7 Mac utilities I'd fight to keep, and what I actually use them for (not another 'best apps' list)

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 tweaks and hacks you accumulate, until the line between "native" and "third-party" gets blurry — the good ones just start to feel built in. These...

CurrentKey, Removing Mac Friction Points with Space Naming and ScreenTime Info You Can Actually Use

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 deals with both of those irritants: CurrentKey (formerly CurrentKey Stats)...

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 LineupApptorium 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 • 38% off FiveNotes and...

AudioBo: The Audiobook Builder That Doesn't Make You Choose Parts 1, 2, and 3

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 stop and start listening without searching for your place, add bookmarks and get a description and info on the...

Finbar is an Indy Gem for Keyboard First Users

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 BetterTouchTool that try to address menu bar searches. Most of them are good at doing 70%...

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...

Viraam Made Me Admit I Was Wrong About Break Reminders

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 Store options for this. I landed on Viraam. The...

Free and Discounted Copies of Sxitch for Reader

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 SxitchSxitch 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, letter-narrowing mechanic is the clear differentiator versus Cmd+Tab's unpredictable cycling. The free tier includes tree-based switching and themes; Pro adds...

The World Needs More $5 Apps Like NanoClip

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, fully remappable: • Clipboard history (⌃⌘V) -- everything you've copied, searchable • Snippets (⌃⌘S) -- text expansion with keyword auto-triggers • Flows (⌃⌘F) --...

Allihat: Good App, Hard Sell

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 other half has quietly used it to do things that would have been difficult to impossible without it....

Developer Spotlight - WidgetWorx

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 features. You can tell he put real thought into each title, and I've used enough of them long enough...

The Best eBook Readers: Readest vs. Bookshelves

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 1.5-million-book built-in catalog. Cross-platform reader? Readest. Living entirely on the Mac and want the nicer native app? Bookshelves. Full breakdown below. I spend a...

Variations on a Theme: Five Recent Cmd+Tab Interpretations

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, GroupCtrl walks you through building app groups that match your actual workflow -- Bloom,...

Mira Makes YouTube Usable

Markdown --- title: Mira Makes YouTube Usable description: Mira is a standalone YouTube player that has all the built in features you try to capture with a browser and an ever-changing collection of extensions.. date: 2026-07-01 --- 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....

RegexPilot: Regular Expressions for Regular People (and no AI hallucinations)

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 VoodooIt 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 accumulated over the years. If you do find-and-replace in BBEdit, Nova, or Obsidian; clean up messy CSV exports; build...