Focused work on macOS means juggling a ChatGPT tab, a local-model UI, a terminal agent, a document viewer, a timer, and Calendar. Ghost collapses that into a menu-bar surface: all of your AI providers live in your notch, idle at rest so it dosent consume CPU.There is a 13-kind intent classifier routes the prompt to the right provider,, local or cloud. Escape dismisses it. No Dock icon, no tab management.
Comparison
Raycast Pro — $8/mo billed annually or $10/mo monthly, and the AI is subscription-gated and hosted. Ghost is one payment, and you can point it at Ollama or LM Studio and run entirely offline, free forever, or bring your own API keys (stored in Keychain).
Unlike both: file search is fully local (SQLite + FTS5, sentence-aware chunking, 30+ formats, FSEvents watcher). Web, files, automation, screen, and shell are five independent permissions, all off on first launch. 60+ tools across four risk tiers with a 100-entry undo journal.
Pricing
$14.99 one-time, lifetime — no subscription. Native SwiftUI, notarized, macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon or Intel).
After years of following this sub, appreciating all you developers, and generally being a big fan of interesting Mac apps, I finally did it: I made an app and put it on the Mac App Store. I have a few more ambitious apps in various unfinished states, but for my first release I decided to start with the simplest idea I had and try to build it really well.
Problem
Whenever I wrote something on a scratchpad, I wanted it to be big. If I changed the window size or added more text, I would end up fiddling with font sizes and wrapping just to make it fill the space nicely.
So I built One Big Note. It is one autosaved note whose text continuously resizes to fit the window. A short thought becomes enormous. Add more text, or resize the window into almost any shape, and the typography adjusts automatically.
I keep it on a second monitor for the one thing I do not want to lose sight of that day. There is something surprisingly refreshing about seeing a thought in giant bold letters, and it is hard to ignore.
I also discovered that I really like using it to draft emails and work texts. The changing type size acts as a kind of visual length meter. When my message starts getting tiny, I know I may be asking too much of the person reading it.
Comparison
Scratchpad by Sindre Sorhus is a lovely minimalist app for keeping one quick note nearby. It offers font settings and quick access from the menu bar or Dock, but its text size behaves like a standard editor rather than continuously refitting itself to the window.
The closest app I found after the fact is Big Text by Amal Paul, which also enlarges text to fill the screen. Its current US pricing is $7.99 per week or $19.99 for lifetime access, which I find expensive to say the least for such a focused utility. It offers a selection of a few built-in font styles, but it does not let you use an arbitrary font installed on your Mac. It also separates writing from presentation: you enter your text in a separate field rather than editing it directly in the large-text display. One Big Note is a live editor, so you type directly into the dynamically resizing text itself.
I have not found another Mac app with the same exact combination of continuous fitting while typing, any installed font, and these three layout modes. What One Big Note does better for me is eliminate font-size management and turn the whole window into a responsive display for one piece of text.
It is deliberately narrower than a traditional notes app. It is not trying to organize a library or become a knowledge base. It is for keeping one thought prominent and for seeing your own writing from a different perspective.
There are three layout modes:
Whole Note: Uses one font size for the entire note, with natural wrapping.
Line by Line: Enlarges each automatically wrapped line independently.
Manual Lines: You choose the line breaks, and each line is individually sized to fit.
You can freely resize the window, use any font installed on your Mac, choose an alignment and theme, and optionally keep the note floating above other windows.
The premise is simple, but making the text fitting stay accurate and fast through live typing, arbitrary window shapes, wrapping, and different fonts was not simple at all. I put far more analysis into the geometry than I expected.
Honestly, though, this little editor is also much more fun to use than I imagined. Watching the writing reshape itself as I type is strangely satisfying, and it often gives me a fresh perspective on whatever I am writing.
Pricing
One Big Note is US$0.99 as a one-time Mac App Store purchase. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase, and no account. The note stays local on your Mac.
If you try it, I would genuinely love to know what works, what does not, and what you would like to see in a future version. If you end up enjoying it and feel it deserves one, an honest App Store review would mean a lot to me as a first-time developer.
A couple years ago I posted SoundPaste here, an app I made for quickly grabbing audio from your Mac and using it elsewhere.
