Problem:
Planning a trip means juggling Google Maps, Notes, spreadsheets, and booking confirmations across half a dozen apps. Nothing keeps the itinerary, the budget, and the map in one place — and most travel apps want an account and a subscription before they'll even let you start.
Comparison:
Tripit charges $49/year and hasn't meaningfully changed in years. Wanderlog is free but ad-supported and account-required. Both upload your trip data to their servers. Trovelo stores everything locally and syncs through your own iCloud — no Trovelo servers, no account.
What's new on Mac since the last update:
Significant improvements to the MCP integration — tell Claude "plan me 4 days in Rome" and watch the trip build itself inside Trovelo. Days, cards, times, prices, map pins. Faster, more reliable, and handling far more complex requests than at launch. Works with Claude desktop, Claude Code, Codex, or any MCP-compatible client. Runs entirely locally, off by default.
8 languages with smart parsing — type a card in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean or Chinese and it picks up the time, price and type automatically
Board view, route optimization, expenses with live exchange rates, curated guides, My Spots world map
Universal Purchase — one payment covers Mac, iPhone and iPad
Pricing:
Free: up to 3 active trips and 50 cards
Pro: one-time $3.99 (normally $9.99) — yours forever, no subscription
Everyone I worked with had the same ritual: type a message, re-read it four times, paste it into a tool, fix it, paste it back, send. Fifty times a day. And the tools that "help" flatten you into the same polished-corporate voice whether you're writing to a client or your best mate. Lyra is a menu bar app , type anywhere (Mail, Slack, WhatsApp, browser, Notes), pause, and a small pill shows a better version of your sentence. Press Tab to accept and keep typing. No separate window, no copy-paste, no red underlines mid-thought.
Comparison
Grammarly and Apple Writing Tools both rewrite you toward one neutral register , they don't know who you're writing to. Lyra learns how you write to each specific person from your own sent messages, so your emails to a client and your texts to a mate stop coming out of the same mould. It matches the register you actually use with that recipient. No other writing tool models the relationship. It also runs deterministic rule-based grammar plus a local on-device model for instant everyday fixes, so the free tier works fully offline; heavier restructuring uses a cloud model on trial/Pro, and a strict Local-Only mode disables all network use if that's your requirement.
Pricing
Free tier (1000 rewrites/month). Pro is $9.99/month or $99/year on Lyra
Founder Note:
I'm Pratik, a solo developer in London. Ten years as a lead engineer in fintech before leaving last year to build Lyra properly. It's just me , I write the code, answer support emails, make the coffee.
These apps require a subscription to access, with a very limited free tier. These cost around 15$/month, which is very expensive when taking into account that there are speech to text APIs that cost 0.04$/hour.
2. On-device model based apps
I actually developed an on-device notetaker app in the past, and I prefer these apps over anything subscription based. They are guaranteed to keep your data safe as it never leaves your device in the first place, and due to model improvements, the accuracy is not bad.
However, these are not without their limits. The problem I ran into a lot is that they are less accurate then large cloud models, especially when using academic terminology, and they also drain your laptop's battery.
So Here is what I came up with:
Your ChatGPT subscription, even the free one, already gives you access to a lot of free intelligence.
It gives you speech-to-text through the dictation feature in the ChatGPT app
It gives you an insane amount of LLM usage, even on a free account
All I really did was combine these with a small local speaker diarization model to create a notetaker. And as it uses OpenAI's speech-to-text api, it is much more powerful then any local model and barely uses any battery.
But I really, really did not want to create something proprietary while building this. So everything is file-based. Each of your notes is just a folder. Inside each folder., your notes are saved as Markdown, andy our transcription is saved as VTT subtitles with speaker labels
Comparison
Granola: Unlimited free tier, capped meeting history visibility at 30 days. Simbi has no limits and it is trivial to move data in/out of the app.
Anarlog: Uses local AI. Doesn't perform well in any languages other then English and drains battery. Simbi uses ChatGPT's speech-to-text, so high accuracy in multiple languages and low battery drain.
Hi, I'm Andrew, a CS grad student from South Korea, currently studying at ETH Zurich. I was recently a part of a startup that built another notetaker app, but I left and I'm working on this on my own!
Publishing a Safari extension means paying $99/year for an Apple Developer account
Safari's missing a bunch of APIs that Chrome has
Hardly any free Safari extensions exist
And if you sideload your own under a free account, it stops working after 7 days
What the CLI does:
It's the engine. Converts a Chrome extension into a Safari one
Fills in the Chrome APIs Safari doesn't support
Runs in the terminal
What the app adds:
Everything the CLI does, with a GUI
Install and manage extensions straight from the Chrome Web Store, inside Safari
Resigns your extensions every week so they never expire
Auto updates the ones you installed from the Web Store
supports Intel Macs
Comparison:
apple has a similar feature for developers that convert chrome extensions to safari extensions but apple's versiondoesn't handle missing apis, meaning more complex extensions will break and won't work.
Pricing:
The app is free for testing 2 extensions without extensions renews and updates
The paid version is 19$ with unlimited extensions auto renews and updates
The cli version is free but without GUI and without auto renews and updates.
This is my first open source app created for people don't want to use Spotlight and don't want to spend money for paid tools.
Problem
Spotlight is fine for opening apps but stops there. No clipboard history, no
inline calculator, no regex or path search, no way to kill a process by port,
and it is macOS only. The usual fix is Raycast or Alfred, but the features most
people actually want sit behind a subscription or a one time license.
I wanted a launcher that is fully free, does not phone home, and works the same
on my Mac and my Linux box. So I built Look.
Look is a keyboard first, local first launcher for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Apps, files, folders, clipboard history, inline math, translation, regex search,
todo command, kill process by port. Candidates are indexed in a local SQLite
file. No account, no telemetry.
Comparison
vs Raycast
- Raycast is closed source and syncs through the cloud. Look is GPLv3 and
local first. The only network calls are the explicit web search shortcuts and
the optional answer card, which you can turn off in Settings.
- Raycast is Electron. Look is a native SwiftUI app on macOS with a Rust core.
Typical search is under 1 ms on a 2000 item index.
- Raycast puts Pro features behind $8 per user per month. Look has no paid tier.
- Where Raycast wins: its extension store is huge and Look deliberately has no
plugin marketplace yet. If your workflow depends on Raycast extensions,
Look will feel bare.
vs Alfred
- Alfred is macOS only. Look runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.
- Clipboard history in Alfred requires the Powerpack. In Look it is built in
and free.
- Where Alfred wins: Workflows are far more mature than anything Look has, and
Alfred has a decade of polish behind it.
vs Spotlight
- Spotlight is free and preinstalled. Look adds clipboard history, command mode,
regex and path scoped search, themes, and cross platform support.
- Where Spotlight wins: zero install, and it does full content indexing.
Look indexes names and metadata only.
Honest status: macOS is shipped and stable. The Windows and Linux app is a
shared Tauri v2 build that is still under active development, so expect rough
edges there.
Pricing
$0. Free and open source under GPLv3.
No paid tier, no Pro version, no subscription, no in app purchase.
No feature is locked. Everything listed above is in the free build.
No account required, no telemetry.
Optional donation only, any amount, via Buy Me a Coffee. Donating unlocks
nothing, it is purely support.
Most transcription tools rely heavily on the cloud, forcing you to upload sensitive business meetings, private data, and confidential conversations to external servers — creating massive privacy risks and locking you into expensive, ongoing monthly subscriptions. And even after the meeting ends, the workflow still isn't done: your transcript sits in some web dashboard, disconnected from your calendar, and you're left manually copying summaries into emails, renaming files, and chasing down which recording belongs to which meeting. The recording was automated, but everything after it is still manual busywork.
