I built Parchley because converting a PDF into usable Markdown usually means uploading the document somewhere or installing a Python project or working from the command line.
Parchley is a native SwiftUI app for macOS. Drop in one PDF or several, and it converts them one at a time and fast. You can compare the original PDF with the generated Markdown, edit the result, preview it, and export it.
Everything runs locally and fast. Scanned PDFs use the bundled OCR model, so there is no account, cloud upload, or separate model download.
Comparison
I don't know if there is a macOS app that convert PDF to markdown. There are github projects Docling and Markitdown which are two libraries that are both much broader. They supports many document formats, configurable OCR engines, structured output, and document-processing pipelines. If you need an automation framework or several output formats, those projects are better suited to the job.
Parchley is for someone who wants to drop a PDF into a Mac app and work on the Markdown immediately. It is a normal Mac app focused specifically on reviewing PDFs and producing editable Markdown. You do not need to install CLIs/OCR models or anything like that. Everything comes bundled in. Just drop your PDF and convert it to markdown. However that comes with certain downsides. (read the information at the end)
Pricing
Free. There are no paid features, subscriptions, accounts, or usage limits.
This was a weekend personal project that turned into an app, it may be the only release unless people find major bugs that need fixing. The bundled OCR model is deliberately small, so it may struggle with complicated scans, unusual layouts or images. But it should do a servicable job for most PDFs. Big advantage of using it is that you never have to share you data with anyone or open a terminal to figure out how to convert your documents.
We've released DriveSync, a fast command-line utility for comparing and syncing local folders with Google Drive. Free and opensource CLI released under the MIT license, and available for arm64 and x86_64 Macs (and Linux).
Yes, it is yet another CLI for Google Drive, but before you dismiss it please try it. It comes with some unique and key differentiators which makes it very fast:
Native* rust-based binaries for macOS (and Linux)
Supports parallel upload/download streams (8 by default, upto 64)*
Parallel hashing during diff, incremental indexing (tracking via Drive Changes API)*
Local sqlite db for indexing & hash caching
Resumable uploads for files
rsync-styled --fast mode (size & mtime checks)*
Data verification after transfer (--verify)*
gitignore-style .driveignore rules (to exclude files and paths)
(* what makes it very fast & reliable)
Problem
Google Drive for Desktop is useful when you want continuous background synchronization. We wanted something that can be wrapped in scripts for automation and for sysadmins, developers & power users that is very simple, easy to use & also very fast:
See exactly what differs before transferring anything
Choose whether to push or pull
Run synchronization from the terminal or scripts
Avoid automatically deleting files
Keep conflicts visible instead of resolving them silently
Make repeated comparisons fast, even across large directory trees
DriveSync has a deliberately very small command set:
dsync status dsync diff dsync push dsync pull
Diff changes nothing, just shows a list of files & folders differences in local and remote path. Push and pull display their transfer plans and ask for confirmation before doing anything. They all supports the flags:
--refresh Ignore the cache and re-list the whole remote tree
--fast Trust equal size and mtime instead of verifying MD5 (rsync-style quick check)
--verify Re-read and perform fast hash instead of trusting the local hash cache
-j or --threads <THREADS> Number of parallel workers or streams [default: 8, upto 64]
Comparison
DriveSync is not trying to replace Google Drive for Desktop for everyone. If you want an always-running sync client with Finder integration, Google's Drive app remains the better choice for GUI users.
The other popular CLI options are:
rclone is probably a better choice, https://rclone.org/drive/ but also with a lot of complicated features than simply push/pull/diff.
The "drive" CLI used to be the most popular https://github.com/odeke-em/drive in the space until it stopped working (oauth2 and maintenance)
The new workspace CLI https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli has very broad set of features and not necessarily essential the push/pull/diff features in git-like way
There may be a many others in this space but either not maintained or offering ready to use binary download for macOS, and often not fast (single stream or sequential in nature)
Pricing
DriveSync is completely free and open source under the MIT license.
About us: ScaleNinja is building apps and tools in the "Mac as Infrastructure" space, after the last decade+ building opensource IaaS cloudplatform. DriveSync joins three of our other Mac focused storage/infra apps & utilities, Noject (published on app store, keeps permanently attached drives mounted and blocks accidental ejections), DeltaSync (provides a graphical Mac app for comparing and syncing local, external, and network folders with rsync) and DeltaSnap (Filesystem version control & APFS snapshot manager).
Note on safety: DriveSync never deletes files on either side. Conflicts block unattended transfers, destinations are rechecked before being written, and interrupted push or pull operations can simply be run again. Google documents (docs, sheets, slides etc) are listed but skipped.
Note on AI use: we used it for writing tests, code review validation and refactoring. The key feature sets, caching, lookup & parallel streams I/O design and architecture are all our work.
Note on privacy: You provide your own Google OAuth desktop credentials, so no shared credentials are embedded in the binary. No data or telemetry is sent to us, it's opensource and available for anyone's inspection. Binaries are built by Github Actions and published on git-tagging that are publicly auditable.
Note on testing: tested with Google Drive in both consumer/retail and paid/workspace accounts.
I’m a solo developer, and I built Rocky because I wanted to hold a shortcut, talk to my Mac, and have it actually do things.
Rocky lives in your notch. Hold Control+Option to ask about what’s on your screen, arrange your windows, set timers, create reminders, calendar events, and notes, or play music. Hold Fn+Control to dictate into any app. You can also hand off research and file chores to run in the background. Rocky has its own browser for web tasks and brings back research with sources.
It includes a searchable clipboard history and a Library for screenshots, web pages, and links. It only remembers facts about you when you ask it to. Screenshots are taken only when a request needs one. Apps you mark as protected are excluded, and sensitive text is redacted on your Mac before the image is sent.
The video is a "short" tour. The site has the full feature list, which I’m regularly expanding, and the docs have more short demos.
Comparison:
HeyClicky is the closest app, and it’s good: voice interaction, screen awareness, on-screen annotations, dictation, and agents. It offers a free tier and paid plans at $20 and $100 per month. Rocky’s pricing works differently: you can use your existing ChatGPT or Codex account, even on the free ChatGPT plan, with a one-time Rocky license after the trial. Rocky also brings together clipboard history, the Library, saved window layouts, timers, and its own browser.
Energy focuses on handing off browser and workflow tasks. Rocky brings that kind of background task delegation together with voice interaction and everyday Mac tools.
Other notch apps tend to focus on individual utilities, such as music controls, calendar views, timers, or quick access to files. Rocky brings everyday tools into the notch too, with an AI voice assistant that can understand your requests and act on them.
Pricing:
No monthly Rocky subscription. Two ways to use it:
Your ChatGPT: Works with your existing ChatGPT or Codex account, including the free ChatGPT plan. Free accounts have a smaller Codex allowance that resets every 30 days; paid plans offer higher limits. Listening and speaking run on your Mac. Try Rocky free for 14 days, then purchase a one-time Rocky license for $19 during the beta. The price will rise to $29 for new customers after the official version 1.0 launch.
Rocky Cloud: Uses pay-as-you-go credits, with no OpenAI account or Rocky license required. Includes $5 in starter credit, which expires after 14 days and may run out sooner depending on usage. This option includes realtime voice.
Limitations:
Requires an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later.
Microphone access enables voice input; Input Monitoring enables global shortcuts. Accessibility and Screen Recording enable actions and screen context. Grant only the permissions needed for the features you use.
Speech can run on your Mac, but AI reasoning requires an internet connection and uses OpenAI through your account or Rocky Cloud.
Optional on-device speech models require separate downloads ranging from 225 MB to 1.5 GB.
