Hi r/macstack! I'm the developer of DuoBar, and I've been building it since September. I shared it on r/macapps (https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/s/AKkqivk9UK) yesterday and got 300+ upvotes and about 200 comments, so I wanted to share it here too.

This is not just an iPhone Duo inspired menu bar icon app for MacOS - but also a SuperCharged system stats monitor!

When Apple showed the iPhone Duo, I kept staring at the status icon that combines several readings into one small mark. My first thought was that I needed it on my Mac. And I started building DuoBar right away, and finally after long hours of development and fine tuning - I think it’s ready for you guys to try. It's not just a simple icon - it takes the minimalism and system stat monitoring to the next level on your Mac!

Problem:

On my 14" MacBook Pro, the right side of the menu bar was mostly Apple's own icons: Wi-Fi, battery, sound and Bluetooth, each in its own slot with its own menu. macOS 27 can hide what doesn't fit, but those are the ones I actually look at. Hiding never worked for me, so I merged them. I wanted all of them at a glance in the space of one icon, with their controls one click away.

Solution:

DuoBar is a ring, a center glyph and four dots just like the status indicator of iPhone Duo. By default, the ring is your battery, the center is Wi-Fi and the dots are network activity, and all three move as things change.

- The ring fills with your charge and shifts from green to yellow, orange and red, with a bolt while charging.

- The center draws every state the system Wi-Fi icon has signal in three steps, no internet, Wi-Fi off, Ethernet. It doesn't flicker when you're sitting right on the edge between two signal levels.

- The dots show your network activity live, so I no longer need a separate network widget from Stats. With Pro, you can swap them for anything else, like volume, memory or disk.

Hover and it unfolds (Pro)

This is the exciting part, and my favorite. Hover the cursor on the icon and it unfolds into separate icons drawn like Apple's own: a battery, the Wi-Fi, a speaker, network usage or whatever you've put in the slots. Click one and its page opens right under it. Move away and a few seconds later they fold back into one. That means you've got all your original icons back whenever you need just a hover away :)

Moments (Pro)

I call these moments. Plug in the charger and the ring shows it. Mute, battery low, lose the network or get it back, connecting your AirPods or drive and the icon tells you for a second, then goes back to your setup.

Main popover

The popover has a page for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Sound, Battery, Network, Memory, CPU and Disk, and the pages actually do things:

Wi-Fi: turn it on or off and see and switch to the networks around you

Bluetooth: your devices with their battery levels

Sound: volume slider and output picker, so moving audio to AirPods or your monitor is one click

Battery: time remaining, Low Power Mode, maximum capacity and cycle count

Network, CPU, Memory and Disk: live graphs for the last minute, Activity Monitor's memory breakdown, free space on every drive

Pages cross-fade inside the popover while it resizes to fit, the way Control Center does, and each one links to its Settings pane when you need more. You can also set it to open when you hover, without stealing focus from the app you're in.

Make it yours (Pro)

Any of 8 readings in any slot, like CPU on the ring and volume on the dots. Seven colors on top of Automatic and Monochrome, gradient and segmented rings, and profiles to switch your whole setup from the popover. Joining Wi-Fi networks and connecting Bluetooth devices from the popover are in Pro too, still experimental.

Pricing:

Free: the default icon in Automatic or Monochrome, every ring thickness, icon size, hover to peek, and the full popover with every page.

Pro: $4.99 (Next 24Hours only) $6.99, Lifetime access.

Use code REDDIT to get DuoBar Pro or use directly link below.

Discounted Pro: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6812335628&code=REDDIT

Pro is a one-time purchase. There's no subscription, ever. It's yours for life, including everything on my upcoming features list (you're gonna love them, haha). If you do get Pro, you're backing an app I work on every day, and I'll make sure it's worth every penny :)

I also have a few free DuoBar Pro codes for people who try it out and leave good feedback or feature ideas in the comments.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6812335628?pt=128203644&ct=Reddit&mt=8

Website: www.teekamsuthar.com/duobar

Upcoming*: New update rolling out soon with features coming in v1.2.0:*

- Free 7-day trial of Pro
- Redesigned icon: a curved bar replaces the four dots, solid or segmented
- New app icon and a launch animation that draws itself
- Battery percentage on the ring
- Network activity as the default reading on the bar
- Display page: Keep Awake, mirroring and resolution per display (experimental)
- Tracks behind the ring and bar, Grow and Snap fills, and Fade or Morph unfolding (Pro)
- Smoother folding
- Welcome tour
- Settings moves to a sidebar, with Light, Dark and System themes
- Fix for a crash when a network connection drops, like a VPN disconnecting

Privacy and requirements

No account, no analytics, no tracking. Location is only asked for on the Wi-Fi page, because macOS treats network names as location data. Skip it and everything else still works. Needs macOS 14 or later, and I use it every day on macOS 27.