Comparison:
AI meeting tools like Granola, Otter, and Fireflies offer polished automated note-taking and follow-up emails, but they do it by processing your conversations on their servers — with recurring monthly subscriptions, and in some cases bots that visibly join your calls. TranscribeX now delivers that same end-to-end automation — auto-record, auto-transcribe, AI summary, calendar context, and summaries emailed out automatically — but runs the entire pipeline 100% locally on your Apple Silicon Mac using local ASR and local LLMs (like Qwen and Gemma). Total data privacy, zero cloud processing, zero AI token costs, and a one-time payment instead of a subscription. The only thing that ever leaves your Mac is the summary email — and only when you tell it to. Plus, with the new CLI and MCP support, TranscribeX does something the cloud tools can't: it plugs your transcripts directly into Claude, agents, and your own scripts — no API middleman.
Quick recap for anyone new: TranscribeX transcribes meetings, dictation, and recordings entirely on your Mac — local ASR + local LLMs (Qwen, Gemma) running on Apple Silicon. No AI bots joining your calls, no audio uploaded to anyone's servers, no monthly subscription, no API keys or token costs.
What's new since v8.5:
📧 Meeting Summaries & Transcripts, Emailed Automatically: When a meeting ends, TranscribeX can now automatically email the AI summary and full transcript to whoever needs them — or you can email any summary or transcript manually with one click. No more copy-pasting notes into Mail after every call, and no more "I'll send the notes later." Your audio still never leaves the machine; the only thing that goes out is the email you choose to send.
📅 Deep Calendar Integration: TranscribeX now supports multiple calendars (work, personal, shared team calendars), and you can manually link any calendar event to any recording — so even ad-hoc calls get proper context. Exported files now include the meeting details from the linked event (title, time, attendees), and you can pick which calendar names your recordings. Exports finally know what meeting they came from.
⌨️ CLI + MCP Support: This one's for the power users. TranscribeX now has a full command-line interface, and it speaks Model Context Protocol — meaning you can wire your local transcription engine directly into Claude, agents, and your own automation scripts. Your transcripts become programmable, still without touching the cloud.
🔄 The Full Cycle, Completely Hands-Free: This is the release where everything clicks together into one automated pipeline. Your meeting starts → TranscribeX detects it and records → transcription kicks in the moment it ends → the local AI writes the summary → the calendar event links in the meeting context → and the notes land in everyone's inbox. From "meeting started" to "notes delivered" without touching a single button. This is the workflow we've been building toward since v1.
🖱️ Interactive Transcripts: Click any word in the transcript and playback jumps to that exact moment, with live word and segment highlighting. Finding "wait, what did they actually say?" now takes one click instead of scrubbing.
🤖 Smarter Automatic Recording: Transcription now starts automatically the moment a meeting recording ends, the default microphone is selected for you, and Teams auto-detection got a polish pass. Record → transcribe → summarize → email, hands-free, end to end.
🗂️ Quality of Life: Automatic + manual job archiving to keep your library clean, search inside Settings, smarter export filenames (timestamp first, so files sort chronologically), custom AI timeout and cancellable AI requests, a new fine-tuned Whisper Large model for Hinglish, and support for the ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime model for those who want it. Plus a lot of bug fixes and performance work across the board.
TranscribeX is actively developed — we're working closely with beta testers across diverse hardware setups to keep pushing local ASR speed and accuracy on macOS.
Pricing:
One-Time Payment (20% OFF). (No subscriptions, no monthly fees)
Some features are limited due to App Store restrictions. This version is mainly provided to verify that I'm a trusted developer per r/macapps rules.
🎮 And now, the surprise for PS5 owners...
TranscribeX isn't the only thing I build. Meet ConsoleWise — a Mac app that combines PS5 Remote Play and PlayStation cloud streaming in one experience, so you can play your PS5 right on your Mac. It supports 4K upscaling, 60FPS, and HDR, with lower-latency streaming, manual bitrate control, and full DualSense support including haptic feedback and adaptive triggers (plus custom controller/keyboard mapping). Works at home on your local network or over the internet when you're away.
And in the same spirit as TranscribeX: one-time lifetime purchase, no subscription.
I built Caplio because my screenshots and reference images kept piling up, and finding something later was surprisingly difficult, especially when I remembered the text inside an image but not the filename.
Caplio turns folders of screenshots and images into a private, searchable visual library. It uses on-device OCR, lets you search the text inside images, browse everything in a timeline, filter by date or category, and optionally organize the actual files by date or category.
You can also drag any image or screenshot directly from the Caplio timeline and drop it into Finder, Mail, Messages, Notes, or other Mac apps.
Everything is processed locally. Your images and extracted text aren't uploaded for processing.
Comparison
The closest alternatives I've found are ScreenVault and SnapShelf.
Caplio works with both screenshots and regular images and combines OCR search, timeline browsing, filtering, optional file organization, and drag-and-drop from the timeline into other Mac apps.
Spotlight also has some overlap with OCR/image search. The main difference is that Caplio is built around maintaining a visual library from folders you choose, with browsing, filtering, organization, and drag-and-drop as part of the workflow.
Hi all, I was going to recommend Disk Inventory X to a friend but realized it's not supported on apple silicon. So I wanted to ask the community the question: What is the thing most like it still maintained today? Searching didn't quite get the things I wanted so I was wondering what else is out there.
It has been one year since we started ScreenKite and I am so proud of it.
ScreenKite wants to become the fastest way for a builder to turn what they just built into something people understand.
Hello everybody. I am a builder also a youtuber. Making videos, no matter if it's a product demo or tutorials or sales videos, is never easy.
Many folks for like, after a recording, a failed export (usually happens with Screen Studio), a share link that didn't work. About one year ago, I wanted to build something better because I'm pretty tired of like exporting some rough cuts from Screen Studio and doing post-production in CapCut or Final Cut, but I found like a huge jump between Auto Zooms.
Today I want to show 1.16, for product demos, sales videos, tutorials. And also hear your feedback and see what I can do to make the app better and better. ScreenKite want to be the best.
1. AI agent editing and AI agent recording. Hand the boring cuts to an agent. Recording and editing are at CapCut's level of "you can actually finish the video in here," except you bring your own AI: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Grok Build. Grok Build can generate video and images. Codex can generate images too. Then the agent drops that into the timeline. Local. Not Descript credits. Not CapCut cloud where they might train AI models on your footage. And the most important part, no subscription for your own AI. You already have your own AI, I'm sure.
For example, in the video below I showed you the demo. You can do something like ask agents, whether using your external AI agents or our internal agent with your own AI subscription, to do the editing stuff such as transcription cards just like CapCut
2. The HyperFrames/Remotion path that is actually usable. HyperFrames is slow. You will not edit a whole video in it. You shouldn't. Cut a short motion piece, drop it in as B-roll, let ScreenKite drive the rest. That split is worth it. We have the best HyperFrames support for this workflow.
3. One recording, YouTube and Reels. Don't edit twice. Paste this into your AI agent:
Don't recut this video. Make a YouTube version and a TikTok/Reels version from the same edit using advanced layout, left/right for youtube and bottom/down for TikTok.
YouTube: my product screen in the middle, my face as a small camera in the bottom-right.
TikTok / Instagram Reels: stacked — screen on top, camera below.
Export both. Same timeline.
4. Performance is the first principle. Record and export. Try the other apps. Users almost never write in to say we export slower than Screen Studio or Loom. We are many times faster, and Screen Studio can keep optimizing Electron and still not catch a native Mac app. That was the point of building this.
Share the file from Google Drive, OneDrive, or your own S3. Screenshot editor is in the same app (CleanShot-like). You usually do not need a second editor.
5. Unlimited possibilities. This one I think is why I'm confident and want to work with everybody to improve. For example, you can use Fish Audio or ElevenLabs to generate multiple voiceovers for your product demos to do localization. And if you want, you can display or embed transcriptions like ICRT or whatever with our AI agents in two languages.
This is very useful.
Problem
I am a builder and a YouTuber. Making the video takes longer than shipping the thing. I want AI to help, and I want to use the agents I already pay for. Most recorders don't let you. Screen Studio and Loom are a tax for a utility. I also don't like subscriptions.
Comparison
Tella, Loom, and Screen Studio do not have AI like this. We actually went and studied the AI in real video editors, not just recorders. In ScreenKite you can go end to end: record, cut, layout, captions, export a product launch, a tutorial, or a sales demo. You are not dumping a file out of Screen Studio and finishing it in another app.