Rocky is still in beta, so expect some rough edges. I use it daily, mostly for dictation, clipboard history, and the Library, and I’m regularly shipping fixes, improvements, and new features.
Who am I:
I’m Pedro Canterini, a solo developer building Rocky under Bald Cactus LLC. Rocky is signed under Bald Cactus LLC and notarized by Apple.
TLDR; Timely is the first focus timer (at least that I have found) to ENSURE you focus! Specifically, it’s the first to prevent distractions in both the digital world with App & Website blocking, and distractions in the physical world with Presence Detection. It does both of these things, and everything else, for FREE.
In this update, Timely has exciting features like Menu Bar Integration, Widgets, Notifications, and improved Presence Detection.
Timely is open to public beta testing! The download links are listed at the bottom of this post. All downloads and feedback help massively!!!!!! 🥺🥺
The Problem:
With traditional focus timers, I always found myself losing focus midway through the session. Whether it’s a quick Instagram session turning into an hour of doomscrolling, or a breath of fresh air turning into distractions around the house. So, I made Timely—a focus timer that ENSURES you stay focused while the timer is running. Lose focus, and you may lose your streak or other related statistics!
How do we ENSURE you stay focused?
A revolutionary Presence Detection feature incentivizes staying at your computer while you’re supposed to be working, helping eliminate distractions in the physical world!
App & Website Blocking on your Mac prevents you from wandering into the void of digital distractions.
Together, this combo prevents distractions in both the digital world (App & Website Blocking) and the physical world (Presence Detection). So, when you start a 30-minute focus timer, unlike with other focus timers, you really HAVE to focus for the full 30 minutes!
Comparison:
Sorry for the cramped table, but I feel like this gives the most analytical comparison possible (though it's still biased). I also wanted to mention that Flow, Be Focused, and FocusPomo offer other pricing options, such as yearly and lifetime plans. You can view a better comparison here: https://timelyfocus.app/blog/best-focus-pomodoro-timers-for-macos-in-2026
Name
Price
App Blocking
Website Blocking
Presence Detection
Tags
Design
Timely (our app)
Free plan only!
✅
✅
✅
❌ Not available yet (coming next!)
✅ Clean liquid glass design, fully native
Flow
Free plan, or $2.99/month.
✅
🟨 Paid Plan Only
❌ Not Available
🟨 Paid Plan Only
✅ Minimal and simple to use design.
Be Focused
Free plan, or $2.99/month
🟨 Paid Plan Only
🟨 Paid Plan Only
❌ Not Available
❌ Not Available
❌ Simple but slightly outdated-feeling design
FocusPomo
Free plan, or $3.99/mo
🟨 Paid Plan Only
❌ Not Available
❌ Not Available
✅
✅ Very cute design! Though it feels like it belongs only on iOS.
Feature Breakdown
Presence Detection: Incentivizes you to stay at your laptop while focusing, helping block out physical distractions. Leave your laptop, break your streak. It uses secure, Apple-made, on-device models and is fully optional.
App & Website Blocking: Self-explanatory, it blocks apps & websites of your choosing. If you remove the block, you also break your streak. Unlike other apps, Full App & Website blocking is free with Timely.
Pomodoro Timers: Set focus intervals, with breaks in between. You can choose from customizable presets, or make a schedule from scratch. The best part is that, with presence detection, you're forced to stay on schedule.
Menu Bar Integration: Highly requested, allowing users to start focus timers without opening the app! Choose a session to repeat, adjust its duration, and get back to work!
Widgets & Goals: Set a weekly focus goal, and track your progress toward it with widgets!
Price: Fully Free
I hope you try it out; we could really use the feedback!!
Also, if you're viewing this post on mobile and want to remember this app, you can get a quick email from us to remind you; just click the link below.
Back at the end of July I posted here about Bibliome, a native macOS PDF librarian that runs its AI entirely on device. The post got 8 upvotes and 51 comments, which turned out to be the good half. Most of what has shipped since came directly out of those comments, so this is the follow up.
What you asked for, and where it is now
Someone with 20 to 100 page scans that were never OCR'd pointed out that my automatic OCR stopped at 12 pages. There is now a setting for how deep to scan, including every page, with an estimate of the time and size before you commit.
Two people asked about Word documents. It now reads docx, odt, ods, xlsx, rtf, md and txt as well as PDFs, and you can switch each type on or off and set a size limit per type. Still no .doc, that one fought me.
Someone with a capable machine asked for a bigger model. You can swap the bundled Llama 3.1 8B for a larger local one in Settings. I tested several around the 20B mark and they were not equal, so it recognises a tested model when you add one. GPT-OSS 20B (MXFP4-Q8) scored 100% on my test set and is the one I can vouch for. My own machine is 36GB, so I cannot verify anything much larger.
Someone leaving Evernote asked about attachments. Bibliome now reads .enex exports directly, rebuilds the notebook structure, keeps the original dates, and indexes the embedded documents. No conversion scripts.
A moderator here asked whether an external model could reach the index without a networking entitlement, perhaps through MCP. It can, and it now does. Seven read only tools over stdio, so Claude Code, Cursor or Zed can search and ask against your library. Worth knowing if you build your own: the entitlement gates sockets, not pipes, so stdio or a Unix socket is fine and a server on localhost:PORT is not, because macOS checks the socket family rather than the destination.
What is new in 1.5 itself
Markup happens where your documents are. Select anything in View Library and click Markup in the title bar, and the document you are reading becomes the one you are editing.
Page Tools moved inside Markup. A rail of page thumbnails sits beside the page, so rotating, reordering, duplicating, deleting and adding pages from another PDF all happen in one place, and every page change is undoable, which the old separate screen could not manage.
You can make a new PDF from the pages you pick, extract or split, and the result lands in your library next to the original.
Word search used to stop at 50 results even when more documents matched, so real matches were simply missing. It finds everything now. Smart Groups had a related bug where a large group was truncated before its filters ran, so membership was wrong. Also fixed. Both of those got worse the larger your library was.
What it still does not do
The scale question from July is not resolved. Retrieval is a brute force scan over the whole vector matrix, not an approximate index, and the largest library I have measured properly is about 5,000 documents. Two of you have 60,000 and 200,000. The 1.5 fixes above remove two things that broke at size, which is not the same as proving it scales.
OCR is Apple's Vision framework, so it is built for print. No language picker, no deskew, and it does poorly on 19th century cursive.
There is no trial. The Mac App Store does not offer them for paid upfront apps, and I have no date for the alternatives.
Problem
Most Mac PDF tools either make you do the organizing yourself with folders, tags and rules, or they send your documents to a cloud service to get any intelligence out of them. I wanted the organizing done for me without the documents leaving the machine.
Comparison
DEVONthink is far more powerful as a general information manager, and it now charges a subscription for updates. It also asks you to build the database and the rules. EagleFiler is a good filing cabinet and the filing is still yours to do. Zotero and Mendeley are built for academic citations, not for a manual or an invoice. PDFgear is free and has AI, and that AI runs in the cloud.
Pricing
$29.99 once for the Mac app, no subscription. The iOS and iPadOS companion is free.
The categorization, semantic search and Ask Your Library all run on device, either on Apple's on device model or a bundled Llama 3.1 8B (Built with Llama). The Mac app ships with no network entitlement in its sandbox, so there is no cloud call it could make. iCloud sync between Mac and iOS goes through your own account, carried by macOS rather than by the app.
Most renamers make you build the pattern and then supply the facts yourself. That works for a folder of photos and falls apart on a drive full of media, because the thing you actually need is the real episode title, the correct year, or the date a photo was taken. That information is either already inside the file or sitting in a database somewhere.