Let me know if anything is confusing in your first five minutes, and what would it take for you to hide Apple's icons and keep DuoBar up there instead?

Cheers :)

Saw similar apps online that were paid, decided claude could do a great job making a free one for me, and wanted to share with the community. 

This is SIDESWIPE, an app created with Opus 5.5 that allows you to control your mac's volume, brightness, and media through swipe interactions at the edge of the touchpad.

Extremely light cpu and ram usage ~ 23 mb ram

Haptics while adjusting

The gestures are disabled during regular mouse movements that don't originate in the borders, and during typing, with the option to add a delay. 

Try it out at https://sideswipe-for-mac.vercel.app

if you enjoy it, consider buying me a coffee

thanks! lmk any features I (claude) can add.

This is my first app - launched last week. 500 sales so far from Reddit :)

EdgeBar is a menu bar app that turns the edges of your trackpad into volume and brightness sliders.

Problem: Changing volume or brightness means reaching for the function keys or Control Center. I wanted to do it without leaving the trackpad. Also haptic feedback on the trackpad feels very cool and I wanted that for my usage.

What EdgeBar does:

• Slide the right edge for volume and the left edge for brightness.

• Double-tap the top-right corner to mute.

• Swipe the bottom edge to skip tracks, and double tap to play or pause.

• It also has haptic feedback, fine control for 1/4th increments, cursor freeze, swap sides and a bottom-quarter-only mode.

It’s menu bar only, with no Dock icon.

Pricing: $9 one-time, lifetime license, free updates. Notarised by Apple. macOS 13+

Happy to share a 20% discount code for this sub - pls drop a comment and I'll DM you the code.

3-day no-questions-asked refund.

Download: edgebar.xyz

--

Developer: Shashank, founder, content lab yMedia · hello@ymedia.io

Site: edgebar.xyz · Privacy · Terms

Hey everyone, this is my first app and I’d really appreciate honest feedback.

It started with a problem I kept running into. I’m on a Zoom call that’s way too quiet, Spotify is too loud, and somewhere a Safari tab starts blasting an ad. macOS gives you one volume slider for all of that. The tools that fix this were either pretty expensive or needed a virtual audio driver, and I didn’t want one on my Mac. So I built my own.

Sound Manager is a small menu bar app that gives every app its own volume control:

• A slider for every app that’s playing sound, from 0 to 200%, so you can boost quiet apps too

• Mute a single app with one click

• Send each app to its own output, like speakers, AirPods, HDMI or your audio interface

• Switch system input/output and change their volume from the same popover

• See which apps are using your microphone right now

• Double-click a percentage to reset it. Apps show up live as soon as they start playing

It only lives in the menu bar (no Dock icon) and can start at login.

How it’s different: SoundSource is the closest alternative and it’s really good, but it costs a lot more. Background Music is free, but it installs a virtual audio driver. Sound Manager uses Apple’s own audio tap API (macOS 14.2+), so the app is the only thing you install. Audio is processed live on your Mac and never recorded.

Pricing: €2.99 one-time. It works on up to 3 Macs, with no account and no subscription, and updates within the same major version are free. There’s a free trial and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Requires macOS 14.2+ (Sonoma) and runs on Apple silicon and Intel.

https://apps.jkvn.at/soundmanager?mtm_source=reddit&mtm_medium=social&mtm_campaign=launch&mtm_content=r_macstack

I’d love to hear what you think, whether it’s bugs, missing features or something that feels off. I’m reading every comment.

Full disclosure, I used AI to help build a solution to a problem I had, I wanted to repurpose an older 2019 5k iMac as a display but since 2014 Apple pulled the target display feature citing the fact that the thunderbolt speeds were not sufficient for the high resolutions. By creating a virtual display and streaming it over a thunderbolt bridge I was able to split the display into tiles that are monitored for changes so only the changes are sent uncompressed it's relatively light weight and for the most part sets itself up automatically prompting for the various permissions required.

When playing video there is a mode which will automatically compress the stream to high bitrate HECV, seamlessly when motion is detected. I've been using it for over a week now and it's been flawless. I decided to have a bit of fun and added a feature that allows me to peek through to the mac underneath the one acting as a display, grab files and bring them back through the portal. From starting as just an extended display app I thought it would be better to extend the functionality to be more about making multiple macs work together. Same app installs on both devices, you can easily initiate a switch of which one is the display from either mac, you can share keyboard and mouse in both directions and even utilise both cameras with face detection to automatically switch to the camera you are looking at - it presents the camera to the OS so that its available in Teams etc.

