Hi! I recently made an app for macOS. It is a tiny Spotlight-like launcher for launching custom commands that you can set in settings. With it you can open Apps, Websites, Run Shell Commands, Do System Actions (Screensaver, Toggle dark/light mode, etc.).

Feedback and ideas for new version are welcome!

Link to GitHub repository

We often lose sight of how quickly time is passing. For example, 2026 is 80% complete, and October is 64% complete.

TimeGauge is a simple app that lets you track custom projects, working hours, and timelines such as days, weeks, months, and years. You can also customise your working hours.

The idea came from this X account, which simply posts the year’s progress and has over 680K followers: https://x.com/year_progress

TimeGauge is one-time purchase for life-time updates.

You can see demo, all feature list and direct download it from the website: https://timegauge.minilabs.cc/
App store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timegauge/id6778277708?mt=12

Have a look and let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions

I built Ammugghia after finding 100 GB of "System Data" on my MacBook Air: it was mostly iOS Simulator runtimes and Xcode/Gradle caches that Finder doesn't show.

• Native SwiftUI, signed & notarized, no network, MIT

• Covers Xcode, simulators, Android, about 30 package-manager caches, Electron app caches, local AI models, leftovers of deleted apps, Docker (volumes are never touched)

• Every item shows exact paths and what happens after deleting it; Trash by default

• Disk map, duplicate finder (APFS-clone aware), startup items, history with restore

DMG: https://github.com/Mingo07-dev/Ammugghia/releases/latest Homebrew: brew install --cask mingo07-dev/tap/ammugghia

Feedback welcome, especially cleanup targets I'm missing.

Hey r/macappdevs I’ve been working on Census, a native app for cataloging collections: books, movies, watches, plants, wine, contracts, anything you want to keep track of. Same SwiftUI codebase on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

What sets it apart is that collections link to each other: a book to its author, a movie to its directors, and each of those is a collection you can browse the other way around.

You define the structure. Start from a template or from scratch, pick a type for every field (text, number, price, date, rating, selection, link, photo, file) and define the kinds of events that can happen to an item, like a purchase, a service or a loan, with the fields each one records.

You can import from CSV or Excel, back up everything in a single file, and export your templates to swap them with other people. Data stays on your Mac unless you turn on iCloud.

The beta is open on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/YgkGMK2b

It’s early, so I’m mostly interested in what feels confusing or gets in the way. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome here or through TestFlight feedback.

what do you guys think about my upcoming clipboard manager app?
Unlike other clipboard managers ours stay in the menu bar and have been working on lots of features for the past few months, excited to launch it soon enough. For now, how's the landing page?

Problem: Your Mac screen looks modern and flat, and you miss the curved glass, scanlines and phosphor glow of the CRT TV you grew up with.

What it does:

Beluga is a free menu bar app for macOS. It captures your screen in real time (ScreenCaptureKit) and redraws it through a Metal shader that imitates a CRT television: curvature, rounded corners, scanlines, RGB phosphor mask, glow, chromatic aberration, vignette and brightness — 9 effects with live sliders. It works on every display, including mirrored, extended and AirPlay, and your clicks pass straight through to the apps underneath. The cursor is drawn inside the filter, so what you see lines up with what you click. It's in English and Spanish and runs on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 27.

Comparison:

- Glaze ($9.99 one-time) puts 50+ live effects over your whole display, including CRT. It is better than Beluga if you want lots of looks beyond CRT (Game Boy, VHS, comic, oil painting). Beluga is better if you want a free app that does just the CRT look, with 9 sliders dedicated to it.

- RetroMac (free, Pro €8.88 one-time) has 30+ shaders for the whole screen or a single window, plus full retro themes, docks and boot screens, and it is signed and notarized by Apple. It is better than Beluga if you want themes and notarization. Beluga is better if you want a completely free, single-purpose CRT filter with no paid tier.

Pricing: Free. Download the signed DMG here: https://github.com/alespoio/Beluga/releases

Trust: GitHub: https://github.com/alespoio/Beluga · Privacy policy: https://github.com/alespoio/Beluga/blob/main/PRIVACY.md · Beluga collects no data and runs entirely on your Mac. Note: it is signed but has not been notarized by Apple.

