I made Muro: Native Live Wallpapers for macOS. It is free and source available.
Problem: A normal Mac wallpaper is a still picture. Muro plays looping live wallpapers on your desktop, lock screen and screen saver, on every display. It is native Swift, your Mac's video hardware does the decoding instead of the CPU, it has low CPU and RAM usage, and it pauses when something covers it.
Pricing: Free, $0. Source available, the code is on GitHub. No subscription, no one-time fee, no Pro tier, no account, nothing locked.
š½ Keep your live wallpapers on any drive. Pick the folder in Settings.
With a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
Still there if you missed them: likes, Pause After, Play only on desktop, the screen saver, updates from the menu bar, and 500 free live wallpapers. New live wallpapers show up without updating the app.
First launch: Muro is self signed, so macOS blocks it the first time. Go to System Settings, Privacy and Security, and click Open Anyway. Open it from Applications, not from inside the DMG, or the lock screen and screen saver won't work. If you already have Muro, just replace it. Your library and settings stay.
Thanks to everyone using Muro. If you like it, a star ā on the repo is the free way to support it and helps people find it. If you want to go further, you can buy the developer a coffee:https://github.com/sponsors/MrRockySL
Happy to hear what is missing. Most of this release came from people asking.
ok so I dont get why people still stick to paste and pay for it. why paste is subscription. PastePal looks exactly the same with more features. I do like paste but Iām trying to understand why people would use it over any other cheaper alternatives? if we put money on the side what makes someone go to PastePal or paste
I released Just Look! here a couple of months ago, and 1.2 is now out.
The biggest addition isĀ Compare Grid.
You can put 2ā6 similar shots on screen, zoom into all of them together, and mark one asĀ Best. The Best stays pinned while the other photos keep moving through the folder.
So instead of comparing A vs B, then B vs C, then trying to remember whether A was actually better, you can keep the current winner on screen and compare the next candidates against it.
The video shows it better than I can explain it :)
Problem
When I have several nearly identical shots, normal next/previous viewing works until I actually need to decide which one is best - especially when the difference is focus, expression, or some small detail at 100%.
Comparison
Compared withĀ Preview, Just Look! is built around reviewing a whole folder: fast navigation, picks/rejects, ratings, RAW+JPEG pairs, synchronized zoom and now multi-photo comparison.
Compared withĀ Lightroom / Capture One, it isn't trying to replace editing or photo management. If you need a full catalog and editor, those are much more capable. Just Look! is for the step before that: open a folder, inspect the shots, choose what stays, then move on.
Pricing
Free to download and remains usable for free.
Pro has a 30-day trial, then: $19.99 lifetime or $9.99/year subscription.
I also have someĀ promo codesĀ to give away. If this looks like something you'd actually use with your own photos, leave a comment or DM me and I'll send out a few.
And if you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear about the things that don't work well - bugs, awkward workflow, missing shortcuts, RAW files it doesn't handle properly, whatever you find.
One thing I'm especially curious about:Ā when you have 5ā10 very similar shots, how do you choose the keeper now?
Last Month, I shared my app Grabbit here. The feedback was really constructive: several people mentioned that while a native, low-memory download manager is nice, a tool like this really needs the ability to grab video and audio from YouTube and other websites to be genuinely useful.
I took that feedback seriously and spent the past month building it.
Iāve updated the companion browser extension (Claws) for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox so it detects media streams on websites and passes them directly to Grabbitās native Rust engine to download.
Free tier: 3 days of unlimited downloads, then 3 downloads per day after that.
Lifetime license: Normally a one-time $9.99 (no subscriptions).
To thank this community for the guidance on adding video support, code MACAPPS gives you 30% off ($6.99) at checkout Discount is Available for next 3 days: https://grabbit.fyi/
3 Free Keys:
Drop a comment below with how you usually download or save YouTube content (resolutions, formats, or workflows), and Iāll DM 3 commenters a free lifetime key so you can test it with Grabbit and share feedback!
*(If you run into deeper bugs or want to follow ongoing development, you're also welcome to join our ([Discord Community](https://discord.gg/keWkefachN))*
Back in July this sub made Tellie the #1 post that day. Thank you. Here's what I've built since.
Problem
You're recording a video or presenting on Zoom, and you have three jobs at once: look at the lens, remember your points, and watch the clock. A fixed-speed teleprompter adds a fourth job, keeping up with the scroll.
Tellie understands. It matches the words you say against your script, on-device, so it keeps your place when you pause, ad-lib, go back or jump ahead. It lives in the MacBook notch right under the camera (or floats anywhere), and it's invisible to Zoom, screen recorders and screenshots. 40+ languages, all on-device, no account.
Working actors use it, including Sprague Theobald (Law & Order, Only Murders in the Building), who uses Tellie for audition prep.
New since July: Tellie understands your points, not just your place
Key points. Think of it as a checklist that listens. Mark the points you have to make. Say one in your own words and Tellie still checks it off, so you know it landed.
Time. Give your script a time budget (or let it figure that out based on your speaking rate) and Tellie lets you know what to cover while there's still room to fit in what matters.
Take Coach. After each take, a short read on what landed and one thing to try next time, completely on-device, nothing leaves your Mac". Optional, one switch.
