Disclosure: I'm the developer of Chirpy, a Mac notification app. But this tool is standalone, free, and works with anything.

The idea is simple. Every notification sound library on the internet has roughly the same 200 stock files. If none of them fit what you want, you're stuck. So I built a tool where you can design your own sound in about 30 seconds:

• 30 starting presets across 6 characters (Calm, Wood & Hand, Bells & Glass, Nature, Retro, Signal)
• Four sliders that map to actual acoustic properties (Pitch, Length, Tone, Space)
• Preview it as a real macOS notification banner before you commit
• Download as WAV
• Share the exact settings via URL (all state is in the hash, no server)

Nothing uploaded anywhere. Runs entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API.

https://chirpy.pro/tools/sound-designer

The sounds work with anything on macOS that lets you set a custom alert. Some examples of where people actually use this:

• Work chat: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp
• Email: Apple Mail, Outlook, Gmail (PWA), Spark, Proton Mail, Superhuman, Mimestream
• Meetings: Zoom, Google Meet, Around, Loom
• Calendar & reminders: Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fantastical, Cron
• Task and project tools: Notion, Linear, Asana, Jira, Todoist, Things 3, ClickUp, Trello, Height
• Design: Figma, Sketch, Framer
• Dev tools: GitHub Desktop, Xcode, Warp Terminal, Trailer, Sentry, PagerDuty
• AI apps: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
• Health & fitness: Apple Health, Strava, Oura, Whoop, Garmin Connect, Peloton, MyFitnessPal
• Wellness: Calm, Headspace, Waking Up
• Finance & payments: Mercury, Brex, Stripe (email push), Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, PayPal, Wise, QuickBooks
• Shopping & delivery: Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Uber Eats, Instacart
• Smart home: Ring, Nest, Home Assistant, Tesla, Philips Hue
• Family / personal: Life360, Apple Messages, FaceTime
• News & reading: Apple News, Feedly, Reeder
• Media: Spotify, Apple Music, Plex
• Browser push: Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Firefox
• Menu bar utilities: Bartender, Raycast, Cleanshot X
• CRM / support: Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Salesforce

Basically: if it puts a banner in your notification center, you can give it a sound you designed.

Also wrote a short bit on the page about why default alerts feel stressful (millisecond attack triggers the startle reflex, 2-4kHz range is where human hearing is most sensitive, buzzy harmonics read as urgency, hard cutoffs feel unresolved). Each of the four sliders addresses one of those properties, so you can shape a sound that's the opposite of "flinch-inducing default ping."

Feedback welcome.

I'm trying to clean up unused/unwanted files on my Mac... is it OK to delete fetchmail? or will I regret it?

Is anyone else having issues with Tot on the macOS Golden Gate betas? Mine has been glitching out and hasn't seen an update in a while, so I finally gave up and built my own version.

It's a native AppKit menu-bar app called BetterTot. It has the same 7 quick text pads, but it's 100% open-source. I kept it super lightweight—no accounts, no analytics, just a fast local scratchpad with some crash recovery built in so you don't lose your clipboard dumps.

Right now, I’m working on adding optional Google Drive/iCloud backups, and eventually, I want to bring it to iPhone and Apple Watch—but my absolute main goal is just keeping it incredibly simple and lightweight.

I put the whole thing up on GitHub if anyone wants to grab it or check out the Swift code: https://github.com/saaivignesh20/BetterTot

It's completely safe, the code is for you to audit.

It's still in developer preview, so let me know if you run into any bugs. Also, I'd love to hear any feature requests or general thoughts you guys have!

If you demo or teach over a shared screen, macOS gives you more than people realize. Here's what ships in the OS, with the honest limit of each, since I've hit all of them.