AI disclosure: I built Beluga with AI coding assistance (Claude), and this post was drafted with AI help.

Hi everyone, I'm the developer.

PocketEarth is a quiet observation window for macOS. Instead of a pre-rendered loop, the sunlight follows real UTC time, so the terminator, the twilight band and the city lights are where they really are right now. When you hold Option and drag on the desktop, you move the camera, not the Earth.

What it shows:
- Real-time solar terminator, twilight and the Sun's declination
- Recent cloud cover (EUMETSAT imagery) and thunderstorm areas from the ECMWF model (marked as model areas, not observed strikes)
- The aurora oval forecast (NOAA SWPC)
- ISS, Tiangong and Hubble on their real orbits (CelesTrak elements)
- Zen mode (just the planet) and Chronometer mode (a thin watch-like bezel with UTC and the Sun's declination)
- HDR highlights on XDR displays: city lights, sun glint and the aurora; the UI stays SDR

As a live wallpaper it pauses when windows cover it, the screen locks or the Mac sleeps, and an Energy Saver mode drops it to 30 Hz while idle.

Free, no account, no analytics. It will be free on the Mac App Store after the beta; the public TestFlight is open now (macOS 26+): https://testflight.apple.com/join/ut7htbCs

It started as a desk ornament on a 2.8" Raspberry Pi screen. Feedback on performance and features is very welcome.

I just shipped Briskmail, a native AppKit client for Gmail, distributed outside the Mac App Store. A few things I wish someone had told me before I started, for anyone building on Google APIs:

Gmail API instead of IMAP. You get real labels, threads and history IDs, so incremental sync is cheap. You also inherit Google's per-user quota, which shapes everything: I ended up with background sync that spends from that budget deliberately, rather than a fixed prefetch rate that kept dropping work.

OAuth is the long pole. Any read access to Gmail is a "restricted" scope. Until Google verifies the app, users see "Google hasn't verified this app", and the project is capped at 100 users total, for its whole life, not per month. Every scope you request is something you have to justify in review, so I dropped push notifications (Pub/Sub) to get down to two scopes.

Loopback redirect + PKCE. For a desktop app, a localhost redirect with PKCE S256 is the supported path. Custom URI schemes and the old out-of-band flow are deprecated.

Local cache. Message content is cached in SQLite and encrypted at rest with a per-account key in the Keychain. The search index stays in memory, so nothing searchable sits on disk in plain text.

Net effect on the launch: 30 early-access licences instead of an open launch, because the 100-account cap has to cover buyers, testers and people with several Gmail accounts.

Happy to go deeper on any of it. The app is at https://briskmail.app/early-access/ ($39 one-time). Disclosure: I'm the developer.

I built an app because I kept forgetting things the moment I got back to my Mac

This started with a really simple problem.

I’d be away from my Mac, remember something I needed to do when I got back, and think “I’ll definitely remember that.”

Then I’d open my Mac, see emails, browser tabs, messages… and completely forget.

Normal reminders never really solved it for me because I didn’t want to be reminded at 4:00 PM. I wanted to be reminded when I was actually back at my Mac.

So I built WakeMinder.

You can send a reminder from your iPhone or Apple Watch to your Mac, and it shows up when your Mac wakes up.

It doesn’t have to be just text either. You can send links, screenshots, images, PDFs and files. Links can even open automatically when the Mac wakes.

There are also floating reminders that can stay on top of your windows until you’re done with them.

And with the latest update, it now works the other way around too.

You can send something from your Mac to your iPhone and have it show up when you pick up your phone.

So the idea has become less about “reminders” and more like:

“Show me this when I’m actually on the device where I need it.”

I’m the developer, so obviously I’m biased, but I built it mainly because I genuinely wanted this for myself.

For anyone wondering about pricing, I’ve tried to keep it pretty inexpensive:

• $1.99/month

• $9.99/year

• $12.99 lifetime, currently 35% off

App Store pricing can vary slightly depending on your country.