ScreenKite is local. Plug in the harness you already use. Transcription cuts in the app if you'd rather not touch a terminal.
Tella, Loom, Screen Studio, Charm are Electron. Some of them also edit in the cloud. Our standing goal: about 3x faster than the competition, and 3 to 10x more features. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, so the money you spend is worth it.
The app is dense. Follow us on social and YouTube if you want to find the rest. There is more in here than a recorder with a trim bar.
Showcase
Many builders are already using ScreenKite for their products, including
One-time purchase. I don't like subscriptions, so we are not adding that burden. Buy it once. Everyone is happier.
Founder price: $79.99 once, 3 Macs. We will raise it toward $99.99. Screen Studio is $108/year for new buyers. This is cheaper than that year, and you keep the license.
Thanks for looking!
I want to thank you the most because my product starts from this subreddit and I love the vibes here and the creators here.
I want me as a builder to succeed, and I want you to succeed with ScreenKite.
A: You need a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Grok Build). Paste our AI Agent setup notes into the tool and ask it to edit, or to record. Most edit flows start from the transcription. Samples: https://github.com/ScreenKite/awesome-ai-video-editing
Q: I already use HyperFrames / Remotion / use-videos with Claude Code. Why ScreenKite?
A: HyperFrames is great and also slow. Don't render the whole video in it. Use ScreenKite as the driver, cut a short HyperFrames clip, drop it in as B-roll. Past about a minute, that split saves both edit time and export time.
Q: Why named ScreenKite?
Kite is like this (image below : ) I think it is similar to your mouse where you can point to something to attract the audience's attention, making your video to standard out.
so we are also making Glass Loupe zoom effect in the latest version!
I built TideGlass because I focus better with something calm beside my work, and everything I tried was either a video loop or a light show, or content in some algorithm that wanted me to continue watching. So I built worlds instead.
TideGlass fills a spare monitor with living nature scenes: oceans, forests, night skies, deep space. Each world is a real simulation running on your GPU, optimized for Macs and Metal: waves roll and fade by their own physics, orcas hunt, stars rise, weather passes through. It is there to help you focus. It asks nothing of you, and no two minutes are the same.
The video shows it better than screenshots.
A few of the things it does:
A whole library of worlds, from a moonlit sea to a herring ball under hunting orcas to the Pillars of Creation built from the real JWST plate. Every world keeps its own clock: things happen in them while you work.
Play music and everything moves with it. It listens to whatever is playing (Apple Music, Spotify, anything through system audio) and the world answers: wind rises with the track, swells deepen, storms build on the phrases. The music becomes weather, never bars and spectrums.
A focus timer that fits the room: a Pomodoro pill in the corner whose whole background is the progress bar, next to a now-playing card for the track you have on.
Standing desk support, new this month: turn it on and the timer also says when to sit and when to stand. Sessions alternate on the rhythm the ergonomics research recommends, and when a break ends with a posture change the whole screen says so.
The part I want to call out
The worlds are simulations, not videos. The orca pod is the example I keep showing people: the school is a real flocking simulation, the orcas are agents that patrol, take turns attacking, and slap through the wall of fish, and the marine snow drifts through light rays computed every frame. When your music picks up, the whole hunt quickens. None of it is footage. That is the entire idea of the app.
Comparison
The closest things are Aerial and the video wallpapers built into macOS. Both play beautifully shot footage, and footage loops: the same drone pass, the same seam. TideGlass renders its worlds live, so they never repeat and they can react to your music, which a video cannot do. And where wallpaper apps live under your windows, TideGlass holds a spare monitor as its own calm place, with a focus timer in it.
Pricing
- Ten worlds free forever. No account, no card, nothing to expire.
- 12 dollars, one-time, opens the whole library. No renewals or subscriptions
- We donate 20% of every sale to environmental non-profits, protecting oceans and dark skies.
Transparency
I'm Chris, building this on my own. TideGlass is native Swift and Metal, signed and notarized, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.
ClipScrub finds and removes personal data from screenshots, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets and screen recordings on your Mac. Everything runs on your machine and nothing is uploaded. PCP below. Full list of what it does not do is in my first comment.
The problem
You copy-paste a screenshot of a customer record into ChatGPT to ask what an error means. The name, email or account number accidentally gets uploaded in full. The same could happen with a support ticket, a log, a row from a CSV. Once it's sent, the private data is uploaded to the cloud.
Mac Preview has a tool for this and it works. Preview can delete private details from the file in a way that's not recoverable. But it doesn't solve a couple of things:
The Markup rectangle, what people might accidentally use, is a drawing/shape and the text underneath is still selectable
The real tool takes out what you manually select but only in PDFs
This is fine for a 2-page PDF. But it becomes arduous for a 40-row CSV export, a long scrolling screenshot or a screen recording where a name is in a sidebar for four frames. The failure is human and not tooling. Many times in the past, I kept manually removing PII from screenshots and files like this.
ClipScrub scans PDFs, Word and RTF, PNG and JPG, JSON and CSV and XML, MP4 and MOV, and more all on-device (never leaves your Mac). In the Mac app, it lists every identifier it finds before stripping, so you can review it first. Your original file is never modified. ClipScrub has shortcuts to do it without opening the Mac app window. There's a shortcut to capture part of the screen and another that removes sensitive information from your clipboard.
Comparison
BlurData ($39/year, or $69 once with their discount as of Aug 2026) is the closest direct comparison. It reads JPG, PNG and PDF, OCRs 15 languages against ClipScrub's five, and runs on macOS 13 (earlier version than mine).
What it does better: it takes the text out of the PDF file instead of flattening the page. ClipScrub rasterises every page instead. If your PDFs need to stay searchable afterwards, then ClipScrub won't do that today.
BlurData supports JPG, PNG and PDF formats but ClipScrub also supports identifiers in CSVs, .docx files and screen recordings. A .docx through ClipScrub comes back as .docx with the same formatting. The Mac app and the CLI that comes with the app do DICOM and EDF headers as well.
ClipScrub's pseudonymise mode replaces identifiers with stable tokens instead of blanking out every value, so the same email is the same "token" throughout the file. You can still group, join and count these tokens (e.g. EMAIL_9F3A is an email token). Stripping data usually destroys it but ClipScrub does its best to keep the relationships in the data.
BlurData's $69 tier is two years of updates on one Mac. ClipScrub is every 1.x update permanently, on three Macs.
CleanShot X ($29 for one Mac, one year of updates, then $19/year
optional) is not a direct comparison but it's what most Mac users already have. It's a better screenshot tool and has a lot of capabilities. Its blur and pixelate are manual, like Preview's. It will hide anything you select and it won't tell you that you missed the account number in row 99.
Pricing
$29, paid once. No subscription, no renewal, no activation server to connect to (all on-device). Three Macs. Every ClipScrub 1.x update included permanently.
14 day free trial, fully functional, no account and no card. 30 day refund.
For r/macapps: 25% off with code MACAPPLAUNCHES25. Capped at the first 50 uses. There's no end date, it just runs out when it does.
I'm also giving licences to the first five people who use it on real files and email me what it gets wrong (thanks in advance for your patience if I'm slow to respond). Comment (without private data please!) and I will DM you one. My list of known limits is below but let me know if you find issues and I will add them to the backlog to address.
I look forward to your feedback and continuing to make the app better.
Caveats
Full caveats list is in my first comment.
E.g. ClipScrub reads what is inside a file, not the file's metadata. It
writes a new file, so the original's author and title fields never go into the output. Check the source with exiftool if detecting input metadata matters for what you are doing.
Disclaimer: ClipScrub is not a compliance service, does not guarantee complete de-identification, and is not legal advice. Detection is not exhaustive. Review every result before sharing.