So you end up doing it by hand, or running something built for a download pipeline you do not have.
Media Renamer Pro reads the metadata inside your files, looks up the real title online when that helps, and builds a rename plan you review before anything moves.
The.Last.of.Us.S02E04.1080p.WEB-DL.x265-GRP.mkv
becomes
The Last of Us - S02E04 - Day One.mkv
Six media types: TV, movies, photos and video, music, audiobooks, and retro game ROMs. TV and movies come from TVmaze, TMDb and OMDb. Audiobooks from Google Books and OpenLibrary. ROMs from IGDB and RAWG. Photos are analyzed on device with Apple's Vision framework, so your pictures never leave your machine.
Every batch is previewed before it runs and can be undone in one click. It detects collisions instead of overwriting, and it handles renames over SMB and NAS shares, which is where a lot of renaming tools quietly break.
COMPARISON
FileBot is the heavyweight here and it is genuinely better than mine at hard TV and movie matching. It has years of edge cases baked in. It is also Java, it is TV and movie focused, and it does not run on your iPad. Mine is native Swift, covers four more media types, and is a one time purchase.
A Better Finder Rename is excellent at pattern renaming and I still recommend it for that. It does not look anything up. If you need "name these 400 files by their EXIF date," it is great. If you need "what episode actually is this," it cannot help you.
Worth saying plainly: if you already run Sonarr or Radarr, they do this for free inside a download pipeline and you probably do not need my app. The gap I built for is everything outside that pipeline. Discs you ripped yourself, archives from before you had an arr stack, home video, music, audiobooks, and anything you want to fix from a phone or iPad.
PRICING
$4.99 one time. Universal purchase across Mac, iPad and iPhone. No subscription, no ads, no account, no telemetry, no analytics SDK. There is a Local Only Mode that blocks all network calls if you want it fully offline.
Hi everyone. I built a macOS screen recorder and motion editor called SmoothCapture. First version shipped about a year ago, it is on 1.2.60 now.
Problem
A raw screen recording is flat. To make one look like a product video, you either paid for a tool or you exported and rebuilt it in After Effects.
The big thing in this release started as a joke to myself: what if you put a device frame inside another device frame? A recording on a MacBook, that MacBook on a Studio Display, the whole display on a watch face. I expected it to look like garbage. It didn't, and it is now the part I use most. You can nest as deep as you like, and each layer keeps its own lighting, shadow, reflection and camera move so a nested layer sits perfectly still until you decide to reveal it.
What it can do
Record screen, window, region, or a connected iPhone/iPad, system audio captured natively, no BlackHole
Or record wirelessly using airplay mode
Drop a recording on a 3D device frame and get a camera sweep and zooms already on it (one click)
Nest a whole composition onto another device's screen, as deep as you want
Trim, split, freeze-frame, music and voice-over on a timeline that snaps to cuts
Export MP4, MOV, GIF, or transparent alpha
The part most people miss: you do not have to screen record anything. Import any video or photo you already have and you get the exact same editor.
I also spent an embarrassing amount of time on lighting this release. The screen is a real light source now, a display throws its colour onto the body around it, the desk it stands on, and its own reflections. There is a blacked-out studio environment for those long bright streaks down an edge, a mirrored floor, and a closed laptop finally shades itself. None of it was necessary. It just bothered me.
It is also light on the machine. On my M4 MacBook Air it edits at around 30-40% CPU, where I had got used to 50-70% and a laptop that was hot to the touch, and exports come out about 3x faster than I was used to. The pipeline is Metal end to end.
What it is like
Shortest description I have: SmoothCapture is what you would get if Screen Studio and Rotato had a baby.
From the Screen Studio side, the smooth zooms and the cursor follow, the shot tightens on whatever you are doing without you asking for it. From the Rotato side, your recording wrapped inside a real 3D device frame you can turn, tilt, light and move a camera around.
If you try it and something felt awkward or did not behave the way you expected, tell me and I will work it into the next update. If you are bored of normal screen recordings and want something with more motion in it, that is who I made this for
Kamil here, the developer of Spencer. Today, I’m celebrating the app’s first birthday!
It has been a really busy year. My main goal was to follow user feedback and make Spencer faster, more reliable, and more consistent. I also wanted to improve how it restores multiple windows from the same app. I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved, and much more is coming!
Problem
A short reminder of what Spencer is (since my last post here was 9 months ago, many new Redditors have surely joined us during this time).
Spencer is a window manager that saves and restores windows from all apps across all displays and Spaces.
It doesn’t require any manual setup - just click Save to remember the position and size of every window, then click Restore to bring everything back. That’s it.
I created Spencer to clean up the mess after restarting my Mac or changing my display setup, when windows often end up scattered across different displays and Spaces. It’s also useful if you switch between using only your MacBook and connecting it to external displays, or if you change your display setup often.
The idea is to keep your apps in place and automatically hide the ones that distract you.
The key features:
full support for native macOS Spaces
restoring the number of saved Spaces (when using only your MacBook you can have 4 spaces, for external displays you can save more like 10). Yep, it can add or remove spaces in Mission Control.
launching apps
Hiding windows that are not saved
Recognizing multiple windows of the same app
What changed during the last year:
Restoring windows is 3x faster
Better handling of multiple windows of the same app
Much better reliability
CLI
Shortcuts
Layout Manager
Desktop Layouts
Added a trial
New onboarding
Restoring a single window
Ability to update the active Space
And many more small improvements
Comparison
Magnet, Rectangle, Moom - Spencer is not another snapping tool. It saves what you have on screen and does not help you to fill your entire free space by snapping windows together.
Lattix, Layoutish, and ShiftPlus work across spaces, but in a different way. Unlike Spencer, none of them can move a window from one Space to another on the same display. They can switch to a Space and launch an app there. But if the app is already running, they have to quit and relaunch it in the correct space - they cannot move its existing windows.
AeroSpace, FlashSpace, Ikuna - don’t support native macOS spaces.
Pricing
7-day free trial (no signup)
One-time purchase: $22.99 for a lifetime license (up to 3 devices).
20% off with code CELEBRATEYEAR (till September 20)
I've mentioned McKinley on here when I was beta testing. Well, today it launches! There's a 15% launch week discount (see below).
McKinley is a studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple's own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again.
SF Symbols are Apple's vector symbols for use by app developers in their apps. Apple ship about 6000 of them, but you can create your own. Until now, creating them was fiddly…
The Problem:
Making SF Symbols via Apple's recommended workflow was frustrating. You had to export a different symbol as a template, and open it in your vector editor of choice. Then you had to draw three symbol weights (ultralight, regular, black), but each weight had to have the same number of paths in the same order, with the same number of points on each path.
You could only use outlined paths: no shapes or strokes, so you had to do a lot of manual conversion before saving. And that of course meant that editing your symbol later was hard.
And then, back in the SF Symbols app, you had to find each path and annotate it with its colour, some animation properties, whether it erases behind, etc.
Finally you had to export it again into a format you could take into Xcode.
I think that's a clear statement of the problem! McKinley avoids this multi-app workflow by having vector editing, property annotation, previewing, and sending to Xcode, all in one app. Your symbols stay editable because you don't have to outline your strokes just to appease Apple's parser. Keep the .mck file (McKinley's native format) as your source of truth, and set McKinley up to sync your changes to an Xcode asset catalog, so there's no need for manual export.
