AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foldicon/id6801609658

Problem:

Open Finder/Desktop. It's the wall of the same folder, again and again. Work, photos, side projects, taxes same box. You don't see nothing. You see names.

Comparison:

Flairy : Is the closer comparison, and it’s a good one. But it has limited choices

Most other apps on the App Store share the same old idea; a color picker and an emoji stamped on the default folder. But nothing that feels personal or vibey Foldicon changes that.

What Foldicon Offers:

It has more than 200+ icons to choose from, more added in coming updates also you can make your own Foldicon's inside the app. Drop a photo of yourself, your dog, a moment, a painting. It gets redrawn as a folder icon in the same style as the rest of the set not a raw photo jammed into a folder shape.

Features:

• Drag and drop any folder or drop several at once 
• One-click apply, one-click revert 
• 200+ curated vibe icons across moodboards 
• Make your own Foldicon from a photo, redrawn in the same style as the library 
• iCloud sync for generated icons

Pricing:

The icon library is completely free, and it stays free. Future icons get added to the app for free as well.

Custom Foldicons use coins. There’s one pack:
10 Coins for $2.99 —  so that’s 10 custom folders.

No subscriptions. You only pay if you want to create your own Foldicon's

AI Disclaimer:

App was made using claude :) For the people who will come down just to type “AI slop”. Please add something else to it. Genuine critique is always welcome and it can actually help improve the app down the lane.

I built Edgy, a fun little native macOS menu bar app that makes the edges of your screen glow, whatever your mood. No strips attached.

You can pick any color, animated scenes, sync the light with your music, or use Ambient mode to match whatever is on screen. Every display gets its own light, and it automatically curves around your notch.

Every control is also a Shortcuts action, so you can do things like red when Focus is on, green when a meeting app opens, amber when the battery is low, or a flash when the doorbell rings.

The app is small and notarized. Nothing is tracked or leaves your computer, except the license check.

How it compares: Apple's Edge Light only works during video calls, with one color. Lumn ($9.99) is the closest, its light follows album art in Music or Spotify, which Edgy doesn't do, while Edgy syncs to any app and adds scenes, multiple displays and Shortcuts integration. LightBuddy ($4.99) is a ring light for calls. MacEdgeLight and RingLight are free and open source, if a plain border is all you want.

You can download it at getedgy.app and try every feature free for 72 hours. After that it's €4.99 once, launch price, for up to 3 Macs, updates included.

I'm Renato Costa, indie developer on weekends. You can find more of my stuff at renato.works and reach me on X u/renatoworks.

Hope you have as much fun with it as I do.

Enjoy the glow!

Hi everyone, CaskHub update!

A free, open-source, native app store for Homebrew casks

I posted CaskHub here five weeks ago and asked for your feedback.
I got it, and it basically became my roadmap. Since then, CaskHub went from 0.6.8 to 0.8.0 across six releases and joined the official Homebrew cask repository. I'm nothing but humbled by the love it got from the community. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you!

Problem

Quick recap for anyone who missed it: CaskHub treats Homebrew casks like an app store - browse, search, install, update, and uninstall, all through your real brew binary, so nothing is locked into the app. The main reason I started this project was the Recently Added, a feed of casks published to Homebrew in the last 30–90 days, so you can find a new app without already knowing its name, because there are a lot of good indie Mac apps buried in Homebrew that nobody discovers unless you've heard about it somewhere else. I wanted this to be a place where they get found.

Comparison

The closest alternatives are still Applite and Taphouse, both of which I like and use. The difference is discovery. Applite's browsing is a curated, hand-picked selection and Taphouse doesn't surface the full catalog either. CaskHub surfaces the entire cask catalog, automatically categorised and with real icons extracted from the actual artifact, so a brand new cask appears in browse on day one instead of waiting to be hand-added. That pipeline is CaskFlow, open source too.

Pricing

Free. 100% free and open source under the MIT license, with no subscription, no premium tier, and no ads.

What's New:

Some of what you asked for in the last thread

• Brewfile export & import - back up your entire shelf to a Brewfile and restore it on another Mac
• An ignore list for Adopt - the new Shelf Setup page lets you choose which apps the Adopt scan skips, so apps you deliberately keep outside Homebrew stop asking to be adopted
• Homebrew path selection - Apple Silicon, Intel, or a custom location
• SHA checksum in the cask info popover
• Health page - run a Homebrew checkup, update Homebrew, sync your collection, and reclaim disk space from caches, old versions, and orphaned dependencies

Important items from the changelog since July 31st

• Now in the official Homebrew cask repo - brew install --cask caskhub
• Native macOS menus and an in-app help center
• One-click conflict recovery when an install collides with existing files, and conflicts now name the conflicting cask instead of failing with a generic error
• Browse sections and the house pick brought into list view
• Homebrew commands now run one at a time, so operations can't conflict with each other
• Much faster search, faster launch on large catalogs, chunked loading for long lists, smoother scrolling while installs are running
• CaskFlow - Applite now uses the official CaskFlow tool to source app icons

Links

Full changelogs - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskHub/releases

Repository - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskHub

Classification tools & pipeline - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskFlow

About me

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

Upvote on ProductHunt, we are live now! - https://www.producthunt.com/products/caskhub?launch=caskhub

Notes: CaskHub is notarized and signed. It sends anonymous, opt-out usage analytics (TelemetryDeck) and crash reports (Sentry), each of which can be disabled on its own in Settings.

Same ask as last time - I would appreciate your feedback. What would you want it to do that it doesn't? And if you tried it back in July and stopped using it, what made you close it? Contributions of all kinds are very welcome 🙂

Posted docktor here a while back and got a ton of feedback from people here. Some very good bug reports, some absolutely cursed monitor/Dock setups, and a bunch of stuff I hadn’t thought about at all.

So figured I’d post an update because it’s changed a lot since then.

If you didn’t see the first post: docktor is a macOS app I built to use the empty space on either side of the Dock. If you leave the Dock visible, there’s just a bunch of unused space sitting there, which has bothered me forever.

docktor puts widgets there instead.

Currently shipping:

• Music: Spotify + Apple Music, synced lyrics, like/favorite controls
• Calendar: Apple Calendar
• Weather: Self explanatory lol
• Device Batteries: Mac, AirPods, Magic Mouse/Keyboard/Trackpad, and Logitech devices
• Feedback: mostly so you can tell me something is broken without opening GitHub

The widgets stay small when you’re not using them and expand when you interact with them. They follow the Dock if you resize it, move it, switch displays, etc.

There’s also quite a bit more customization now. Widget width, Fit to Dock, compact layouts, drawer behavior, glass tinting, and an option to carry that tint behind the Dock so it all looks like one surface.

Probably the biggest chunk of work that isn’t obvious from a feature list was rebuilding Settings and onboarding.

Settings is pretty much a different app from the version I first posted. A lot of the controls now have live previews, so changing widget width, tint, glass appearance, drawer behavior, etc. actually shows you what it’s going to look like instead of making you tweak a setting, close Settings, stare at the Dock, go back, tweak it again...