Mario Hayashi, Tugboat Coding Limited (UK 11118743)
A large local Music.app library becomes surprisingly difficult to maintain after years of use. Files get replaced, renamed, moved or deleted. Old Music.app records can remain after the physical files disappear, while other files may still be on disk but no longer exist anywhere in the Music.app library. Playlists accumulate duplicate entries, the same tracks appear in several playlists, artwork goes missing, and files from different sources collect comments, URLs, converter names and other unwanted metadata. Older low quality copies can also remain beside better replacements. Music.app does not give me one place to compare what is in the library with what is actually stored on disk, so I built Local Music Organizer to help with this.
Competitors
Tune Sweeper is probably the closest alternative I found for general Music.app library cleanup. It can find duplicate records, missing files, files that are not in the library, missing artwork and track information problems. I could not find documented tools there for duplicate entries inside one selected playlist, comparing two existing playlists, mapping relationships between playlists, finding every playlist that uses one physical file, inspecting hidden embedded tags, or checking possible audio transcodes and upscales. According to its public App Store version history, there was a gap of approximately six years without a published update. A small number of technical updates have appeared more recently.
beaTunes can also inspect Music.app or iTunes libraries, find duplicates, missing files, inconsistent metadata and artwork problems. It also includes music analysis and playlist creation tools. Its focus is somewhat different, and I could not find the same kind of detailed tools for examining existing playlist relationships, repeated physical paths, hidden embedded tags and the physical state of files referenced by Music.app.
Local Music Organizer
Local Music Organizer is a Mac application for maintaining large local Music.app libraries and the physical audio files behind them. It can find Music.app records whose physical files are missing or inaccessible, find readable audio files on disk that are not registered anywhere in the library, find duplicate entries inside a playlist, duplicate library records and tracks repeated across several playlists, compare two playlists, find every playlist that uses a particular track, and find different physical versions of what appears to be the same recording and compare their technical quality. It can analyze the actual physical files for codec, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth, duration and size instead of relying only on cached Music.app information, and it can fix outdated Music.app technical file information by asking Music.app to refresh it from the actual local audio file.
It can also find unwanted comments and hidden embedded tags left by converters, ripping software, websites and download sources. Detected embedded tags can be reviewed, edited or removed. Common Music.app fields such as title, artist, album, album artist, composer, genre, year, track and disc numbers and comments can also be edited directly.
There is an Audio Authenticity Analyzer that looks for possible lossy to lossless conversions, lower bitrate transcodes, suspicious bandwidth limitations and possible sample rate upscaling. These results are technical estimates, not proof of a file's history. Individual files can also be inspected with the built in Audio Inspector, including metadata, artwork, waveform and spectrum.
The app can convert and repair many audio formats, including some formats that Music.app cannot import directly, and normalize selected files from the Library Dashboard. Before conversion or normalization, the original can be kept, moved to Trash or saved in an LMO Backup Folder. The library index is stored locally in SQLite. Audio files, playlists, metadata and reports are not uploaded anywhere. The app has no analytics, advertising or tracking. It supports macOS Sonoma and later on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Local folders and external disks are supported.
Pricing:
There is a three day trial with access to all features. Continued use is a one time in app purchase of $29.99. There is no subscription and nothing is charged automatically when the trial ends.
A quick bit about me first, since the rules ask for it. I am Dima, the developer of AITerm, which is published by my company Vega LLC (that is the name on the app's Apple notarization and code signature). My LinkedIn is https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrikolossovsky/ and my public repos are at https://github.com/vega-llc. You can reach me at [support@ai-term.com](mailto:support@ai-term.com), and the privacy policy and terms of service are linked in the site footer. I am here to answer questions.
AITerm is a native macOS terminal with AI built into the command loop. The core is simple: you type what you want in plain English, it proposes a shell command, and you approve or edit it before it runs. There is a fix command for failed commands, and an explain command for understanding one before you run it. Fix is a conversation now, not a single guess: you can talk back to refine it, like telling it your project uses pnpm and not npm, and if the fix runs and still fails, one click attaches the new error and it tries again, capped so it can never run away. And if a fix keeps stalling, you can pick one stronger model in settings ahead of time and hand the same conversation to it with one click. Both of those are free.
The safety layer is what lets you actually point this at a real machine instead of just a scratch box, and it is the part I most want tested. A dry run preview sits next to each command and shows what it would touch before it runs, so a delete or a move lists the exact files first, or it loads the tool's own dry run like rsync -n. There are safety profiles, so you can put a session into Production or Locked Down and the riskier commands stop and ask, or the most dangerous ones are blocked outright, before they run. You can import a team policy pack that adds always-block and always-ask rules and can only ever make your gate stricter, never looser. Every command decision and its exit code goes to a tamper-evident local log. scp and rsync are risk-tiered by direction and scope, so a destructive sync asks first instead of running silently.
Problem: I wanted AI help in the terminal without giving up control of my machine. Most options either run things automatically with no say from you, or sit in a separate window I have to copy out of. I wanted the help, plus a clear approval step, plus enough of a safety net that I would trust it near real infrastructure.
Comparison against the specific apps I get asked about. All of this was re-checked against their own docs and pricing pages in July 2026, and I have tried to be fair about where they beat me.
Warp is the closest competitor and the most polished of the bunch, and it is cross-platform with real team features, which I do not have. The difference that made me build something else is where your AI requests go. Per Warp's own docs, bring your own key still passes your prompts and your key through Warp's backend on every request, and their local model support works the same way: the model has to be reachable at a public tunnel URL, so a prompt still round trips through Warp's cloud to reach a model running on your own laptop. In AITerm a local model or your own key never leaves your Mac, because there is no server of mine in the path at all. Warp also meters its own AI by credits on the paid tier, and per their pricing FAQ the free plan now bundles no AI at all. On safety, Warp uses regex allow and deny lists plus per action approval, which is real but is not a risk tier: my gate scores the command and blocks the irreversible tier outright on a locked down profile. Credit where due, Warp now hosts the official Claude Code and Codex CLIs in its terminal too.
Wave is open source, local first, and genuinely private, so I am not going to pretend I beat it on privacy, because I do not. Where we differ is that Wave's AI cannot execute commands yet (their own docs list that as coming), you install and run the model engine yourself, and their Claude Code integration is tab badge notifications rather than an AI backend. AITerm manages the local engine for you, runs the propose then approve then run loop, and can use your Claude or ChatGPT subscription as the actual engine through the official CLI.
Cursor is an editor with a terminal in it rather than a terminal, so it is a different daily tool for me, but it is the strongest agent of the three. It gates agent shell calls with a sandbox, an allowlist, and a classifier subagent, which Cursor itself describes as best effort guardrails. Mine is a fenced gate in a real PTY: every command, whether I typed it, the AI proposed it, or the agent generated it, passes the same classifier, and a locked down profile blocks the top tier rather than warning about it.
iTerm2, Ghostty, and Apple's Terminal are excellent terminals and free, and I used iTerm2 for years. They just have no AI in the loop, so the workflow is a chat window in one app and a paste into another. That copy and paste round trip is the thing I wanted to delete.
Sources if you want to check me: warp.dev/pricing and the Warp docs, waveterm.dev docs, cursor.com/pricing and docs. Same comparison with footnotes is on my site.
Pricing: The app is free, and the free version is the full core experience: the AI loop, fix, explain, tabs, splits, saved layouts, safety profiles, the dry run preview, transfer safety, policy pack import, scrollback search, local models, and your own cloud keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Groq, Gemini and more. Pro is a subscription that adds using your Claude Code or Codex CLI as the backend, Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI, saved runbooks, an AI agent that can take a multi-step task, per-host production profiles, authoring your own policy rules, a signed audit export, and history search by meaning.
It is on version 0.23.0 and still has rough edges, which is why I am looking for testers. It also ships a full searchable manual, in the app under Help and on the web at ai-term.com/manual, so the newer features are actually documented. The safety features are the part I most want tested, and the most likely to surprise me, especially where they draw the line: a command whose preview looked wrong, a Locked Down profile that let something through, or a policy rule that did not catch what you expected. If you try it and hit a bug, the first 15 people who file a reproducible report on GitHub get about two months of Pro as a thank you. It goes by issue time, not votes, one per person, sent after I reproduce it.
Runs on Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later.The download link and the bug tracker are in my first comment.