Comparison:
There are a number of other ways to work with SF Symbols, but none are a complete solution like McKinley:
SF Symbols app plus your vector editor of choice (e.g. Figma): For vector editing, it's the tool you know. And you probably already own (or rent) it. However, it's a tool that's not designed for this use: you'll have trouble making all your symbol weights match, and you'll end up iterating by checking for error messages in SF Symbols and trying again.
Create Custom Symbols: admittedly much cheaper than McKinley, this tool aims to replace the most painful bit of the process: turning existing SVG artwork into an SF Symbol. It offers limited editing capabilities beyond that, but you can set the margins, and it pairs up three SVGs to form your different weights.
Glyphs: this one's really a font design tool, and five times as expensive as McKinley. You still have to do the export dance from Apple's app, but being a font designer Glyphs nails the multi-weight editing.
CustomSymbols: another tool for going from SVG to SF Symbol. Choice of subscription or lifetime purchase. It can make use of SVG strokes to synthesise the various symbol weights (although it doesn't offer the range of customisation that McKinley does!)
Symber: I haven't tried this one but it also goes from SVG to SF Symbol.
McKinley isn't aiming to compete on price with the SVG conversion tools: rather, it's aiming to compete on user experience by offering everything under one roof. (Although McKinley can quite happily convert SVGs too. And it's ready to let you make tweaks and modifications while you do so.)
Pricing:
McKinley is $60 as a one-off purchase (no subscription!) And for launch week (until 14th Sept), there's a 15% discount, making it $51.
The purchase grants you a license to McKinley version 1, including all the 1.x updates.
If we ever release a version 2, that will be a paid upgrade (with discounts for version 1 owners), but upgrading will be optional — your version 1 license will continue working. This is how all software used to be sold, and in my opinion it's much more consumer friendly than a subscription or a "year of updates" method.
McKinley is not on the App Store. For an app this specialised, it made sense to handle our own distribution. Licensing is provided by Amore and updating by Sparkle.
A few months ago I posted here about Displace, and since then I've made a few changes and added some features.
For those who don't know it, Displace is a utility that allows you to take more control over your display layouts. The main purpose is to allow resizing and arranging displays independently of their resolution, so that there are no dead spaces between your monitors in which the cursor gets stuck (see quick preview), but it's much more than that. I don't want to bore you with all the features, though. You can see many of them in my previous post and on the website, where you'll find animations, an interactive playground, and some videos of the app.
Some of the changes and additions in Displace since I first posted about it are:
Custom Hot Corners: Customize what each hot corner does, allowing different behaviors depending on the display where the hot corner was triggered and on the modifier key being held.
Remember that Displace also makes all your Hot Corners work, even the ones that are in contact with another display (macOS disables those).
Free users get unlimited profiles: Previously, free users could have up to 3 display profiles available, but I recently removed that limit to make it less restrictive.
Profile Switcher: You can switch between profiles quickly with a keyboard shortcut or from the menu bar.
Hide menu bar per display: macOS lets you hide the menu bar globally. Displace lets you hide it on the displays that you want.
Move a side Dock by pushing against the edge: In macOS, when you have the Dock on the side, you can't move it to another display. macOS chooses the display for you. Now you can treat it like the bottom Dock and you are able to move it between displays by just pushing against the edge where you want it to be.
Pin the Dock to multiple displays: Displace already let you pin the Dock to a display so that it didn't move to another one accidentally, but if you wanted to allow the Dock to be on two displays but not on a third one, you couldn't. Now you can.
Comparison
Displace is one of a kind, but some of its features may be similar to those found in other applications. The closest match would be Cursr, which is a KVM that allows you to link different displays, similar to what Displace portals do. DockLock is an alternative to the "Pin the Dock" feature. And apps like BetterTouchTool also provide powerful alternatives to the native macOS hot corners.
Pricing
Displace is free to use and has a $15 Pro license for unlocking all features on up to 5 devices.
When the app is opened for the first time, a 14-day Pro trial will start. After that, it will continue to run in Free mode, with Pro features disabled.
You can check out the website for up-to-date info on the Free and Pro features.
About Me
My name is Jere and I'm a software engineer. For the last few years I've been mostly working on open-source repositories. You can check out my GitHub profile, personal website, and LinkedIn profile.
Problem:
Hi, I am a software developer with more than 20 years of experience. I have been working with autocomplete tools helping me to write code for quite a while, and I wanted to have something similar working everywhere, not just in my IDE. This is when I started to work on TypeSeer. Initially I planned to make it work only for my own use, but once I saw what it could do, I decided to polish it and make it available to everyone.
TypeSeer works locally, using a local LLM model to generate suggestions when you type (notice how Wi-Fi is turned off in the above video). It supports 15 languages, and it keeps your writing private. It works in the majority of applications and can be personalised to suit your writing style.
TypeSeer as default, uses Gemma4, but you can use any LLM model you like.
On top of that, TypeSeer learns from your writing style and adapts to it over time. It offers spelling corrections and allows per-app customisation.
TypeSeer understands context of what you are writing.
This is just a very short description of what TypeSeer is and how it can help you, so please visit the website to learn more.
Comparison:
Cotypist - this is the current leader in the space. It is really good at what it does, and for quite a while it was my benchmark when working on TypeSeer, but the main problem with it is the pricing model and licensing tiers. I am a strong believer in paying once and getting the whole product, and Cotypist does not allow that.
Pricing:
Free 14 days trial, so you can see how good it is, after that, there are following options:
The main license you should be looking at is Lifetime for £59.99, but if you really prefer to pay monthly, there are annual £23.99 and monthly £2.99 options. On top of that, I am offering a 25% discount MACAPPS25 (works until end of September), dropping the prices to £45 for lifetime and £18 for annual (for the first year) and £2.24 for monthly license (for the first month).
There is only one license tier with all the options available, and the license works on two devices.
Limitations:
Apple Silicon only.
Requires Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions (it needs to be able to read your writing).
Initial download: 3.8GB model, or any model you choose (from Hugging Face).
Frankly speaking I was trying to keep this post as short as possible, to not overwhelm you with the available options, but feel free to nudge me in the comments if you want to know more!
Edit: Those of you who downloaded the earlier version of the app (pre-1.0) - please message me and I will fix you with a code for a free month, since you have used your 14 days on early version, which wasn't as polished as the current one.
Just over a month ago I introduced the Sub to my app Atheria: Live Wallpaper. I really appreciate all the support I get here! Thank you! Since then I've been working hard on improving it and getting the word out. Having some success with regular installs and IAP's, so THANK YOU for the great start!
In case you missed it before, here's the PCP rundown again and change log to see my progress.
Problem:
macOS doesn’t have built-in live wallpapers. Most apps that add one are really just video players. You get a library of loops, a seam every time the loop restarts, a file to download for every wallpaper, and a wallpaper that keeps decoding video while you have Xcode or a browser covering every pixel of it or an un-sandboxed app that's very difficult to remove every bit when you're finally sick of it. I built Atheria because I wanted the desktop to feel alive, native performance, and not play like a clip.
Although Atheria has a library of shaders, it is really an engine with simple tools to create digital art. You can code and compile or convert GLSL to MSL shaders and save them to your library. The Flame Creator is much simpler. Anyone can create and customize nearly infinite (like 10^350) variations of these beautiful fractals. More wallpapers than everyone together can see in a lifetime. The flame fractals run on chaos and math (Draves open source Equation), what could be cooler than that?
A flame is a fractal grown from a small set of numbers (genome, same as all living creatures) rather than a file, so it never repeats, and every one of them can be shared as a short text code you paste anywhere. You can grow a flame from an archetype, a chaos game, or a blank canvas. Mutate the genome, roll the colors, and watch it live on your desktop while you shape it. Keeping it there is the Pro part, but honestly, the making is where the fun is anyway, and Peach Web, one of my own favorite flames, comes included for free on every display.