The widget settings are all organized in one place now too, with the actual widgets rendered into the Settings UI where it makes sense. I spent an unreasonable amount of time on this part, but I think configuring docktor finally feels like part of the app rather than a developer settings panel.

Onboarding got the same treatment. It walks through the actual Dock setup, widgets, permissions and appearance instead of immediately throwing a bunch of macOS permission dialogs at you. Location is optional now, Screen Recording is optional, and Spotify/Apple Music permissions are handled separately. Basically trying to make the first five minutes not suck.

I also added smooth mouse-wheel scrolling. It’s optional, configurable, works system-wide, supports per-app exclusions, and leaves trackpads alone.

Dock hover previews and the window-based Cmd+Tab are still there too. Those have probably gotten more bug fixes than anything else. Magnification, auto-hide, left/right Dock, multi-monitor, weird window positioning, Dock relaunches, all that fun stuff.

Coming soon-ish

I’ve got a few more widgets/features in various stages of development:

• Clipboard
• Stocks
• Spaces
• World Clock
• Timer / Focus stuff
• More Calendar stuff

Some of those are already mostly working internally, I just don’t want to ship a pile of half-finished widgets for the sake of making the list longer.

A lot of this came directly from people who tried the first versions, so thank you. Seriously. There are a bunch of bugs in the current app that I never would have found on my machines, and quite a few features/settings that only exist because somebody here asked for them.

Still free. No account, no license, no subscription. What’s free now is staying free. I might eventually make some new stuff Pro, but I’m not going to put the current app behind a paywall later.

https://docktorapp.com

macOS 26+ only (Tahoe / Golden Gate betas). It’s signed + notarized with Developer ID.

Permissions: Accessibility is needed so docktor can find/track the Dock. Screen Recording is only needed if you want live window thumbnails in Dock previews. If macOS decides not to show docktor in the Screen Recording list after install, hit the + button and add it from /Applications. Still not sure why Apple makes that flow so weird.

There’s also a small opt-out beta telemetry system. It’s basically “is this version still running,” some product/settings state, and redacted crash info so I can tell when I break something. No Sentry or third-party analytics SDK. You can turn it off during onboarding or in Settings.

Privacy: https://docktorapp.com/privacy/
Terms: https://docktorapp.com/terms/

And since it came up last time: I’m Peter Sauer, full-time SWE. This is just my own project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petercsauer
[petercsauer@me.com](mailto:petercsauer@me.com)

I use Claude a lot while building docktor, same as I use AI tools at work. It helps me move faster, especially on boring/repetitive stuff and debugging, but I’m the one designing the app, making the decisions, reviewing the code, and owning whatever breaks. Mentioning it because I’d rather just be transparent about it than be weird about AI usage.

If you tried docktor a few months ago and it was buggy / didn’t work with your setup / just wasn’t there yet, I’d be really curious what you think of it now.

And please keep sending bug reports. The Feedback widget goes straight to me and I read all of them.

Problem

covered above — the Dock leaves dead space on either side (worse on wide displays) and macOS does nothing with it.

Comparison

No single app does all this. DockDoor (free) and HyperDock (paid) do Dock previews; AltTab (free) does window-based Cmd+Tab; uBar (paid) replaces the Dock entirely; Übersicht (free) is DIY desktop widgets. docktor bundles previews + window switching and is the only one putting ready-made interactive widgets (Music/lyrics, Calendar, Weather, Batteries) in the Dock’s empty margins.

Price

Free — $0. No account, no license, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no locked features. Signed + notarized. May add new optional Pro features later; everything shipping today stays free.

Edit: added PCP section

Solo dev, 30 years of it. I built Cullstack because my shoots are never in one place. Some on the internal SSD, some on the NAS, some in Dropbox, and usually a card still in the reader.

Cullstack opens all of it in one window and culls in place. Nothing gets downloaded or consolidated first, and nothing is copied or moved unless you tell it to. Mounted NAS volumes, SFTP, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, the Apple Photos library, and your iPhone over USB, all in the same sidebar.

Video is culled in the same pass as the stills, with a frame accurate scrubber.

It also finds duplicates in a folder and its subfolders, either exact copies or visually similar shots, and lets you act on the results rather than just listing them.

Mac specifics, since this is r/macapps: native builds for both Apple Silicon and Intel, signed and notarized, HEIC decoded through the system decoder rather than a bundled fallback, and video rendered through Metal. No Electron.

Eleven months of work, most of it in places you never see: decoding HEIC and RAW fast enough to cull at speed, rendering video through Metal, and getting seven different storage backends to behave the same way in one sidebar.

Pricing, since it always comes up: 30 day trial with full features, no card and no account. Early Access is $99/yr, going to $179 at release. Renewals are 40% off list for as long as you keep renewing, which is $107/yr at today's Pro price. If you stop paying you keep the last version you licensed and it goes on working.

The AI runs on your own machine. Closed eye flagging, blur and quality flagging, face detection, and search where you type "the cake" or "red dress" and it pulls them up, once it has indexed the folder. No account, no telemetry, no upload, and it works with the network switched off.

Windows and Linux too, same license. The interface is in twelve languages, including Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Polish.

https://www.aviastone.com/cullstack/

If you cull on a Mac, I'd like to know where your workflow actually breaks down: getting the files off the card, the first pass, or picking between near identical frames. That's what I'm building next around.

Hi Reddit,

I have always felt that the standard macOS overlays lacked a certain vibrancy and personality. Because of this, I decided to develop VisorPro. It is a comprehensive tool designed to let you completely swap out the default Apple overlays with the colorful, dynamic ones shown in the photos above.

However, VisorPro offers much more than just a visual refresh. My application also introduces a wide variety of original, highly functional overlays. These include dedicated displays for battery status, caps lock, copy-paste-cut actions, high RAM warnings, and keyboard brightness levels. I truly expect there will be something useful for everyone, regardless of how you use your Mac.

Additionally, most of these overlays are interactive and can be expanded, allowing you to perform quick actions and adjustments directly from the overlay itself without needing to open another menu. Beyond just interactivity, VisorPro offers extensive customization when it comes to overlay behavior. You can assign custom audio cues so that specific overlays trigger their own unique sounds when they appear. You can also independently set the position for each overlay, choosing from six different screen locations to perfectly fit your workflow.

Finally, I know a lot of new macOS apps are dropping support for Intel Macs, but I wanted to make sure VisorPro is available for everyone. The app natively supports both Apple Silicon (M-series) and Intel processors. Since I don't personally own an Intel Mac to test every single edge case, feedback and bug reports from Intel users are highly appreciated to help ensure everything runs as smoothly as intended!

The Problem it Solves While Apple does update the native macOS OSDs (on-screen displays), they remain very safe, grey, and lack any real edge. After looking at them every day, they simply get boring. People just want a fresh, vibrant alternative. VisorPro solves this by offering a completely new, colorful visual style, while also turning these basic indicators into an interactive tool that gives you immediate control exactly when an event happens.