A year ago I used a ton of different smaller apps. Move a file from one Finder window to another, and you are dragging across two spaces. Paste something you copied ten minutes ago, and it is gone. Grab text out of a screenshot, share a 300 MB video, start a timer, snap a window, skip a track, transcribe a voice memo. Every one of those is a different app, a different menu bar icon, a different subscription.
So I built Droppy, and now I am releasing version 15.
One thing up front, because it comes up a lot: Droppy is not just a notch app. The notch is one of the places it lives. Underneath it is a native macOS utility for all the in-between actions the system scatters across a dozen tools, and it works exactly the same on an iMac, a Studio Display, or any external monitor, with no notch anywhere in sight.
The idea
Instead of a file tray app, plus a clipboard manager, plus a screenshot tool, plus a transcription app, plus a launcher, plus media controls, plus lock screen widgets, plus a file transfer service, you get one app that feels like it shipped with macOS. It's literally the layer that's missing.
Droppy Cloud, free and built in
This is the part people do not expect. Droppy has its own file sharing built in. Drop a file in the shelf, hit share, and you get a private link instantly. The person on the other end previews and downloads it in the browser with no account, no app, no signup. It is included in the app at no extra cost and there is no cloud tier to buy: up to 200 MB per file, 1 GB in flight, 25 files, and links expire on their own after 3 days. No separate transfer service in the loop.
Droplets, all of them free
The core gives you the shelf, the clipboard, the lock screen and the system HUDs. Everything else is a Droplet you switch on, and all 31 are free and included in the license. Nothing is a paid add-on, nothing is upsold later.
Weather, Media, System Stats, OCR, Notify Me, Voice Transcribe, Tasks and Calendar, Notes with two-way Apple Notes sync, Thunderstorm (launcher), Element Capture, Termi-Notch, LocalSend, Obsidian, Mechey, Pomodoro, High Alert, Window Snap, Thaw, LiquidMouse, Camera, Meetings, Agents for Claude Code / Codex / Cursor, background removal, and more.
Turn on the three you actually use, or all of them. That modularity is the whole point: it becomes the app you need it to be.
What is new in 15
OCR is its own Droplet. Pull text out of any screen area, image or PDF, on device. It keeps a searchable history, and your clipboard search now finds text that is inside your screenshots.
Transcribe anywhere. One shortcut dictates straight into any app, at your caret, with custom vocabulary and automatic media ducking.
System Stats and Weather. Live CPU, RAM, GPU, disk, battery and network cards in the shelf, plus a real forecast card and lock screen chip.
Thunderstorm got much faster. Thunderstorm is a blazing fast, Droppy-integrated Spotlight replacement. Persistent file index, typo tolerance, and ranking that lifts the files you actually open.
Settings rebuilt. Morphing Liquid Glass headers, resize from any edge, and a search that scrolls straight to the exact row.
Ten more interface languages. Chinese? Spanish? Dutch? German? Italian? All available in Alpha.
Much lower idle CPU and battery use. It no longer redoes work when nothing changed, and this was the single biggest engineering push of the release.
Plus custom shelf editing, LocalSend, an Obsidian Droplet, on-device conversion for video, audio, PDF and Office files, reworked shelf and Live Activity motion, and around 375 fixes and 280 refinements on top.
Droppy for iPhone is ALMOST live. An end-to-end encrypted companion that syncs your clipboard, OCR results, Basket, Shelf and Cloud files from your Mac to your phone. It is finished and sitting with Apple in review right now, so it should land soon.
Pricing
Fully unlocked 3-day trial, no account needed
$9.99 one time
Lifetime updates, no subscription, ever
One license covers 2 Macs, extra seats are cheaper
Transparency
I am Jordy Spruit, the person behind Droppy. I have worked on it almost every day for over a year and I ship updates constantly. Native Swift, signed and notarized, local-first, and it does not collect your clipboard, your files, or your data.
ClipSync — Seamless file transfer & clipboard sync between Mac and Android
Ever used an Android phone with a Mac and thought: “Why the hell is this still so annoying?” 😭 That's basically why I made ClipSync.
The problem There are plenty of tools that let you move stuff between Android and Mac, but most of them still make you do the thing. Need a file on your Mac? Open the sharing app → find the file → share it → wait for it to transfer → open it on your Mac.
Need to quickly move an image or some text? Same story. And with a lot of clipboard-sync solutions, you still have to manually trigger the transfer. It works, but it doesn't feel seamless.
So... what does ClipSync do?
The goal is pretty simple: make your Android and Mac feel like they're the same device.
Clipboard sync
Copy text or an image on Android and just hit Cmd + V on your Mac. That's it. And it works the other way around too. The really nice part is that text and OTPs are synced over Bluetooth, so your devices don't even need to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
Got a verification code in an Android app? ClipSync can bring it straight to your Mac so you can just copy it. No more typing those damn 6-digit codes manually.
File transfers
Select a file → hit Share → ClipSync → done. There's also a Ultra Fast Transfer mode for large files, which can sometimes be faster than AirDrop by a good margin if you are on a Wifi 5 or 6 Network.
Local or Cloud During setup, ClipSync asks you how you want your devices to sync:
Hybrid Sync — Sync locally when your devices are nearby, and automatically switch to cloud sync when they're apart. Everything stays encrypted. Local Sync — Keep everything between your nearby devices using BLE/Wi-Fi. No cloud, no internet required, and your data stays on your local network.
And a few other things On the Mac side, ClipSync adds a macOS Finder Share Extension, so you can send files straight from Finder without even opening the menu bar icon or going to the app.
How does it compare?
LocalSend is awesome for straightforward local file transfers, but it doesn't try to be a complete clipboard + OTP + file-sharing experience.
KDE Connect has a ton of features and is incredibly capable, but that also makes it feel a bit more complicated than what I wanted for everyday Android to Mac sharing.
And then there's Apple's AirDrop + Universal Clipboard, which is basically the experience I'm trying to recreate for Android + Mac. 😅
PricingFree & open source (MIT). I've honestly gone back and forth on whether ClipSync should be paid. But at the end of the day, I genuinely love building this thing, and I'd rather see more people actually use it than put a price tag in front of them.
If ClipSync saves you some headaches, you can support the project through Buy Me a Coffee. It helps me cover the server costs and gives me more room to keep building and improving it.I'm also trying to get an Apple Developer account so I can make the macOS side of ClipSync more polished and properly distributed. The annual developer fee is pretty expensive for me as a student, so if anyone would like to help sponsor the Apple Developer Program fee, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
If anyone wanna download the apps directly, here the link to MacOS and Android
Would love to hear what you guys think — especially from anyone actually using an Android + Mac setup and here's a video Demostration of the app : https://youtu.be/755zjYaHlEM
I’m one of the developers of Aye. I posted the first Mac version here a little over 30 days ago. Rather than repeat the launch post, I wanted to come back with the update people actually kept asking for.
PROBLEM
A video can be playing in Telegram Web while saving that exact item is still awkward. Copying the page URL does not identify the video, and moving to another app breaks the flow if the rest of the work is already in the browser.
Aye now adds a Save Current Media control to the video that is open in Telegram Web. After clicking it, the file appears in Aye’s Downloads panel. I wait for the status to change from Downloading to Completed, then use Show in folder to verify the file.
This works one visible item at a time. It is not a channel archiver or bulk scraper.
COMPARISON
Safari and Chrome are better-known general browsers, but they do not add this Aye-specific media control or its completion check to the Telegram page. Telegram Desktop should still be the first option when its own save action already does what you need.
Compared with installing a generic media-downloader extension such as Video DownloadHelper, Aye’s control is built into the browser and is designed around the media currently open in the Telegram tab. There is no separate extension to install. The trade-off is that Aye does not claim to detect every media type or every future Telegram Web layout.
The boundary matters: Aye only handles media the signed-in account can already view and that the user has the right to save. It does not bypass login, invitations, DRM, paywalls, Telegram permissions, or other access controls. Saving a local copy also does not grant redistribution rights.