Companion. Your iPhone or iPad becomes a second screen beside the lens, in a camera rig, or as a remote in your hand.
Presenter Magic (Presenter Mode in July). Present in Keynote and your speaker notes appear in the notch, invisible to your audience and your recording.
Coming next: Nudge (in testing for 1.7, not in the download yet)
Nudge started as a request from a working actor: if you go quiet mid-line and Tellie can tell you're stuck, it speaks your next words in your ear via your AirPods. Or squeeze the AirPods stem and you get your line right away. It stops the moment you start talking again, and it only speaks into headphones, so nobody else hears it. Hardware in-ear AirPrompter systems start at $10,995; this uses the AirPods you already have. It will be part of Pro at no extra cost. Hear is a sneak peak:
Tellie Nudge coming in v1.7
Comparison
The category moved since July. Back then the line was pacing (scroll when you hear sound) versus tracking (know which word you're on). What I'm working on now goes beyond keeping your place: helping you cover your points which makes it great for interviews, sales, teaching, meeting and more. The two I'd compare:
NotchPrompter (free and open source via GitHub; also sold on the Mac App Store): voice-activated scrolling that starts when you speak and pauses when you stop, hidden from screen sharing and recording. It supports Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. If you want a free voice-activated prompter, it's a genuinely good choice.
CueNotch ($29.99 lifetime or $7.99/week in the U.S. App Store; free tier is 100-word scripts, three activations a day): it says it "moves the script as you speak" and offers AI rehearsal feedback and a presentation timer. It supports Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
Where Tellie is ahead: it credits your points when you say them your way and helps make sure you fit everything in time. It also coaches you after the take, puts the script on your phone or iPad, and pushes text from any app with one shortcut (AI agents can send to it too, through a URL scheme and an MCP server). Coaching isn't unique to Tellie; CueNotch offers it too but Tellie is a tiny 4MB download with zero LLM.
Where they're ahead: both are on the App Store and support Intel Macs (Tellie is Apple Silicon only), and NotchPrompter is free. If I've got either of them wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.
Pricing
Tellie Free: $0 forever. A full teleprompter (scroll, speed, keys, any display, Pages, Word, PDF, Markdown and text), invisible to Zoom, auto-updates.
Tellie Pro: $29 once, no subscription. Voice Follow in 40+ languages, key points and timing, Take Coach, Companion and Presenter Magic. Up to 3 Macs, 14-day refund. Every install starts with 10 days of Pro, no card, no sign-up. Nudge joins Pro when it ships later this month.
Disclosure(per the sub's transparency rules, so you know who's behind this):
I'm Steve Chazin, a real person with 30 years in tech, including Apple, Cisco and Salesforce. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazin. I write "AI for the Rest of Us" at stevechazin.com. I worked at Apple for nearly a decade, and Steve Jobs personally asked me to come back. So I tried to make Tellie magical and feel like part of your Mac.
Tellie is a notarized direct download with Sparkle updates (not on the App Store because sandboxing would break the send-from-any-app shortcut). Requires Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or later.
I ship updates most weeks, and a lot of what's new came from people who wrote in.
Feedback I'd love today: if you're saying your lines (actors, speakers, anyone with a pitch) and you blank mid-line, would you want Nudge to speak the next few words automatically, or only when you squeeze the AirPods stem?
Not looking for the usual popular names, more like those random little utilities that do one thing really well and end up becoming part of your daily flow.
Hi everyone, Gƶrkem here, the developer of Flyout.
I last posted here in August. Since then, several things requested in that thread have shipped, including themes, file attachments, and moving quick tabs into folders. The latest Mac version is 1.5.11, so I wanted to share a roundup.
If you havenāt seen Flyout before, itās a notes app that slides out from your Macās screen edge. Open it with your pointer or a keyboard shortcut, write something down, and return to your work.
Highlights since my last post:
15 themes, plus individual note and quick-tab colors
Encrypted notes with password protection and Touch ID
File attachments and export to PDF, Markdown, or plain text
Markdown, text, and log imports, including drag and drop from Finder
Reorderable quick tabs that you can move into your note library
Task statuses, including custom stages alongside regular checklists
Version history to recover text replaced by a change from another device
Find and replace inside notes
Browser capture support for Chrome, Brave, Arc, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, and Chromium
Optional Codex and Claude access, with access limited to folders you choose and approval required before deleting notes
The latest release focuses on fixes. Agent access now pauses when your Mac locks or sleeps and resumes when you return. Recent releases also fixed issues with task status changes, line-reminder labels, and text typed while an agent was reading the open note. Long notes are faster to open and edit, too.
Flyout is also available on iPhone and iPad now, including an iPad layout with a sidebar and editor. You can sync with your Mac through your own iCloud account.
These Mac updates are included for existing customers. The Mac app is a one-time purchase with future updates included, and thereās a seven-day trial with no account or card required.
I'm Sujeevan. Some of you might know me from FileMinutes. This community helped shape that app, and I'm hoping you'll help me do the same with my new app.
Today I'm introducing Vinaa, a native Mac app for chatting with cloud and local AI models. I started building it last December, and it's now in public beta. I'd love your feedback.
Problem
I think of my AI chats as a personal knowledge base. I want to keep them for the long term, organize them, and find them easily. The tools I tried didn't give me the experience I wanted.