Comparison

• MediaMate: This app mostly just brings the standard iOS design over to the Mac without adding much originality. It is also very restricted in features, offering only 4 overlays: volume, screen brightness, keyboard brightness, and media.
• SlimHUD: This one is even more limited than MediaMate. It doesn't even feature a media overlay, restricting you to just volume, screen brightness, and keyboard brightness in a very basic package.
• Aegis: This app tries to do too many things at once (modifying the cmd+tab switcher, the Dock, etc.), which many users dislike. Because it is not strictly an OSD app, its overlay replacements are just a side feature—they are very basic, limited in number, and completely lack the dedicated, polished design that VisorPro offers.

Pricing & Link Pricing: 100% Free and Open Source. I plan to introduce a premium tier for future modules, but anyone who grabs it now during this launch gets lifetime access to all current features for free.

Link: https://github.com/sonor-studio/VisorPro

Privacy policy: https://github.com/sonor-studio/VisorPro/blob/main/PRIVACY_POLICY.md

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/grzegorz-adamczyk-0a6999424

Candela is a free, open source menu bar app for macOS that protects external monitors from OLED burn-in, keeps a health record of the panel, runs a diagnostic checkup on any display, and adds the monitor controls macOS leaves out.

Pricing: free. Open source under MIT, no paid tier, no account.

Download at https://candela.fyi or with Homebrew (`brew install --cask rydersel/tap/candela`).
Source: https://github.com/Rydersel/Candela

As a programmer, I spend all day in the same layouts. Same IDE sidebar, same terminal pane, same browser tabs, for hours at a time. Then I bought an OLED ultrawide, which is the worst possible kind of panel to show static UI for that long, because that is exactly how OLEDs burn in. The monitor's own built-in protections can help (more on those below), but on the Mac's side macOS does nothing about it, and doesn't even let you control the brightness or volume of an external display unless it's Apple's own $1,600 Studio Display.

So I built Candela. The part I actually wanted:

Burn-in protection. Adaptive and real-time: Candela watches what the screen is showing, region by region, and eases down bright areas that sit unchanged, while live content stays at full brightness. Alongside it, one-click auto-hide for the menu bar and Dock, dimming when you step away or lock the Mac, and settings that survive sleep, replugs and reboots.

Panel health. Hours, wear, and an exposure heat map of what your screen has actually displayed, so you can see where burn-in risk is accumulating instead of guessing. All of it stays local on your machine.

Checkup. A diagnostic that identifies defects and wear on any display, new or years in, and checks what the monitor claims against what it does. Run it on a new monitor while the return window is open, or on your daily driver to see what's changed. It ends in a report you keep, and it grades every result by how it was known rather than stamping anything "certified".

Controls. This part isn't new. Other apps do it, and the comparison below names the two most known. The difference is that Candela does it free, works on the newest MacOS, and lives in the same app that protects the panel, so you don't need a second display app. Brightness, volume and contrast over DDC/CI from the menu bar or your keyboard's media keys, plus an HDR toggle and the HiDPI scaling sizes macOS hides. And it handles HDR natively: when HDR is on and DDC brightness goes dead, the slider switches to macOS's own brightness control instead of dying. Software dimming is nothing new; a brightness slider that keeps working in HDR mode is, as far as I've found.

Also in there: one slider that moves every display at once, software dimming below the hardware floor, arrangement, mirroring and rotation, virtual displays, and a keep-awake toggle.

Straight answer on the obvious objection: software cannot make burn-in impossible. What it can do is measure your exposure, reduce it, and show you evidence instead of a vibe. Every number Candela shows is measured or labeled as an estimate.

What about the monitor's own built-in OLED care? Keep it on. Pixel shift, static-screen dimming and the refresh cycle are the only protections that run at the panel level, and Candela never touches them. But the firmware is working blind: it sees a video signal and nothing else. It can't tell that you walked away, that the Mac is locked, which of two monitors you're looking at, or whether a bright block is your Dock, a window edge that's been there all morning, or a still photo, so it has to protect cautiously, because dimming the wrong thing means dimming something you're looking at. And it keeps no record you can see.

I spent a while trying to get at my MSI's OLED Care over the cable: nothing is documented, the panel answers every read with zeros, and the refresh cycle runs on its own timer at the next standby with no way to see when it last ran. That's the black box. Candela is the half that knows what's on screen and what you're doing.

Compared with MonitorControl and BetterDisplay: on the monitor controls there's real overlap, and both are good at what they do. BetterDisplay goes deeper on display configuration (EDID overrides, PIP, streaming) and I'd point you there for that. What neither does is protect the panel over time: the adaptive burn-in protection, the health history, the exposure heat map, and the checkup only exist in Candela.

Privacy: everything runs on your Mac. No account, no analytics, no telemetry, and the app has no networking code of its own; the only connection it makes is Sparkle's update check against the feed on candela.fyi, with no system profile attached. The exposure map is a coarse grid of how bright each region has been, sampled about once a minute; nothing is stored as an image. Per-app time comes from window positions and app names, never window titles or contents. The brightness measurement needs Screen Recording; turn it off and Candela works from window positions alone (less precise). Exports are files on your disk and never leave your machine.

What's coming in the future: I have a lot planned. Deeper OLED burn-in protections, font sharpness enhancements, and more kinds of checkup types.

One sneak peek of a feature I think is pretty cool that is in the works: matching the color profiles of one monitor to another using your iPhone camera. Both displays show the same calibration field, the phone sees both in one frame, and one is adjusted until they read equal. On the bench it already works across an OLED and an IPS panel and looks matched to the eye. No planned release date yet but stay tuned for a demo video soon.

Who's behind it: me, Ryder Selikow, an independent developer working solo. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryder-selikow-21299a218 and email [ryder@candela.fyi](mailto:ryder@candela.fyi). The site has a privacy policy (https://candela.fyi/privacy/) and terms (https://candela.fyi/terms/), and the whole project, hardware findings included, is public on GitHub.

Free, MIT licensed, native Swift/SwiftUI, no paid tier, notarized, auto-updates via Sparkle. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon.

If there's a feature you'd want, or you have thoughts on the direction this project should go, please let me know.

Thanks for reading,

Ryder

A few weeks ago I posted Prefab here after u/amerpie put it in 'More Free Mac Apps'. Those threads did more for the app than anything I'd done for it myself. Downloads sharply increased, but the useful part was the feedback - in the replies, and by email ever since. People are still sending bug reports and feature requests, and most of what's below came straight from them. Thank you.

I'd grown pretty sick of dev work the last 6 months - the constant battle against bots and vibe-coded apps. So it was really nice to interact with real people in the replies.

Still free. Still no account. Here's some of what was added since that post:

Bug fixes: Minor to major bug fixes throughout. Most serious ones related to hiding of confirmation modals and dialogues behind the main application.