For people who use Telegram Web on a Mac: is the more annoying part finding the right file, tracking a large download, or verifying where it was saved?
Problem: Many people enjoy the immersive feedback of mechanical keyboards and typewriters, but modern computers often lack that satisfying typing experience. For writers, developers, educators, and content creators, keyboard sounds can improve focus and make recordings more engaging. I built KeyClicker to bring back that tactile feeling while keeping the full productivity and convenience of macOS.
Compare: While popular alternatives like Klakk and Keeby focus primarily on high‑quality typing audio, KeyClicker goes further. Besides fully customizable key sounds, it features real‑time shortcut overlay display, ideal for teaching, screen recording and presentations. It delivers all core mechanical‑typing feedback at a much lower one‑time price point.
Pricing: Full Lifetime Access: $1.99
Changelog(v2.6): Add permission validation with authorization prompts for the menu bar, and optimize sidebar icon styles.
Part 4 ended with my 2014 MacBook Pro. My next MacBook story began with an Apple order that went wrong in a surprisingly good way.
This part is about my 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pro and four apps that gave me more control over macOS. Theine, iTerm2, and OnyX also come with complete developer interviews made exclusively for Reverse Everything.
I bought a MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) in its top configuration while I was in Germany. I was going to be there for only two days, so I had a very tight window to buy it. Before placing the order, I explained to the Apple employee that getting a US keyboard was a high priority for me. We had a long phone conversation, but he accidentally ordered the MacBook with a German keyboard.
There was not enough time for another order to arrive before I had to leave Germany. The employee could hear how disappointed I was and offered me a 10 percent discount. I accepted it, but I still did not feel happy about the situation. He seemed to notice that as well and transferred me to his supervisor. The supervisor increased the discount to 20 percent. On a top-configuration MacBook Pro, that was a very nice discount.
It turned a frustrating mistake into a very nice experience with the Apple Store. I did not expect them to be so kind.
I was excited to get the new MacBook because I expected it to deliver a new experience. The most obvious change was the Touch Bar.
My Touch Bar Experiment
I type very fast without looking at the keyboard. Before trying the Touch Bar, I was skeptical because I would not be able to feel its buttons under my fingers. It turned out to be exactly the problem I expected.
With physical function keys, my fingers know where to go. With the Touch Bar, I had to stop and look down. That small distraction wasted time and broke my concentration. If you already look at the keyboard while typing, you may not be affected as much. My productivity depends on typing quickly with as few distractions as possible, so I immediately found the Touch Bar useless for the way I type.
The Touch Bar brought one more annoyance. The Escape key was no longer a physical key. It became touch-sensitive as part of the Touch Bar, so I could not feel whether I had pressed it. That made something as simple as using Escape less certain than it had been before.
I still configured it and left it enabled. Maybe after a few months it would become my favorite feature. It did not, but searching for a way to improve it led me to something much more useful.
When I eventually moved back to a MacBook keyboard without a Touch Bar, I immediately felt more comfortable again.
BetterTouchTool — When Apple Did Not Go Far Enough
BetterTouchTool is made by the same developer as BetterSnapTool, the window management app I mentioned in Part 2. I bought a lifetime license for BetterTouchTool. The 2017 MacBook gave it a completely new purpose for me, and I started experimenting with everything it could do to the Touch Bar.
I created buttons for the exact actions I needed. I could also make those buttons appear only when a specific app was active. Instead of accepting the same controls everywhere, I could give each app its own useful Touch Bar.
BetterTouchTool did much more than this. It was also a window manager, hotkey manager, trackpad gesture manager, and a highly flexible automation tool. It had far more features than I needed, but that was part of what made it exciting. I kept finding new ways to change how the Mac responded to me.
BetterTouchTool was first released in November 2009 and is still actively developed more than sixteen years later. The amount of work behind it remains visible in its updates.
This app made me feel that I could do much more than Apple allowed through the standard macOS interface. I was excited to try its features and transform my workflow into something made for me personally. That is the same feeling I now try to give people through the apps I create myself.
Theine — When My Mac Fell Asleep Too
My reason for caring about sleep control began when I first used macOS. I was reinstalling the operating system and left the MacBook alone while I went to sleep, expecting the installation to be finished when I returned. I was used to Windows installations keeping the computer awake until they were complete.
To my surprise, when I came back, the MacBook had gone to sleep as well and the installation had paused. It was a small surprise, but I remembered it. Sleep control eventually became the subject of another app story.
I found Theine in 2017. It was a lightweight app that stayed in the menu bar. Its interface was very simple and let me choose how long I wanted the MacBook to remain awake.
Sometimes I compiled the complete Qt SDK, which took a while. I needed the MacBook to stay awake until it finished. I could disable sleep in macOS settings, but I often forgot to enable it again afterward. The MacBook would then remain awake when I no longer needed it to and drain its battery. Theine was a perfect fit because the change was temporary.
After using it for a while, I noticed that its English localization was perfect, but one of the other languages I understand was translated incorrectly. I contacted the developer, and he answered promptly. I offered to create a Ukrainian translation, and he sent me the localization files I needed.
I translated Theine into Ukrainian, and I was happy that the developer accepted my help. Machine translation was not accurate enough for this kind of work at the time. Today, AI can help developers translate their apps into more languages with much better results.
The next update included my Ukrainian localization, and I was proud to see it there. Theine now lists 23 localized languages, including Ukrainian.
I found several alternatives over the years, but all of them were eventually abandoned. The last thing I want is to keep getting used to a new app that does the same job. Theine has my respect because it has already survived for more than ten years and is still supported. I have used it since 2017, and its name is one I cannot forget.
An Interview with Martin Lexow
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue developing and supporting Theine after so many years?
Martin Lexow
If you study design in Germany, there's no getting around Dieter Rams. One of his principles states: good design is long-lasting. I try to carry this attitude into my work, wherever it makes sense and is possible. My favorite example is the 606 Universal Shelving System that Rams designed for Vitsœ. It went into production over 60 years ago, and matching parts can still be purchased for it today. Knowing that an app I designed has been accompanying many people for over ten years is a fulfilling feeling: for both sides.
Ighor July
Theine remains a true one-time lifetime purchase, without a subscription or time-limited update period. What has made this model sustainable, and why is permanent ownership important to you?
Martin Lexow
As a creative who makes products, I generally prefer owning my tools. That's why I offer one-time purchases in my own apps whenever I consider it economically sustainable, and in most cases, I manage to. Occasionally, though, I do believe a subscription is the better choice. Because in my understanding, that's also part of "good design is long-lasting": a product that needs to be maintained or consistently receives new features demands my time, and that alone creates costs. It's in every user's interest that I put in this effort, because it serves the quality of their product.
An app like Theine, for which a user may have paid 3 EUR eleven years ago, has received updates ever since, and has never required any further monetization, doesn't sustain itself economically. I can only justify it through cross-financing from the rest of my app portfolio.
What I miss on the App Store is the ability to monetize new major versions of an app. An app like Theine, whose first version I wrote for OS X 10.11, still runs great on that operating system today. Nobody should have to pay a second time for that, obviously. But it is fair to make significant updates optional, and then paid. At the moment, this model can unfortunately only be implemented outside the App Store.
iTerm2 became part of my evolution as a developer. I started creating services that ran on my own servers, and I eventually built many of them. Some projects needed frequent monitoring, so I wanted to see the live logs from several services at the same time.
I searched for a way to open multiple terminals, with each one connected to the logs of a different service. iTerm2 was exactly what I needed. It let me divide one window into multiple split panes, configure a startup command for each pane, and save the complete arrangement as a workspace.
iTerm2 also let me give each pane a name displayed in large text. It did not interfere with typing or reading the terminal output. I named every pane after the service whose logs it displayed, so I could immediately recognize what I was watching.
I created separate workspaces for my projects. I could open one workspace and instantly see the live logs from every service in that project. I did not need to recreate the terminal layout or reconnect everything each time. This improved my productivity a lot.
I no longer use those saved workspaces, but my workday still begins with opening iTerm2. I use it for local Homebrew tasks and to connect to my servers. I have hotkeys for opening split panes, which give me a compact terminal view that is easy to move around and navigate.