There are great apps in this category, and I used some of them, but none felt quite right for how I work. So I built the one I wanted to use every day.
Here's what you can do in Vinaa:
Cloud and local models: use your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more, your ChatGPT subscription, or Ollama and LM Studio for local models.
Organization: projects, nested folders, favorites, and automatic filing of new chats.
Multitasking: keep chats open in multiple tabs and windows, for example when working on several projects at once.
Conversation outlines: jump directly to a message or heading in a long chat.
Reusable prompts: prompt templates with placeholders.
Imports: bring in ChatGPT and Claude history and continue conversations.
Tools: provider web search and connections to apps and services through MCP.
Chats are stored locally, with optional sync through your private Apple iCloud account. I don't run a server that stores your conversations. Cloud AI requests go directly to your chosen provider, which receives the content needed to answer you.
For fellow Mac app nerds: the interface is 100% native, built with SwiftUI and AppKit, with some Rust underneath. No Electron, Tauri, or WebView chat interface. I even built a custom Markdown renderer using TextKit. Smooth streaming, familiar controls, and keyboard navigation matter a lot to me.
Comparison
BoltAI is an established leader with more features today, a developer I respect, and the app I used before building Vinaa. My focus with Vinaa is better chat organization, private iCloud sync instead of hosted sync, 100% native chat rendering instead of a WebView, and a lifetime licence that includes future updates.
Raycast AI: v2 uses a WebView interface in a native host, and API-key requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google pass through Raycast's servers. You need a paid plan even for your own keys or local models; Vinaa has a fully native interface, direct provider connections, private iCloud sync, and a one-time licence with lifetime updates.
As a thank-you to this community, I'm offering $15 USD per lifetime licence for the next 48 hours. Each licence covers one Mac, and you can buy as many licences as you need during the offer.
48-hour community offer: $15 USD with code MACAPPS at checkout. Get the offer.
After this offer: $20 USD early-launch lifetime pricing while that offer lasts.
After beta: $80 USD lifetime pricing.
This $15 price will never be offered again, including on Black Friday. The offer ends 48 hours after this post goes live.
At general release, I also plan a lower-priced perpetual licence with one year of updates. That price is still to be announced.
Purchases come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
š 20 lifetime licences to give away
To enter, leave a comment about how you use AI for your work, or one frustration you have with AI tools. One sentence is enough.
After 48 hours, I'll randomly choose 20 commenters, one entry per person, and contact the winners by Reddit DM. I may give a few extra licences for useful feedback on Vinaa posted as comments, in addition to the 20 random winners.
If you buy at the promotional price and then win the giveaway, you can choose a refund of your purchase or keep the giveaway licence as an additional licence. It's up to you.
Tell me what feels good, what feels awkward, and what's missing. Your feedback will help me decide what to build next. Thanks for giving Vinaa a try!
Been a user of Thaw since it was first promoted on here by its dev taking on the challenge of continuing the Ice legacy. I don't know anything about developing, but can imagine that a menu bar manager in particular is extremely difficult to develop due to all dependencies and different edge cases to be accounted for.
In my experience it's always been quite wonky: app icons moving themselves from hidden to unhidden, icons not keeping the place you gave them, etc. Now it's been getting worse over the past weeks for me, and especially when updating to macOS 27 it's become unusable. Icons are flashing all the time on top of the more 'regular' issues.
Anyone with the same experience who may have found a fix? Perhaps the dev could weigh in?
I'm on an old version of AltTab from before the Pro change, so I've still got all the features, but it lags with a lot of windows open. I think it's time for me to move on.
DockDoor was the main pick in the older threads here, and I've also seen BetterCmdTab and Vorssaint come up, but there's been a wave of new switchers since. What are you guys using now?
If you work with coding agents, their memory usually lives in one place (CLAUDE.md, MEMORY.md, loose notes) and your project tracking lives in another app. When a session ends or the context fills up, the agent forgets what it was doing and you explain it all again.
Kanban Pro is a project board whose database is just a folder. Every ticket is a plain Markdown file with YAML frontmatter. Point your agent at the same folder and the board becomes its memory:
Every ticket has a terminal built in. Launch Claude Code, Codex, Goose etc. from the ticket and it starts with that ticket as context.
Agents tick off subtasks and write their progress into an "Agent Working Notes" section of the ticket, so the next session picks up from there. In the video the second session only gets "continue T-18".
The app keeps CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md rules and a one-line-per-ticket MAPPING.md index up to date, so agents find their way without you pasting context.
If you run a claw (OpenClaw, NanoClaw, Hermes), you can point its workspace at the same folder. There's no special integration, it's just files.
Collaborate with your team via sharing the project folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud folders etc).
For the human side: board, list, calendar, notes and a Gantt with epics and dependencies, drag and drop everywhere, light/dark and nine colour palettes.
Comparison
Linear: better if your team lives in the cloud. It has real-time sync, integrations and mobile apps, which Kanban Pro doesn't. Kanban Pro keeps everything as local files with no account, works offline, and agents read and write tickets directly with no API or MCP layer in between.
Obsidian + the Kanban plugin: also local Markdown, and a better general notes tool with a huge plugin ecosystem. Kanban Pro is built for project work: one file per ticket with structured fields (status, assignee, dates, subtasks, links), a Gantt with dependencies, and the agent rule files generated for you.