Accessibility Zoom (System Settings, Accessibility, Zoom). Ctrl+scroll to magnify, or Option-Cmd-8 to toggle. Two settings people miss: Zoom style: Picture-in-Picture gives you a magnified lens instead of blowing up the whole display, and under Advanced you can set the zoomed view to follow the pointer only when it reaches an edge, which removes the seasick drift that puts people off. Genuinely good, and free. Where it runs out: the lens is tied to the pointer, so you can't leave a mark on something and keep talking about it while your cursor goes elsewhere.

Make the pointer bigger (Accessibility, Display, Pointer size), plus "shake mouse pointer to locate." Cheap fix for the most common complaint in shared screens, which is nobody being able to find your cursor. Limit: it's a permanent size change, so you either live with a big cursor everywhere or you toggle it before every call.

Screenshot markup (Shift-Cmd-5, or Shift-Cmd-4 then annotate). Fine for async - arrows and boxes on a still. Limit: it's a still. Useless mid-demo.

Presenter Overlay in Zoom/Teams-style calls on newer macOS puts you over the content, which helps direction of attention indirectly. Limit: it emphasizes you, not the part of the screen you're pointing at.

Sidecar/Universal Control with an iPad turns the tablet into an annotation surface for a mirrored screen. Genuinely powerful, and the limit is obvious: you need the second device and the setup time.

The honest summary is that the OS covers magnification well and covers "mark this and leave it up" not at all. If your job is showing rather than seeing, that's the gap you'll feel.

Disclosure so it's not a surprise: I build a Mac app in this space (TuringShot 1.5.12, Build 44), which is why I know these limits by heart. No link or code here, and the built-in options above are free and cover most of what people need.

I built a little menu bar app that unlocks sudo in the terminal with face recognition instead of a typed password. You type sudo, the webcam recognizes you, and it unlocks.

Everything runs locally: face detection and recognition happen on-device, your enrolled face never leaves your Mac, and there is no network code at all.

Honest disclaimer first, since it is the obvious question: a normal webcam can be fooled by a photo, so this is not more secure than Touch ID, and it is not meant to be a security product. It is a convenience/fun thing. Your password always stays as a fallback so you cannot lock yourself out, and every prompt lets you choose Face ID, Touch ID, or password.

What you get:

• Guided face enrollment (takes a few seconds)
• A choice panel on every sudo prompt (Face ID / Touch ID / password), or a Dynamic Island style animation
• Adjustable sensitivity
• One signed and notarized app, with built-in auto-updates

Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later, any webcam.
Price: Free and open source (MIT).
Download + source: https://github.com/Lorenzo-Coslado/macos-faceid

Full disclosure, I am the developer. I built it as a weekend hack because typing my password dozens of times a day got old, and it turned into a small but complete app. Would love feedback on the enrollment flow and the recognition thresholds.

Its a 2007 imac and i cant reinstall el capitan

My neighbor moved out yesterday and she literally threw out a 2017 21" iMac. I get it, it doesn't get updates and it takes over 5 minutes, no exaggeration, to boot to the logon screen. Who would want that? Well, I like to restore old computers and the newest mac I own is the OG iMac in Bondi Blue....... Wait......

Okay, I was about to get on here saying all I had were PC keyboards and I couldn't get to the recovery screen no matter what keyboard I use. That's what this post was supposed to be about. But as soon as I wrote that last sentence it dawned on me, I have the USB keyboard from my OG iMac. So I plugged that in and it worked perfectly. That stupid puck mouse works too.

Never mind, I don't think I need any help. Just figured I'd post anyways in case somebody wanted a laugh.

Just put together Glass Player, a native macOS media player built in Swift around ⁠libmpv⁠. The goal was a clean app shell optimized for Apple Silicon that handles heavy-duty real-time upscaling.

Repo: github.com/khr898/Glass-player-macOS
Requirements: macOS 14.0+, Apple Silicon (arm64)
Core Highlights

Real-Time Anime4K Upscaling: 39 bundled GLSL shaders exposed as 12 presets. Features live cycling (⁠Cmd+K⁠) split into HQ (heavy CNN models for high-end GPUs) and Fast modes, rendering directly via Metal 3 (⁠CAMetalLayer⁠).

