TL;DR:
Iris is a Mac photo viewer that indexes photos where they already live (folder, external drive, or your existing Apple Photos library) instead of importing them into a managed database. It does on-device face recognition, OCR/speech search, and a real map (Photo Trails) that plots every geotagged photo so you can browse by location. No cloud, no account, no subscription; one-time purchase, 14-day trial. It's a viewer, not an editor, so RAW/Lightroom workflows aren't the target use case.

Tyler Hall has a new app, Iris, a photo management app built for a very specific kind of workflow. I am a Tyler Hall fan. He is a respected Mac developer with a proven track record operating a one-person shop out of Richmond, VA. Longtime Mac folks will remember his web-developer tool VirtualHostX; he sunset that in 2021 and rebuilt around a small set of native, single-purpose apps. The rest of his catalog is made up of the kind of apps I love:

• TextBuddy ($19): a Swiss Army knife for plain text; faster than opening your IDE, easier than remembering the right command-line incantation.
• Fastmarks ($9): search and open your browser bookmarks from anywhere with one hotkey, 100% keyboard-driven. This is exactly the kind of friction-remover I adore.
• Ears ($9): an instant audio-output switcher for hopping between speakers, AirPods, and that one weird USB mic.
• Steve (free): a casual daily puzzle game for when you need to not be productive for five minutes.

Iris is currently being offered for $19 on the app's website or the Mac App Store., and will be $29 after the introductory period is over. You can get Iris for free, believe it or not. All you have to do is donate $20 to any one of a variety of causes and submit a receipt. (Includes St. Jude's Children's Hospital, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, and others.)

As a certified old person, I have been accumulating digital photography a lot longer than I've had an iPhone. I have over 80,000 photographs from a variety of sources: scans of black-and-white images from past decades of family history, GBs of DSLR images taken with my full-frame Canon Mark V, and a mishmash of images from an assortment of old-school digital cameras and vintage cell phones. An iCloud-based Apple Photos library is a handy tool for day-to-day management of a current working set of photos, screenshots, and downloads, but it's not the tool I would recommend to anyone with a collection like mine, for some very clear reasons:

• Anyone who thinks it's impossible to lose access to their Apple account through no fault of their own is living in denial. A quick web search will give numerous examples of this rare but real nightmare.
• Likewise, accidental deletions of iCloud photos happen on the regular, even to experienced users. A quick trip to r/iCloud on Reddit will show you a whole collection of broken hearts tied to this occurrence.
• Apple Photos is a prime example of Apple's "We know what's best for you" management style. While not exactly impenetrable, it's pretty close to a walled garden where your photos are swallowed by a single .photoslibrary database that Apple really doesn't want you messing with.

Iris takes the opposite bet. It points at wherever you store your photos: a folder, an external drive, or even your existing Apple Photos library in read-only mode. It never moves, copies, or modifies a single original. Then it builds its own fast, intelligent index on top of what's already there and gives you the good stuff (on-device face recognition, a real map, text and speech search) without asking you to hand over your files or your privacy. It doesn't need a cloud account or a subscription.

Iris itself has a long runway behind it. It began as a project called AntiPhoto back in November 2020, and a lot of the multi-year effort went into an unglamorous problem: making a six-figure photo library scroll smoothly. Tyler hit a documented milestone in April 2022 of smoothly scrolling a 101,706-item library. That's the difference between a demo and a tool, and it's why the app feels the way it does. It's also worth knowing that Apple initially rejected Iris from the App Store; it's since made it in, and you can buy it there or direct.

Five features that matter to a Mac power user

• Filesystem-first, read-only, non-destructive: Iris reads your existing folders or Apple Photos library and leaves the originals exactly where they are. Your library is still just files you own; Iris is a lens, not a container.
• On-device face recognition: faces are recognized locally using Apple's own ML frameworks. Nothing leaves the Mac, and Iris will even show a person's age in a shot, calculated from their birthday.
• A real map with Photo Trails: every geotagged photo gets plotted; you can jump to nearby photos, bookmark favorite locations, and retrace where you actually were on a given trip.
• Search that reads your photos and listens to your videos: Iris runs OCR on text inside images and transcribes speech in videos, then makes all of it searchable. This is how you find the whiteboard photo or the receipt you swore you kept.
• Local multi-device, no cloud tax: pair the Mac app with Iris on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV over your home Wi-Fi. Your Mac stays the source of truth: no re-uploading, no cloud account, no second subscription. And the app itself is a one-time purchase.

This is an app made by a developer who is passionate about quality and principles, so much so that the Iris website features a manifesto that lays out a set of principles and explains: "Iris is not an app for professional photographers. It's also not an app for people who snap photos with their phone, upload them to Facebook, and forget about them. Iris is for people who care about their photos and videos and believe they're worth safeguarding in a private, future-proof format that will outlive their grandchildren. Iris is for family historians and archivists."

Rather than paraphrase the feature set, I recommend just going to the website and reading it over.

To demonstrate why this is a special app made by a special type of developer, let me share this story. I've been following the development of Iris since before it was publicly released. Tyler contacted me, but not as part of a marketing campaign to get publicity. He just wanted feedback on the app's quality. After the release, when the initial (and expected) bug reports filtered in, he had this experience and shared it with me.

I wanted Iris to present a "human" approach to viewing your memories. I didn't want the app to be another endless stream of photos, or half-organized photo albums. I wanted the app to let users explore and get lost in their library the way you might lose time flipping through physical photo albums in your attic, or by following related links around Wikipedia.

Based on feedback, I think I've accomplished that - or gotten close to it. But it's also emphasized how carefulI need to be with how that data is presented. When people feel a connection to a piece of software, it can amplify the severity of bugs.

For example: a woman emailed a bug report that ripped my heart out. She added her mom to Iris - so she can filter by photos of her. She also filled in her mother's birthday, so Iris can surface how old people are in photos. And she filled in the date her mother passed away, too. A bug slipped through where Iris correctly identified her mother in a photo, but that photo's capture date was ten years after her mother passed, and Iris dutifully listed her mom with an age she never reached. (I knew this case would happen and guarded against it, but there were two corner cases in the UI where it slipped through.)

A bug like that isn't critical from an engineering point of view, but it is critical from an emotional point of view. And it hit me harder than any other crash or bug report.

Hopefully, I've made it clear who this app is for.

But it's not for everyone, of course. Iris is explicitly a viewer, not an organizer or editor; if you shoot RAW and work in Lightroom Classic, Iris shows the original unedited file and ignores your catalog's edits and metadata, so it isn't a replacement for that workflow. If Apple Photos already works for you and you're happy in iCloud, the built-in app is free and covers the same three headline features. And Tyler is candid that Iris can still have performance hiccups on complex searches and truly massive libraries, so if your collection is enormous, take the 14-day trial for a real spin before you buy.

How it compares

My focus is on helping people find the right app, not talking anyone into using something just because I like it. To that end, I usually try to list alternatives.

The features Iris bundles are not, individually, unique. Face recognition, maps, and photo search are all just features inside larger apps; Apple Photos ships all three for free, and pro catalogs like Lightroom and Peakto fold them into much heavier tooling.