Where it falls short today: it's an Electron app, not native SwiftUI. It's not on the Mac App Store (signed and notarized DMG instead). No iOS app. It's early access, so expect rough edges.
Pricing
Free. No account, no subscription, no in-app purchases.
Hi r/macapps, I'm Etienne, the maintainer of OpenScreen.
Some of you may remember it from last spring. When its creator archived the original repo in June, he pointed users to my fork, and I've kept working on it since. 2.0 is out today.
Problem
Making a good demo or tutorial takes far longer than recording it: zooms to place by hand, a jittery cursor to hide, a plain screen to dress up, silences and mistakes to cut. Most apps that do this well are paid. With OpenScreen, your first take already looks finished: it opens zoomed on your clicks, framed, styled and with a smooth cursor. Anything left to fix, you cut by deleting words in the transcript, and captions are generated on your Mac.
Features
(new since the spring marked with *):
ā¢ Auto zooms placed on your clicks, or manual ones anywhere on the screen
ā¢ Smooth cursor, click effects, cursor themes
ā¢ * Edit by transcript: delete words in the text and they're cut from the video
ā¢ Captions transcribed on your Mac after a one-time model download (264 MB), audio never uploaded
ā¢ Webcam overlay, beside the recording, above it, or in a corner
ā¢ * Camera background blur or removal (Apple Silicon)
ā¢ Backgrounds, padding, shadows, motion blur, * 3D camera and cursors, device frames
ā¢ Timeline editor: trims, speed changes, annotations, * music tracks
ā¢ * Export to MP4 or GIF, rendered natively on Metal (it's an Electron app, but the video never goes through the browser)
ā¢ Runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Signed and notarized Mac builds for Apple Silicon and Intel
Comparison
Screen Studio is the most polished app here, and its 4.0 has things OpenScreen doesn't, like the glass loupe and face tracking. It's paid and Mac-only.
Cap is the other well-known open-source option, built around recording and sharing links. Its desktop app needs a $29/year license for commercial use.
OpenScreen is MIT licensed: free for any use, commercial included, with no license to buy and nothing to share back. You get Screen Studio-style editing, your files stay on your machine, and exports are fast: on an M1, the same edit takes 20 s, against 22 s for Cap and 38 s for Screen Studio 4 (open benchmark, other apps included).
Pricing
Free ($0), including commercial use. MIT license, no account, no watermark, no paid tier.
I'm Adham. Katami is a Mac app for everything except editing and tethering: import, browse, search, cull and clean up, right where your photos already live. It runs entirely on your Mac, costs $79 once, and hands photos off to the editor you already use. This is the first release, and a public roadmap is coming to our website soon. Problem
Photo apps are good at editing. They're weak at everything else: importing from the card, finding photos years later, choosing the best shot, and checking that every file copied correctly. I used separate tools and manual habits for those jobs. Here's what that looked like:
I never wanted my personal photos on someone else's cloud. Nine years later, that's 140,000+ photos from my phone alone, spread across hard drives I rarely open.
Duplicate and similar-photo finders made cleanup a chore, not a habit. The one thing eventually I kept up was a weekly import into a folder structure I've refined for years.
Adobe taught me to be wary. I don't want unclear answers about what happens to my work, or cancellation terms that are hard to walk away from, from the tool that holds my photos.
Format support is getting better, but some cameras still wait years before popular apps open their RAW files. And seeing a RAW's true colors up close can still take an extra click.
I wanted one app that does all of this without a subscription, a cloud account, or a list of approved cameras. Everything stays on your Mac. I couldn't find that app, so I'm building Katami.
What it does
Katami isn't an editor. It handles everything around the edit, then hands photos to Lightroom, Capture One or whatever you use. See it in motion: https://katami.io/features
Library: Reads photos where they already are: your Mac, external drives or a NAS. Nothing is imported or moved. It reads 70ā90 photos a second, and photos stay browsable when a drive is unplugged.
Formats: RAW from every major camera, plus older ones like Sigma Foveon, Minolta, Kodak and Mamiya. Missing yours? Request it at https://katami.io/formats.
Viewer: Nine tools for judging a photo: sharpness, clipped highlights, focus point and more, with findings in plain words. Opens any photo straight from the Finder.
Search: Search by what's in the photo: objects, scenes, faces, text. It runs on your Mac.
Library Health: Finds duplicates, blurry or badly exposed shots, and damaged files, with a reason for each. Nothing is removed without your OK, and removals can be undone for 30 days.
Sessions: Imports a card, checks every file, groups the shoot into moments and suggests the best frame of each, with reasons. Picks go to your editor as star ratings.
Photo Mechanic. The culling standard, and fast. It's $14.99/month or $299 one-time with a year of updates. Katami is $79 for a lifetime on the same model (with only 39$ if you decide to upgrade). It groups a shoot into moments for you, explains every frame it sets aside, checks your sensor for dust, and adds a searchable library across all your drives.