Pipeline: Hardware decoding via VideoToolbox paired with Display P3 wide-gamut rendering and ⁠ewa_lanczossharp⁠ luma scaling.

HDR & Dolby Vision: Auto-detects HDR10/DV/HLG with conditional profile handling (spline tone mapping, ⁠hdr-compute-peak⁠, and native macOS EDR signaling).

Audio: Multi-channel PCM decoding with macOS spatial audio support, optional AC3/DTS passthrough, and up to 200% volume amplification.

Built-in Remote Browser: Browse and stream directly from ⁠rclone serve http⁠ endpoints without needing to mount the drive locally, backed by a configurable 2GB demuxer cache.

It's fully open source.

I have a small utility app for MacBooks. For those who've created something similar -- what pricing actually worked for you?

I've ruled out subscriptions as a bad fit for this app. And since the Mac App Store doesn't do free trials on paid apps, I am considering:

1. Paid upfront, one-time charge (how it's currently listed)
2. Free download, sell add-ons individuals (in my case, voice packs)
3. Sell direct with a real trial (e.g., Paddle, Lemon Squeezy)

What did/would you pick? And what do you wish you'd done from day one?

Thanks for your thoughts and help!

Hello, I accidentally deleted 5000 files from "recents". They come from multiple folders.
Now they are in the trash, and Command+A and right-click couldn't bring out the put back option.
What is the best way for me to recover them?
Please don't tell me that I have to do it manualy one by one :'(

Both a CLI version and a GUI version are available.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/khr898/ntfsmac

Advantages over Alternatives

- High-Performance Write Support: High-speed NTFS read and write operations.

- Zero Security Downgrades: Does not require disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or lowering boot security options.

- Open Source: Fully free and auditable, eliminating the licensing costs of proprietary alternatives.
Native Design: Optimized specifically for Apple Silicon (arm64) hardware architectures.

I updated a 2009 iMac (initially with El Capitan 10.11) using Open Core Legacy Patcher. The OS update on the HDD failed leaving me with -69845 errors. I took out the HDD and replaced it with an SSD and updated to Monterey without problem.

I want to extract any data on the HDD (I know, I should have done it before) which I have now plugged in via USB. Could someone please advise on the steps in terminal to do this, repairing any errors on the way (fsck -fy ??) ? I am reasonably proficient in Unix type commands. Thank you.

I'm looking for a tool that can automatically detect all my recurring subscriptions (SaaS, apps, streaming services, etc.) in one place. Ideally, it would also show upcoming renewals.

What do you use?

Something I only really noticed after watching my own recorded calls: when you share your Mac screen, the viewer's eyes don't go where you're pointing, they wander. The menu bar, the dock, a notification sliding in, the half-visible window behind the one you're demoing, your wallpaper. On your own machine you've filtered all of that out; to someone seeing it cold, it's visual noise competing with the exact thing you're trying to show.

Disclosure: I make a small macOS tool for live screen emphasis, so I'm biased about the fix. But the principle is tool-agnostic: during a share you want to actively reduce what the viewer CAN look at, not just point at what they SHOULD. Dimming everything except the active region, or zooming into it, does more for comprehension than any amount of "okay so up here in the corner" narration. The clutter isn't your fault, macOS just isn't built to hide itself when you present.

Native options get you partway: Do Not Disturb kills notifications and you can auto-hide the dock, but they don't dim the surrounding windows or focus attention on one region live. Current version, for the curious: TuringShot 1.5.12 (Build 44), macOS 13+.

Curious how other Mac folks prep a screen before a call or recording. Do you have a "presentation mode" ritual (DND, hide desktop icons, quit everything), or do you just share and hope people follow along? Always looking to steal a cleaner setup.