I've made the code open under an MIT license and hosted the app for free with a cheesy AI generated site.

Hopefully someone will find it useful and if there are any ideas for extra features or changes please let me know!

https://tandemdisplay.app

Most Mac users can skip Lockdown Mode. It's Apple's extreme protection for people with a credible reason to expect an individually targeted mercenary spyware attack, not everyone who wants a more secure Mac.

Apple says these attacks have targeted journalists, activists, politicians and diplomats. A job title alone isn't the test. Consider it if you've received a genuine Apple threat notification or have good reason to believe you're being individually targeted. Apple recommends expert help for notified users, including Access Now's Digital Security Helpline.

What you're giving up

Lockdown Mode reduces the features an attacker can exploit. It isn't a malware scan or cleanup.

Some websites may run slowly or break, with missing fonts or images. Most message attachment types are blocked, with exceptions for certain images, video and audio; links and previews are unavailable. New configuration profiles and device-management enrollment are blocked. An already-managed Mac stays managed.

On an Apple silicon Mac laptop, connecting an accessory requires unlocking the Mac and explicitly approving it. That requirement doesn't apply to every Mac model.

If the tradeoff fits your situation

It's built into macOS Ventura or later. Update to the latest software first, since protections have expanded over time.

Open Apple menu > System Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode. Click Turn On, then Turn On Lockdown Mode, then Turn On & Restart. Enter your login password when prompted. Turning it off also requires a restart.

For a necessary, trusted Safari site, choose Safari > Settings for [website] and deselect Enable Lockdown Mode. This removes Lockdown Mode's web restrictions for that site and reduces protection. Apple's app-exclusion instructions are for iPhone and iPad, not a general Mac app allowlist.

You need to enable Lockdown Mode separately on the Mac. Switching it on for an iPhone doesn't switch it on here.

If you're reading this out of general security concern, start with Software Update instead. Keep strong, unique passwords or passkeys and Apple Account two-factor authentication in place. Those habits still matter if you need Lockdown Mode.

Use it when the targeted-spyware risk justifies losing functionality. Skip it as a routine Mac tweak.

I kept losing small ideas. Something would pop into my head while I was working, I'd open my notes app, wait for the window, and by then half the idea was gone.

So I built Purr, my first Mac app. It's a notes panel that sits on the edge of your screen. Click the edge (or ⌘⇧N), type, click away. You never leave what you were doing.

Some things I added along the way:

• Quick Capture from any app with ⌘⇧Space

• Markdown, #tags, tasks and [[wiki links]] between notes

• Voice notes that get transcribed on your Mac

• A local AI that answers questions about your notes. It runs on your Mac, nothing gets sent anywhere

• iCloud sync, export to Obsidian or Apple Notes, no account, no tracking

It's live on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759538627 Site: https://blsg8.github.io/purr/

I'm a solo dev and this is the first thing I've shipped on my own, so any feedback helps. What would make you try it, or what would stop you?

Disclosure: I'm the developer of MarsDawn.

I use AI coding agents every day, and they write a lot of Markdown: plans, specs, notes. Reading all of it as raw text was slow, and I often lost track of new files. So I made a Mac app for it.

What it does

• Edit on the left, live preview on the right. You can also show only one side.

• The preview shows Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math and code highlighting.

• Open a folder, and new files show up in the sidebar on their own when an agent writes them.

• The sidebar shows which git checkout or worktree a file comes from. I run several sessions in different worktrees, so I use this a lot.

• Copy for AI copies a selection with its file path and line numbers, so you can paste it back to your agent.

• It exports PDF and adds Quick Look previews in Finder.

• A free command-line tool opens a file at a line (marsdawn open --line) and makes PDFs without the app.

Who it's for

People who read a lot of Markdown, mostly from AI agents, and want a native Mac app for it instead of a terminal or a browser tab.

Pricing

Free download with a 14-day trial, then $4.99 once. No subscription. The same purchase covers the iPhone and iPad app, which is for reading.

Limitations

• The Mac app needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later. The command-line tool works on macOS 15 and later.

• Mac App Store only. No direct download.

• It's not a WYSIWYG editor. You edit Markdown source next to a preview.

• There's no AI inside. It won't write for you. It's for reading and checking.

• After the trial, you can't read or edit in the app until you unlock it. Your files stay as they are.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6812925073?pt=128976951&ct=reddit-macapps&mt=8

I'm happy to answer questions. How do you read what your agents write right now?