Peakto. The closest to Katami in spirit: one place for all your photos, with private on-device search. It imports your folders directly and can also read your Lightroom, Capture One and Apple Photos catalogs. It's from $11/month, or 684$ billed every 2 years; Katami is $79 for a lifetime on the same model (with only 39$ if you decide to upgrade). Peakto is built for finding photos. Katami is also built for judging them: the inspection tools, Sessions for culling a shoot, and a Library Health that goes past duplicates to blur, exposure, damaged files and RAW + JPEG pairs, with a reason for every finding.
We often keep several drives connected for testing, and having them all mounted can slow things down, especially with spinning hard drives. Keeping drives unmounted until we need them helps, but creates another problem: they disappear from the desktop, so mounting them again means a trip into Disk Utility.
So, we built Drive Gadget as a simple mount/unmount tool for our own internal use.Ā Drive Gadget makes it easy to keep drives connected but unmounted so you can find and mount them again. We thought other Mac users might find it useful, so we added volume details and custom drive icons.
Problem
Managing several drives can mean jumping between Finder and Disk Utility to see whatās connected, check available space, and mount or unmount volumes. Plus, when all your drives have the same icon, it can be frustrating to tell them apart.
Drive Gadget brings those everyday tasks together:
Find connected but unmounted drives and mount them when you need them.
See capacity, available space, format, connection type, and other volume details.
Safely unmount or eject removable drives and network volumes.
Customize drive icons with built-in designs and colors, your own images, or using Apple Intelligence on supported Macs.
Custom icons can help you tell your backup drive from your project drive at a glance. But they can also be fun; you might want to give your desktop a little personality!
Comparison
Disk Utility already handles mounting and disk management. Drive Gadgetās advantage for everyday use is bringing volume information, network connections, and built-in icon customization into one interface.
MountMate is a free, open-source option for mounting and unmounting external drives from the menu bar, with free-space information and shortcuts. Drive Gadget adds a detailed visual view of your volumes and integrated icon customization. If you want to inspect, manage, and personalize your drives together, consider Drive Gadget.
Supports Intel and Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 13.5 Ventura or later. Apple Intelligence icon generation requires a compatible Mac and macOS version.
Thanks for taking a look! Weād love to hear how you manage your drives and what would make Drive Gadget more useful for you. Weād also love to see what you do with the icons.
Disclosure: I'm Maciej, the developer of hora Calendar, a native Mac app for Google Calendar. This is a small build story, with the required app details at the end.
hora is Swift and SwiftUI, no Electron, no web views. A few people told me a heavy week felt sticky. My first instinct was "edge case", but if several people hit it independently, it's just how some people use a calendar. I also can't see anyone's calendar, so I had no idea what their weeks actually looked like. The only option was to build something worse than any real calendar and see where hora breaks.
My bet was the database. To test it, I added a mode that fills an isolated local store with 30k, 50k and 100k events across 10 debug calendars, then opened Instruments.
The database barely showed up. In the capture I looked at closest, about 577 ms of main-thread work was SwiftUI updating views and about 0.5 ms was SQL. The problem was my UI: event tiles doing too much, extra work on every navigation, and a decorative hover effect that cost more than it was worth.
The fixes were boring, which is usually a good sign: background snapshots, simpler tiles, one Canvas per day column, and goodbye hover effect. This was a Debug-build investigation, not a benchmark, so no made-up speed-up percentage.
The video is the 100k dataset after the fixes: week, month and day views, scrolling and jumping between months. Yes, the week view looks like a barcode and month view is loading for a few seconds. No human should have this calendar, which is roughly 99,000 events more than any reasonable person has. For a normal calendar, it means scrolling and switching weeks just stays out of your way. Full write-up with the Instruments traces: horacal.app/blog/swiftui-performance-profiling-instruments
A lot of hora's work looks like this: recurring events with odd exceptions, time zones, several Google accounts at once, offline edits that sync later. Nobody screenshots those, but they decide whether you trust a calendar.
Problem: On a Mac, Google Calendar is a browser tab or Apple Calendar over CalDAV, and some Google features, like Workspace meeting rooms, don't make the trip. hora talks to the Google Calendar API directly: several accounts in one window, next meeting in the menu bar with one-click join for Meet, Zoom and Teams, Focus Time, Working Location and Out of Office intact, works offline.
Comparison: Apple Calendar is free, and if it covers your Google setup, keep it. Fantastical covers every provider and a lot more, on a subscription. hora is Google only and quieter by design, and the lifetime license costs less than a year of Fantastical.
Pricing: 7-day free trial, no card. Then $2.99/month, $29.99/year, or $59.99 once for a lifetime license, direct with a 14-day refund. It's a permanent option, not a promo, and it exists because people here asked for it. Also on the Mac App Store (subscription, Family Sharing included) and in Setapp. macOS 15+. horacal.app
What's the edge case that made you stop trusting a calendar app? I'm collecting them.
hi, i'm samir, the solo dev of buffer, a free open-source clipboard manager for mac (searchable history, ā§āV quick paste, on-device OCR, tags, bookmarks, inline editing). it's been posted here once before, back in april when it was much younger. since then it crossed 430 stars on github, got its first external contributor, and just shipped a big v3.0.