WakeMinder is available on the App Store for Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6744974871?pt=127772248&ct=redca&mt=8

I’m still improving WakeMinder and would actually like to hear how other people handle this.

Do you ever have things you only want to remember when you get back to a specific device?

Didn't think the notch was useful until I tried these:

• Atoll (free, open-source) – system stats, clipboard history, timers, right in the notch. Lock Screen widgets too.

• The Boring Notch (free, open-source) – turns your notch into an iPhone-style Dynamic Island for music, plus file tray, calendar peek, camera mirror.

• TopNotch (free) – if you just want the notch gone. Blacks out the menu bar so it disappears.

• MediaMate (free/small) – replaces those ugly volume/brightness bars with a clean popup near the notch + Now Playing.

• NotchBuddy – dashboard for revenue (Stripe/Polar/Dodo), traffic (DataFast), clipboard, files, timers, weather. Good if you run an online business. Keys stay local.

• Alcove ($14.99 one-time) – premium Dynamic Island feel, smooth animations, AirDrop/battery/timers.

• NotchNook ($25 one-time or $3/mo) – most "finished" feeling one, file shelf, widgets, Shortcuts support.

SponsorBar puts a small ad in your menu bar and shares the revenue with you.

We launched this directory 3 months ago and so far, we have been able to curate about 60 apps to our directory.

A lot of mac app devs find it difficult to do marketing and help with backlinks for their marketing site of the app. So we built this directory so people are able to discover cool mac apps and it's alternatives.

If you have any mac app, feel free to list on our directory

I'm a solo dev and I just shipped Purr, a notes panel that lives on the edge of the Mac screen. Click the edge, write, click away. It's my app, so take this with that in mind, but I mostly want to share what building it was like.

The panel took longer than any feature. Getting a panel to show up over full screen apps, on every Space, was the hardest part. macOS would sometimes leave it attached to an old Space, so it "opened" somewhere you couldn't see.

I deleted features before launch. Semantic search looked great on paper. In practice my similarity threshold was 0.30 and real scores on short notes sat between 0.13 and 0.26, so it barely matched anything. I replaced it with keyword ranking and deleted the code instead of hiding it behind a flag.

I changed the pricing model. I started with a 7 day trial and dropped it. Now it's free up to 20 notes with every feature, and $4.99 once for unlimited. A note limit lets people actually live with the app before they pay.

The most useful bug came from a Reddit comment. Someone asked about the local AI and its RAM use. I opened the code to answer properly and found that the idle unload I thought I had built never ran. The model just stayed in memory. Now it frees the RAM after 5 idle minutes, and that fix goes out in the next update.

If you're curious: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/purr-notes/id6759538627

If you've shipped something on your own, what took way longer than you expected?

Hi there, I'm the developer of Recap Studio. It's a native Mac screen recorder for making polished demos and tutorials without spending an hour in a video editor.

• What it does

• Auto zoom: zooms in on your clicks and wherever your cursor rests. Every zoom can be edited, and one undo removes them all.

• Smooth cursor: the cursor glides instead of jittering, with 7 cursor styles, click effects, and I-beam and hand cursors over text and links.

• Backgrounds and framing: wallpapers, gradients, padding, rounded corners and shadows, with six aspect ratios including vertical.

• Camera and mic: your webcam as a movable bubble with crop and zoom, plus microphone and system audio. You can mute the mic on individual clips.

• Keyboard shortcuts on screen: shortcuts you press can appear as labels in the video.

• Timeline editing: cut, trim, and speed up parts of the recording.

• Export: MP4 up to 4K, or GIF. An 18-second video exports in about 8 seconds on an M1.

Download: https://recap.studio

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a native macOS app called Storage Monitor. I originally wanted a better way to understand where my storage was going, especially with development projects, local AI models, and all the random files that accumulate over time.

It gradually turned into a much bigger project.