• Apple Photos (free, built-in): the incumbent Iris wants to replace. It already does faces, maps, and search well, but it imports your photos into a managed library and steers you toward iCloud storage. If that model already suits you, the built-in app is free and fine; Iris is for people who specifically don't want the walled garden.
• Lyn (~$20 one-time, lynapp.com) [Verify This]: a lightweight, long-running image browser that reads folders and even Aperture/Photos/Lightroom libraries, and adds actual non-destructive editing. It's the closest one-time-purchase competitor, but it's more of a classic viewer/editor and lacks Iris's on-device face recognition and video transcription.
• digiKam (free, open source, digikam.org): the power-user's DAM, with faces, tags, geotagging, and duplicate detection, and it can even live on a NAS. It's the most capable free option by a mile, but it's cross-platform, not very Mac-native, and considerably heavier to learn. This is what I use for my own heavy lifting.
• Mylio Photos (free tier; Photos+ $99.99/year, mylio.com): also filesystem-based, and syncs across your devices without cloud storage fees. Broader in scope than Iris, but the features most people want tend to sit behind the subscription.
• Peakto (subscription ~$10/month or a ~$270 lifetime license, cyme.io): AI cataloging and search that spans multiple folders and editing catalogs at once. Powerful, but subscription-priced and aimed at working photographers rather than someone who just wants their family archive to make sense.

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As a Reddit user for over 20 years, I feel qualified to do a deep dive on my favorite subreddit, r/MacApps. I recently analyzed the culture that's developed there.

I've decided I like this place, so I am hanging around despite some of its quirks.

Take your average question, let's say it's someone asking about a simple app to keep a window on top. Within an hour, the replies will include:

• A free open-source utility
• A $5 single-purpose app
• A $30 app that also performs 46 unrelated functions
• A recommendation for Raycast
• Someone saying that Alfred can do it better
• Someone else announcing that subscriptions are destroying civilization
• That guy who accuses everything of "being AI"
• The developer of a completely different app, praising the question and dropping a link to his unrelated app "if you're interested"

This is a feature, not a bug.

Few things make me sadder than someone who confesses that they have been thinking about getting an app like Keyboard Maestro, but they're holding off because they "are not a power user." We need to clear up some misconceptions. First of all, their reaction is understandable: in KM, there are colored blocks, nested actions, variables, conditions, triggers, and mysterious references to shell scripts. The whole thing looks less like a Mac app and more like the control system for a nuclear reactor. Most people just want to open an app, do something, and close it. They do not want to spend Saturday afternoon creating a four-finger trackpad gesture that resizes Finder, launches Obsidian, mounts a server, and tells the kitchen Echo to play London Calling.

Some of us do.

The Power User Defined

A Mac Power User (MPU) is not necessarily someone who knows how to write code, who uses the Terminal exclusively, or has memorized every defaults write command ever posted on Stack Overflow.

A power user is just someone with a low tolerance for friction and a high tolerance for tinkering. That's the whole entrance exam. If you've ever been annoyed enough at a repeated task to wonder whether there's a better way, you're already qualified. The apps aren't the hard part; deciding you're allowed to use them is.

They notice repeated friction, investigate whether it can be removed, and then spend 45 minutes automating a task that previously took eight seconds. This looks irrational until the automation fires correctly for the first time. At that moment, the heavens open, angels sing, and those eight seconds become a matter of principle.

What matters isn't technical skill; it's the persistent belief that the Mac could behave better if only someone would make it listen. When you stop seeing applications as singular entities and begin seeing how they form an interrelated system, that's when you have the mental framework required of an MPU.

A screenshot is not just a screenshot. It must be captured, annotated, compressed, renamed, filed by date, and moved into an archive folder after 30 days. Ideally, none of this should require conscious thought. (Confession: this is my actual workflow via Screenshot X, Hazel, Clop and NameQuick). The question is never just, "What does this app do?"

It is, "Can I trigger it with a hotkey, AppleScript, URL scheme, command-line tool, Shortcuts action, Stream Deck button, or unusually aggressive trackpad gesture?"

They do not:

• Necessarily know how to code
• Have a "clean" setup; most of us are one launcher away from chaos
• Agree with each other about anything, ever

That last one matters. Put two power users in a room and you'll get three opinions about clipboard managers.

We Hold Strong Opinions About Little Things

A power user can remain calm during the failure of an operating-system upgrade or a smoking router. If some app moves one menu bar icon without permission, however, the day is ruined.

Small interface problems become deeply personal:

• An app opens on the wrong display.
• A window refuses to remember its size.
• A network share does not reconnect after sleep.
• A menu command lacks a keyboard shortcut.
• A utility uses 340 MB of memory while allegedly doing nothing.
• A new app is Electron-based, or worse yet, subscription-based.

None of these problems threatens civilization. Still, each one produces the same response: "There has to be an app for this."

There usually is.

It costs $7.99 on Gumroad, was made by one person somewhere in Eastern Europe, and has settings for things you did not know macOS could detect.

Just a Little Too Proud

Every hobby has its peacocks, and ours are easy to spot. The menu bar with thirty icons, curated like a trophy shelf. The person who has "finally settled" on a text editor for the fourth time this year and announced it in a post. The one who describes their file naming convention with the quiet confidence of someone who has never once found the file they were looking for on the first try.

I can make these jokes because I am these jokes. My Mac feels broken if certain utilities are missing, and I have absolutely rebuilt a workflow that already worked because a new app looked interesting. The peacocking isn't malice; it's enthusiasm with nowhere to go. The only version that deserves an eye roll is the one aimed downward, at people who just want their computer to work. Those people aren't doing it wrong. They're the control group.

Enter r/MacApps

The sub is our natural habitat: developers answering questions in their own threads, lifetime-license hunters comparing notes like coupon clippers, and "best clipboard manager?" arriving roughly every eleven minutes and still getting sincere answers. Rarely does anyone get mocked for asking a basic question. The worst outcome is leaving with four new apps you didn't plan to buy.

That's the tell. Power users aren't gatekeepers by nature; they're recruiters. Ask one a question about window managers and your real problem becomes ending the conversation. You'll eventually find out that half of the complex setups presented are just hobbies, not necessities. The best Mac setup gets out of your way and lets you work without fighting you; utility count has nothing to do with it. Conversely, there's nothing wrong with tinkering with apps as an enjoyable pastime IF you have the self-awareness to know that is what you are doing. Always remember, the time preparing to work is not actually work. Don't be the guy who, on the clock, builds elaborate macro chains in Keyboard Maestro to rename screenshots, run them through an image optimizer, and archive them by year; only to capture two screenshots a month.

Wannabe power users are welcome here, and if you don't want that label, that's fine. Someone has to keep us honest

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TL;DR: PopClip, Raycast, BetterTouchTool, Keyboard Maestro, Apple Shortcuts, Supercharge, and ExtraBar; concrete daily uses for each, not feature dumps. For people already comfortable on macOS who've hit a specific friction point (clipboard, mouse buttons, background-app switching) and want the tool that kills it.

One of the perks of working on a Mac: with a few painful exceptions, whatever workflow itch you have, some app already scratches it. The longer you're in this ecosystem, the more tweaks and hacks you accumulate, until the line between "native" and "third-party" gets blurry — the good ones just start to feel built in. These are apps I recommend constantly without always explaining why. So here they are: a few Mac powerhouses, and the specific things I actually use them for.