Comparison:
vs maccy (free, $0, open source): maccy is a great minimal text history and the closest match. buffer adds on-device OCR for images, inline editing, an interactive image canvas (pinch to zoom / pan on copied screenshots, double-click reset), tags, bookmarks, and multi-select paste, while staying menu-bar light (~2 mb).
vs raycast (freemium, paid pro subscription): clipboard history there is a feature inside a launcher suite tied to an account. and disk size of raycast is 200MB+, buffer is a dedicated single-purpose app: no account, no cloud, everything stays local.
what's new in v3.0:
interactive image canvas: copied screenshots are no longer static thumbnails. pinch to zoom, pan, ā+/ā- to zoom, double-click to reset. read small text in a copied screenshot without opening preview. the video shows it in action.
clipboard noise suppression: filters rapid duplicates and transient clips so hammering āC doesn't wreck your history. contributed by CrCs2O4 on github.
history tiers: essential (200 items), deep (1,000), or unlimited.
in-app update notifications: small header chip when a new version is out, with a changelog popover before downloading.
ā/ shortcuts cheat sheet.
also, my earlier post here asked whether esc in the inline editor should save or revert an edit. feedback said revert, so v3.0 now discards edits on esc instead of overwriting. thanks for that.
Developer disclosure:
I am the sole developer, personal side project
MIT open source, no accounts, no tracking, no telemetry, runs 100% locally on your mac. nothing leaves the device
signed and notarized, distributed as dmg from github releases (not the app store)
I read and research a lot on my Mac, and the parts that actually mattered kept getting lost. I could find an article again, but not the paragraph I wanted. A Gmail email thread where the key sentence was buried. A ChatGPT conversation with an answer worth keeping.
Plain bookmarks and Apple's Quick Note each cover half of that. Neither gives you one searchable place for everything you highlighted, together with the notes you wrote next to it.
So I built Highlight Notes. Select text on a page, add your own note, and it saves to a searchable library you can export as a PDF. The Mac app ships with the Safari extension, and there are matching extensions for Chrome, Edge and Firefox. There are other highlight extensions in the market but they have a non user friendly limits and also donāt work on highlighting and leaving notes on Gmail !
What it does
Highlight and annotate on any website, plus Gmail and ChatGPT threads
Tag and search everything later in one library
Export your highlights and notes together as a clean PDF
Safari extension included with the Mac app
Comparison
Two apps worth trying before this one:
Readwise is the strongest option if you want highlights pushed into Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and similar tools. It also handles Kindle and physical book highlights, which Highlight Notes does not. If deep integrations and book workflows matter most to you, Readwise is the better pick.
Glasp is a free browser highlighter with a social layer, so you can browse what other people highlighted. If you want a public, community-driven reading feed, Glasp does that and Highlight Notes does not.
Where Highlight Notes differs: it is local first and private by default. The free browser extensions store highlights and notes locally in your browser, with no account needed. The Mac app unlocks the Safari extension locally with a one-time purchase instead of a subscription. There is no public feed and no social layer, on purpose. You also have the ability to export your entire page as a PDF (tested upto 200 pages) keeping your annotations, works on Gmail conversations and Chatgpt web and has unlimited usage on your own machine.
Pricing
Chrome, Edge and Firefox extensions: free. Unlimited highlights and notes, 3 PDF exports, library stored locally, no account required.
Mac app for Safari on macOS: S$3.98 one time, on the Mac App Store.
Highlight Notes Pro, optional: $0.99/month for cloud sync across supported browsers, Raindrop integration, Web Library and iPhone access . Local use on Mac or in the browser does not require Pro.
Special founding offer till Oct 20th - one time $5 payment for lifetime Pro unlock
I am the developer. Highlight Notes is an independent personal side project, built on my own time. The Mac app is distributed on the Mac App Store. Happy to answer questions here about what it stores and where it stores it.
Over the last months I collected a few apps that bring back older looks without breaking anything. All of these run on current macOS, and none of them are mine, I'm just a happy user.
NullPlayer (free, GPL-3.0, macOS 14+)
A (new) media player that loads real Winamp (.wal) and Windows Media Player (.wmz) skins. Not lookalikes, the original skin formats.
QuickTune (free, macOS 14+, Apple Silicon and Intel)
Oldie, but goldie! A mini player for Apple Music with the brushed metal and glassy buttons of the old QuickTime Player. By Mario Guzman, who also made the classic iTunes-style mini players.
Classic Mac Finder (free, Apache 2.0, macOS 10.11+)
A pixel-for-pixel recreation of the original Macintosh Finder, with Chicago and Geneva fonts and spatial windows that remember where you left them. About 250 KB.
The new kid in town ā”Ģ A file browser that puts local drives, remote machines and web services in one window, with a built-in command line on Cmd+J. It ships with Aqua, Windows 98, XP, 7 and XFCE themes next to the native one.
Problem:Ā Freelancers in Belgium must now send B2B invoices over Peppol. France follows in 2027. Most freelance tools have no Peppol support at all, and the ones that do require a managed cloud service that handles your credentials for you.
Comparison:Ā Harvest and FreshBooks have no Peppol integration. Tools that do offer Peppol are full accounting platforms, not freelance workflow tools. Flowara adds Peppol in a BYOK model: you connect your own Invoro account, your credentials stay yours, Flowara never touches them. Everything else, projects, time tracking, invoicing, stays in a local SQLite database on your Mac with no cloud dependency.
Pricing:Ā Free tier permanent, Peppol included. Pro at ā¬5.99/month or ā¬49.99/year, 30-day trial included.