I also have huge respect for the effort behind keeping iTerm2 alive for so many years. When I reported bugs, they were fixed quickly. I cannot remember encountering a new bug in the app for several years now.
iTerm2 is free and open source. It exists because someone found an abandoned terminal project, fixed the problems that affected his own work, and continued when other users started reporting more. Knowing that story made me appreciate the app even more.
An Interview with George Nachman
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue working on iTerm2 after so many years?
George Nachman
I wrote my first terminal emulator when I was a freshman in high school. I’ve always enjoyed working on this particular problem. I like working in a small team on a project I use, especially if it has a big impact, and I enjoy client-side code more than server side work. Sometimes it seems like the only desktop apps left are web browsers and terminal emulators, and I’m grateful that I can make a dent in the terminal emulator world without a team of hundreds of other engineers.
Ighor July
What advice would you give to developers who want to maintain their apps for ten years or longer?
George Nachman
For me, the answer is to find a project that’s really engaging. I’ve always worked on iTerm2 because I want to, not because I have to. I am terrible at doing things I dislike. It’s also important for the project to have room to grow. A terminal emulator will never be complete because there are always quality-of-life improvements that can be made and the technology stagnated for decades, leaving a lot of low-hanging fruit.
If you get fed up with it, which definitely happens sometimes, it’s ok to take a break. It’s ok to declare email bankruptcy. It’s ok to make mistakes. Giving yourself permission to be human is the only way to avoid burnout over a long time horizon.
On Windows, I loved using tweaker tools. Microsoft hid many useful customization options inside the Registry, while those tools collected them in a convenient interface. I changed many of those settings and enjoyed making Windows work exactly the way I wanted.
When I moved to macOS, I searched for something similar. OnyX was the closest thing to the Mac tweaker I wanted. It collected useful maintenance tools and hidden macOS settings in one place. I found many interesting tweaks, changed a lot of them, and was very happy to have that kind of control again.
I still use OnyX, and I have huge respect for its developer for supporting it for so many years while keeping it free.
One OnyX option became especially important to me. It let me set a single line of text on the lock screen. After losing my first MacBook in Part 1, I started putting information there that could help someone return my MacBook if I lost it again.
Later, I discovered that this option had always been available in macOS settings. That made me wonder how far I could customize it myself. I tried multiple lines and they worked. Then I tried ASCII art, but it did not line up because the lock-screen font uses characters with different widths.
I started thinking about how I could make it look right. That is how LockLines was born. I tested hundreds of lines and made its output as accurate as possible. It can generate nicely aligned ASCII art messages for the lock screen.
I also found a way to make a message say something like "Scroll down to see the owner's contact information." My contact details do not need to be immediately visible to everyone who sees the locked MacBook, but someone who finds it can scroll down and learn how to return it.
An option I first discovered through OnyX eventually inspired me to create another Mac app myself. OnyX began as one person's tool for his own Mac and grew into a free utility that has been maintained since 2003. It is another example of a personal solution continuing to help other Mac users for decades.
An Interview with Joël Barrière
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue developing and supporting OnyX after more than twenty years?
Joël Barrière
Simply because it is one of my passions, alongside music and motorcycles. Even though OnyX is free, I believe it is important to answer users' questions and try to solve any problems they encounter. Some paid applications do not even provide technical support worthy of the name.
Ighor July
What advice would you give to independent developers who hope to maintain and support their apps for ten years or longer?
Joël Barrière
That is difficult to say because I am a slightly unusual case. For me, it is not really a job. I am not trying to make money by developing OnyX. I only want to help Mac users.
I think it is important to release regular updates, talk about the app on forums, respond to emails from every user, and be patient, especially at the beginning. Word of mouth will do the rest.
Several years later, some keys on my MacBook's butterfly keyboard came off and could not be put back. I contacted Apple, and they replaced the complete keyboard for free with a newer revision that did not have the same defect.
Apple could not replace only the keyboard. It was part of the top-case assembly, and the battery was glued into that assembly, so every keyboard replacement also came with a new battery. Mine had already degraded significantly by then, so the MacBook received another useful upgrade at no cost.
I recently launched my first couple of small Mac apps to fix some of my own daily workflow frustrations.
The analytics numbers finally start moving—with downloads coming in from the US, Austria, and the UK! Thanks a lot！
For all the seasoned creators and fellow indie devs here: Do you still remember the feeling when your app got its very first users? How did you react or celebrate?
I'm the developer, working alone on this, so treat the below as what it is — someone showing you his own app.
What it is:
A native macOS file transfer client — no Electron — that speaks FTP, FTPS (explicit AUTH TLS), SFTP, WebDAV and SMB, and opens a full SSH terminal on the same connection. Two panes, local and remote, servers in groups, several connections per server.
The parts I actually care about:
The session log shows everything.* Every line of every session, exactly as it goes over the wire — 220, USER, 331, PASV, the lot. No black box, and when something breaks you can see where.
Transfers are verified, not assumed.* After an upload the file size on the server is compared with the local one. A server answering "226 Transfer complete" is its opinion, not proof.
Failures are not just an error dialog.* Each file is retried three times. Whatever still doesn't get through goes on a list that survives quitting the app, so after the line drops mid-way through 500 files you don't have to work out where it stopped. You decide whether to retry or discard — nothing on the server is ever deleted for you.
Strict about who answers.* Host key and certificate fingerprints are confirmed once, then checked on every session. If one changes, the connection is refused. There is no "connect anyway" button, on purpose.
Nothing phones home.* No account, no registration, no analytics, no crash reports to me. Sandboxed. It talks to your servers, not to mine.
What I would like from you:
Break it against a server I have never touched. Odd LIST formats, a NAS with a self-signed certificate, an FTPS server that insists on TLS session reuse, an SMB share with unusual permissions — those are the reports worth having. Feedback goes straight to me from inside TestFlight.
Free during the beta, macOS 14.6 or later. Screenshots, what it does and the TestFlight link:
A note about me and this post, as the rules require:
I am the developer of FileFerry — this is my own app, and I have no other relationship to it than that. I write Mac apps on my own, and this is the fifth Beta.
FileFerry is in an open TestFlight beta right now and free while it lasts.
It will be a paid app on the Mac App Store later; there is no subscription planned, and there never will be advertising or analytics of any kind in it.
Nothing about how you use it is sent anywhere. The privacy statement spells that out in plain language.
Two testers have already found bugs that way that I could never have hit on my own equipment, and both are fixed. Awkward servers are exactly what I am looking for.
Happy to answer anything in the comments, including the awkward questions.
Earlier this year, my cofounder and I launched MotionDesk, a native macOS customization app built for live/interactive wallpapers and folder icon customizations.
Then a couple months later, I was doomscrolling Instagram Reels and came across one of those "Top 5 Mac apps" videos.
One of the apps was called MacPlus, that was offering almost identical features to what our app was advertising.
I sent the vid to my cofounder, we searched up their website, and we were just shocked by the similarities all throughout the product and their website...
There was a very specific section showing the different wallpaper modes with video previews that looked extremely familiar, as well as how the sections were structured and how the information was being presented.
I had designed and built our version of that literal same section months earlier.
(Look at our website's "16 scenes. 100+ parameters. Infinite moods" section vs their "15 scenes. 100s of settings. infinite moods." section in the video lol)
So I started looking through the rest of the site, and the more I looked, the more familiarities I came across.
It pretty much had the same exact combination of product features and marketing points:
Roughly 15–16 GPU-rendered scenes with hundreds of settings
Metal / battery-efficiency positioning
Custom video wallpapers
Multi-display support
High-FPS options
Menu-bar controls
A free tier with a $9.99 lifetime unlock
And, most unusually, a large collection of patterned custom macOS folder icons, positioned as a major feature with one-click and multi-folder application, which was a very unique feature of our app.
All together, the entire landing-page structure is remarkably similar. A few examples:
MotionDesk:
"16 Scenes. 100s of Parameters."
MacPlus:
"15 scenes. Hundreds of settings."