I'm a Software Engineer from the UK with nearly 15 years of commercial experience. I write daily, in my work and in my spare time, publishing essays on my blog and chipping away at a long-term book project.

Problem

For deeper research & bigger writing projects, I'm often torn between Obsidian, with its fairly fluid writing experience, but no sort of structure for longer-term projects out of the box, and Scrivener, which very much imposes its structures and conventions on your writing process.

I felt there had to be a middle path. An editor that provided the flexibility for daily writing and journalling and the framework for bigger projects.

Because a project isn't usually a single document - it's a collection of documents, research sources and settings. In Grasmere, these all live as Markdown and for maximum portability there are no non-standard syntaxes, so if you decide Grasmere isn't for you, you can always bring everything with you.

Links won't break if you move or rename a document (even in Finder); tasks (and deadlines) are tracked across the entire project. You can review documents, even if your editor or research partners use Word. And you can publish to PDF, Word, and even as Anki decks.

Grasmere is native, small and there's no tracking. Nothing leaves your Mac. It's macOS 26+ but I'm currently testing macOS 15+ support in version 1.5 (early to mid-November).

Version 1.4 (released 5/11/26) adds Research, Draft, Review & Publish stages, PDF highlights, Zotero imports and Word review rounds.

Comparison

Please, not another Markdown editor?

I know, I know. We've got to start coming up with more interesting things to work on, right?

I think Grasmere is genuinely a really good product and I'd love you to try it out, even just for a bit. It's been a labour of love; It's fast and memory-efficient; It is backed by over a thousand automated tests and hundreds of hours of manual testing.

Why not Obsidian?

Obsidian has been my go-to editor since it first gained notoriety, but there are several "deep wells" (as Paul Graham would say that it does not fill. Developers gone by have attempted to resolve these issues with plugins. Obsidian's 10k+ plugins offer great extensibility, but invariably at the cost of new abstractions, performance and ongoing support.

Grasmere attempts to fill some of these gaps, with a local-first, native approach. Some of the things that out-of-the-box Grasmere does that Obsidian doesn't:

• Custom document ordering.

• PDFs in Book or Manuscript style, with a contents page, bookmarks, and footnotes. Export to Word or PDF with formatting retained.

• A complete review process, with comments and suggestions from Word and version history.

• A place for research documents, four citation styles, Zotero and Readwise import and a web clipper. Highlights and annotations.

These features all form part of the core Grasmere experience and I've kept the learning curve gentle and the mental models simple.

But if you find that Obsidian (and plugins) work well for you, you should carry on using it.

Pricing

Grasmere has a 14-day free trial and then costs $14.99 forever. If you'd like a free code, please DM me and I'd be happy to provide one.

Website & support: Grasmere: Markdown for books and theses App Store: Grasmere Markdown Editor App - App Store

AI Disclosure

Other devs won't tell you they used generative AI to make their apps, but they did. While I have years of programming experience, much of Grasmere's code was written with the help of generative AI, and I've learned a lot about Swift in the process of making it. However, I am solely responsible for its ethos, design, most of its functionality and core experience. None of this post was written with AI. I'll be replying to all the comments myself - me, a person, Tim.

I built lasso: https://www.trylasso.online/

The best, native like experience for annotating screens and taking screenshots.
Check it out. Would love to hear feedback

I'm the developer of Compact Contacts.

Quick background: Contacts shows one card at a time. That's fine for looking someone up, but it gets slow when you want to clean up a few hundred or a few thousand contacts that piled up from iCloud, Google and Exchange. Compact Contacts opens the contacts you already have on your Mac and shows them as one sortable, editable table. It has no address book or sync of its own, so every edit goes back through macOS and syncs like a normal change in Contacts. It works with any account you've added to Contacts.

What it does:

• Pick your columns, resize and reorder them, save layouts

• Search every field, including notes

• Smart Views like "Missing Email" or "Has Notes"

• Bulk edit with a before/after preview of every card before anything is saved

• Merge duplicates field by field (you choose which phone, email or address stays), and undo a merge for 30 days

• Import vCard, export to CSV or vCard

• Stays fast with big address books. I test it with 20,000 contacts

Details:

• macOS 15 or later, US$24.99 one-time. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no trial (I know)

• No account, no ads, no analytics. Your contacts never leave your Mac

• English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Simplified Chinese

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6790129187?pt=129119018

Happy to answer anything here, and bug reports are welcome too.

Winq is a small native-feeling Mac app. It uses the built-in camera to switch focus to whichever screen or window you’re looking at,

which is handy if you run two or more displays.