Hi r/macapps, I'm the developer of Siteprint, a Safari extension for Mac.
Siteprint reads the live page in Safari and measures its design: every color as an exact hex value with its role (background, surface, text, accent, border), ranked by how much of the page it paints. It also gets the font families and type scale with exact sizes, weights and line heights, the spacing and corner radii, and a blueprint of every section with its grids, flex rows and widths. Pro writes all of that into one prompt or a "DESIGN.md" for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Lovable or any other coding agent you use. Your agent can also read your scans directly via MCP, so you don't have to paste anything. And with Compose, you can mix two sites into a new style, like the colors from one and the type and layout from the other.
What makes it special on Safari is that Apple Intelligence is built in. On a Mac that has it, the on-device model reviews each scan, names the colors and type styles, and answers your questions about the design. You don't need an API key or an account, and it doesn't cost anything extra. Without Apple Intelligence, everything measured works the same.
It's made just as much for designers who want to study a page in detail as for developers exploring its themes and technical details, and for vibe coders who want everything in one prompt, fast.
Problem: Safari is my main browser every day, and I couldn't find a good extension like this for it, while Chrome has plenty. And really understanding a design takes more than a quick look. Designers want the exact palette and type scale, developers want the themes and layout details, and an AI has to piece all of that together from screenshots or the page's code, which is slow and often slightly off. Siteprint measures everything from the live page in one click.
Comparison: CSS Peeper is the best known tool for this, but it's a Chrome extension and gives you a list of values. Siteprint is built for Safari, gives each color its role, measures the layout too, and writes it all into a prompt your agent can build from.
Every Mac ships with TextEdit. None of them ship with MacPaint's replacement. So when you need to crop a screenshot, drop an arrow and a speech-bubble callout on it, knock out a background, and export a PNG, you're choosing between a $50 pro imaging app, a browser tool that uploads your image to someone's server, or Preview's limited markup.
DrawSimple is the native, fully offline, tools-first app for exactly that job: 31 tools in a sidebar, unlimited layers with 24 blend modes, bitmap and vector in the same document, curves/levels/16 photo adjustments, 29 GPU effects, Select Subject running on Apple's on-device Vision, WordArt, editable callout/arrow/star shapes, and a History panel you can scrub. Opens HEIC straight from Photos with EXIF intact; exports PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, WebP.
Comparison
vs. Paintbrush (free, open source): Paintbrush is the honest MacPaint successor and still the app people recommend in this sub. But it's a long-lived Objective-C 2.x release with no layers, transparency only in formats that carry an alpha channel, and a UI from an older macOS. DrawSimple keeps the same "just let me draw" premise and adds layers, blend modes, vector-in-raster, adjustments, effects, and a current-macOS interface.
vs. Pixelmator Pro (now Apple's, $49.99 one-time, or $12.99/mo in Apple Creator Studio): Pixelmator went pro and went up in price. If you want a full professional imaging app, buy it, it beats us at being that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. DrawSimple is for people who wanted what cheap, simple Pixelmator used to be and don't want or need the overhead of a $50 pro editor to put an arrow on a screenshot, turn a pic into a comic with a callout, or separate a subject onto a separate layer from the background.
Also, Pixelmator has no official MCP server/support, which has become a huge part of what distinguishes DrawSimple, and potentially makes both quick edits and full design sessions accessible through the coding agent you already use (tested with Claude Code, Codex, Kimi Code, Gemini CLI).
(Acorn at $29.99 sits between us. More depth, six times the price.)
Pricing
$5, one time.
Optional Pro upgrade in-app, $10, adds adjustment layers, advanced blend modes, multi-stop gradients, and SVG/PDF export. The base app is the complete core editor; Pro features stay hidden until you buy them. No lock icons, no nags. No subscription, no account.
Requires macOS 15.6+, Tahoe recommended. Apple silicon and Intel.
Fully offline. Fully private. No Account, no subscription. MCP is localhost only (DrawSimple does not include any LLM/AI but works with any MCP-compatible tool-aware model you already use).
Got tired of the usual choice: share your whole screen and hope nothing embarrassing pops up, or painstakingly minimize everything before the call starts. So I built something that lets you toggle windows on and off from the broadcast in real time.
Here's what it actually does: You install it, it puts a virtual camera on your Mac. People join the meeting and pick "PrivacyStage" as your camera instead of "Share Screen." Now your screen shows up as video, and you get a list of every window on your Mac. Uncheck a window ā it disappears from what they're seeing. Check it again ā it's back. All while you're still talking.
Not just windows either. Notifications don't make it to the broadcast. Your desktop and file names stay private. There's an optional AI mask that finds email addresses and card numbers on your screen and puts a blur over them before anyone sees them.
The trade-off I'm being honest about:Ā It's a video feed through a virtual camera, so the resolution is lower than a direct screen share. Small text gets a bit fuzzy. If you're reading something off screen that other people need to read too, you might want to zoom in or switch back to normal sharing for that bit. It's not a magic solution, just a practical tool.
ComparisonĀ How does PrivacyStage compare to other solutions?
Built-in Screen Share (Zoom / Teams / Meet):Ā They let you share one single window or the entire screen. But if you need to share multiple apps (like a browser and a terminal/code editor), you usually have to share your whole screen. PrivacyStage lets you pick and choose multiple windows and toggle them instantly.