Popclip Performs actions on selected text

PopClip - A Must Have Productivity App

• Either script or use ChatGPT to write your own extensions for any website you search frequently. I have extensions for GoodReads, Anna's Archive and Kagi.
• Send text to Terminal, iTerm or Ghostty
• Add text to the clipboard without erasing what's already there — works multiple times in succession, so you can build up a batch before pasting

Raycast Spotlight Replacement with plugin architecture

How to Get The Most from Raycast

• Even with the huge selection of standalone clipboard managers, I always fall back to Raycast's for searchable categories, editing clips, pinning clips and more
• Shortcut combo for Kagi, my search engine of choice (⌘+k, enter a search term, press enter)
• Built in emoji picker is 🔥

BetterTouchTool Input controlled Mac automation

Better Touch Tool Favorites

• No need for a separate app to program my 6-button Logitech mouse — extras include instant Mission Control, show-all-spaces, an application switcher, and a pie menu
• Completely replaced Elgato Stream Deck software (a security nightmare) with BTT, and it works even better
• Uses typed strings for triggers, not just hotkey combos, and it lets you use the Fn (globe) key — something Keyboard Maestro doesn't expose. I've programmed double-taps of all my modifier keys for special functions

Keyboard Maestro 30 different triggers for Mac automations

Keyboard Maestro, The App That Makes Everything Better - Tips for the Automation Curious

• Batch open and batch close apps to switch contexts
• Launch anything on a schedule with time of day triggers
• Mount and unmount selected groups of network drives with a hotkey

Apple Shortcuts Programming for non-programmers

Enhance Apple Shortcuts with These Apps

• Even more scheduled tasks:
  • Create an Obsidian daily note and add weather and calendar events
  • Build a daily CSV that combines web history from Safari and Firefox into one document
  • Text every person in my address book on their birthday
  • Run a weekly backup of all my shortcuts

macOS Many, many undocumented tweaks

• Make the dock disappear with no delay
• Make the library folder in my home directory always visible
• Change the default screenshot file type to jpg

Supercharge Huge collection of useful system tweaks

Using Supercharge

• Close all open apps
• Close everything in Notification Center at once
• Backup and restore the settings for any app, super useful with new computers
• Find out what keyboard shortcuts are in use

ExtraBar Puts anything you want to do into one always-available menu

WIP — Extra Bar Gets Extra Features

• Pick any running application from a list — including background ones — and restart it
• Mark all unread mail as read in Fastmail
• I'm currently running three displays and sixteen virtual desktops, and I keep a folder in ExtraBar with a shortcut to each one

Who this list is for

You already know your way around macOS and you're not looking for training wheels. You've hit some specific friction — clipboard chaos, a mouse with buttons doing nothing, shortcuts that only run when you remember to open the app — and you want the tool that kills it, not a tour of System Settings.

Who it's not for

If you're still getting comfortable with the Mac basics, most of this will feel like solving problems you don't have yet. Raycast's clipboard categories and BetterTouchTool's Fn-key double-taps are answers to annoyances you haven't accumulated. Start with the stock apps; come back when something specific starts bothering you.

Why these and not the alternatives

Every one of these replaces something clunkier: BTT over Stream Deck's software, Raycast over Spotlight and a half-dozen single-purpose clipboard managers, ExtraBar over hunting through Mission Control for a background app. None of them are novelties. They're in daily rotation because pulling any one out would put a specific annoyance back in my life immediately.

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Here are two Mac friction points:

• It's been 16 years since Mission Control was released, and "Desktop 3" is still "Desktop 3." Apple's API doesn't expose Space naming to any third-party app — there's no system-level hook to hang a label on.
• Screen Time gets activated when an app launches and stays that way as long as the app is open; the clock keeps ticking even if the app is minimized or buried six windows deep on your desktop. To me, that makes it practically useless.

There's an app that deals with both of those irritants: CurrentKey (formerly CurrentKey Stats) wraps every Space in a named, icon-coded "Room" you can jump to by hotkey or dropdown, then quietly logs how much time you actually spend in each one, broken down by app. The name lives in CurrentKey's own popover and menu bar, not inside Mission Control itself.

I wrote about CurrentKey a couple of years ago (CurrentKey Stats - A Triple Threat App, when it was working through a subscription model — an admitted turn-off for many. Today the app is free, although if you want to support the developer, Spencer Dailey, you can pay $3.99 to turn on a cosmetic layer that offers custom icon colors, any emoji as a Room icon, custom icon images, and banner images that pop up in a screen corner when you enter a Room. Those are nice to have but don't affect functionality. The basic (free) version has Room naming, hotkeys, switching, AppleScript triggers, and stats/export functionality. (App Store)

Five Features, Well Done

• AppleScript hooks on every Room switch. This is the feature that separates CurrentKey from being just another desktop labeler — you can automatically fire a script the moment you enter or leave a Room, which means bringing a specific app forward, pausing a timer just by switching context or even something crazy, like triggering smart lights.
• Time tracking scoped to foreground use, not just "app open." Unlike Screen Time, which counts an app as active the whole time it's running, CurrentKey only counts minutes an app is actually in the foreground — closer to what a freelancer billing by the hour actually needs.
• Per-Room, per-app breakdowns with CSV export. Eleven charts, 30-day history, daily and weekly summaries, and a real export path if you want to reconcile hours against a client invoice instead of trusting a dashboard.
• Hotkey-driven Room switching, up to 16 per screen. Mac Spaces already cap at 16 per display; CurrentKey lets you actually use that ceiling by making each one reachable without a three-finger swipe and a guess.
• All data stays on-device. No account, no cloud sync required to use the core app — export is opt-in, which matters if the whole point is separating "work" time from "distraction" time and you'd rather that stay local.

Alternatives

• SpaceJump ($9.99 one-time after a 14-day trial) is the more direct competitor — it uses overlay windows to project custom Space name labels onto the Mission Control view itself (no SIP disable required), and it also tracks time per Space. It's not "true" system-level renaming either — Apple doesn't expose that to anyone — but the label appears inside Mission Control rather than in a separate popover, which is a real difference in feel from CurrentKey. Pricier, and it skips the AppleScript hooks.
• Desktop Space Renamer is a lightweight, low-cost menu bar app that does the naming and emoji-labeling part of CurrentKey's job with none of the time-tracking or scripting depth — a fine choice if all you want is to stop guessing which Space is which.
• spaces-renamer (free, open source) is the older, hackier route: a SIMBL-plugin-based renamer that predates Apple Silicon and reportedly doesn't work reliably on M1/M2 Macs or recent macOS versions. It's free, but effectively unmaintained for anyone on current hardware.

If you use BetterTouchTool, and you know how to use it, you already have multi-Space switching, window snapping tied to specific Spaces, and gesture-triggered Mission Control previews as part of a much larger automation toolkit. You lose CurrentKey's purpose-built stats and per-Room AppleScript triggers.

Who This Helps

You can use CurrentKey if your Mac already has more Spaces than you can honestly remember, and you want both the friction of switching between them and the accounting of time spent in them solved by one small, actively maintained, free utility with real scripting hooks. The AppleScript integration in particular is doing work other Space renaming apps don't.

Who This Isn't For

If you want the Space name to actually show up inside Mission Control's swipe-up view rather than in a separate popover, CurrentKey won't scratch that itch — SpaceJump will, for the extra cost.

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TL;DR - Turn just about any collection of audiobook files (FLAC,WAV,MP3) into a single iPhone compatible M4B complete with metadata and chapters. Mac, $9.99, Solo dev

I've been listening to audiobooks since they were called books on tape. I progressed from there to CDs and then to miscellaneous downloads. These days, the gold standard format, at least for Apple fans, is audiobooks packaged as single M4B files regardless of the book's length, complete with chapters and metadata. That way you can stop and start listening without searching for your place, add bookmarks and get a description and info on the author and narrator. My go-to tool for audiobook conversion is AudioBo, from solo developer Vlad at OrsoLabs, available in the Mac App Store for $9.99. It will turn a folder full of old MP3 files and assorted cruft into something you can listen to on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and yes, even classic iPods. Length is no issue. If you've got a 60-hour doorstop fantasy novel, AudioBo can handle it.