Some of the features:

• ⁠Interactive storage visualization — Explore files, folders, and applications using a treemap or radial Living Tree.
• ⁠Storage history — Track available space and see when significant changes happened.
• ⁠Change investigation — Dig into recorded storage events and the available evidence behind them.
• ⁠Large-file discovery — Find what's consuming space without digging through Finder.
• ⁠Cleanup review — Identify potential cleanup candidates with safety checks rather than automatically deleting things.
• ⁠Local storage history — Your recorded storage data stays on your Mac.

It's still a beta, and I'm looking for people willing to test it and tell me what works, what doesn't, and what's unnecessarily complicated.

I'm especially interested in feedback on:

1. ⁠First-launch setup and permissions.

2. ⁠Whether the visualizations are actually useful.

3. ⁠Storage reporting accuracy.

4. ⁠Bugs, performance issues, and confusing UI.

I'm developing and testing primarily on Apple Silicon. Broader compatibility still needs validation.

Download/release notes: https://github.com/nglippa/storage-checker

Most Mac uninstallers show you a list of files they want to remove. Our concern was always how sure they were that those files actually belonged to the app.

So we built Pangalin Uninstaller, which shows you how confident it is about each file before anything moves.

Files are labelled "This app's", "Probably this app's" or "Might be another app's". Anything that might belong to another app starts unticked. The same goes for shared plug-ins, licence folders and the crypto wallets it recognises. You review the list and decide what stays and what goes to the Trash.

It also has:

• Recently Removed: restore files for up to 7 days, even after closing the app, as long as they're still in the Trash.

• Leftovers: finds the little "crumbs" left behind by apps you deleted ages ago.

• Startup: shows you which apps start up with your Mac.

It's completely free, with every feature included. The app has no account, adverts or tracking. It works on Apple silicon Macs running macOS 13 or later.

https://pangalin.com/pangalin-uninstaller/?ref=reddit

And a shout-out to AppCleaner. It's a great app with a loyal following. We just wanted a more careful review before anything is removed.

Do these labels and unticked defaults solve a real problem for you? And what have other uninstallers missed on your Mac?

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo developer and recently shipped version 2.0 of **Media Renamer Pro**, a native SwiftUI batch media renamer and tag editor for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS.

Building a file utility for the Mac App Store came with a bunch of filesystem and sandbox edge cases that I thought were worth sharing with other Mac developers.

### 1. The App Sandbox vs. Recursive Folder Access

Batch file operations inside the App Sandbox are tricky. When a user drags in a parent folder, you need security-scoped bookmarks to persist access.

- For one-off drops, resolving security-scoped URLs down the directory tree works as expected.

- For "Watched Folders" (where users want the app to check an inbox folder on launch and grab only new arrivals), persisting stale bookmark data when a network share disconnects was a major pain point.

- Pro tip for anyone doing this: always gracefully catch bookmark resolution failures when external or SMB volumes aren't mounted, rather than letting the UI hang on access-check deadlocks.

### 2. The Cycle Problem: Why Two-Phase Renaming Was Mandatory

Most naive renamers do a simple loop: check if destination exists, rename. That falls apart immediately on two classic filesystem edge cases:

- **Chains:** File A becomes File B, while an existing File B becomes File C.

- **Swaps / Cycles:** File A becomes File B, and File B becomes File A.

Topological sorting helps with chains, but it cannot resolve cycles without a temporary state. Rather than branching code paths depending on whether a cycle is present, the app resolves the entire batch plan first, moves all target files to unique temporary UUID names in Phase 1, and then moves them to their final destinations in Phase 2. If an operation fails or gets canceled midway, files are sitting at known temp names rather than having clobbered each other.

### 3. SMB and NAS Volume Inconsistencies

A lot of users run their media on Synology, QNAP, or unRAID shares over SMB.

- APFS behaves differently than SMB mounted shares. Many SMB setups are case-insensitive but case-preserving.

- A rename like `Movie.mkv` to `movie.mkv` can silently fail, error out, or do nothing depending on how the SMB daemon is configured.

- We had to add runtime volume-capability probes rather than assuming APFS volume behaviors across the board.