The Flame Creator is now free to try, 15 new flame archetypes (27 total), flames can breed, a Back button in the creator, Quiet While You Work (the wallpaper settles when you are typing in an app you choose), and the lock screen image and still wallpaper now sync with any live wallpaper you apply. Sync sets a high-quality render of your flame or shader as a still wallpaper, so if you do have to close the app, like heavy long heavy GPU renders, for example, you still have a beautiful wallpaper up.
Comparison:
The two seasoned competitors:
Wallux: a huge catalog of stock video loops, something like ten thousand, with a free plan to browse them. If you want a big library of videos made by other people, that is a good app, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Wallux can put a video on the lock screen, Atheria syncs a rendered still of whatever you are running instead.
Backdrop: also video-based, with a lock screen video feature and an iCloud community. Their trial is watermarked and limited to a few backdrops.
Both claim very low CPU, and to be fair, so do I, so the honest version is: any of these can be cheap while it is animating on the lowest setting. Both are also direct downloads outside the App Store. Atheria is on the App Store and sandboxed, which is the reason it does the lock screen as a still rather than a video, the video trick needs to run unsandboxed, and I would rather have the sandbox and trust.
Pricing:
Free, with a one time $9.99 Pro unlock. No subscription, no account, one purchase on your Apple Account for all your Macs.
Free:
your own video wallpapers, load and change them freely
the Aurora living wallpaper and the Peach Web flame
your wallpaper on every connected display
the Flame Creator, to try with your own flame live on your desktop
a 45 second live preview of any Pro shader
playlists of up to two items, 30 fps
Lock Screen / still wallpaper Sync
Pro ($9.99 one time):
the full library of 85 living wallpapers
keeping, saving, sharing the flames you make, and breeding them
the Shader Creator: write your own Metal shader and run it as the wallpaper
a different wallpaper on each display
smart triggers (time, power, Focus) and presence-aware effects
P.S. There is also a free iPhone companion app for making flames on the phone and handing them to the Mac, with animated locks screen wakes on the iPhone.
If you try the Flame Creator I would love to see what you grow, paste the code in the comments. If you’d like, I can return them in 4k rendered and sonified videos or print-quality 80 MP images
Last month, I posted about popular and new apps that I had found, and many of you suggested that I continue posting similar content. Thank you so much for your support and interest!
I have decided to create a list for August as well and hope you find it useful.
Disclaimer:
I have no association with any of the apps/devs mentioned in this post. I just like to look out for new apps that interests me.
The list is in no particular order
Tags:
In addition to the pricing and platform information, I have also added data processing method, such as local, cloud, unclear or none - as suggested in my last post. I will also try to link the original developer of the apps here so that they can directly answer the users' questions.
It's pretty rare to start such a post with a terminal app, since many find it to be complex and not-so-useful. But that doesn’t stop developers like Brett Terpstra from creating such a unique app.
His problem statement is:
I gave up trying to find a tool that did what seemed like it should be a simple thing: take things like progress reports, status indicators, and generated images and display them in macOS and iOS widgets. There are a couple of options out there, but they’re of limited flexibility and all suffer from huge lags in update times. So I built my own
You can read the documentation, CLI and community snippets (or recipes as it is called) here: https://terminalwidget.app/
ps: He also created few other apps, FileRouter (like Velja/OpenIn but for documents), ScreenCoord (to get coordinates) - are interesting as well
MacOS comes with a lot of built-in actions that are deeply buried in the menu settings. There are many third-party apps to make the useful actions more accessible, such as Menuwhere, Trickster.
However, there is an another issue: actions without key bindings. Or with key bindings that you'd like to change based on your preferences.
For this, you can use Custom Shortcuts to create your own key bindings for any individual app. In addition, you can use it with KeyClu to view your custom shortcuts alongside the standard ones.
By Default, Duplicate Tab has a different keyboard shortcut on macOS (I guess!). I changed it to my liking using Custom Menu Shortcuts.Custom Menu Shortcuts Window with all opened apps. You can see my custom shortcut for Duplicate Tab.
tag: OTP, Direct, Local (with optional anonymous usage reporting)
It's a companion app for Apple Notes with additional functionality.
From their website,
Notomo is a native Mac companion for Apple Notes. Your notes stay in Apple Notes. Notomo does not operate a hosted notes service and does not sell your note content.
I was really impressed by this app as it has taken a unique problem at hand, when numerous markdown editors/clipboard managers are being pushed out. Kudos to the developer (u/tmrmn)
As its GitHub page says:
One layout per keyboard.
A macOS menu bar app that switches the input source automatically when you switch keyboards.
I came across Slopscan (thanks to u/metamatic), which is a simple tool that checks whether the given gitHub repo has AI footprints. Think of it as reddit's App store/GitHub bot - but specifically for AI usage. You can check how it works, on their documentation page.
Note: An app can't be branded as AI-slop just because it has AI components in its code. Slopscan does not deliberately tell you whether that's a vibe-coded app or not, however it offers information to users to decide on their own.
For testing, I scanned the GitHub repo of a popular app (KeyboardCowboy) and new app (Keychange). The results were as follows:
It's a new RSS webapp from my personal favorite creator - Matt from Macrumors. He has a great video explaining why he created this app, how it works and unique features of it. It is currently on early bird discount of 29/year, instead of 39/year
7. Shareshot by Marc Palmer
ShareShot is a Mac app to frame screenshots/mockups. Surprisingly, I haven't seen it mentioned on this subreddit but have seen it mentioned by many including Stephen Robles from Mac Power Users (MPU).
It has a generous free-tier (free backgrounds, lighting & shadow controls with no watermarks) which covers the general audience's needs. Even, the paid pro version is just $14.99/year for universal license on all devices. I bought the pro version to support the developer.
I'm an iOS developer, and I kept repeating the same setup before every debugging session(but no, I am not tired of this!).
Launch with a particular environment variable, switch the language, force dark mode, find the right deep link, send the matching push payload. Then do it all again on the next build.
So I built CosmoKit, a native macOS control center for iOS Simulator workflows. Built with SwiftUI and SwiftData.
What it does today
App Profiles: launch arguments, environment variables, locale, and appearance saved per app, switched from the main panel or the menu bar
Deep links, push payloads, locations, and routes, all scoped to the active profile
Reads and writes the app's UserDefaults directly from the panel
Grants and revokes permissions, and clears the keychain, without erasing the Simulator
Launches a profile across every selected Simulator at once
An HTTP/HTTPS proxy with response stubbing
A capture pipeline for App Store screenshots and recordings
Two things are already built and go out in the next update:
Network conditions in the proxy. Presets like Edge, 3G and LTE, or your own latency, bandwidth and packet loss, applied per host, to any app on the Simulator with no SDK in the app. Offline was the first step; this is therest of it.A mode for AI agents.
A CLI and an MCP server so an agent like Claude Codecan boot a Simulator, launch a profile, tap through the app, read what is onscreen and check the proxy log — the same tools, driven from a terminal or anagent session instead of the panel.
A design-comparison overlay to drop a Figma export over the running app
An inspector for the app's SwiftData/SQLite store
And any new features you suggest on this post.
And yes, I know there are already some really good tools in this space. My problem was that I ended up paying for several different apps to cover different parts of my workflow, and the cost added up quickly.
So I built the tool I wanted for myself: one place for the Simulator workflows I use every day, with pricing that makes sense for an indie developer.