For a long time, Reddit has recommended Audiobook Builder, and it's fine, except for the part where it caps output length and forces you into multiple part files for anything long. That's not a workflow, that's a workaround. For the price of a Big Mac combo, you can get AudioBo which converts MP3, FLAC, WAV, and other common formats into polished audiobooks and simplifies management and playback for good.

Features

The three selling points for AudioBo are:

Metadata Fetch

AudioBo pulls title, author, and cover art from Audible, Apple Books, and Google Books in one click. That's the tedious part of building an audiobook done for you.

Non-Destructive Editing

You can adjust chapters and metadata on an existing M4B without re-encoding. That preserves audio quality and saves real time, since re-encoding a long file is not fast.

No Length Forcing

Long-form audiobooks stay as one file instead of getting split into parts because the app couldn't handle the duration.

Intangibles

While researching AudioBo for this review, I found multiple instances where the developer has responded to feature requests in a thread and then shipped within days. To me, that's a pretty good sign that this app will be maintained going forward. I'm normally wary of App Store reviews because of astroturfing and vague "Good App!" posts, but reading through the reviews left for AudioBo is pretty convincing. The written reviews back it up with specifics rather than vague praise. "Far and away, the best audiobook conversion app I've found," one reviewer wrote. Another called it the "Current Gold Standard of Audiobook Converters on App Store." 9to5Mac gave it a full hands-on writeup, not a roundup mention, and the reviewer's (well-known Mac journalist, Bradley Chambers) verdict after testing it on several massive projects was direct: it delivers, and it's now his go-to.

Roadmap

There are still a few features that the app needs. Currently it doesn't support batch/multi-instance processing. Opening a new window wipes the book you're currently working on, even mid-export. So, don't expect to dump your library in a folder and walk away. The good news is that the feature is coming, according to the dev. The only other hiccup is pretty specific: when re-encoding existing M4B files to go from stereo to mono or to change the bitrate, several people report having issues. That's not something I would ever do, so I haven't experienced it firsthand.

Who This is for

If you're building or maintaining audiobooks on the Mac and you've hit Audiobook Builder's length ceiling, or you just want metadata fetching that doesn't require three separate lookups, AudioBo is the better option. It's Apple/M4B-focused only, so if you need Audible AAX/DRM handling or cross-platform output for Kobo or Kindle, this isn't that tool, and it isn't trying to be.

$9.99 one-time, free demo on the developer's site. No subscription - something we all appreciate.

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In past lives, my bosses pressed me into using a few complex and complicated apps - mostly Adobe and Microsoft stuff, some AutoCAD. One thing they all have in common is crammed menu bars where what you are actually looking for seldom makes sense and when it does, it's buried three levels deep. Those are the ones that Microsoft likes to use as answers to questions on certification exams.

There's no shortage of specialty apps, like Paletro and automation tools like Raycast, Alfred and BetterTouchTool that try to address menu bar searches. Most of them are good at doing 70% of what it takes but they just never seem to get that final burst of polish it takes to solve the problem. That's where Finbar steps in. For $9.99, you get an app that sees every menu bar option, no matter how deep.

• Can't remember the name of what you're looking for? Finbar has fuzzy search.
• Use the same commands over and over? Finbar remembers that and surfaces them for you.
• Don't use part of the app? Exclude its menu choices from what you see to reduce clutter and simplify things.

If your keyboard skills are equal to or greater than your clicking skills, take advantage of the free trial and test Finbar. Outline Mode is the feature to try first--it transforms every menu bar into a keyboard-navigable tree, like Finder's sidebar. You can arrow through, expand/collapse, and commit without lifting your hands.

If your workflow isn't keyboard centric and you aren't regularly drilling into menu items, you don't need this. Use Raycast or Alfred. But, if your daily drivers include the apps I mention earlier, this should be an instabuy.

$9.99, one-time purchase. Free trial available. Download at finbarapp.com or via Homebrew (brew install --cask finbar). Requires macOS Big Sur or later. Roey Biran--@finbarapp on X--built this on the Unix principle of doing one thing well. It shows.

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Apple, in its infinite wisdom, buries a great many popular system controls three layers deep in Settings, or worse, leaves them accessible only via the command line. Luckily, we have a community of indie developers who are pretty good at surfacing that stuff, building an app around it, and selling it for $5. An app for brightness. An app for the notch. An app to keep the Mac awake. An app to mute the mic. Then one day your menu bar has 40 icons in it and your login items are out of control.

There's a relatively new, free and open-source app that takes the opposite approach. Currently sporting over 500 GitHub stars, Mac Tools folds more than 40 of those functions into a single menu bar icon. It's built natively in SwiftUI and AppKit; the functions run on native Mac architecture, not scripts. Brightness goes through CoreDisplay, audio through CoreAudio, and disk cleanup runs path verification before it deletes anything. That last one matters: a cleanup tool that checks its work before emptying folders is rarer than it should be.

Check out the Mac Tools website. Mac Tools is available through Homebrew:

brew tap ggbond268/mactools  
brew install --cask mactools

What It Does

The features break down into five groups. You enable the plugins for what you want and leave the rest turned off.

Display Control -- resolution switching per monitor, DDC/CI brightness for external displays, True Tone, dark mode, Night Shift, display sleep, prevent sleep, notch hiding, and menu bar icon hiding. This group alone covers what most people buy three or four separate utilities to do.

System Operations -- Stage Manager toggle, system and microphone mute, disk cleanup, Xcode cleanup, eject all disks, empty trash, clear clipboard, lock screen, batch quit apps, and a fix for the "app is damaged and can't be opened" error, which is really just quarantine flag removal with a file picker instead of an xattr command.

Efficiency Tools -- three-finger middle click on the trackpad, a cleaning mode that blacks out the screen and locks input so you can wipe the keyboard, IP lookup, translation, global app hotkeys, a full-screen Launchpad replacement, Finder right-click enhancements, and a zsh config editor.

Monitoring Panel -- CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network, and battery with one-hour history curves; keyboard, mouse, and app usage statistics; battery levels for the Mac plus Bluetooth peripherals and AirPods; fan control; and a charge limiter that defaults to 80 percent.

Personalization -- custom menu bar icons including GIF and MP4 animations, Launchpad appearance controls, 11 languages, and a plugin marketplace.

The plugin architecture is what keeps this from becoming bloatware. Everything can be enabled, hidden, or reordered, so the panel only shows what you actually use.

What It Replaces

The point of Mac Tools is consolidation, not feature-for-feature parity with every indie tool it overlaps. Lunar is still the king of independent monitor control, but if you just need brightness adjustment, Mac Tools handles it. If Amphetamine is only in your Dock to stop the Mac from sleeping, Mac Tools does that too. Across a whole set of single-purpose categories, it's a credible replacement for:

• a notch hider
• a mic mute utility
• an eject-all tool
• Itsycal-style calendar duty
• a Stats-style monitor
• a fan controller
• a charge limiter
• an app usage tracker

The Catch and a Reality Check

This is a relatively new app. After it appeared on GitHubDaily and in a Medium article, its popularity spiked fast. The developer's true identity is unknown; "ggbond268" is a pseudonym, and the project came out of the Chinese Mac community. The README is in Chinese, though the app itself is localized into English and ten other languages. That's not disqualifying on its own -- I run Chinese-built apps like Qspace regularly -- but it's the kind of context you want before you grant an app broad system access, not after.

