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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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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....
July 8th, 2026 Mac Apps

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...
July 5th, 2026 Mac Apps

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...
July 3rd, 2026 Mac Apps

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,...
July 2nd, 2026 Mac Apps

Mira Makes YouTube Usable

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 license (or $2.99/month). If you only want ads gone and you are fine with YouTune in a browser, Brave or the Vinegar...
June 25th, 2026 Universal Apps

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...
June 24th, 2026 Mac Apps

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 Mac Apps

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 Mac Apps

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 Mac Apps

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 Mac Apps
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