My goal is to keep expanding it and bring more of the useful features that are currently spread across different iOS development tools into one place. I don't expect to replace every specialized tool out there, but I'd like CosmoKit to cover more and more of the things I reach for during everyday development without needing five different apps open.
That's also why I'm posting this here. I'm very open to suggestions, criticism, and feature requests, especially if there's a tool or workflow you rely on today that you'd love to see built into CosmoKit.
I'm still completely opposed to an app that has a free tier and a subscription tier. And you have to keep paying to keep the subscription tier features.
And I'm totally opposed to any app that adds unnecessary cloud storage or "AI" features to a subscription to justify the subscription tier that has some feature you need.
But I now better understand modern software development. Developers need to sign their apps, which is a subscription fee to Apple. And time spent fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities is time spent that you're not going to get from sales revenues of existing customers.
So, there is one software model I agree with. Sell me the app and give me some predetermined time —say a year— of free updates. After 1 year, I stop getting all updates, but my apps continues to work without losing any features. And any update mechanism in the app needs to be very clear that the update you're pushing will require someone to re-up their subscription.
This does three things:
It gives the developer a recurring revenue stream.
It incentivizes the developer to keep working on the app to make people want to renew for another year.
The user is not held ransom by their data being in an app.
Now if your app has a monthly recurring cost such as cloud storage or AI tokens, then I can see you needing to charge a monthly fee. But I also believe app developers should allow end-users a chance to use a cloud storage provider of their choice, enter an API key for the LLM of choice, or just provide an MCP server.
Last month I announced on this subreddit my own markdown editor.
Everyone is building one nowadays, and a new one is launched every single day.
I didn't expect anyone to notice my little app.
But to my surprise my post got 52K views, 71 upvotes, tons of great feedback, new bugs and feature requests.
Two people wrote about it on German and French tech sites.
In one month ~1800 people downloaded it and I think most of them are still using it.
So I'm super grateful for those original upvotes and comments here. I think it's my second most popular personal project I've launched.
I was so motivated by the reception that I did around 15 releases in the past month: bug fixes, design feedback, features requested by users.
If you are looking for a WYSIWYG Markdown (and Typst!) editor that works on mac, iPhone and iPad (and soon web), has history and comments from day 1 - please give it a try.
TL;DR: Is there really no viable successor to Reeder classic?
I tried really hard to like the new Reeder with the timeline but my ocd just can’t take it.
when i open the R. classic - I see 3 unread items - mark all “read” and move on.
when I open the new one - there’s 1 big list of read, unread, all look the same and I have to figure out which ones I’ve seen. No the scroll position is not a solution to this problem. It is the source of it.
The classic version also has better typography settings (can change fonts) and more control. But the problem is - that it doesn’t refresh the feeds so reliably (especially for reddit and youtube).
Apart from reeders I’ve tried:
Feedly
Feedbin
readkit
Unread
Tapestry
Readwise Reader
NewsNinja
NewsExplorer
NetNewsWire
Lire
FluentReader
FieryFeeds
Feeeed
FeedFlow
Current
Cupfeed
Artykul
InoReader
And probably couple more that I didn’t even bothered to record (including the most popular self-hosted options).
None of them come even remotely close to the UX of the classic Reeder (which is amazing feat for a 4yrs old app). The closest one is probably News Explorer but for some reason the UX is just not there. Others might have some good bits but are lacking elsewhere.
My requirements are simple:
mac & ios apps (native!)
Rss + yt + reddit
Filters would be a bonus
Decent typography options
Good UX
Reliable (meaning: 1 freeze, 1 crash - and you’re out)
Ideally: 0 (zero) AI - in the app as well as in the code.
If I could melt Reeder classic with the new one - it would be perfect.
I’m the developer of HealthAtlas, an open-source macOS app for exploring Apple Health exports locally.
I built it because Apple Health can collect a lot of useful data, but once you export it, working with the resulting Export.xml or ZIP file on a Mac is pretty awkward.
HealthAtlas turns that export into dashboards, trends, timelines, calendars and descriptive insights. Everything is processed locally. There is no account, cloud upload or external service handling your health data.
Problem
I wanted a straightforward way to open an Apple Health export and actually make sense of it on a Mac.
You select an existing export and HealthAtlas reads it locally. You can browse your data, compare periods, look at trends and inspect individual metrics without syncing the data anywhere else.
Comparison
Two apps I looked at while building HealthAtlas were Health Auto Export and Health Data AI Analyzer.
Health Auto Export is more focused on exporting and syncing Apple Health data in different formats and connecting it to other services.
HealthAtlas is aimed at a different use case. You already have an Apple Health export, open it on your Mac and explore it locally.
Health Data AI Analyzer also works with Apple Health exports and includes AI-based analysis and additional synchronization options.
HealthAtlas intentionally does not use AI providers, accounts or cloud synchronization. The idea is simply to give you a local way to inspect and visualize an existing Apple Health export.
Features
Native Swift/SwiftUI macOS app
Opens Apple Health Export.xml files and ZIP archives
Configurable overview with 4, 8 or 12 cards
Timeline with up to four data types
Trend views for 7D, 15D, 30D, 3M, 6M and 1Y
Clickable data points and calendar view
Current period vs previous period comparisons
Full-screen metric view
Local snapshots, data coverage and recording pattern insights
PDF reports with selectable periods, data types and themes
Search, categories, pins and custom ordering
Four interface themes
German and English UI
Optional GitHub release checks
No analytics, advertising, tracking, account or cloud upload
Imported health data stays in memory for the current session. When you open HealthAtlas again, it starts empty.
HealthAtlas does not provide diagnoses, health ratings or treatment recommendations. The insights are descriptive only.
Version 1.2.0 is available as DMG and ZIP downloads, with SHA-256 checksum files included.
The current build is ad-hoc signed, so macOS Gatekeeper may show a warning the first time you open it. The repository explains how to open the official build without disabling Gatekeeper system-wide.
This is the first stable release. I’d be especially interested in feedback from people trying it with real Apple Health exports, particularly the dashboard, trends, insights and metric coverage.
Bug reports and suggestions are welcome.
Security policy: available in the GitHub repository in English and German.
If someone downvoted without writing why, please explain it so I can make improvements.
I first posted Zenteek here a few months ago, shortly after launch. I've been building pretty much nonstop since then, and I thought it was time for an update because the app has changed substantially. I'm a solo developer and a lot of your initial feedback has made it into the current version.
PROBLEM
I love physical media and lossless audio, but every macOS player forced a trade-off: native feel, library management, file format support, presentation, hardware support, performance - pick some, lose the rest.
Even the ones I liked would in the end silently resample my audio the moment I touched the equalizer. So I thought "There has to be a way", stopped looking for the right player and began building.
A few things that set Zenteek apart:
Source-rate DSP that doesn't lie to you. A new modular DSP system and a four-channel gapless local transport architecture, all without silently resampling your files.
It plays almost anything you throw at it. CD ripping, SACD ISO, 1-bit DSD via DoP, DFF, DST, 5.1/7.1, OPUS - formats most players treat as edge cases, Zenteek treats as normal.
Your library, actually explored. Full discographies, wishlisting, credits graph, smart matching, front and back artwork, concert dates and links.
And then there's Zen-A-Llama: a new optional controller window that runs classic Winamp skins. Yes, really. Your music library can look like it's 2001 if you want it to, right down to the pixel-y sliders. (added in my recent "birthday release" - just for fun).
Beyond that, there's now Audio Unit support (isolated, crash resilient), DJ-style pitch control, audio analysis (key, energy, spectral cutoff), Plex/Navidrome/Jellyfin library sources, DLNA/AirPlay support, customizable color themes, remote control, an album crates system, smart filters ... but at this point I'm just listing things, so I'll stop.