And several of these features do ask for broad access. Fan control installs a helper with admin rights. Disk cleanup deletes files. The middle-click feature uses an event tap. Quarantine removal is the kind of thing you want done carefully, not casually. The code being open and the app being native counts for a lot -- that's the whole argument for shipping as a public repo instead of a black box. What it doesn't have yet is a public security audit. Worth knowing before you install, not a reason to skip it outright.

Is This For You?

If you're comfortable installing from a Homebrew tap, you like open source, and your menu bar currently hosts a small orchestra of single-purpose utilities, Mac Tools is an easy experiment. It's free, it's light, and the plugin design means you can turn on three features and ignore the rest.

If you'd rather pay for a mature tool with a support address and years of releases behind it, or handing admin rights to a young, pseudonymous project makes you itch, stick with the battle-tested standalones for now and check back in six months. Promising and early -- both are true at once.

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I've resisted the whole category of apps that nag you about breaks, posture, hydration, and eyestrain. Being told what to do by my computer felt like an insult to my judgment.

The reality: my judgment about when to take a break is bad. I lose track of time at the keyboard, I resist interruptions on principle, and by the end of most days I'm running well under 100%. None of that is a software problem until you decide it's worth fixing with software.

I evaluated a handful of the popular Mac App Store options for this. I landed on Viraam.

The features that actually matter

Context detection. Viraam auto-pauses during meetings, calls, screen sharing, fullscreen video (Netflix, YouTube, VLC), and when you've stepped away from the Mac. This is the feature that makes the rest of the app tolerable — a break reminder that fires mid-screen-share is a break reminder you'll disable within a week.

Six routines, not one timer. Eye rest (20-20-20), stand and stretch, hydration, general breaks, walking, meditation. Most competitors in this category do the eye-strain timer and stop there.

Guided audio eye exercises. Palming and blinking sessions with calming sound. This is the one feature I hadn't considered before trying the app, and it's the one none of the comparable apps below offer.

Quiet Mode, Pomodoro, and automation. A toggle for cafés and shared offices, a configurable Pomodoro timer (5–120 min), Shortcuts and Siri support, and Focus Filter awareness so behavior changes per Focus mode.

Local-only data. No account, no analytics, no telemetry. The App Store privacy label says "Data Not Collected," which for once matches the actual product.

Who this is for

Anyone who spends long uninterrupted hours at a screen and has already proven, to themselves, that willpower alone doesn't produce breaks. Developers, writers, designers — the people whose flow state is exactly the thing that erases the sense of time passing.

Who this isn't for

If you just want a plain 20-20-20 timer with no wellness scope creep, Viraam is more app than you need. Stretchly or BreakTimer will do the one job without asking you to also think about hydration and meditation.

The competition

Time Out (App Store) — free, with one-time supporter tips ($3.99–$14.99, no subscription). Mature and deeply configurable via AppleScript/Automator, but it has no automatic meeting or video detection and no guided exercises. This is a scriptable utility, not an adaptive system.

Stretchly (GitHub) — free and open source, cross-platform. The honest choice if you want zero cost and don't care about native polish. It's Electron, it ships unsigned on Mac, and it has no eye exercises, hydration, or meditation content. Does the timer job and nothing else.

LookAway (lookaway.com) — starts at $19 one-time, also on the App Store and Setapp. The closest real competitor: posture/blink reminders and "Smart Pause" context awareness are comparable to Viraam's context detection. Where it stays narrower is scope — it's built around screen breaks and iPhone sync, not hydration, meditation, or sleep wind-down.

DeskRest (App Store) — free with in-app purchases. Pairs breaks with posture alerts and an end-of-day "quitting time" boundary reminder, which is a genuinely useful idea Viraam doesn't have. It doesn't do guided audio eye exercises or mindfulness routines, though.

For me, context-aware pausing and breadth of routine mattered than "is it free". Trialing Viraam and LookAway side by side helped me decide to go with Viraam.

Details

• Website: viraam.app
• Price: $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $49.99 lifetime; 7-day free trial
• Availability: Mac App Store only, direct download via developer site
• Privacy: No data collected

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Umang Syrana, the developer of Sxitch, a keyboard tree based app switcher gave me 10 free licenses and 10 licenses at a 50% discount to distribute to AppAddict readers.

Get it free: Use code AMERPIE

50% Discount: Use code AppAddict

Sxitch

Sxitch is a variation on the Right-Cmd launcher pioneered by the Low-Tech Guys. Right-Cmd opens a popup; type letters and the list narrows -- "tree-based navigation" -- until one app is left, which auto-focuses. No cycling.

What I like: The tree-based, letter-narrowing mechanic is the clear differentiator versus Cmd+Tab's unpredictable cycling. The free tier includes tree-based switching and themes; Pro adds window switching, a Hide/Quit mode, overrides, blacklists, and priority support via Discord. The developer is responsive to user feedback and has already shipped a list-view feature based on Reddit requests.

Cons: May not be enough of a difference from Raycast or Alfred to justify a separate tool for some users.

Price: $10 for lifetime access on up to 3 Macs, or $2 a month, cancel anytime.

Sources: Sxitch homepage · Sxitch vs rcmd vs Dory

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NanoClip is a menu-bar app combining clipboard history, text-expansion snippets, and clipboard automation "flows." Free/demo tier; Pro is $9.99 one-time ($5 with code EARLYBIRD through Jul 31). macOS 14+, local-first, optional iCloud sync, no account. By Victor Baro. (getnano.dev/clip)

The world needs more $5 apps like NanoClip. Before you roll your eyes at yet another clipboard utility, this one is actually three utilities rolled into one, and each can be summoned with its own global hotkey, fully remappable:

• Clipboard history (⌃⌘V) -- everything you've copied, searchable
• Snippets (⌃⌘S) -- text expansion with keyword auto-triggers
• Flows (⌃⌘F) -- automations that transform whatever's on your clipboard

Upfront, I'll tell you that you can get a portion (but not all) of what NanoClip offers from Raycast or Alfred. The developer isn't hiding from that; right on the product page he features detailed comparisons against both of those big-name launchers, plus Maccy and Paste.

I'm a heavy Raycast user, and inside it I keep a large set of text expansion snippets I've been using for years, imported from the OG TextExpander app, which is now subscription-based. NanoClip's snippets can go head to head with Raycast's: they support dynamic placeholders for the current date, clipboard contents, or fields you fill in before pasting.

I also use Raycast's clipboard manager, and unlimited history is one of the main reasons I pay for Pro. Raycast, however, doesn't sync clipboard history between machines, and that's why I'm continually tempted to leave it. NanoClip Pro gives me unlimited clipboard history for $5 once versus $8 every month for Raycast Pro (which adds more than just clipboard history, to be fair). It also syncs history and snippets between Macs via iCloud -- optional, for obvious privacy reasons.

The tools power users expect are here too: search, pinned items, and a paste queue that lets you copy several items and then paste them out in order -- handy for forms and spreadsheets. History captures text, rich text, code, links (with rich previews), images, GIFs, files, and color values, each rendered with an inline preview so you can see what you're about to paste.

Although I write a lot, I confess to underusing the text manipulation tools I already own. Flows might fix that. You get 30 built-in blocks across text, image, URL, and AI categories, including regex extraction, JSON formatting, OCR, image resize/convert, URL tracking-parameter stripping, QR generation, and even Bash commands (direct-download build only). The AI blocks are strictly optional and run either locally (Apple Intelligence or Ollama) or through your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini.