Watched folders: A folder from a template keeps working after it's made. Drop files in and they get renamed, converted, resized, stripped of location data or sorted by kind, using the answers you gave when the folder was created. Preview before it runs, undo a run afterwards.

Globals: Placeholders, actions and saved sets of answers defined once, available to every template. Save "Acme Inc" as a preset and one pick at the prompt fills every field.

Placeholders inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint: {{client_name}} inside a .docx or .xlsx is filled in on the way out, formatting kept, and the file opens without a repair prompt.

Prefab for AI agents: Any agent that speaks MCP can list your templates, build new ones and deploy them. Off until you switch it on, and it only reaches folders you've granted. npx -y prefab-mcp if you want to try it.

Deploy links carry values: A prefab:// link can fill in placeholders rather than falling back to defaults, and reports what it created.

Terminal commands report failures: A command that failed used to look like it worked. It doesn't any more, and commands have a timeout.

Sharing: Export a template as a single .prefab file with everything it needs. Double-click it on another machine.

Pricing hasn't changed: free forever, no in-app purchases, no subscription. macOS 14.6 or later.

Same ask as last time - tell me what would make it more useful, and I'm always happy to talk about the development side. Thanks once again. Edit: oh and a bunch of you were kind enough to review it on the App Store - pity Apple seem to think they're spam 👀

• App Store
• Prefab
• Prefab Docs
• Roadmap

Hi r/macapps — I’m the developer of Neon Vision Editor. Since my last post in July, the app has moved from v0.9.7 to v1.5.6, with a lot of work focused on making the editor faster, more native, and more useful across Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

This is a follow-up to my previous r/macapps post, where I shared v0.9.7 and the first shared-file synchronization workflow. Since then, Neon Vision Editor has reached v1.5.6 with major improvements to the editor core, macOS rendering, Markdown, previews, project navigation, and mobile editing.

Problem

I wanted a focused native editor for code, Markdown, notes, and large text files—without Electron, accounts, telemetry, subscriptions, or IDE-scale complexity.

Comparison

Compared with Visual Studio Code and Cursor, Neon uses native Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, and UIKit rather than Electron. Compared with Nova, it is free and open source, with a local-first workflow and versions for iPhone and iPad as well as macOS.

What changed since my last post

• Reworked the macOS editor around a file-backed document model and bounded virtualized rendering, keeping large documents responsive without loading and measuring everything at once.
• Added Focus Mode and improved macOS scrolling, selection, wrapped-line navigation, cursor placement, and tab state preservation.
• Redesigned the Project Sidebar into a single Files, Search, Git, and Terminal navigation rail.
• Added conflict-aware synchronization for files in iCloud Drive and network folders. Clean tabs refresh automatically while unsaved changes are protected with Keep Local, Reload, and Compare choices.
• Improved Markdown editing with contextual formatting controls, heading levels, lists, quotes, code blocks, links, images, and tables.
• Added clearer Markdown, HTML, and SVG preview controls, improved refresh behavior, and better local-image support.
• Added Apple Pencil hover caret preview and precision range selection on iPad.
• Added Code Snapshot exports with themes, gradients, typography, padding, and multiple export sizes.
• Expanded Markdown preview themes and improved light/dark appearance support.
• Added syntax-colored Finder Quick Look previews for more file types.
• Added pinch-to-zoom font sizing on Mac trackpads, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro.
• Improved minimap activation, viewport synchronization, and draggable-marker behavior.
• Added safer handling for files 100 MB or larger: they open as a clearly labeled, read-only partial preview instead of risking a full-file memory allocation.

The latest release is v1.5.6. - update: now 1.6.0

Pricing

Free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. There are no subscriptions, paywalls, or locked editing features. An optional $4.99 support tip is available for anyone who wants to help fund development.

The app is available on the Mac App Store, GitHub, and TestFlight.

I’m an independent developer, and I’d especially appreciate feedback from Mac users who work with large files, Markdown projects, or the same documents across Mac and iPad. What should I improve next?

About a month ago I posted the Bounce38 update here. Since then I have shipped one major Mac release, Bounce Connect 39, and a new Android release, Bounce Companion 9.0.1.

For those unfamiliar: **Bounce Connect solves the Mac–Android divide.*\* Apple gives iPhone users native Continuity, AirDrop, calling, and notifications on macOS, while Android users get almost nothing native.

Bounce brings native call controls (cellular + WhatsApp), SMS with dual-SIM support, bidirectional notification syncing, clipboard sharing, and local file transfers between Android and Mac without third-party servers.

Here is what actually changed.

The biggest Mac additions:

Encrypted local data. Synced messages, contacts, notifications, calls, clipboard history, transfer records, device details, and cached Android app icons are now stored inside an encrypted vault on the Mac.

The vault uses AES-256-GCM, with its master key stored in the macOS Keychain. Different categories of data use separately derived encryption keys.

Safe migration from Bounce38. Existing data is migrated automatically and the original data is removed only after the encrypted replacement has been written, decrypted again, and verified. Existing Android pairings and synchronized history are preserved.

Authenticated connections. A device is no longer trusted simply because it connected to the Mac. The Android phone must prove that it owns the saved pairing key before Bounce accepts messages, notifications, calls, clipboard data, or file transfers.

Secure QR-only pairing. New devices are paired using the encrypted QR code shown on the Mac. I removed the old six-digit manual pairing method because it could not securely exchange the complete encryption key.

Call Android from telephone links. Bounce can optionally become the Mac’s default calling app. Clicking a tel:, telprompt:, or callto: link in Safari, Mail, Contacts, or another app can start the call on the connected Android phone.

This is opt-in and disabled by default. Settings includes setup instructions, connection status, a test-call option, and protection against invalid numbers or repeated links.

Safer file transfers. Transfer metadata and keys now travel through the authenticated encrypted connection. Bounce rejects unsafe filenames, path traversal, missing chunks, duplicate transfer starts, incorrect sequencing, and incomplete transfers.

Privacy-safe diagnostics. Routine logs no longer intentionally include message text, clipboard content, contacts, phone numbers, pairing secrets, QR contents, filenames, local paths, or decrypted payloads.

The biggest Android additions:

Reliable offline use. I removed an older in-app Play licensing layer that could treat an Internet or Google Play service problem as a failed purchase.

Previously, repeated licensing failures could eventually disconnect the Mac, stop the background service, and erase the pairing. That destructive two-hour failure path is now completely removed.

Google Play Automatic Protection still protects the Play Store release, but a legitimate user can now keep using Bounce over local WiFi even when the router has no Internet connection.

Pairing-preserving upgrade. Updating from Android 9.0.0 removes only two obsolete licensing timestamps. Pairing keys, Mac identity, known networks, security settings, connection information, and transfer-resume data remain untouched.

More predictable reconnection. Service restarts, WiFi returning, and Android leaving Doze now use one guarded reconnect system. Recovery can restart when it is genuinely waiting or exhausted, but it will not interrupt an existing connection, discovery attempt, or encryption handshake.

