AppAddict

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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Six Free Utilities, Zero Subscriptions

TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources. The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it do what they wanted. I wish I had those chops, although with AI, the days of being...

September 21st, 2026 Mac Apps

McKinley: The SF Symbols Editor Apple Never Built

The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole thing still reads as the same symbol from thin to bold, and doing it all in a way Xcode will accept without...

September 8th, 2026 Mac Apps

Five Free Apps With No Telemetry & No Accounts That Do One Thing Well: TetherShot, Folder Forge, Image Fuel, doktor, and Kompakt

TL;DR: Five free, mostly open-source, no-telemetry Mac utilities from this week's testing: docktor (dock widgets + hover previews), Kompakt (drag-and-drop image/video compression), TetherShot (live iPhone screen capture over USB/Wi-Fi), FolderForge (rule-based folder icon styling), and ImageFuel (import-free folder browsing with RAW support). Each gets a free alternative below if you want to compare before committing. Removing Irritation My app testing time this week was spent on free apps, most of them open source and all privacy-respecting. No accounts needed. No telemetry. I've been looking for original, niche apps that do one thing well. docktor docktor calls itself the dock you...

August 30th, 2026 Mac Apps

Five Free and Low Cost Apps: Holeberry, Dock Party, Neon Vision Editor, MojiBar and Snick

Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one. Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour, or indefinitely, giving you the same toggle as Pi-hole's own...

August 23rd, 2026 Mac Apps

AppAddict Records 1,000,000th View

When I wrote and published my first software review in 2024, I had no idea I'd still be going strong after 500+ reviews. Thank you to all of my fellow App Addicts and all the developers out there who keep writing high quality Mac software.

August 19th, 2026

Five Unique Free Apps

Here are five free Mac applications you've most likely never come across. A project template/scaffolding automator, a local music player, resize batch images, a posture app that takes Advantage of the AirPods motion sensors, plus a financial calculator for cash flow simulation.  • Prefab - Capture a folder structure as a reusable "blueprint," add variable placeholders to names and contents, then deploy it anywhere via the app, menu bar, or Finder right-click. Deployment can chain actions: git init, npm install, opening the project in an editor, arbitrary terminal commands. Built for developers but pitched at anyone with a repeatable folder-setup ritual: lawyers, researchers, creatives. • Playhead - Local-first music player for people who keep their own files instead of streaming. The pitch is "waveform-first": it generates and caches waveform data so you can see and scrub a track's structure instead of...

August 17th, 2026 Mac Apps

Five Free Alternative to Paid Apps

Are you paying for an ad blocker, folder automation, notes & PKM and image editing ? You don't have to. • wBlock - a next-generation ad/content blocker for Safari: 750,000 rule capacity across 5 Safari content-blocking extensions (150k each), ~40MB idle RAM by running Safari's native content-blocking API out-of-process, Protocol Buffers + LZ4 filter storage, HTTP conditional-request updates, and iCloud sync of filter selections/custom lists/userscripts/whitelist. It bundles an Element Zapper, "Tube Cleaner & Player Cleaner" userscripts that restore native Picture-in-Picture/background playback on media sites, a full Greasemonkey-API userscript engine, UserCSS support, custom AdGuard-syntax filter-list import, per-site controls, a blocked-request logger,...

August 16th, 2026 Mac Apps

Lore: A Free App for YouTubeVideo Downloading, also Builds YouTube Playlists Without Signing In

TL;DR: Lore is a free Mac app that follows YouTube channels over plain RSS, no algorithm, no Google account, then archives what you keep as a permanent offline file with transcript search, highlights, and SponsorBlock built in. The site's source-code link 404s, so don't take open source on faith. Alternatives for readers who want a lighter touch: FreeTube (free, open source, no algorithm, no download) and Grayjay Desktop ($9.99 one time, aggregates YouTube with other platforms). Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could When you find a video you want to archive, any app that merely...

August 15th, 2026 Mac Apps

The Extension Aided Method of Ignoring thee YouTube Algorithm

TL;DR: Control Panel for YouTube, UnTrap, and DeArrow all quiet YouTube down without making you leave the account, the browser, or the ecosystem behind. That's the whole point and the whole limit: you still get Google's ranking, you just stop looking at what it hands you. Control Panel is free and open source on Chrome and Firefox; the native Safari app is $3.99 once, no subscription. UnTrap is $4.99 once for all 250+ controls; an optional $3.99/month or $35.99/year adds cross-device sync and unlimited AI video summaries, which send content to a third party. DeArrow fixes a different problem, clickbait...

August 13th, 2026 Mac Apps

How to Experience YouTube With No Algorithm

TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data API instead, which should make it sturdier, but needs macOS 15. Play, Yattee and Unwatched Won't Fix YouTube's Algorithm. They Just Won't Ask...

August 12th, 2026 Mac Apps

YouTube Premium kills the ads but doesn't solve the real problem. Here's the stack I use to do that.

TL;DR: Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren't. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming. Google did not design YouTube to entertain you or to inform you. Every major design choice points toward one purpose: to make you watch more YouTube. Watching more leads to one of two outcomes: your attachment to the platform gets stronger, or you get shown more advertising. For a lot of people, it's...

August 11th, 2026 Mac Apps

Caption Snap: Meeting Transcriptions With No Bot, No Model to Download, No Data Transferred and No Drain on Your CPU - Free Trial, One Time, $9.99

TL;DR: CaptionSnap is a $9.99 one-time menu bar app that saves your Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet transcripts by reading the live captions the meeting app already displays. No audio recording, no bot in the call, no cloud, no model download, and Accessibility is the only permission it asks for. Speaker names come from the platform, so attribution is a lookup instead of a guess. You have to enable captions yourself, transcripts are only as good as the platform's captioning, and it requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. CaptionSnap Reads the Captions Your Meeting App Already Shows You Here is...

August 10th, 2026 Mac Apps

Autoshelf Has an MCP Server You Probably Don't Need and The Rule Engine Is Weak - A Review

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 by file size, and an action list a fraction of Hazel's. AutoShelf delivers less using AI than its marketing promises...

August 9th, 2026 Mac Apps

The Apps I Use So Apple Can't Take Everything

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 identity if it's an @icloud.com address, your photos and messages, your purchases, your hardware in every...

August 7th, 2026 Mac Apps

All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Apple Disaster Scenario

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 therefore affect data, purchases, services, and hardware management at once.This post covers how accounts get closed, what you lose when it happens, why getting back...

August 6th, 2026 Mac Apps