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I emphasize honest, practical reviews from my perspective as a power user and productivity enthusiast — not a marketer I have a particular fondness for the indie Mac scene, privacy-respecting software, open-source tools, and workflow automation. I also cover self-hosting, the de-Googling/de-Apple-ification of digital life, and the art of building efficient Mac workflows with the right combination of small, focused apps. Posts range from single-app deep dives to multi-app roundups, workflow walkthroughs, and developer spotlights. If you're a developer and have an app you'd like me to check out, let me know.
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ProcessSpy After a Year

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 that question, and at this point it has more...
June 23rd, 2026

SmoothCSV: Finally, a CSV Editor That Doesn't Guess

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 for most tasks. Here to...
June 22nd, 2026

SupaSidebar Boosts Privacy and Productivity

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, and monetize you across the web. One strategy many people use is spreading their work across multiple browsers. That has a second benefit: it lets you match...
June 16th, 2026 Mac Apps

Cache Out - A Privacy Focused Free Tool For Multiple Browsers

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 DoesCache 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 from a list. You select the categories of data to remove. Then, you click a single button and BOOM. It's done. After the files...
June 1st, 2026 Mac Apps

Just Wondering Around Github, Looking for a Software Fix

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 you spend time looking around, you find that GitHub also contains...
May 27th, 2026

Why I Replaced Jettison with Ejectify after 15 Years

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, St. Clair Software, also makes Default Folder X, History Hound,...
May 26th, 2026 Mac Apps

10 Ways to Get More Out of Apple Shortcuts

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 updated my list of free and cheap apps that boost Apple Shortcuts, so here’s...
May 23rd, 2026

Marked 3 Is the Markdown Companion a Lot of Mac Writers Have Been Waiting For

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 alternatives. Never mind the huge app footprint, the licensing mess, the...
May 21st, 2026

Airspace: A Polished Fix for a macOS Friction Point

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, BetterTouchTool. On the other hand, we have all seen apps with plenty of...
May 14th, 2026

DockDoor Pro - The Dock Apple Wouldn't Build

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. The splash page for DockDoor Pro puts its claim front...
May 13th, 2026

Bartender Enters a New Era with 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 release, called Bartender Pro, expands beyond traditional menu bar management with a feature called Top Shelf. The idea is...
May 12th, 2026

New Droppy Release is a Full Featured Utility Suite

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 releases. Droppy is written in native Swift. It’s signed and notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 14 and later,...
May 11th, 2026

Liqoria: The Mac Dock Player That Should've Been Built In

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 storefront, not a music player. Thankfully, we now have Liqoria, which quietly removes the whole category of app-switching...
May 8th, 2026

Corel Painter Is Still Alive and Still Ridiculously Good

Corel’s Spot on Memory LaneI 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 first color laser printer I’d ever seen. And then there was Corel; a...
May 6th, 2026 Mac Apps

Substage - A Natural Language Command Line Tool for Finder

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, ffmpeg, zip, qpdf, pandoc, git. No hallucinated output. No “trying until something works.” The command either...
May 5th, 2026 Mac Apps
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