Amerpie by Lou Plummer

TL;DR: AutoShelf ($19.99 one-time) ships an embedded MCP server that works, but do you actually need that? An AI model can write a launchd LaunchAgent and a shell script once and it runs forever, no app, no daemon, no purchase. The MCP's real value only shows up once you're managing enough rules to want conversational audit and editing instead of hand-maintained scripts, and even there, my hands-on testing found the rule engine underneath thin: no dynamic subfolder sorting, limited management…

My parents were young when I was born, only 17, but despite the relatively small time gap, we are from distinctly different generations. They've been divorced since the 70s, so their needs and circumstances, while similar, are still unique. Last year, my dad and his wife moved to an assisted living facility about a 20-minute drive away. It takes about three hours to get to my mom's. That's doable, but not as easy. For most of my life, each has been independent. They are both part of the…

TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every quarter. Disaster Avoidance Apps Yesterday I laid out what happens when Apple closes your account: your…

TL;DR: Mac power users vet apps carefully and then hand their entire digital life to Apple without a second thought. Apple can close your account on suspicion alone, keep your unspent balance, and never tell you why; a federal judge confirmed all of that in 2023 and threw the case out. An Apple Account is simultaneously an authentication system, cloud-storage account, software license repository, device-activation credential, communications identity, and payment account. A full lockout can…

"Radar Love" by Golden Earring Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you want to take a midnight drive? - Radar Love by Golden Earring This has got to be the classic answer for a reason: the bassline mimics tires eating up highway miles, and the lyrics are literally about driving through the night to a lover, View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

TL;DR: Four free iPhone apps that handle jobs you would normally do on your Mac: API Bot for testing endpoints, View Source Vibe for inspecting a suspicious link, Fiper for algorithm-free RSS, and Owl VIP for sender-level email notifications. Two earn a place on your phone. Fiper loses to NetNewsWire for anyone reading this blog, and Owl VIP charges a subscription for something iOS Focus Modes mostly do free. None has a native Mac app. Every so often, something breaks and you are nowhere near…

You have a chance this week (ending August 7th) to pick up five apps at the lowest prices I've seen them listed for. Sale Details. Reviews of Apps I Have Personally Tested TextSniper - Better Than Native OCR | AppAddict ($7.99- On Sale For $1.99 -%75) Hit a hotkey, drag a box over anything on screen (a locked PDF, a video frame, a screenshot someone sent you), and the text lands on your clipboard; it also reads QR codes and barcodes and can speak the captured text aloud. OCR runs entirely on…

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" by The Band Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that perfectly captures anticipation. - When I Paint My Masterpiece, written by Bob Dylan, performed by The Band at the 30th Anniversary Celebration Bob's song writing along with Levon's voice. It doesn't get better. Promise that you'll be there with me, when I paint my masterpiece. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

TL;DR: RAD Weather pulls forecasts from four services and shows you where they disagree instead of averaging the disagreement away. Free, with RAD Ultra at $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, plus a MultiPass tier at $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual. The Mac build is a real Mac app, the subscription is justified by per-forecast data costs, and there is no radar. RAD TV shipped in 7.6.7 and an Apple TV version is announced. RAD Weather's Unique Feature Years of obsessive cycling…

TL;DR: Orbit runs each of your Google accounts in its own isolated WebKit session inside one native Mac window, for $89 one time instead of the $50 to $200 a year the alternatives want. It exists because you can de-Google yourself but you can't de-Google your father. The catch is that it only works as long as Google keeps letting Mac apps sign in, and passkey-only and Advanced Protection accounts already can't. The Google Accounts I Didn't Ask For My opinion of big tech companies has hardened…

TL;DR: Blankie is a free, open-source ambient sound mixer for Mac, iPhone, iPad and CarPlay; no ads, IAPs, or subscriptions. 24 mixable sounds, saved presets, custom audio import, menu bar control. Stacked against Noizio, Dark Noise, myNoise, and Endel, all of which charge something for depth or convenience Blankie gives away for free. I'm not usually one to complain about app pricing, but I make an exception when it feels like someone is misrepresenting the complexity of something simple to…

Mac users tend to be nostalgic about the hardware and software they used in their earliest exposure to tech. That doesn't mean anyone wants to try to get real work done on a late-90s PowerPC Mac clone, or go back to 14-inch monitors. People just enjoy being reminded how far we've come, and pretend there was once a time when everything "just worked." (It didn't. I was there.) German developer Maik Klotz created a free app, RetroMac, that turns your current Mac into a version of the Wayback…

"Jack and Diane" by John Cougar Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the feeling of being seventeen. - Jack and Diane by John Cougar I grew up fast. I was desperate for adulthood and freedom, but the good stuff already felt like it' was slipping away in real time. That's what this song feels like to me. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Quick Look extensions have evolved over time. Once the category seemed to be made up of legacy junk: kernel-adjacent hacks that broke every time Apple shipped a point release, the kind of thing you install once, forget about, and eventually blame for a random Finder freeze. That reputation was earned. For years the ecosystem really was a pile of abandoned generators held together by community goodwill. Then, starting with Peek in 2021, the category was reborn on native QLPreviewingController…

Is it possible to shrink image file sizes on a Mac using native tools? Yes, but with some big IFs thrown in. Preview can knock a file's size down if you dig into the export dialog and guess at a quality slider, and Photos will do the same on export, but neither remembers what you did last time or watches a folder for you. That's way too much friction when alternatives exist. No one wants to live like an animal. Image compression is a solved problem and it has been for a while. What separates a…