Comparable apps

• Maccy is free and open source, the default recommendation for pure clipboard history, but has no snippets, flows, sync, or rich previews.
• Paste ($29.99/year or $89.99 lifetime) has the prettiest UI and iPhone/iPad sync, but it's a subscription for what NanoClip charges $9.99 once for.
• Raycast includes clipboard history (30-day retention) and snippets free inside its launcher; unlimited history and sync need Pro at $8/month.
• Alfred's Powerpack (one-time, ~£34) similarly bundles clipboard history and snippets into a launcher.

NanoClip's free tier is a demo more than a daily driver (last 5 clipboard items, 3 snippets), but at $5 through July 31 -- $9.99 after -- Pro is a bargain if you need all its features.

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Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the other half has quietly used it to do things that would have been difficult to impossible without it.

None of that changes what a review is for: what the app does, who it helps, and what I learned from actually testing it. So here goes.

AlliHat

AlliHat is a Safari extension by Nathan Kontny that puts an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple's on-device model — in the Safari sidebar (App Store). Free download, $29.99/year IAP, macOS 14 or later.

Features

• BYOK. Bring your own key from any of the paid models, or use Apple's built-in model entirely on-device. Communication with the paid models is direct — no middleman — and your key stays on your machine.
• Agent Mode (Claude only). Clicks, fills forms, scrolls, and navigates pages for you; essentially Claude-in-Chrome for Safari. If you've de-Googled and want to stay that way, this gets you a Chrome-native feature without Chrome.
• Per-URL conversations. Chats about a page are saved against its URL and reappear when you revisit. In Agent Mode, you can save and reuse workflows for repeated tasks.
• PDF handling. Open a PDF in Safari and AlliHat can read and summarize it, NotebookLM-style. It handles scans and tables too.
• YouTube summaries via video transcripts.
• Native Safari App Extension. 603 KB, no Electron. Global hotkey (⌘⇧C) and right-click actions on selected text: Explain, Summarize, Synonyms.

Comparable Apps

• Sider works in Safari, Chrome, and Edge with a free tier and paid plans from roughly $8.30/month, but it's credit-metered and routes through Sider's servers rather than your own API key.
• Elephas ($9.99/month, $99/year, or lifetime tiers) is a Mac-wide AI assistant that works in every app, not just Safari, but has no browsing agent mode.
• BrainyAI is a free, open-source sidebar alternative to Sider and Monica, but Chrome-only.

Beyond extensions, an AI sidebar is a built-in feature of the AI browsers (Dia, Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas) and of Anthropic's own Claude extension for Chrome. AlliHat exists precisely because Safari has none of these.

Who It's For

If you only use Safari for privacy or battery reasons and want page-aware AI without switching browsers or paying a second subscription on top of your API costs. BYOK plus a native extension is exactly the right architecture for that person, and nothing else on Safari that I am aware of offers an agent mode at all.

That's the catch: $29.99/year plus your own API bills for one browser's sidebar is a hard sell when switching to Chrome gets you Claude's extension free, and Apple keeps folding more AI into Safari itself. Good app; the pricing math is the part you have to make peace with.

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TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a 1.5-million-book built-in catalog. Cross-platform reader? Readest. Living entirely on the Mac and want the nicer native app? Bookshelves. Full breakdown below.

I spend a significant portion of every day managing and curating an embarrassingly large ebook collection. For a long time, I was a dead tree books guy and honestly, I can be talked in to visiting a book store with very little effort, but for sheer usability and utility, nothing matches a digital collection.

I still rely on calibre for the heavy lifting. While aesthetically, it may look like a Windows app from 1996, nothing can match it feature for feature for format conversion, metadata retrieval from multiple sources at once, file management and search ability. Using it as a reader is a non-starter though.

Calibre Keeps Getting Better | AppAddict

Apple Books

macOS has included an ereader, Apple Books, formerly iBooks, since 2013 when it was introduced as a stand alone app in Mavericks, Mac OS X 10.9. But even before that, iTunes offered ebook management. For casual readers who buy most of their books directly from Apple, it's enough. You get a clean, distraction free reading experience, annotation support, world class typography and excellent synchronization across Apple platforms. Apple Books is a storefront, first and foremost, just like Apple Music. Both are designed to get you to spend money. Apple Books also has very limited support for library management and for many file formats.

The real ereader competition

While there are a lot of options available to Mac users for a native ebook experience, the top tier as I see it comes down to two apps: Readest and Bookshelves.

Readest

Developer: Open-source community (AGPL-3.0) Price: Free and open-source; App Store version available Formats: EPUB, MOBI, KF8/AZW3, FB2, CBZ, TXT, PDF Platform: macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Linux, Android, Web GitHub: readest/readest

Readest is a modern rewrite of Foliate (the well-regarded Linux ebook reader), rebuilt in Next.js and Tauri v2. It has 21.5k GitHub stars, 89 contributors, and ships on every major platform including a web app at web.readest.com. It's technically a v0.x release (currently at 0.11.17), but the feature list reads like a mature product.

Readest's feature depth is uncommon: parallel reading (two books side-by-side in split screen), DeepL/Yandex translation at the sentence or whole-book level, text-to-speech with multilingual support within a single book, KOReader sync, WebDAV sync, code syntax highlighting for technical books, a reading ruler, paragraph-by-paragraph focus mode, and full accessibility support including VoiceOver, NVDA, and Orca.

The translation feature alone separates it from every competitor in this category. If you read in multiple languages or work through texts in a non-native language, there is no real competition.

OPDS and Calibre integration are first-class, not bolted on. If you run a Calibre library, Readest slots in without ceremony.

There is a catch: AGPL-3.0 licensing keeps the code open, but the business model is donation-based. That's fine for now (the project is clearly active), but it's a different kind of bet than a commercial app with a defined revenue stream. The v0.x version number also signals that the API and sync behaviors may shift. AI summarization and advanced reading stats are still "building," and audiobook support is currently vaporware.

Bookshelves

Developer: CPE Verm. GmbH Price: Free (10-book limit); one-time Pro upgrade ($6.99) Formats: EPUB, PDF, CBZ/CBR/CB7, FB2, MOBI/AZW3/KF8/KEPUB Platform: Apple ecosystem only (Mac, iPhone, iPad) App Store: Bookshelves eBook Reader

I've been using Bookshelves since the day of the first public release. It has always impressed me as the solution for most design issues faced by Mac App Store ereaders. It's 67.4 MB, currently sitting at #24 in the Books category, and the developer ships new features at a blistering pace. The most recent update dropped localization in 33 languages and a batch of reader and comics fixes.

The reading experience is the priority here. Paginated and scroll modes, 10 themes, 10 fonts, full-text search, highlighting, and annotations: all the basics, executed cleanly. Comic and manga readers get CBZ/CBR support with two-page spreads and right-to-left mode, which most ereaders skip entirely.

The built-in catalog is useful in practice: 1.5 million free books from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive, and a Spanish-language collection. Standard Ebooks alone makes this worthwhile; that project produces beautifully formatted public domain texts that most readers ignore entirely.

The Pro tier ($6.99) unlocks iCloud sync (progress, highlights, preferences across devices), Calibre wireless transfer, OPDS server access, and highlight export. If you're in the Apple ecosystem and already use iCloud for everything else, this is the path of least friction.