You can see the full changelog and related blogposts on the website.
COMPARISON
Audirvana, Swinsian, or Roon - Zenteek sits somewhere in that space, but I never built it by looking at what they do. It grew out of what I personally needed and what users kept asking for. It has its own spot since it does a few things different than most.
PRICE
$79 one-time. No subscription, ever. Free updates for life, everything above shipped for existing users at no extra cost. 2-seat license.
I move files around all day and Finder always felt like it was built for someone who doesn't. The alternatives that do have the power mostly look like they stopped getting design attention a decade ago. So I spent the last year building the middle that I couldn't buy: Finder's feel, without Finder's ceiling. Native AppKit/SwiftUI, no web views anywhere.
Workspaces just shipped this week, so it felt like the right moment to finally post here.
Problem:
The moment you need two folders side by side, a rename across 40 files, a server connection, or to grab that file you copied three folders ago, Finder sends you to extra windows, extra apps, or the terminal. I wanted all of that in one place that still feels like macOS.
Browsing:
Icons, List and Columns views, configurable list columns, one-click filter chips (Images, Documents, Code, Videos...).
Tabs with session restore, pinned tabs, and named Workspaces: save a window's whole tab set ("Client X", "Video project") and reopen the layout later.
Dual pane on a real AppKit split view (the divider drag is buttery, that took embarrassingly long to get right), plus a folder comparison mode that visually links matching files between both sides: same name, different size or date. Syncing two folders by hand stops being guesswork.
⌘K switcher that searches every open tab across every window.
A Home dashboard: drives with free space, pinned items, recent activity, your servers.
Preview panel, Quick Look, and a Get Info window with overview, permissions and activity tabs.
The address bar does something I haven't seen elsewhere: type claude, terminal or git into it and it opens a terminal right there in that folder running that thing. Type code and the folder opens in VS Code. Small feature, weirdly addictive.
Doing things to files:
Batch rename: find & replace, add text, numbering, case. Live preview, and the whole batch undoes as one step.
Organize into folders: pick a rule (kind, extension, year, first letter) and a messy Downloads sorts itself into subfolders. Also one undo.
Archives with zero bundled binaries: creates zip, 7z, tar.gz, tar.xz, extracts those plus RAR. Everything through what macOS already ships.
Quick Actions in the context menu: convert images (PNG/JPEG/HEIC/TIFF), resize to presets, combine PDFs.
The Shelf: drag files onto a floating tray, navigate anywhere, drop the batch or "Move here" in one go.
Real transfer progress with a live throughput graph, undo/redo on file operations, and Finder-style prompts for locked files instead of silent failures.
Trash across all volumes in one view, with Put Back.
Finder tags: read, write, browse by tag. Everything stays visible in Finder and Spotlight.
On macOS 26 it reads and writes the new emoji/symbol folder customizations, including on releases where Finder's APIs don't expose them to third-party apps.
Search:
Spotlight-backed, filename or full content, extension chips, tag/date/size filters. Any search saves as a Smart Folder that re-runs live from the sidebar.
Beyond the local disk:
Servers: SFTP, FTP/FTPS, SMB, WebDAV. Browsable like local folders, credentials in the Keychain, host keys and certificates handled properly.
Cloud drives as first-class citizens: iCloud Drive (with the merged app-containers view Finder shows), Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box. Sync-status badges, download on demand, "Remove Download" to free space. DockDuck never talks to a cloud API and never sees your cloud login. It reads the filesystem and the provider's own app keeps owning sync.
For developers (all off by default): git status badges on files and folders, open-in for Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty and your editor.
The native part:
Every shortcut is rebindable from one command registry, the toolbar is customizable, there's an optional menu bar item and a global hotkey that reveals your latest download. Light/dark, your accent color, SF Symbols, system materials. 14 languages. Listings, icons and thumbnails render on the first frame from cache and upgrade in place. No spinners for opening a folder.
Comparison:
Finder: honestly fine until it isn't. No dual pane, no batch rename, no servers, silent failures on locked files. If you're happy in Finder, stay, it's free. DockDuck is for the day you catch yourself with three Finder windows and a terminal open for one job.
ForkLift: the closest established comparison, and strong at transfers. My bet is tighter native polish plus the workflow layer: workspaces, the shelf, folder comparison, smart folders.
Path Finder: the veteran, huge feature list, showing its age in density and performance. I deliberately ship fewer, deeper features that don't need a manual.
Marta: fast, keyboard-driven, free. If you want an orthodox commander configured in text files, it's genuinely great. DockDuck is for people who want the power with zero configuration.
QSpace Pro / Commander One: capable and fairly priced, both leaning utilitarian in design. My whole thesis is that this category can be powerful and still look like Apple shipped it.
Bloom: newest entrant, genuinely nice, we clearly diagnosed Finder the same way. DockDuck goes further beyond the local disk (servers, cloud drives, folder comparison, cross-volume trash, git badges) and ships in 14 languages. If your files live on one Mac, try both. If they live everywhere, I cover more of your day.
Privacy:
Your files never leave your Mac. No telemetry on your files, zero cloud credentials held, remote connections go straight to your servers. You sign in once to start the trial or activate the license (no key to type) and that's it.
Pricing:
$49 one-time (Pro Lifetime) or $24.99/year with manual renewal. It never auto-charges, it just expires and asks.
Both cover 3 Macs.
14-day full trial, no card, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.
macOS 15+ (Sequoia), Apple Silicon and Intel (universal binary).
AI disclosure:
No AI features in the app, nothing leaves your Mac. Development is AI-assisted (pair programming and code review); every feature is designed, tested and shipped by me.
Transparency:
I'm Martin, solo developer behind DockDuck (Heylel Labs).
I'll be around in the comments. Ask me anything: architecture, why no Electron, how the cloud support works without touching a cloud API, or what should come next. The shelf and workspaces both exist because of watching how people actually move files, so feedback here genuinely lands on the roadmap.
Problem: Hope to have a retro-style mini local music player that can directly read and play audio files in folders, manage music via traditional folder hierarchy, and support a wider range of audio formats.
Comparison: Compared with the system native Music App, this player focuses purely on local playback without redundant cloud, subscription and online library features, featuring smaller size and flexible window modes. Different from mainstream third‑party players, it adds waveform progress visualization, one‑click switch between three window sizes and menu bar quick controls, with a minimalist customizable UI and full lossless format support including FLAC. Uniquely, it supports MCP stdio, enabling AI Agents to directly search, play and control playback — something most music players do not offer. When matched against ultra‑simple players, it provides broader audio format compatibility and richer visual interaction details, balancing practicality and appearance customization, plus the new AI‑controllable capability.
Pricing: Lifetime Access: $3.99
Changelog(v3.6): This update adds support for MCP stdio mode and updates the app icon.