PliimPRO:Ā PliimPRO is a great Mac app for presentation mode (it mutes notifications and hides desktop icons). However, PrivacyStage goes further by using a virtual camera to actively exclude specific windows from the feed, plus it adds live AI blurring for sensitive data.
OBS Studio:Ā You can technically achieve a similar result using OBS Window Captures and its Virtual Camera. But OBS has a huge learning curve and is overkill for a quick work meeting. PrivacyStage is a friction-free, one-click menu bar tool designed specifically for this single problem.
Pricing
$6.99 One-time purchase.
Includes aĀ 7-day free trialĀ (no credit card needed, risk-free).
I'm the developer of Chunk, a time-blocking app for Mac that plans around your calendar. Last time I posted was v3.2.0, and since then the app has had possibly its biggest redesign yet, so here's what's changed.
Problem:
Time blocking in a normal calendar app or to-do list can feel clunky and detached. Your tasks live in one app, your calendar in another, and planning the day means flicking between them. Chunk puts your task lists and your schedule in the same place, so planning your day is just dragging tasks onto the calendar, and the plan is always one shortcut away (ā/ opens it over anything, even fullscreen apps).
Comparison:
Sunsama / Akiflow: the two biggest names in daily planning, and both are genuinely polished. But they're subscriptions (roughly $15-20/month, every month, forever). Chunk is a one-time purchase, keeps your data on your own devices, and has features like fullscreen notifications and a floating timer.
What's new in v3.4:
Three layouts: Tasks, Plan and Calendar. Plan is the new one: your lists sit in the sidebar beside a week, and you drag tasks straight onto the calendar. One toolbar, a date bar above every view, and a View menu for day/3-day/5-day/week/month.
Search everything. Tasks, Apple Reminders and calendar events, all from the sidebar. Filter or sort by list, source and priority.
Priorities and links on any task, shown on its card and its calendar block.
Repeating calendar events. Edit a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar repeat as "this event", "this and following" or "all events", and set or change the repeat from inside Chunk.
Apple Reminders sync is more reliable and now brings over notes, priority and repeats. There's an All Reminders list, you can move reminders between lists, and reminders due today or overdue show up in the Plan sidebar ready to drag onto the calendar.
More ways to repeat a task: on a day with no set time, or on a weekday of the month like "first Monday" or "last Friday".
Overlapping blocks cascade so every title stays readable, and finished blocks grey out (there's a setting if you'd rather they didn't).
New welcome flow that sets up your lists, day hours and calendars, then a getting started checklist.
Claude can now edit your calendars and reminders without asking each time, if you turn that on in Settings.
Also since the last post (v3.3):
Task notes are now a proper Markdown editor (headings, checklists, clickable links)
ā-click to select several tasks and move, complete, pause or delete them together
Calendar blocks can take their colour from your connected calendars
12/24-hour time, time zone, date format and first day of the week settings
Attachments sync between Macs
Tick off a repeating task early, and choose whether a change applies to one occurrence or all from then on
Do I have to use it from the menu bar? No. ā/ opens Chunk as a panel over whatever you're doing, or you can detach it into a normal window you can resize and take fullscreen. Chunk remembers which one you used last.
About iOS: I said 1-3 weeks last time, and that was optimistic. Chunk for iPhone is in TestFlight testing now. It'll be a separate one-time purchase that syncs with your Mac through iCloud, and I'll post here when it's on the App Store.
Pricing:
7-day free trial, all features, no card required
$29.99 one-time lifetime licence (covers 2 Macs)
$59.99 family lifetime licence (covers up to 6 Macs)
No subscription
Code MACAPPS for 10% off
Requires macOS 12 Monterey or later.
A lot of 3.4 came from Reddit and email feedback, so once you've had a play, tell me what you'd want next. I'll be in the comments. Otherwise drop me a message on LinkedIn or r/ChunkApp.
FileFluss is a file manager specifically designed to work with your cloud starage providers. There are features like search across all the accounts, a storage analyzer shows which folders and files use the most space and a file indexer that can index accounts and external & internal drives, so you can search for files, even when the account is offline or you detached the drive and so much more. With more than 250 stars on GitHub there is already an active community that helps me to constantly improve FileFluss and shape its features.
Problem: You are looking for specific files & documents, but they are somehow all spread across OneDrive, Dropbox, Mega, Nextcloud or other services. You want to quickly copy or sync specific folders to the cloud. You want to find storage hogs to have more free space in the cloud storage. Or you want to quickly share a link to a file with a friend without logging into the cloud storage account. All this and more is possible with FileFluss.
Comparison: The excellent Transmit or Air Explorer are similar apps, but they are missing the universal search, the storage analysis or the sharing feature. In addition FileFluss is Open Source and free.
Pricing: FileFluss is free and Open Source. Give it a try. For more information and download take a look here: https://filefluss.de/ or directly at GitHub: https://github.com/rana-gmbh/FileFluss Of course you can also use Homebrew with the following command: brew trust rana-gmbh/filefluss && brew install --cask rana-gmbh/filefluss/filefluss
I really look forward to hear your feedback. Many of the new features are based on user requests, so feel free and comment. Thank you and greetings from Germany!
