AppAddict

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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.…

I've resisted the whole category of apps that nag you about breaks, posture, hydration, and eyestrain. Being told what to do by my computer felt like an insult to my judgment. The reality: my judgment about when to take a break is bad. I lose track of time at the keyboard, I resist interruptions on principle, and by the end of most days I'm running well under 100%. None of that is a software problem until you decide it's worth fixing with software. I evaluated a handful of the popular Mac App…

Umang Syrana, the developer of Sxitch, a keyboard tree based app switcher gave me 10 free licenses and 10 licenses at a 50% discount to distribute to AppAddict readers. Get it free: Use code AMERPIE 50% Discount: Use code AppAddict Sxitch Sxitch is a variation on the Right-Cmd launcher pioneered by the Low-Tech Guys. Right-Cmd opens a popup; type letters and the list narrows -- "tree-based navigation" -- until one app is left, which auto-focuses. No cycling. What I like: The tree-based,…

NanoClip is a menu-bar app combining clipboard history, text-expansion snippets, and clipboard automation "flows." Free/demo tier; Pro is $9.99 one-time ($5 with code EARLYBIRD through Jul 31). macOS 14+, local-first, optional iCloud sync, no account. By Victor Baro. (getnano.dev/clip) The world needs more $5 apps like NanoClip. Before you roll your eyes at yet another clipboard utility, this one is actually three utilities rolled into one, and each can be summoned with its own global hotkey,…

Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the…

I spend a lot of time watching the free-software sites, and for a couple of years now one name keeps earning a click: WidgetWorx. There are currently 17 "unquestionably niche, but surprisingly useful apps" on offer, none of them more than $4.99. In a throwback to yesteryear, a few are fully functional donation-ware. Every app is signed and notarized. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no Electron bloat. The developer answers support quickly and keeps the apps current with bug fixes and new…

TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a…

Apple's Cmd+Tab has real blind spots. It works on apps, not windows. It doesn't know about Spaces. It has no search, fuzzy or otherwise. Several independent developers have recently taken a crack at fixing it, each with a different idea of what "better" means. I'm not picking a winner here -- just laying out what each one gets right and where it falls short, in case you want to try one yourself. GroupCtrl -- Free, Open Source (GPL-3.0) Instead of assigning a different hotkey to each app,…

TL;DR: Mira is a small (5.6 MB), native Mac app that makes YouTube calm and pleasant: no Shorts, no sponsor segments, no recommendation rabbit hole. It folds SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, searchable transcripts, optional bring-your-own-key AI summaries, Picture-in-Picture, background audio, and a real Focus Mode into one signed app instead of the pile of browser extensions you have to maintain on your on. It collects zero data, has a long free trial and costs $39.99 for a lifetime…

RegexPilot by developer Kristof Polleunis, is an app designed to protect you and your work from the hallucinations and miscalculations AI can inject into the regular expressions you ask it to build. Not Voodoo It took a while, but I finally realized that regular expressions are not the computer voodoo I always assumed them to be. In 2026, even regular (non-developer) users are managing and searching large data sets of movies and tv shows, music, ebooks or even just collections of documents…

Activity Monitor is one of those apps you open when something is wrong and then quietly resent. It tells you a process called java is eating a core and offers you almost nothing else. No version, no path, no command line, no idea which of the four Java apps you have running is the culprit. For a tool that ships on every Mac, it is remarkably bad at answering the one question you actually have: what is this thing and why is it doing that? I've spent the last year using ProcessSpy as my answer to…

If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor…

SupaSidebar in Action Most technically oriented people who value privacy do so because privacy is, and should be, a human right, not because they have something to hide. Maintaining privacy in the current technical environment requires a real strategy and almost constant attention to an evolving landscape. It is no longer enough to block trackers, ads, and cookies. Browser fingerprinting has become one of the primary privacy-violating mechanisms used by companies that want to identify, profile,…

Cache Out, a free new single-purpose utility from veteran Mac developer Jim Mitchell, fits right into an app category that is severely underrepresented - utilities that work across multiple browsers from a single interface. What It Does Cache Out's superpower is selective data removal from a variety of popular macOS browsers with the click of a single button. It removes five categories of information - cache, history, downloads, favicons, and cookies. You select the browsers you want cleared…