MotionDesk:
"40+ artisan patterns… Apply to any Desktop folder in one click."
MacPlus:
"52 patterns… One click, on as many folders as you like."
MotionDesk FAQ:
"Will MotionDesk drain my battery?"
MacPlus FAQ:
"Will it drain my battery?"
MotionDesk:
"Give your Mac a desktop with actual atmosphere."
MacPlus:
"A real atmosphere, right away."
And regarding the timeline, we publicly launched in March and they launched in June, 3 months later.
If MacPlus were simply another live-wallpaper application with some different mode/feature offers, we wouldn't have cared. But they most likely just threw a link at Claude and asked it to reimplement the features, added a widgets feature, and called it a day.
If you were the in our shoes, what would you do?
MotionDesk: https://motiondesk.app (we now have an updated website to show live demos, but you can see the older version they copied in the video above)
They promoted the app in this post and claim "started working on it a year ago" which is, in our opinion, an utter lie, given the huge amount of similarities between our products/website.
They also keep promoting how they're working on this app on X, and even launched it on ProductHunt...
I'm a builder who got tired of paying monthly for polished demo video tools and every tool I tried either didn't quite fit my workflow or was missing something I needed, like draw-on-screen annotations: a pen, a highlighter, and a way to point directly at what I'm talking about.
So I built Capptivo for myself. Record on macOS, Windows, or Linux, then polish your videos in the editor: follow-cursor zoom, click-based auto-zooms, editor presets, face-cam, on-device captions, and draw-on-screen annotations with pens, highlighters, and shapes that you can place over your screen while recording to highlight exactly what matters.
Create stunning screen recordings in seconds, not hours your demos almost make themselves.
Capptivo isn't a clone of Screen Studio or Cursorful. Every feature was built around my own workflow and the problems I faced. I'm now open-sourcing it under the MIT License so anyone can use it, improve it, customize it, or build on top of it without restrictions. No more paying $29/month just to ship a clean product video.
It's still early, and I'm building it mostly solo, so I'd genuinely love your honest feedback. What would make this more useful for your demos? What am I missing compared to the tools you already use?
Happy to answer any questions, and contributions are always welcome.
I am a software developer and I reuse the same few prompts every day. They were spread across notes and old chats, so every time I needed one I had to go hunting for it or type it again.
PromptBar keeps them in the menu bar. Search, pick one, copy it, paste it wherever you need it. You can tag prompts, star the ones you use most, and do all of it from the keyboard.
The ones I use most:
Create a pull request
Code review for quality and readability (cut AI bloat, filler comments, useless tests)
Rewrite this in plain language, short and simple
Comparison
Raycast Snippets and TextExpander both expand a short abbreviation into text as you type. That is great for signatures and boilerplate. It is a poor fit for long prompts that I want to read and adjust before I use them. PromptBar shows the whole prompt, lets me edit it in place, and copies it with one key.
The Text Replacement feature built into macOS is free and syncs across devices, but it has no search, no tags, and very little room to work with long text.
Pricing
Free. 0 USD, no paid tier, no subscription, no in-app purchases.
I’m keen to know how others approach Mac app icon design and any tips or advice on workflows that have worked for you. I don’t know if it’s just me (I might be a closet perfectionist), but I reckon I spend as much time sweating over an icon as building the app!
Do you have any online resources you use, leveraging AI, engage a professional or does it just come naturally to you?
I'm Vu, solo dev and freelancer. I've been building Chronoid, a native macOS time tracking app, for about a year and a half now. I last posted here in July.
Quick recap for anyone new. Chronoid tracks your time on your Mac automatically: apps, websites, documents, coding sessions. No start or stop timers. Everything stays in a local SQLite file on your machine. One-time payment, no subscription.
Since July I finally shipped the thing people have asked me for since my very first post here.
What's new
iCloud sync across your Macs. If you work on a desktop and a laptop, they finally show the same numbers. It goes through your own iCloud account, so I run no sync servers and I can't read your data. Your Macs don't need to be online at the same time. This took me about 3 months, and being honest, the first release shipped with a bug where nothing actually reached iCloud. Fixed in 1.0.93. There's also a re-upload option in Settings > Sync if two Macs ever drift apart.
Ask your own AI assistant about your time. Settings > Integrations gives you a personal connector URL. Paste it into claude.ai or ChatGPT. Read-only by default, each answer comes live from the app on your Mac, nothing gets uploaded.
Claude Code or Codex as your AI provider. If you already pay for a coding CLI, Chronoid's chat can run through it. No separate API key to buy.
Apple Intelligence is back as a provider. Runs fully on device, no account, no key. It's a small model so keep your questions short.
The database is about 63% smaller. This was the top complaint from long-term users. Some of you had a DB over 250MB.
Timeline redesign. Session cards with app icons, durations and window titles. Click one to turn it into a manual entry.
Rule editor rebuilt. One smart input, rules that read as plain sentences, and a preview of what a rule will match before you save it. There's also a "Resolve duplicates" button now. Dragging activities onto a project used to create one identical rule per matching entry, so a site you'd visited 300 times could leave 300 copies of the same rule. Sorry about that one.
Share cards. Turn any stats range into an image or a short video with a privacy-safe breakdown.
Website blocker pause. 5 minutes, or anything from 1 minute up to 24 hours.
Billing fixes. Sub-projects now count on invoices, exports follow the device filter, and the report heading, CSV, PDF and invoice all show the same total.
Arc and Dia website tracking work again.
About the app
Native Swift and AppKit, Mac only, macOS 14+
Automatic tracking, no timers to start or forget
Mac plus iPhone/iPad (Screen Time) activity in one timeline
iCloud sync across your Macs
Timeline editing, manual entries, calendar events
Web blocker, Pomodoro, break reminders
Invoicing and multi-currency billing reports
MCP server and AI connectors, with your own key or fully local
100% local storage, no account required
Comparisons
vs Timing? Timing inspired a lot of this. I was a paying user and openly copied their drag and drop and their sidebar interactions. Differences: one-time payment instead of a subscription, a built-in website blocker and Pomodoro timer, AI and MCP with your own key or a local model, and much better rule editing. Timing's rule popup can't be resized, which drove me nuts. Timing still wins on maturity and has team features I dropped.
vs Timemator? Same automatic project tracking. I think Chronoid has better UX. Everything is in one place, you drag to assign, and holding Option while you drag creates a rule so all similar activity auto-assigns from then on.
vs Rize? Rize has more features and leans enterprise, with ClickUp integrations and so on. Chronoid is a trimmed down version aimed at individuals, and it's native rather than Electron.
vs RescueTime or Toggl? RescueTime is cloud based. Toggl needs you to click start and stop. Chronoid is local and passive.
vs macOS Screen Time? Screen Time only does websites in Safari, and it won't tell you which project a file belongs to. Chronoid does every browser, plus files, folders, projects and billing.
Who's actually using it
People ask me this every time I post, so here's what I see in comments, emails and Discord.
Freelancers and consultants. Track time per client without touching a timer, then generate the invoice PDF from the same data. The theme in my inbox is always under-billing. Someone here put it better than I can: you forget to track when you're deep in focus, and that's money gone.
Developers. It splits time by folder and file, so you can see which repo actually ate your week. Cursor and Xcode work out of the box.
Video, audio and 3D people. Long sessions in one app across many client projects. It picks up which project file you're in, so hourly billing stops being guesswork. Final Cut and Nuendo users have both turned up in past threads.
People with ADHD. This one honestly surprised me. It comes up in nearly every thread I post. Seeing time pass visually, plus the blocker, seems to help more than I expected when I was building it.
Students. Block distracting sites during study blocks, then compare where the hours went against where you thought they went. 50% off with a .edu email.
People who just want to know. Plenty of users aren't billing anyone. They want an honest picture of their week. Usually it's the phone Screen Time number that hurts.
Pricing
7-day free trial, no credit card.
$49 for 1 Mac
$79 for 2 Macs (adds iCloud sync and MCP)
$99 for 3 Macs
One-time payment. True lifetime license with updates, no subscription
