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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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...

July 16th, 2026

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%...

July 15th, 2026

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...

July 11th, 2026 Mac Apps

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...

July 11th, 2026 Mac Apps

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...

July 10th, 2026

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) --...

July 9th, 2026 Mac Apps

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

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....

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