If you bill clients by the hour, it might be time to reevaluate your workflow. Daily, a Mac time tracker from independent developer Niels Mouthaan, continuously supported since 2013, just got a substantial update: a web API, a Zapier integration, and an MCP server. Because it works via user polling and not background process monitoring, it's the go-to privacy-respecting choice in its category. Based on its review history, Daily enjoys broad support from tech professionals with ADHD and time…

TL;DR Imagin Raw is a free, open-source Mac app (4.3 MB) for culling and rating RAW photos — no import, no library, folders stay where they are. Writes ratings/labels to standard XMP sidecars so Lightroom and Bridge both read them. Compares itself directly to Adobe Bridge (9 MB vs. 2 GB, 0% idle CPU vs. nonzero). It's a few weeks old, Mac-only by design, and has a known issue with Fuji RAF previews. Not a Photo Mechanic replacement for pros yet, but a solid free option if you just need to look,…

"Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that feels like it has healing powers - Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye "Sexual Healing" works because the arrangement carries the argument: the drum machine's pulse against Gaye's voice creates tension between mechanical desire and genuine ache, which is the whole thesis of the song. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

All four of my grandparents lived into my adulthood. For most of my childhood, they were close enough that we could visit them often. Even though my parents split up the year I started school, my mom stayed close to my dad's family, so that was never an issue. As a child, I thought my grandparents were perfect. And as an adult, my opinion of them didn't change very much. Their love for me was as unconditional as love can be. No matter how much trouble I got into at school or with my folks, my…

TL;DR:Iris is a Mac photo viewer that indexes photos where they already live (folder, external drive, or your existing Apple Photos library) instead of importing them into a managed database. It does on-device face recognition, OCR/speech search, and a real map (Photo Trails) that plots every geotagged photo so you can browse by location. No cloud, no account, no subscription; one-time purchase, 14-day trial. It's a viewer, not an editor, so RAW/Lightroom workflows aren't the target use case.…

As a Reddit user for over 20 years, I feel qualified to do a deep dive on my favorite subreddit, r/MacApps. I recently analyzed the culture that's developed there. I've decided I like this place, so I am hanging around despite some of its quirks. Take your average question, let's say it's someone asking about a simple app to keep a window on top. Within an hour, the replies will include: A free open-source utility A $5 single-purpose app A $30 app that also performs 46 unrelated functions A…

TL;DR: PopClip, Raycast, BetterTouchTool, Keyboard Maestro, Apple Shortcuts, Supercharge, and ExtraBar; concrete daily uses for each, not feature dumps. For people already comfortable on macOS who've hit a specific friction point (clipboard, mouse buttons, background-app switching) and want the tool that kills it.One of the perks of working on a Mac: with a few painful exceptions, whatever workflow itch you have, some app already scratches it. The longer you're in this ecosystem, the more…

I'm ready to grudgingly accept that the absolute market saturation of mattress retailers in America over the past 10 years isn't tied to money laundering, even though it's one of the few internet conspiracies that kind of, sort of, might possibly be true. I bought a mattress yesterday. First time in my life. I've lived on this planet 61 years without having that experience. All I can say after nearly selling a kidney to buy a common household item is DAMN. The one we bought cost more than every…

"Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the feeling of being homesick. Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show I've heard this called the unofficial state song of my home, state, North Carolina. "Headed down south, to the land of the pines, I'm thumbin' my way to North Caroline" If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Here are two Mac friction points: It's been 16 years since Mission Control was released, and "Desktop 3" is still "Desktop 3." Apple's API doesn't expose Space naming to any third-party app — there's no system-level hook to hang a label on. Screen Time gets activated when an app launches and stays that way as long as the app is open; the clock keeps ticking even if the app is minimized or buried six windows deep on your desktop. To me, that makes it practically useless. There's an app that…

"Joe Hill (Live at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, 1969)" by Joan Baez Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you feel like you're part of something bigger? Joe Hill by Joan Baez This old song from the labor movement was adopted by the anti-draft movement. Joan Baez, whose husband was imprisoned for draft resistance, sang this to 300,00 people at Woodstock. We are all part of something bigger. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Apptorium, the developers best known for SideNotes, is running a sale from July 20–31 on some of the most recommended apps in their category. Get Details . Apps on Sale from Other Developers CleanShot at 20% off DaisyDisk at 30% off ForkLift at 30% off MindNode at 20% off Nova by Panic for 40% off SetApp for 20% off Apptorium's Own Lineup Apptorium is putting their entire lineup on sale: 40% off SideNotes for Mac, iPhone, and iPad 50% off Workspaces and Desktop Composer 30% off License Store…

TL;DR - Turn just about any collection of audiobook files (FLAC,WAV,MP3) into a single iPhone compatible M4B complete with metadata and chapters. Mac, $9.99, Solo dev I've been listening to audiobooks since they were called books on tape. I progressed from there to CDs and then to miscellaneous downloads. These days, the gold standard format, at least for Apple fans, is audiobooks packaged as single M4B files regardless of the book's length, complete with chapters and metadata. That way you can…

We spend roughly one-third of our life asleep as a biological imperative. My relationship with sleep kind of tells my life story, not in dreams but in the pure mechanics of when I went to bed and when I got up. Oddly, sleep has seldom been a neutral element in my life. It's been something that either prevented me from doing something or enabled me. I had a bedtime enforced by the adults in my life until about a month before I went into the Army. Kids in my house went to bed when they were told.…

In past lives, my bosses pressed me into using a few complex and complicated apps - mostly Adobe and Microsoft stuff, some AutoCAD. One thing they all have in common is crammed menu bars where what you are actually looking for seldom makes sense and when it does, it's buried three levels deep. Those are the ones that Microsoft likes to use as answers to questions on certification exams. There's no shortage of specialty apps, like Paletro and automation tools like Raycast, Alfred and…