Cold file-sharing crash fix. When sharing files or folders from Android, Bounce now promotes the transfer service immediately before processing file lists or restoring transfer state. This prevents Android from killing the transfer with a foreground-service timeout during a cold launch.

Disconnected or malformed transfer requests also stop cleanly instead of leaving an empty background service running.

Smarter music controls. If Android has no active media session, Bounce now opens one explicit and verified music application. It prefers the last player used, followed by installed music and audio apps.

It will no longer accidentally launch Google Search, Chrome, another browser, the main YouTube app, Photos, social media, or a video-streaming service when Play is pressed from the Mac.

If Bounce cannot find a safe music player, it asks the user to open a music app once instead of guessing.

Android 16 readiness. Bounce Companion now targets Android API 36 and includes the WiFi multicast permission needed for more reliable local discovery and connected-device background operation.

Both releases preserve compatibility with Bounce Mac 38 where required, while Bounce Mac 39 and Android 9.0.0 or newer can automatically use the stricter authenticated encrypted connection.

The problem my app solves is that: Mac gives iPhone users Continuity, AirDrop, calling, notifications, and iMessage on desktop. Android users get almost nothing native on macOS.

My app is better than KDE Connect for my use case because: it is built from scratch in native Swift for macOS and is focused specifically on making Android and Mac work together. It supports WhatsApp call controls, bidirectional notification dismissal, dual-SIM messaging, authenticated encrypted sessions, and resumable folder transfers over local WiFi.

Other core features include:

• Smart WiFi Lock that stays active only on trusted networks
• SMS from Mac with dual-SIM support
• Selectable and copyable message text
• Read and unread controls for messages and notifications
• Accept, reject, or mute cellular and WhatsApp calls from Mac
• Call Android from telephone links on Mac
• Dual-SIM reject with message
• Notification mirroring and supported Android notification actions
• Clear a notification on Mac and it clears on Android, and vice versa
• Per-app notification controls
• Continuity-style link sharing
• Universal clipboard synchronization
• Wireless encrypted file and folder transfers
• Interrupted-transfer resume
• Remote Android file browser from Mac
• Media controls with safer music-player selection
• Bounce for Chrome beta
• AOSP and GrapheneOS support
• Android Quick Settings tile
• Encrypted local storage on Mac
• AES-256-GCM encrypted local communication
• No cloud servers

Pricing: $15.99 lifetime. The Android app is purchased through Google Play and the Mac app is free.

I still do not have a traditional trial, but Google Play allows a paid app to be returned within two hours of its first purchase if it does not work for your setup. An app can only be returned this way once.

Changelog: bounceconnect.app/changelog
Privacy: bounceconnect.app/privacy.html
Website: bounceconnect.app

AI Disclaimer: Human validated
About the developer: Built by Deepak, an independent developer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepak-g-290a76144/

Hey r/macapps. We are Anton and Olena, a developer family, and over the last few months we built Scinta. It's a menu bar screenshot app for macOS.

The idea: you take a screenshot the way you always do, and Scinta looks at what is in it and suggests what you were probably about to do with it. An email signature becomes a contact, "Call tomorrow at 5" becomes a calendar event, an error trace becomes a Linear issue with the screenshot attached. It picks the 2-3 actions that fit and shows them on the capture panel.

Demo with 3 actions is in the video above.

Smart actions available right now

• Save contact - prefilled, editable, goes to Apple Contacts
• Create calendar event or reminder - dates parsed, title and location, can be saved to Apple Calendar and Reminders
• Create a Linear issue - titled, with description and screenshot attached, team selection available
• Blur sensitive info before sharing - keys, tokens, account numbers etc
• Explain error
• Extract code, extract table
• Summarize text, translate text
• Decode QR (and others) codes

Plus copy text (on-device OCR) and Ask AI anything about the capture, right in the panel.

Pricing

• Free plan: unlimited captures, copy text, save - forever. Plus 10 AI smart actions a month.
• Pro: $8/month or $80/year, unlimited smart actions.
• Every new install gets 7 days of Pro, no signup.
• For r/macapps: code SCINTA4MACAPPS gives 25% off for life, valid until Sept 30.

AI actions cost real money per call - that ші why Pro is a subscription and not one-time for now. Captures, copy text and saving stay free.

Privacy: Scinta only sees what you choose to capture, nothing runs in the background. Copy text runs on-device. Only when you run a smart action or Ask AI the captured screenshot sent over an encrypted connection to process it.

What are next plans: already actively working on several features and improvements and at the top of the list are local model usage (nothing leaves your Mac), screenshot history "bring your own API key" together with a lifetime purchase option - and of course new smart actions.

Not on the App Store yet: we went with direct download so we can ship fixes and updates within hours instead of waiting for review - that matters a lot right after launch. App Store version will come a bit later.

Download Scinta at https://scinta.app/download - support macOS 15.6+

Site: https://scinta.app
Discord: https://discord.gg/x95wDsBMvy

Happy to answer anything. If you try it and something is off, feel free to write it here or join our Discord server - we are responding and fixing things fast :)

Problem

Apple’s Stickies app was first built in 1994 and last updated in 2001. I have seen countless threads on Reddit of people asking for “a modern Stickies”

New features in v3: Based on feedback from buyers, v3 adds iCloud sync (your notes stay current across every Mac, using your own iCloud, no account required), Markdown that renders live as you type while the raw text stays plain, and a Vim mode. Also added a Note Manager with search across every note, plus import/export.

What’s next for v4: iPhone app, more rich text support, and better checkboxes

Comparison:

• Apple Stickies: outdated look and feel, everything in menu bars
• Plaintext Stickies: does not use modern Mac design language, no markdown

Pricing

• 7-day full featured Free Trial
• Lifetime: $6.50
  • Buy once, install on unlimited Macs
• Already bought Glassnote? Check your email, I sent you the updates for free.

Transparency

I represent Calcium Lab LLC, which is a paid member of the Apple Developer Program. We distribute only fully notarized apps. We have multiple previously accepted posts in this community for Glassnote and Glassbundle.

Hey, mods: Are you able to add “Developer: Glassnote” as my user flair?

App Link

https://calciumlab.com/glassnote-simple-mac-sticky-notes

Hi everyone. I built a macOS screenshot tool called Tracer. It went up on the App Store in August and it is on version 1.2.1 now.

Problem

There are already good screenshot apps out there. I went through quite a few of them. But once I used one for a while, one or two small things always got in the way. So I moved to another app, then another, and ended up a screenshot app nomad.

What I wanted was not some killer feature. I wanted an app that handles the ordinary things that come up all day without making me stop and think about it.

I have worked as a web developer for over ten years, most of it alongside product managers and designers. I took the tasks that kept repeating in that work and tried to make them simple in Tracer. If you need one very specific advanced feature, another app may serve you better. But if you just want the everyday screen work to go a little smoother, I think there is a fair chance you will like it.

What Tracer can do

It gets the ordinary on-screen tasks done quickly and without getting in your way.