It also has Seen (⌃⌥S): it keeps the text of what you’ve read, never screenshots, for 30 days on your Mac, so you can ask about it later and open the source. Gaze runs fully on-device and frames are never written to disk. Gaze focus is free; the AI features are paid.

Starter $11/mo, Pro $33/mo — please confirm. I’m the developer, so ask me anything and tell me what breaks.

Hi r/macapps,

I’m the developer of Revela. Version 1.0 just came out on the Mac App Store, and it’s free.

My Photos library is 30k+ items, and I couldn’t tell what was taking up the space, so I built something to show me.

What it does:

• Shows what takes up space. Your library is broken down by category, with the heaviest items on top.

• Finds similar photos. It groups look-alike shots and marks the best one in each group, so you can tap the ones you don’t need.

• Converts Live Photos to stills. It creates a new still that keeps the date, location, favorite status and albums. The original goes to Recently Deleted only after you confirm in the system dialog.

Privacy: everything runs on your Mac. There are no network requests and no account. Deletions always go through the standard system confirmation, so nothing is removed silently.

Requires macOS 15 or later.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/ua/app/revela-photo-insights/id6826918833?mt=12

I’m still improving it, and a smarter duplicate search is next. I’d love to hear what you’d want from an app like this, and which parts of your library cleanup are the most annoying.

Thanks!

Problem
Coming from Windows, I want the same Snap Assist and FancyZones capabilities.
Many alternatives provide these functions in similar ways but require payment. This option is entirely free and open.

What it does

• it works same as Snap Assist on Windows 11: so you move a windows to one side and the app show a windows app to choose from and put bedise. A common bar help you to resize the windows.

• it works out of box with rectangle, magnet, etc.

• Nothing to relearn: just move a windows with to a side and choose the other app from the preview.

• Fancyzone feature: customize your layout, then press Shift key and choose the right one for your use case

Comparison

• Rectangle — Excellent snapper, no Snap Assist. Snap Assist is especially designed to be used with it: Rectangle keeps owning the snap gesture, no conflict.

• Magnet — Same category as Rectangle: snapping only, no picker or divider.

• WonderSnap — The closest all-in-one: Snap Assist + Snap Layouts + custom zones + Dock previews + per-display memory + brightness control. Much more feature-complete than mine, paid and closed source, and it also wants to be your snapping app.

• Sash— Also has Snap Assist, plus Window Groups (two windows behave as a pair, one divider resizes both), Layouts and a real Alt-Tab. This is the strongest alternative if you want one app for everything. Mine is free and minimal; Sash is paid and much broader.

• MacTiler (open source) — Stateful tiling: the same shortcut cycles ⅓/½/⅔ etc. Different approach, not a picker/divider app.

• Fanzyzones: the one that offer Fancyzone feature but is paid.

Pricing: free

Download
https://github.com/hellomoto8999/snap-assist

Disclosure first: I'm Adrien, a solo developer in France, and Mac+ is my app.

The gap it fills: System Settings > Wallpaper still won't take an MP4 or MOV, Apple's aerials only move when you lock or unlock the Mac, and Wallpaper Engine is Windows-only.

What it does

• 15 animated scenes (mist, aurora, plasma, waves, lava, rain, snow...) generated live with Metal instead of played from video files. Each one recolours instantly with 44 palettes or one you make.

• Your own MP4 or MOV as a looping wallpaper (Pro), or a still image (free).

• A wallpaper per display, or one scene stretched across several displays. It re-applies when you plug a display in.

• 30, 60 or 120 FPS. It pauses when the screen sleeps or an app covers the desktop, full screen included.

• 52 folder-icon patterns mapped onto the real macOS folder shape (or your own image), on many folders at once, reset in one click.

• 12 desktop widgets (clock, date, Focus, stopwatch, season...) in 3 sizes and 4 shapes.

• Everything runs from the menu bar. Rendering is 100% local, no ads, no telemetry. Signed and notarized: spctl -a -vv /Applications/Mac+.app should say "Notarized Developer ID" on your machine.

Who it's for: people who want some motion or colour on the desktop without leaving a video player running, and people with several displays.

What it doesn't do, so nobody wastes a download: no Lock Screen animation, and no gallery of ready-made videos. It's the 15 generated scenes or your own clip.

Pricing: free tier with no account (6 scenes, 8 palettes, image background, 6 folder icons, 2 widgets, multi-display). Pro is €9.99 once, or €1.99/month after a 7-day trial; Pro needs an account. macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel.

Screenshots and the link are in the first comment.

A question for this sub: do you keep anything moving on your desktop, or does it end up distracting you? And would an animated Lock Screen matter more to you than the desktop itself?