The main drawback is lack of support for any other platform. It's Apple-only by design. If any part of your reading life happens on Android, Windows, or Linux, Bookshelves has no answer for you. It's also not open source and it's not free.

Which one should you use?

Choose Apple Books if:

• You primarily buy books from Apple.
• You only use Apple devices.
• Syncing notes across your Apple ecosystem matters more than library flexibility.

Choose Readest if:

• You own your ebooks.
• You use multiple operating systems.
• You run Calibre-Web or another OPDS server.
• You prefer open-source software.

Choose Bookshelves if:

• You live primarily on the Mac.
• You want a polished native application.
• You care as much about browsing your collection as reading it.
• Most of your library consists of DRM-free EPUB files.

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Apple's Cmd+Tab has real blind spots. It works on apps, not windows. It doesn't know about Spaces. It has no search, fuzzy or otherwise. Several independent developers have recently taken a crack at fixing it, each with a different idea of what "better" means. I'm not picking a winner here -- just laying out what each one gets right and where it falls short, in case you want to try one yourself.

GroupCtrl -- Free, Open Source (GPL-3.0)

Instead of assigning a different hotkey to each app, GroupCtrl walks you through building app groups that match your actual workflow -- Bloom, BBEdit, and Preview under "Files," say, or BBEdit, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code under "Text Editors."

What I like: Git-friendly YAML config -- a real advantage for dotfiles fans, since setup is versionable and shareable as plain text.

Price: Free and open source (GPL-3.0) -- no subscription, no paid tier.

Sources: GroupCtrl on GitHub

Switch -- Free, Source-Available

Switch fixes the "apps not windows" limitation of the native Cmd+Tab switcher. It cycles through every open window -- or just the current app's -- with inline type-to-filter.

What I like:

• Lightweight: 1.7 MB
• Actively maintained
• Licensing converts to full MIT in May 2028
• Can replace the AltTab + DockDoor combo a lot of people already run

Price: Free, source-available (FSL-1.1-MIT, converts to plain MIT in May 2028). No subscription, no paid tier.

Sources: Switch on GitHub · switch-dev.sanyamgarg.com

Dory -- $9.99 Lifetime (App Store)

Dory swaps the switcher for a tiny search menu: hold the middle mouse button or the right Command key, then type. It does smart search -- first letter, middle letters, acronyms, even names that just sound similar -- and tracks which apps you switch to most, so your muscle memory builds around how you actually use your Mac instead of a fixed list.

What I like: Broader adoption than the other apps in this roundup. The developer is responsive -- after Dory landed on Product Hunt (where it hit #6), he shipped almost every user suggestion in the very next release, v1.3.

Cons: No free trial.

Price: $9.99 one-time purchase. No subscription.

Sources: Dory homepage · App Store · Product Hunt

Sxitch -- $10 Lifetime (3 Macs) or $2/Month

Sxitch is a variation on the Right-Cmd launcher pioneered by the Low-Tech Guys. Right-Cmd opens a popup; type letters and the list narrows -- "tree-based navigation" -- until one app is left, which auto-focuses. No cycling.

What I like: The tree-based, letter-narrowing mechanic is the clear differentiator versus Cmd+Tab's unpredictable cycling. The free tier includes tree-based switching and themes; Pro adds window switching, a Hide/Quit mode, overrides, blacklists, and priority support via Discord. The developer is responsive to user feedback and has already shipped a list-view feature based on Reddit requests.

Cons: May not be enough of a difference from Raycast or Alfred to justify a separate tool for some users. If you install via Homebrew, double-check the formula -- some users have reported it lagging behind the latest release.

Price: $10 for lifetime access on up to 3 Macs, or $2 a month, cancel anytime.

Sources: Sxitch homepage · Sxitch vs rcmd vs Dory

Scopo -- $1.25/Month Subscription

I really hope the Scopo developer rethinks the pricing strategy, because there's a lot of resistance to paying a subscription for an app that doesn't carry ongoing costs to maintain. That said, Scopo fills a real niche: it scopes Cmd+Tab to the current Space, so a project's windows don't get buried under Slack, email, and browser tabs from other contexts.

What I like: 30-day trial, no card required. Native Swift, not Electron -- and it only needs Accessibility permission.

Cons: Subscription only, no lifetime option.

Price: $1.25 a month.

Source: scopo.app

None of these replaces the others outright. Pick based on what's actually broken for you: free and hackable (GroupCtrl, Switch), a fast one-time purchase (Dory), tree-based muscle memory (Sxitch), or Space-scoped (Scopo).

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TL;DR: Mira is a small (5.6 MB), native Mac app that makes YouTube calm and pleasant: no Shorts, no sponsor segments, no recommendation rabbit hole. It folds SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, searchable transcripts, optional bring-your-own-key AI summaries, Picture-in-Picture, background audio, and a real Focus Mode into one signed app instead of the pile of browser extensions you have to maintain on your on. It collects zero data, has a long free trial and costs $39.99 for a lifetime license (or $2.99/month). If you only want ads gone and you are fine with YouTune in a browser, Brave or the Vinegar + SponsorBlock Safari combo does that for free; if you want YouTube genuinely de-Googled, FreeTube or Yattee are the better pick. For everyone who just wants one quiet, native place to watch, Mira is worth the money. eryone who just wants one quiet, native place to watch, Mira is worth the money.

Mira: Focused Video Player

Buckle up. This is going to be longer than normal, but it's about an app in a pretty crowded field that needs lots of boxes checked in order to compete. Mira is a small but powerful native Mac app with unique YouTube enhancements. It also folds almost all the YouTube features you get from using DIY combos (e.g. Brave/Firefox plus Ublock, SponsorBlock, etc) or other stand alone players (Yattee, FreeTube) into one, unified experience.

If you haven't spent any time on YouTube in the past year you might not know how awful the experience has become: More ads, more Shorts shoved into every feed, autoplay previews chirping at you from the home page, and a "Continue watching?" nag that kills a three-hour lecture stream the moment you walk away. You can kinda sorta deal with the aggravation by piling on extensions like Return YouTube Dislike and the others I've mentioned, but you have to maintain that yourself and there is always the danger of one part not playing nice with another part.

Mira - Focused Video Player (its official App Store Name) is native on the Mac (and iPad and iPhone). It's not some giant Electron thing you get, unsigned from a GitHub page. It's from developer Nicholas Hershy (Hershkovitz Bros LLC) who shipped version 1.0 in May of 2026 (hence the lack of buzz), and it's been getting near-daily point updates since. It's on the App Store, and the home page is watchwithmira.com. Mira has the best privacy policy available, "The developer does not collect any data from this app." (Note: There are other apps named Mira and a video conversion app called Miro. Make sure you are testing the right one.) (Second note - Mira also works with all the big streaming services but for the purpose of this review, I'm concentrating on YouTube)

The Mac Experience

Mira operates like a browser for video. On the Mac it's a full tabbed app: ⌘T for a new tab, ⌃Tab to cycle, using standard Mac shortcuts. You can drag a link in from Safari, Mail, Notes, or Messages and it opens instantly. You can drag links back out to share them. That drag-in/drag-out behavior is Mac-only and it's the kind of small thing that makes the app feel native rather than a phone app stretched to fit a window.