• Capture anything on screen, image or video, and leave it floating right where it is
• Drag over any text and translate it on the spot (2 sec)
• Cut a product or a person out of its background (3 sec)
• Scrolling capture up to 100,000 pixels (10 sec)
• Save an image from the web straight into the folder you want (3 sec)
• Pull the text out of an image and copy it (3 sec)
• Turn a favorite moment into a GIF (10 sec)
• Grab any color on screen and copy the exact value (3 sec)
• Float every reference you need, then view them one at a time (everything else hides)
• Record a product demo, trim it and share it, without another app
• Mark up a screenshot, add comments and hand it over with ⌘C and ⌘V (20 sec)
• Pin a design over the real screen and work through it (clicks pass to the app below)

Nobody asked, but I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the capture sound and the little animation that goes with it. Not everyone wants that, so each one can be turned off in settings.

One rule I kept while building it

I wanted it to feel as natural as breathing. Nothing grand, just things like these.

• Drag out a capture area → it takes the shot and floats it right there
• Press ⌘C while dragging the area → that area goes to the clipboard
• Press ⌘S while dragging the area → take a guess. It does what you expect
• Press ⌘C with no area selected → the previous area goes back to the clipboard. No separate "Previous Area Capture" menu item, no extra step
• Press ⌘C on a floating shot → that shot goes to the clipboard
• Press ⌘C while dragging in OCR mode → the extracted text goes to the clipboard
• Press ⌘C while dragging in translate mode → the translated text goes to the clipboard

The same key does what you would expect in each situation. There is less to memorize.

Comparison

Let me put it next to CleanShot X and Shottr. Both are good apps and I used them for a long time.

CleanShot X is well rounded. Capture, recording, annotation and pinning are all polished. Tracer does better on translation and on price. CleanShot X handles text recognition but stops there, so to read something in another language you have to move the text somewhere else. In Tracer you drag over text in any app, press a shortcut, and the translation appears. No capture, no OCR step. Capturing an area and translating it works too, if you would rather do it that way. On price, CleanShot X is $29 and updates after the first year are a separate purchase. Tracer is $3.99 and that is it.

Shottr is light and fast, and its OCR and scrolling capture work well. Tracer does better after the capture. You can float several shots and use Focus to keep only the one you need, pin a design over your work and keep working in the app underneath, or trim a recording inside the app and share it right away. The drop zone that opens while you are dragging a file is another thing Shottr does not have.

Pricing

$3.99 on the App Store. One payment, no subscription. The price varies a little by region.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785940416?mt=12

Website: https://nmuxlab.com/tracer/

Giveaway

Leave a comment and I will DM you a code. No draw, no picking winners. I ship updates often and I kept the codes from every version, so I have more than enough to go around.

If you feel like adding something, tell me how you take screenshots now, or what you would want Tracer to do. That part helps me the most.

Feedback

Any feedback is welcome. If something felt awkward or did not behave the way you expected, tell me and I will work it into the next update.

-------------------------------------

Tracer is on Product Hunt today. If you want to see what people are asking there, the discussion is here.

https://www.producthunt.com/products/tracer-2

I'm the developer, so this is a self-promo post. Gisti is free: no subscription, no in-app purchase, no account.

Fair warning before the wall of text: part of this is a clipboard manager, and I know how this sub feels about those by now. I didn't set out to write one.

The problem

I copy a command, take a screenshot of an error, type a note about what I was doing. A week later I remember what the thing was about and not one word I actually used. Notes in one app, clipboard history in another, screenshots on the Desktop. Three places, three searches, and every one of them matches exact strings.

I wrote this for myself and used it every day for a couple of months before it went anywhere near the App Store. It is still the app I keep open all day, which is also why it has the odd corners it has: each of them is something that annoyed me on a Tuesday.

What it does

One panel on Option+Space with notes, clipboard history and screenshots in a single list. Switch on semantic search and it runs an embedding model on your own Mac, so "flight to Berlin" finds the note that says "plane tickets". Text inside screenshots is read on-device and searchable too. When you want an exact answer instead, a query in slashes - /TODO|FIXME/ - runs as a regular expression.

The screenshot side grew into a small editor along the way. Shift+Cmd+X grabs a region with a magnifier and a pixel grid over the cursor, Tab picks the color under it, and Shift+Cmd+D puts the shot on a background with padding, a shadow and rounded corners when you need to post it somewhere. A window capture keeps its own rounded corners instead of getting a rectangle behind it.

Things I did not expect to use every day:

Paste something unreadable and a chip in the header names it: base64, JWT, JSON, XML, percent-encoded, escaped text, or a range of spreadsheet cells. Press it to read the thing, press it again to get the original back. Nothing is written to the record either way. Base64 that turns out to be an image shows up as the image, which is how I now look at data: URIs out of devtools, and a range copied from Numbers or Excel copies back out as a Markdown table.

Copying a file clip puts the files back on the clipboard rather than their paths as text, so two files you copied in Finder an hour ago still paste into an upload field. Formatted text stays formatted, and Option+Cmd+C copies it plain.

Rows count how many times you have actually copied them, which turned out to be the only useful way to find the four snippets I reuse in a history of a thousand.

Six Shortcuts actions that hand elements to each other, so "grab a region and ask a model what is on it" is a two-step shortcut instead of a script.

A browser extension for Safari and Chrome saves the page you are reading as Markdown into the same list. It hands the text to the app on the same machine, not to a server of mine, because there isn't one.

AI is optional and off until you turn it on. It talks to a model server you run yourself: Ollama, LM Studio or MLX on the same Mac, or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint. With a local model nothing leaves the machine.

How it compares

Maccy is the clipboard manager I would still recommend if clipboard history is all you want. It is lighter, it is open source, and it does that one job well. In Gisti history is one of three lists and search goes by meaning rather than by substring.

CleanShot X is a better screenshot tool than mine and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It has scrolling capture and screen recording, which I don't. The editor here exists so a screenshot lands in the same searchable place as everything else, with its text already read.

Raycast is the better launcher and it is not close: commands, window management, an extension store, a team behind it. Gisti does launch apps - type a name and Return opens it - but that is one small thing rather than the point. Launching apps was the last thing I still used Spotlight for, and once the panel was on a hotkey, leaving it to start an app was the only step left in the way. It is a section of the results list with a switch in settings, not a platform.

It also looks a bit like Raycast, which is no accident: a text field on a hotkey with a list under it is the shape this kind of app has had since Quicksilver. The difference is what is in the list. Raycast searches what you can do; this searches what you already did - the note, the clip, the screenshot. Plenty of people will want both, and they get along fine.

Privacy

No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no trackers. Everything lives in a local database on your Mac. The only outbound requests are the ones you set up yourself: the AI endpoint you point it at, or the one-time download of the embedding model. The App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.