The mark of a good Internet citizen is whether they star the GitHub repositories they like and whether they upvote helpful posts on Reddit. As someone who devotes a lot of time to online communities, racking up a few Internet points always feels good. I used to be slightly intimidated by GitHub. For the most part, it's full of indie apps by individual devs, so there isn't a marketing department designing websites and writing copy. It's just the same dude who coded the app you want to try. If…

In trying to be open-minded, I recently agreed to try Ejectify, an app that performs a task for which I already had a solution: to automatically eject external disks from my Mac before it goes to sleep and to remount them when it wakes. I worked off a MacBook for a long, long time, and I needed a way to just shut it, unplug, and move on without getting nagged to death about thumb drives and external volumes. I've been using Jettison to do that since I saw it in Macworld in 2011. The developer,…

I like using Apple Shortcuts when it fits my workflow, but advanced features can be confusing. I manage simple loops and variables, but it’s slow and tricky. That’s why I was happy to see MacStories release Shortcuts Playground, a free plugin for Codex and Claude Code. It lets you describe what you want in natural language and creates a real Apple Shortcut you can use or share. You can read about it and get installation instructions for free if you have those platforms. It’s been years since I…

Brett Terpstra has released Marked 3, and this is not just a routine update. It’s one of those releases that makes you stop and think about where a tool actually fits in your workflow. If you write in Markdown on a Mac, there’s a very good chance Marked has been the missing piece all along. For years, I lived in Microsoft Word for anything that wasn’t email. That was the EdTech world: Word was the standard, `.doc` and `.docx` were the expected formats, and no one wanted to hear about…

Airspace, an app I downloaded today, has a lot going for it. It removes a classic Apple friction point by letting you name your virtual desktops, customize their appearance, and assign keyboard shortcuts to jump between them. It also helps me illustrate a point. Making a decision about the right price for an app has to be one of the hardest parts of releasing something new. Some of the most versatile and useful apps in the Mac ecosystem are priced absurdly low. I am looking at you,…

When the free app DockDoor was released in 2024, it was the first time I had seen a developer add window previews to the Mac Dock in much the same way that other operating system from Redmond handles them. For kicks, it also included a Windows-style application switcher, also free. I have been updating some older reviews, so I went back to check on DockDoor. Not only does the original free version still exist, but the developer has also added a paid Pro version with a much larger feature set.…

Top Shelf For the past few weeks, I’ve been beta testing a new release of Bartender; an app with an interesting, and at times slightly controversial, history. Despite that, it’s a utility I’ve relied on for years. I recently did a deep dive into the problems macOS changes have created for menu bar managers and what those changes mean going forward. Even with a few lingering issues in the category, I still came away viewing Bartender as the best overall option for serious Mac users. The new…

Droppy An update to Droppy by developer Jordy Spruit dropped this weekend. What started as a free notch app has evolved into a paid, but still inexpensive, suite of Mac productivity tools. The licensing recently changed so that Droppy’s one-time payment now gets you a license for two Macs instead of one. The change is retroactive and applies to all users. From now until May 31st, the price is €6.99. After that, it will be €9.99. Both prices include lifetime updates, including major version…

Liqoria The promise: A universal music controller that lives in your Dock and unifies Apple Music, Spotify, browsers, and more with animated artwork, real waveforms, and native Apple design. If Apple were the company that so many people pretend that it is, it would make a music controller lives in your Dock and plays not just Apple Music but also Spotify, Youtube and more with animated artwork, real waveforms, using real native Apple design. The reality though, is that Apple Music is a…

Corel Painter Corel’s Spot on Memory Lane I hadn’t thought about Corel graphics apps in a long time until I saw their flagship app on sale recently. I got my first tech-related job in 1994, when my ability to figure things out in Windows 3.1 earned me a promotion from the manufacturing floor to the quality department at the Westinghouse factory where I worked after getting out of the Army. The tools I worked with felt absurdly expensive at the time: a Pentium PC, a Kodak digital camera, and the…

Substage Substage is a command bar that attaches beneath your Finder window. Select files, type what you want in plain English, and Substage generates a Terminal command, previews its side effects, and runs it with confirmation when needed. Think of it less as an AI assistant and more as a natural language layer between your intent and the Unix tools already built into macOS. The key distinction; the AI’s role ends once the command is generated. After that, real shell tools do the work: sips,…