Mac Tools Consolidates Your Utility Bloat — With One Catch

Apple, in its infinite wisdom, buries a great many popular system controls three layers deep in Settings, or worse, leaves them accessible only via the command line. Luckily, we have a community of indie developers who are pretty good at surfacing that stuff, building an app around it, and selling it for $5. An app for brightness. An app for the notch. An app to keep the Mac awake. An app to mute the mic. Then one day your menu bar has 40 icons in it and your login items are out of control. There's a relatively new, free and open-source app that takes the opposite approach. Currently sporting over 500 GitHub stars, Mac Tools folds more than 40 of those functions into a single menu bar icon. It's built natively in SwiftUI and AppKit; the functions run on native Mac architecture, not scripts. Brightness goes through CoreDisplay, audio through CoreAudio, and disk cleanup runs path verification before it deletes anything. That last one matters: a cleanup tool that checks its work before…