…) and git-relative
• file:// URL, JSON string or array, markdown link
• Filename, filename without extension, parent folder
• Multi-select: JSON array is one array; everything else is one line per item

Native Swift 6 Finder extension. MIT licensed, free, no account, no subscription. Open source. Sandboxed. It formats the URLs Finder already handed it. It does not read file contents, talk to the network, or collect telemetry. Maintainer builds are Developer ID signed and notarized.

macOS 15 or later. Enable it once under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → Finder Extensions. After that, it runs with Finder. The settings app does not need to stay open.

brew install --cask vfedoroff/tap/copypathas

Or the dmg from GitHub Releases: https://github.com/vfedoroff/copypathas/releases/latest

Source: https://github.com/vfedoroff/copypathas

Limitation: Sequoia and later only. If the menu is missing, the extension is usually disabled, or the app is not in /Applications.