For the clipboard specifically, since that is the part worth being suspicious of: content marked Concealed or Transient - what password managers set - is never recorded, managers that mark their copies with a private type of their own are skipped too, any app can go on an ignore list, and the list can be inverted into "record only these". Regular expressions in the config file drop a copy before anything is written, which is what I use for keys pasted out of a .env. Clearing the history can clear the system clipboard along with it, and capture can be turned off entirely without losing the rest of the app.

Limitations

Apple Silicon only, macOS 15 or later. Mac only: no iOS app, no sync between devices, nothing in the cloud. Not open source. Semantic search downloads an embedding model (~350 MB) the first time you switch it on; leave it off and the app never fetches anything.

Pricing

Free. No subscription, no in-app purchase, no paid tier, no account. Nothing in it costs me per user: there is no server, no account system, and the AI runs on an endpoint you host or pay for yourself. There is nothing for a subscription to cover.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/gisti-notes-clipboard/id6793511761

Site and docs: https://gisti.app

AI Disclaimer: AI-assisted development, and this post as well - English is not my first language, so I write with the same help. The app is mine and so are the opinions in here: every release gets used and tested by hand on a real Mac before it ships. Not to be confused with the app's own AI features: those are optional, off by default, and run against a model server you host yourself.

I'll be in the comments today. The thing I'd most like to hear: if you already live in Raycast or Alfred, does Option+Space with a list of your own stuff under it sit next to that, or fight it? And if you try it and something is missing or in the way, say so here - that is what the next version gets built from.

Since the initial release in march, I have continued to improve speed and usability of my audio file player. Saisei now starts up in 1/2 icon bounce, uses minimal cpu and memory (thanks to waveform caching), has much lower latency - allowing for playing it like a sampler using keys 1 - 9 and the P marker.
I added options for hiding and resizing UI elements as well as resizing the main window freely.

For the next couple of days I lowered the price from 9.99 to 4.99 to mark this moment and maybe win over some people hesitant to try out its keyboard first (but mouse also welcome) approach.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/saisei-audio-file-player/id6760743390

Thanks for looking!

Hey folks, I know the new version of CleanShot is out, and it looks great. Before I pay for it though, I wanted to ask if there are any free alternatives that are genuinely solid.

I am mainly looking for something that gets close to CleanShot features like quick screenshots, simple annotations, scrolling capture, and screen recording + editor, but without being buggy, and slow.

If you have any recommendations, what do you use and what do you like about it? Also, any dealbreakers or missing features compared to CleanShot?

PS: I already have shottr pro but want screen recording/editing as well for casual and formal demos.

MacOS volume and brightness controls move in large steps. You can use smaller steps by holding shift+option, but when watching netflix in bed pressing 3 buttons at once is not ideal.

The app has made around £650($876) so far from my website and setapp combined, with just under 16% conversion rate from free trials to purchase.

BetterTouchTool (25$ lifetime) and Swish(15$ lifetime) are utilities that require setup and configuration. I realised from a LOT of beta testers that a lot of people want simplicity and convenience. If you prefer these apps or have them already then Slidr might not be for you.

Slidr was made for simplicity. Download and slide your trackpad edge for smooth, precise volume and brightness control with haptic feedback. Native macOS HUD, no overlays, no config. Install and it just works.
Why not lean forward to press your volume/brightness keys? I am lazy so I made a solution to make my netflix sessions even more chill. just slide

Core features:

- Slide one edge for volume, the other for brightness
- Precision micro adjustments (no big jumps)
- Native macOS HUD (no custom overlays)
- Haptic feedback on every adjustment
- Menu bar app, minimal resource usage - UNDER 3MB
- Modifier keys to enable/disable slidr (toggle or hold) if you prefer

The haptic feedback as you slide is quite addictive and you feel every tiny micro adjustment through the trackpad. I use it mostly in bed lying back to slide to the perfect volume while watching something and I haven't touched my volume or brightness keys once since I built it.

$4.99 one-time, 3 day free trial:

Personal website:
https://slidr.xyz

Buy on Setapp:
reddit doesnt allow setapp links so you can find it through my website^

ENJOY!

Changelog on the homepage

Cursor auto complete + claude, reviewed by myself - Comp science grad and software developer

DriveDx detected the X9 but reported “SMART: Not Supported,” so it couldn’t read the SSD’s health data.Don't have access to a Windows computer.

I also installed smartmontools and tried reading the X9’s SMART/NVMe data directly, but macOS won’t expose the drive’s SMART information over its USB connection.

This is for my Crucial X9 external SSD.

Thanks.

Hello everyone,

we have released Thaw 2.0.1: https://github.com/thaw-app/Thaw/releases/latest

TLDR:

We completely overhauled the entire app, and the changes are too numerous to list here. If you want a detailed overview of all the changes, you can dive into the exhaustive CHANGELOG.

Important changes since version 1.2:

• Thaw has been moved from my personal account into an organization on GitHub
• The dev team has grown to 4 people
• Thaw 2.x is only compatible with macOS 26+
• We are currently working on macOS 27 support (more info can be found here.)
• We have a dedicated Discord server: https://discord.gg/Rjy2BkRXg

Features:

• Declutter your menu bar: hide the icons you do not need and keep an always-hidden section for the rest
• Reveal items fast: hover, click, scroll or swipe, or press a hotkey
• Search and jump: find any menu bar item from the keyboard
• Triggers: reveal an item when a condition is met, from the battery level to the active Focus, the Wi-Fi network, or a script's exit code
• Switch layouts by context: bind a profile to a display, to a Space, or to a Focus filter
• Zen mode: one action conceals every section and locks the reveal gestures, then puts it all back. It can engage on its own while you present or share your screen
• Style the bar: tint, gradient, shadow, border, and custom shapes, per light/dark mode and per Space
• Built for modern macOS: supports macOS 26 and 27, including notch-friendly layouts via the Thaw Bar
• Light on your Mac. A small, steady memory footprint.
• Multilingual: Thaw is available in 20 languages.

Integrations:

Every core action is a thaw:// deep link, so Thaw plugs into the launcher you already use.

• Raycast: official extension. Toggle sections, open search, and change settings without leaving Raycast.
• Droppy: pair Thaw with Droppy's shelf and extras for a full menu bar suite.
• Anything else: Alfred, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, or a shell script.

Comparison:

• Bartender: The OG menu bar manager for macOS. Closed source and requires you to buy a license and pay for major updates. Has a 3x higher memory footprint than Thaw.
• Barbee: Closed source and only available on the App Store. Requires the installation of an additional helper app for all features to be available.

Transparency:

• Free, and free to keep. No purchase, no subscription, and no upgrade fee when macOS ships a new version.
• Open source, GPL-3.0. Read the code, build it yourself, fork it.
• No tracking, no account. No analytics, no telemetry, no sign-up.
• Screen Recording is optional. Hiding, revealing, and rearranging items all work without it, and any item Thaw cannot capture is drawn as its app's icon instead. Grant it if you want live item previews and wallpaper-derived tinting.
• Signed and notarized by Apple, with verifiable releases, the OpenSSF Best Practices Gold badge, and an OpenSSF Scorecard for supply-chain posture.