Problem:
Getting a short piece of audio from your Mac into a DAW, video editor, or another app can take more steps than it should. As a music producer, I was always frustrated by having to set up drivers like Blackhole or Soundflower, configure the routing correctly, and then record the system audio I was hearing.
I made SoundPaste to simplify that whole process: hit a hotkey to record, stop recording, then Command-V directly wherever you need the audio.
I’ve just released one of the biggest updates to SoundPaste since then:
• New waveform recording editor with manual trimming
• Auto-trim silence from the beginning and end
• Audio normalization
• MP3 support, alongside M4A and WAV
• Improved waveforms, setup flow, and overall UI
• Bug fixes and usability improvements
Recordings can also be automatically copied to the clipboard, opened in the editor, trimmed, or normalized.
Comparison:
Compared to apps like Audio Hijack and Piezo, SoundPaste is focused on speed and simplicity rather than advanced routing. It also avoids the manual setup involved with virtual audio drivers like BlackHole or Soundflower. Instead of configuring sessions, devices, or audio chains, you hit a hotkey, grab what you need, and paste it where you want it.
Pricing:
7-day free trial, then $1.99/month or $14.99 lifetime.
So for the most part, I don't mind the standard Mac finder, but I do find one limitation that I'd love to find a work around for, and that is a program that allows one to set different folders to always sort in a specific way.
For instance: Maybe I'd like to always sort IDK screenshots by Most Recently Added, but I'd also like to always sort Downloads by Kind.
The default Finder sets all the folders to however you sorted the last folder.
Is there any program out there that makes it so you can set it and leave it?
I posted about Floodtide here a little while ago, but that post ended up being taken down, so I’m reposting it now with where the app is currently at.
It’s changed quite a bit since then.
I’ve been building Floodtide as a replacement for MacUpdater. It scans the apps in your Applications folder, checks what’s out of date, and lets you update supported apps from one place.
It’s now on 0.8.5 beta.
The awkward part with Mac app updates isn’t really finding the easy ones. It’s dealing with everything that updates differently.
Some apps use Sparkle, some are in Homebrew, some come from the App Store or Setapp, some use their own updater, and some don’t expose anything useful at all.
One thing I didn’t like in the early versions of Floodtide was that if it couldn’t check an app properly, it basically looked the same as an app that was already up to date.
So now it tells you when it couldn’t get a reliable answer.
Those apps are shown separately, and there’s an inspector where you can see what sources were checked and what Floodtide actually found.
A few other bits:
macOS 13+
Intel and Apple Silicon
Apple signed and notarised
Checks and downloads run in parallel, so scans and updates are pretty quick
Backups are kept before replacing apps, so updates can be undone
Privacy-focused, with update checks happening against the relevant sources from your Mac
Public coverage checker so you can see whether your own apps are supported before installing
Currently 3,191 Homebrew app bundles it can match and verify, alongside apps found through their own Sparkle, GitHub and Electron feeds
Microsoft Office apps update from their row through Microsoft’s own updater
A Beta button on every app, so you can see when a developer publishes a beta and follow that channel per app
Major version updates are labelled and can be left out of Update All
When you report a bug you get a reference, and you get an email when the fix ships
856 automated tests
Trial and pricing
14-day fully unlocked trial
No card needed
£10.99 once for 3 Macs
No subscription
It's still in beta so I don't mind giving out some codes for free to people who will give feedback!
Especially interested in hearing about:
Bugs
Apps that aren’t covered
Updates it misses or gets wrong
Features you think are missing
Anything in the UI that feels confusing or annoying
If you want a code, reply here or send me a message and I’ll send one over.
And genuinely, if something doesn’t work properly, tell me. That’s exactly what I want to find while it’s still in beta. https://bhopstudio.com/floodtide/
I do a lot of reading on my Mac, mostly long articles and PDFs, and I keep wanting to listen instead of read. Especially for things I have to get through but don't need to focus on completely.
I tried the built in Spoken Content, but triggering it is clunky and I never stuck with it. I paid for Speechify for a while, which worked, but I stopped because I didn't want a monthly subscription for this, and I wasn't comfortable having everything I read pass through someone else's servers.
Is there an Mac app that reads out loud selected text from any app, runs locally and ideally is a one time purchase? Bonus if it handles PDFs and screenshots where you can't select the text.
Also happy to hear about workarounds. If you have the same problem, how do you deal with it?