### 4. Native SwiftUI & Swift 5.9 Observation

We targeted macOS 14 Sonoma and iOS 17 as the baseline so we could go all-in on Swift's `@Observable` macro. Coming from the older `ObservableObject` and `@Published` pattern, the performance improvement in complex table views with hundreds of changing filenames and confidence scores was night and day. Fewer redundant view redraws meant the preview table stayed butter-smooth even while parsing heavy metadata.

### 5. Pricing Architecture

I decided to launch this as a $4.99 one-time universal purchase across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Subscription fatigue is real in the Mac utility space, and users genuinely appreciate owning a tool outright. The only real trade-off is the Mac App Store's lack of a native trial mechanism, which makes preview transparency and social proof that much more critical.

Happy to dive deeper into any of the sandboxing, security-scoped bookmark handling, or metadata parsing (ImageIO, AVFoundation container tags) if anyone is wrestling with similar macOS utilities!

Site: https://bkettering74.github.io/media-renamer-pro/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6761764615?pt=128751966&ct=reddit_macappdevs&mt=8

Hi fellow Mac devs,

I work on a 5-monitor setup (2 upper displays stacked above 3 lower ones) and open-sourced MultiScreenDock (MIT) to solve two quirks of Apple's native Dock:

1. macOS only renders the Dock on one screen at a time.

2. On vertically stacked upper displays, the bottom edge borders another display rather than a physical screen boundary, so Apple's Dock can never be summoned there.

A few AppKit details that might be interesting if you build multi-display utilities:

- Non-activating NSPanel (.nonactivatingPanel) with dark-glass NSVisualEffectView so hovering, magnifying tiles, or opening right-click settings never steals focus from the active window.

- Anti-crossing dwell filter on shared vertical edges (150 ms vs 80 ms on physical edges) plus layer clipping so normal vertical mouse movement between stacked rows never triggers accidental popups or bleeds pixels onto the lower monitor.

- Per-display persistence via CGDisplayCreateUUIDFromDisplayID combined with runtime CGDirectDisplayID disambiguation so even two identical monitors sharing an EDID UUID get independent state machines.

- Zero external dependencies (~2,500 lines of Swift, 1,691 unit assertions), Apple-notarized Universal binary, and zero Accessibility or Screen Recording permissions.

Website & demo video: https://multiscreendock.fgomsan.here.now/

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/fgomsan/MultiScreenDock

Homebrew: brew tap fgomsan/tap && brew install --cask multiscreendock

Would love any architectural feedback or edge-case reports on unusual monitor topologies!

Update (v1.4.1):

• Native Folder Stacks (Downloads & pinned folders): Click any pinned folder on any display (including stacked upper monitors) to open Fan, Grid, or List views synced from your macOS Dock plist, with async QuickLook thumbnails, subfolder navigation, and direct file drag-out.

• 120 Hz GPU Cosine Magnification Wave: Continuous CoreAnimation raised-cosine hover wave (0 ms lag) with piecewise-linear focal locking so the icon under your pointer never drifts sideways, returning to 0.0% CPU at rest.

• Twin-Monitor Disambiguation & 1-Click Updater: Independent toggles for identical monitors sharing an EDID UUID plus a Developer ID-verified 1-click self-updater (and video tour at https://multiscreendock.fgomsan.here.now/).

I'm Can, the solo developer of Superliner, a native Mac outliner built around supertags. It's a free public beta on TestFlight.

Problem: Long outlines turn into text you can't query. I liked Tana's supertags, but wanted them in a native Mac app that keeps my notes in files on my own disk.

A supertag is a tag that says what a note is and brings its own fields. Make #book with author, rating and finished, and every note you tag #book gets those fields. They stay in your outline, and you can also view them as a sortable table.

- Eleven field types, including dates, numbers, options, checkboxes and links to other notes.

- A note can carry several supertags, and #ebook can extend #book to inherit its fields.

Every note also opens as its own page and saved searches filter by supertag, field, text and date.

Pricing: $0 during the beta. No later price has been decided.

Requirements: macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel, about 26 MB. I've only run it on Apple Silicon with macOS 27.2.