I gathered lots of feature requests from my last Reddit promotion. Now Musicer v3.6 is here! Six versions have shipped since that post, bringing plenty of new features. Feel free to share more interesting use‑case ideas and feature requests!
v3.5.0
feat: add bitrate and sample rate display.
fix: fix new window not being brought to the front correctly.
fix: fix FLAC playback failure caused by sample rate mismatch.
fix: fix mini window layout and styling issues.
chore: improve localization and internationalization.
chore: fix several build warnings.
v3.4.0
feat: optimize handling logic for file and folder renaming issues.
feat: add de language.
v3.3.0
feat: add audio output device selection.
feat: add indicator for unreadable music files in list.
perf: fix occasional stuttering in list rendering
v3.2.1
pref: optimize occasional stuttering caused by long‑term loop playback.
fix: keep menu item icons visible on macOS 27.
v3.2.0
feat: Hidden the close button on Standard and Large Cover views until hovered.
feat: Added Equalizer support for sound customization.
feat: Added a search function within playlists.
feat: Improved lyric translation and word-level Karaoke display.
fix: Auto-selects the first track when a playlist loads.
fix: Fixed a bug where hidden folders visibility state was not saved.
fix: Fixed window dragging failure in the area above the main playlist.
v3.1.0
feat: add a Get Info window for editing track tags.
feat: add classic, bars, pill, and segmented progress styles.
feat: add gapless playback between consecutive tracks.
feat: add six new app localizations.
feat: add movable desktop lyrics.
feat: add karaoke lyric sync and a lockable desktop overlay.
fix: restore album art in the status bar.
fix: disable the blue focus ring around the player window.
Problem: There's a general consensus I believe that most folk are truly getting fed up of paying out for subscriptions left, right and centre for all manner of things. When I had my last email from Adobe, it was, unsurprisingly about increasing my subs, for no apparent increase in functionality etc. So when I cancelled my sub, I had to have a way of managing my extensive catalogue, Lumidex Studio was born.
Comparison: The obvious competitor is Adobe Lightroom Classic. What does my app do better?
Handles NAS drives out the box gracefully, no more "?" when LrC decides it has no idea where your network drives have gone. Lumidex Studio simply handles this with ease
Vectorscopes and RGB parades - super helpful for colour grading
Assisted duplicate finder - uses SHA-256 hash checking of content to find dupes
Dedicated colour grading with plot graph - makes tweaking hues child's play
Tethered USB Capture - supports a wide range of camera makes, single-shot from the camera or app, or, programmable time-lapse
Negative scanning mode - eases the pain of processing negs
Focus stacking - into macro or landscape photography and want pin-sharp images across the entire depth?
Ai tools include auto key-wording, semantic tagging (search for images with natural language), denoise, super-resolution
Effects include grain, halo, glow and more planned
Pricing £49 one-time cost, lifetime ownership - https://www.lumidexstudio.app - no account needed, no tracking, no ads, no bs.
Why no MAS? Simply put, Lumidex Studio can't ship on the Mac App Store because the App Store mandates the App Sandbox, and this app's two defining capabilities are fundamentally incompatible with it: tethered capture talks to cameras over raw USB via libgphoto2 (PTP/USB device access the sandbox forbids), and the entire library model reaches photos on a NAS through an AFP network share, reaching arbitrary mounted volumes and network shares the way this app does isn't permitted under the sandbox either.
website has PP and ToS, my linkedIn has no relevant skills to show here (I work as an Azure cloud infrastructure engineer) I do have validated apps in the Mac App Store, one being DiskScanPro, here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diskscanpro/id6802771798?mt=12
Finder is frustrating. Digging through four folders for a receipt you downloaded twenty minutes ago, searching a word you know is inside a PDF and getting nothing back, losing a file to whatever folder the browser felt like using that day.
Kepter watches the folders you pick (Desktop, Downloads, Documents by default), reads what lands there, and shows all of it as one scrollable wall of pictures instead of a list of filenames.
Point it at any folder or drive on your Mac, including your Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud folders, and it reads whatever is downloaded there.
The idea is recognition instead of recall. You do not file photos on your phone and you still find them, because you know what the thing looked like. Kepter does that for receipts, scans, PDFs, screenshots, voice memos, everything else.
The reading is the actual product. Every file gets read on your Mac and the words go into a local index, so you can type what you remember instead of the filename. "my flight" finds the boarding pass. A word on page 12 of a Word doc is as findable as one on page 1. Scans and screenshots get OCR'd. Audio and video get transcribed, so a phrase somebody said in a voice memo finds the memo.
That all runs through Apple's own frameworks: PDFKit for document text, Vision for OCR, Speech for audio, and Apple's on-device models on macOS 26. There are no AI API calls in the read path. Your files are not uploaded and Kepter never keeps a copy of one.
Requirements, and this rules a lot of people out: macOS 26 or newer, Apple Silicon only. The on-device models Kepter reads with do not exist below 26 and do not run on Intel at all. There is no version that works on older Macs, and I would rather say that here than have you find out after downloading.
Some other things it does:
Zips, disk images and installers show as tiles without ever being opened. A zip is findable by the names of what is inside it.
Sort by what the document says. Bills by amount, letters by who sent them, papers by the date printed on them. Finder sorts a receipt by its kilobytes.
Files that iCloud has offloaded, or that live on an unplugged drive, are still findable by their words, because Kepter read them while they were here. Spotlight goes blind on those. Kepter never triggers a download to do it.
Dates inside a document (a bill's due date) can be turned into a reminder in one click.
Save the same thing twice and it shows once, with a count. Only ever grouped when byte-identical or when the pages render identically. Near-identical images are shown as "related, you decide" rather than merged.
A drawer that sits at the edge of the screen so you can drag things out into an email without leaving what you were doing.
What it does not do, since this is the part that usually gets left out:
It is not a backup. Kepter keeps no copy of anything. It reads your files where they sit and remembers them. Delete the original and Kepter loses it too. If you want the bytes in two places, this is not that app.
Photos and screenshots are never redrawn or reconstructed. Share and export always send the original file.
No iPhone app. One Mac app, today.
If macOS cannot transcribe a language on-device, Kepter skips transcription rather than sending the audio somewhere. That file is still kept and still findable by name, just not by what was said.
iCloud offload detection works. OneDrive and Dropbox placeholders do not, because there is no public API for them.
Trust stuff, because this sub asks and it is fair:
I am Chad Maltby. Kepter is made by Maltby Ventures LLC, three of us. Before this we shipped Peddra, another Mac app under the same company. Kepter is signed and notarized with Developer ID, sandboxed, and updates itself through Sparkle with your permission.
Every privacy claim on the site is checked against the shipping code and written up with how it was checked: https://kepter.app/receipts . That page lists every place the app can touch the network and what has to happen for each one to fire. It was updated today when billing went live, because turning billing on made one line of it untrue.
Test counts, since a real number beats an adjective: 274 passing tests across the crypto, shared and app targets.
I use Claude heavily while building this, the same way I use it at work. I make the decisions, I review the code, and I own it when it breaks. Saying so because I would rather be plain about it than weird about it.
Version 1.0.0 went out today. If you don't like it or it is not working on your machine, please let me know. [hello@kepter.app](mailto:hello@kepter.app) goes to me.
Problem
Finder shows you a list of names. People do not remember filenames, they remember what a thing looked like and roughly what it said. Spotlight helps when you can already name the thing. It does not read inside most of what you save, so a word on page 12 of a Word doc or a phrase in a voice memo is invisible to it.
Comparison
Spotlight is free and built in. It launches apps and does quick math; Kepter reads inside your files. Spotlight indexes far less of what you save and goes blind on anything iCloud has offloaded. DEVONthink (paid) is built around you organizing a database; Kepter is built around not organizing anything. EagleFiler and Yep (paid) file documents into libraries and move or copy your files to do it. HoudahSpot (paid) is a much better search front end for Spotlight, but inherits what Spotlight indexed. Kepter is the one that reads everything itself, on-device, leaves every file exactly where it is, and shows the result as pictures rather than rows.
Price
30 days free, no card, no account. After that $2.99/month, which is a founding price kept for life even after it rises to $4.99. Or $39 once, for life, which later becomes $59. One plan, everything included, the two options differ only in how you pay. Signed and notarized. No ads, no tracking, no analytics in the app.