Pricing: Free

But if you find it to be useful, please consider tipping us on of the various platforms we have listed in our GitHub repo.

Big Thanks goes out to u/Ok-Efficiency479 who was the main driver behind this release.

Have a nice one!

Hi! I'm Sean, the developer behind Jott it. I just launched the first version recently and I hope you like it!

Problem

I've been Bullet Journaling for around six years. I love the method, but I kept running into one problem: the physical notebook.

I once left my journal on a train and lost nearly a year's worth of notes. I tried moving to digital tools, but most felt like general-purpose productivity systems that required a lot of setup, or meant locking my journal inside someone else's platform.

So I built Jott it.

I wanted something that felt as straightforward as opening a notebook and writing: no databases to configure, no complicated productivity system to maintain, and no worrying about what happens to your journal if the app disappears.

Jott it is essentially an interface over plain Markdown files on your computer. You choose a folder, Jott it handles the journaling workflow, and the files remain yours.

You can open the exact same journal in any text editor from TextEdit to Obsidian or VS Code.

Key features include:

• You control your data. Your journal is just plain text files — Jott it provides the interface. No import, export, or lock-in.
• Full Bullet Journal workflow — rapid logging for tasks, notes and events, with daily, monthly and yearly views.
• Task organisation — projects, contexts and priorities without needing a separate task manager.
• Habit tracking — track habits alongside your daily journal.
• Local-first and private — your journal stays as Markdown files on your device that you can always edit offline. Jott it doesn't store your journal.
• Built for desktop — fast entry and keyboard-friendly navigation designed around actually journaling rather than managing a productivity system.

Comparison

There are plenty of apps you could compare Jott it with, but these are the three I think of the most:

Obsidian: Extremely powerful and also works with Markdown files, but it's a general-purpose knowledge management tool rather than a dedicated Bullet Journal. You can recreate much of Jott it's functionality with plugins and configuration, but that requires some setup and is not as streamlined. I actually use both: Jott It for journaling/tasks and Obsidian for long-term notes and knowledge.

Todoist: A much more mature and powerful task manager. If you primarily want task management, Todoist will do far more than Jott it. However, Todoist has a proprietary data format, so having control over your data is more complicated while Jott it stores everything as text files. Jott it also integrates tasks into the journaling workflow instead of only doing tasks.

NotePlan: Probably the closest comparison. The founder has spent a long time working on it and it's a mature Markdown-based notes, tasks and calendar app with features Jott it doesn't have yet, such as backlinks. A large difference is price. NotePlan is subscription-based starting at $99/year, while Jott it is more focused and costs $3.99 as a one-time purchase.

Pricing

$3.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store. No subscription.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jott-it/id6802472749?mt=12

Website: https://getjott.com/

I got tired of running one app for Jellyfin, another for IPTV, and "all‑in‑one" apps that compromised on playback quality. So last year I started building Spectati: a single native client for Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, NAS and IPTV on iOS, tvOS and macOS 26 (Tahoe) and later. I’ve focused on making each platform version feel like a proper Apple app, not a port.

How Spectati compares

• vs Infuse: Spectati supports more provider types in one place (IPTV, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, NAS; however no cloud services eg. Google Drive). Playback is also a major focus: you can stream very high bitrates without transcoding, with support for HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and a broad range of Dolby Vision profiles.
• vs UHF: Provider support is largely on par by now, since UHF has added Plex and Jellyfin. The choice mostly comes down to UI and workflow preferences. Spectati has, for example, more tools for cleaning up and managing IPTV playlists.

Spectati is free to download and use, with some limits:

• Free: full playback from up to two providers at SDR and stereo
• Premium: HDR, Dolby Vision and surround sound, unlimited providers, IPTV catch‑up and VOD, offline downloads, iCloud sync, SIMKL and bulk channel tools

Premium is $2.99/month, $22.99/year with a 7-day free trial, or $99.99 lifetime as an introductory offer (will increase to $129.99).

Website (spectati.com)

App Store link

Native Mac apps are at their best when they solve one recurring annoyance and then get out of the way.

There are already plenty of 100-app directories, so this list is deliberately short: ten apps, ten jobs, and one practical reason each is worth knowing. The filter is simple: built specifically for macOS, verifiably native where possible, and useful without a twenty-feature pitch.

One necessary disclosure: hora Calendar is included below, and I am its founder and developer. That entry is obviously biased. There are no affiliate links, and nobody paid or asked to be included.

The list is alphabetical, because ranking Mac apps is a reliable way to start a small civil war.

1. Bear - notes, free tier plus subscription

Fast native notes with Markdown, tags, and a polished editor. Good when you want structure without turning note-taking into another project to manage.

1. CleanShot X - screenshots, one-time purchase with optional paid update renewal

Screenshots, annotation, scrolling capture, and screen recording in one native app. It quietly replaces a small pile of separate utilities.

1. Dropover - files, free to try with a one-time Pro unlock

A temporary shelf for moving files, links, text, and images between places. A very small idea that removes a surprising amount of awkward dragging.

1. hora Calendar - calendar, subscription

Google Calendar without the browser tab. It keeps multiple Google accounts and Google-specific event types together, shows the next meeting in the menu bar, and joins Meet, Zoom, or Teams in one click. Apple Calendar is the free general-purpose option, while Fantastical is the broader multi-provider power-user option. hora is narrower by design and is a better fit when Google Calendar is your source of truth. It does not support iCloud Calendar. There is a 7-day free trial, then it is $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

1. IINA - media, free and open source

A Swift-based media player that handles almost anything while still behaving like a Mac app. Native Picture in Picture is the sort of detail that earns permanent Dock space.

1. Maccy - clipboard, free and open source

Clipboard history with no attempt to become your second operating system. It is keyboard-first, fast, and built with native macOS UI.

1. Mimestream - email, subscription

Gmail without living in Gmail. It uses the Gmail API, so labels, categories, search, and multiple accounts survive the move out of the browser.

1. Nova - development, one-time purchase with optional paid update renewal

Panic's 100% Mac-native editor and IDE. Git, terminal, file transfers, and editing live in one workspace that still feels shaped like macOS.

1. Soulver - calculations, one-time purchase

A natural-language notepad calculator for estimates, conversions, percentages, and all the arithmetic that is too involved for Calculator but too small for a spreadsheet.

1. Things 3 - tasks, one-time purchase per platform

A personal task manager with excellent quick entry, keyboard navigation, and restraint. It does not do team collaboration, which is either a limitation or the point.

Which app belongs in version two? The most useful recommendations say what it replaced, whether it is truly native or just native-feeling, and how it is priced. Corrections are welcome too. “Native” is the kind of word that can accidentally start a 200-comment standards committee.

As expected for an Alfred user, Raycast is giving people some features, then pulling the rug and locking them behind a paywall. Thanks to the Alfred team.. they’ve always been trustworthy.