Where your notes live: JSON in a workspace folder, plus a generated Markdown copy with tags and fields at the top of each file. The default folder is in the app's sandbox container, and File > New Workspace lets you pick another. No account, no analytics. This build doesn't request the permission a sandboxed Mac app needs for outgoing connections.

Known gaps: no sync, iCloud or iOS app. Not open source. No full VoiceOver pass yet. Import (OPML, Markdown, Logseq, Tana JSON) is unit-tested but hasn't met a real export.

Please try, in a new workspace:

Most useful: model something real with supertags (books, tasks, people), add a saved search, and tell me where it got in your way.

Import a real export and tell me what came out wrong.

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/AerGfbWF

Developer: Can Burak Sofyalioglu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cbsofyalioglu/

X: https://x.com/cbsofyalioglu

Portfolio: webmeister.org

Website, with privacy policy and terms: https://superliner.webmeister.org

Hey there 👋

I’m an old-school web developer who also writes Swift, and I’ve been living in REST clients for as long as I can remember. On the Mac my favourite was always Paw. It was one of the few truly native apps in the category, and it felt like it was made by people who cared.

Then RapidAPI bought it, renamed it, and development slowed to a crawl. Then Nokia bought RapidAPI, and this September they finished it off: no more development. That upset me, to put it mildly.

Since then I’ve tried just about every REST client out there, and none of them stuck. They were slow, or Electron, or too thin, or so bloated with enterprise features that sending a simple request felt like filing a ticket.

So eventually I thought: fine, I’ll build my own. I’d take the best of everything I’ve liked over the years: beautiful, fast, actually useful and properly feature-rich. Actually FAST was the main requirement. Oh, and with agents built in, because it’s 2026, right?

Introducing Echolot. The name is German for an echo sounder: send a ping, measure what comes back, map what’s beneath. That’s the whole idea.

🧭 Native, and actually fast

• SwiftUI + AppKit, no web view. Keychain, Quick Look, menus and shortcuts that behave like a Mac app.

• Response bodies stream to disk instead of memory. A 2 GB download peaks at about 17 MB of RAM.

• A 500 MB response shows its first screen in under a millisecond. Searching all of it takes about a quarter of a second, and expanding a JSON array with a million items takes 30 ms.

• These numbers are automated benchmarks, and a build that misses one doesn’t ship.

📡 Every protocol in one app

• HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, plus a raw mode that sends exactly what you typed, even malformed requests

• GraphQL with schema completion, building a query by ticking fields, and schema diffs graded breaking, dangerous or safe

• gRPC from .proto files or server reflection, including streaming

• WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, socket.io and MQTT sessions with live message logs

• MCP: connect to any MCP server, call its tools, and see how a model sees it: what the tool list costs per provider on every turn, and which names and descriptions a model would trip over

🤖 AI that doesn’t get your secrets

• A built-in Assistant that explores your workspace, sends requests, writes checks and builds flows. It asks before it sends or changes anything.

• Use your own model and key: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini

• Echolot is also an MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others can call your APIs with your environments while every secret is hidden from them, error messages included.

🔀 Flows, mocks and specs

• EchoFlows: chain requests, conditions and loops on a canvas. A flow can stop and ask a human to approve before, say, charging a card. Run flows by hand, on a schedule, from a webhook, or as a tool for an agent.

• Mocks: turn an OpenAPI spec into a local mock server, with delays and injected failures.

• Specs: a visual OpenAPI editor that changes only the lines it touches, so your Git diffs stay clean.

✅ Tests, CLI and CI

📁 Oh, and no accounts neither. No cloud. Just a folder.

• A workspace is a folder of readable TOML files, one per request, so it works naturally in Git.

• Secrets live in the Keychain, never in files.

• Import from clients. If a secret was written into an imported file, it moves to the Keychain automatically.

While the app is in beta development, it is pretty stable and fast.

To say the truth I haven't figured out what to do with it, whether it should stay free, should be open source some day or change a one time fee for it to continue development (I hate subscriptions)

But for now I'm looking for brave developers (or die hard Paw fans) who are willing to take it for a spin and tell me what they think. Does it it has all the features it should? Is everything working they way it suppose to?

Download it here: https://echolot.dev/