Here's what you get:

• SponsorBlock, built in. Skips sponsors, intros, outros, self-promos, "like and subscribe" reminders, recaps, and filler using the community timestamp database. You pick which categories to skip, you can color-code them on the timeline, and if it skips something you wanted, an Undo toast lets you jump back. You can also submit new segments from inside the app.
• Focus Mode. Strips the YouTube homepage down to a search bar, and hides comments and the recommendation rail on a video page. This is the feature that changes how you use YouTube; you go to watch a specific thing instead of falling into the feed.
• Set-and-forget UI tweaks. Hide Shorts everywhere, hide Playables, kill autoplay thumbnail previews, force theater mode, default to best quality (up to 4K). Set once, stays set.
• Return YouTube Dislike, integrated. A color-coded ratio bar shows the like percentage so you can judge a video before committing.
• Auto-dismiss "Are you still watching?" so long playlists, lectures, and live streams don't die when you step away.
• Picture-in-Picture and background audio. Float a video over your other apps, or lock the screen and keep the audio going.
• Transcripts. Open a video's full transcript, search it like a document, and tap a line to jump to that moment. This works without any AI key and is reason enough to keep the app open if you research from video.

It runs on macOS 14 or later.

AI with BYOK (but only if you want it)

I think the AI features are valuable, but you do you. Mira doesn't try to sell you marked up tokens or a subscription that coincidentally tracks your viewing habits. It's strictly BYOK from the usual suspects, Claude, OpenAI, and Grok. Mira's AI Summaries include key takeaways, quotes, an outline, a 15-second version, "explain like I'm 12," fact-checked claims, plus a follow-up chat, all gathered, I assume, from a well-constructed prompt that runs in the background.

The reality: you're paying the AI provider directly, pennies at a time. The docs note a $5 preload lasts a long time because a summary costs a fraction of a cent. The catch is that you need billing enabled on the provider account; a bare API key with no payment method returns an error. The good news is that transcripts work without any of this.

Provides More than Brave/Firefox with Extensions

I can already hear that guy in the back sneering because he uses Brave. Yes, iBrave blocks YouTube ads for free, it has SponsorBlock-style features and a built-in PiP, and it costs nothing. If your only goal is "no ads," Brave is the cheaper answer, no argument. Mira earns its price by adding features you don't get in a browser. If any of these appeal to you, you need an app.

• It's a single-purpose app, not a browser tab. Video lives in its own Dock icon and its own window, separate from the 40 tabs you have open for work. That separation is the actual product.
• Focus Mode has no real Brave equivalent. Brave removes ads; it doesn't strip the recommendation feed and comments to stop the infinite-scroll trap. That's a behavior change, not an ad fix.
• SponsorBlock, dislikes, best-quality, theater mode, hide-Shorts, and dismiss-the-nag are bundled and pre-wired. In Brave you assemble most of this from extensions and settings and maintain it. Mira ships it as toggles.
• One purchase covers iOS and iPadOS too, where Brave's YouTube handling is weaker and background audio is a fight. Mira gives you background play and PiP on the phone in the same app.
• Transcripts, in-app search, and bring-your-own-key AI summaries have no Brave counterpart at all.
• No data collection. Apple's privacy label lists "Data Not Collected," and the AI key stays on-device. Brave is privacy-minded too, but Mira's surface area is tiny by comparison.
• Watch Together sync rooms with chat for up to 10 people; Brave has nothing like it.

If you just want ads gone, Brave (or any browser with uBlock Origin) does that for free, and Mira's $40 lifetime price only makes sense if Focus Mode, transcripts, and the all-in-one packaging are value added for your personal use case.

The other free-and-cheap route worth naming is the Safari-extension stack: Vinegar (Two dollars, one-time) replaces YouTube's player with a plain native HTML5 player, kills most ads and the autoplay cruft, restores PiP and background-ish playback, and pairs with the free/cheap SponsorBlock for Safari to skip segments. For a lot of Mac users this is the actual default alternative to a wrapper, and it stays inside Safari. What it doesn't give you: a separate app window, Focus Mode's feed-stripping, transcripts, AI, or Watch Together. It's the minimalist's answer; Mira is full-featured.

The Competition - Free and Paid

I've tested a lot of apps in this category and the one that comes closest to matching Mira is Friendly Streaming Browser. Friendly is the same core idea as Mira: one native-feeling window that wraps Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Spotify, and the rest, with a built-in YouTube ad blocker, Picture-in-Picture, and some media-player extras (local file playback, brightness/contrast/transparency adjustments). It's published by Sensor Tower, it's been on the Mac App Store since around 2012, and it's free to download with an optional paid tier (a few dollars) for extra ad-blocking and to tip the team.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though. It's literally owned by a data mining company, Sensor Tower, and one read through its privacy policy should send you screaming out of the room.

https://sensortower.com/friendly-privacy-policy

The closest comparisons are the open-source YouTube front ends. Two are worth knowing:

FreeTube is free, privacy-first, blocks ads, integrates SponsorBlock, and runs without a Google account. It's an Electron app and a YouTube client, full stop.

Yattee is the one that overlaps Mira's cross-platform story most directly: free, open-source (AGPL), native, and it runs on macOS, iOS, and tvOS. It routes through Invidious/Piped instead of YouTube's own API, blocks ads, and bundles SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, PiP, AirPlay, queue, and history. If you want a privacy-respecting, no-account, genuinely free native app and you don't need the streaming-service wrapping or AI, Yattee is the strongest free alternative on the Mac and deserves a real look before you pay for anything.

MacTube still works, but its last release was February 2022.

FreeTube and Yattee are both excellent and free, so Mira has to justify itself against them. Things Mira does that the open-source crowd generally doesn't:

• It's not YouTube-only. Mira wraps Netflix, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Twitch, and more in the same window, and you can add any public video site as a custom platform with popup blocking. FreeTube and Yattee are YouTube clients, full stop.
• Watch Together with synced playback and chat across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. That's a feature you normally need a separate service (or a Discord screen-share) to get; none of the open-source clients do it.
• In-app AI summaries with your own API key. The others have transcripts and SponsorBlock; none of them summarize.
• It uses the real YouTube signed-in experience, so your subscriptions, history, and watch state are intact. FreeTube and Yattee deliberately avoid the Google account (Yattee even proxies through Invidious/Piped), which is great for privacy but means a different, account-less experience. Mira's trade-off runs the other way: you stay logged into YouTube and get the full account, you just hide the noise around it.
• A genuinely native, signed, current Mac/iOS app from one universal purchase, versus an Electron app (FreeTube) or a third-party-instance-dependent client (Yattee).

If you want YouTube without the tracking, then Mira isn't for you. FreeTube and Yattee are the solutions you want.

Pricing

Three options, billed through Apple:

• Monthly: $2.99/month
• Annual: $19.99/year
• Lifetime: $39.99 one-time

You get 5 days of full access on install, after which the subscriptions start with a 7-day free trial; Lifetime has no trial. For an app you'd use daily, the $39.99 lifetime is the one that makes sense, and it's nice to see a lifetime option offered at all instead of subscription-only. All three unlock all platforms.

iPhone and iPadOS, If You're Interested

Mira is a universal app: one buy unlocks iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It syncs nothing to a Mira account because there isn't one. On iOS and iPadOS the controls collapse into a floating "eye button" in the corner that opens a tool menu and fades as you scroll, rather than the Mac's persistent toolbar. iPad lets you reposition the toolbar to the left, top, or right edge. The mobile versions add gesture controls (swipe up for fullscreen, pinch to crop a wide video edge-to-edge) and lean on an iOS built-in fullscreen player for the custom sites you add yourself, which sidesteps the usual mobile-web fullscreen breakage. Background play and PiP carry over, which is the main reason to want this on a phone: free YouTube on iOS won't play audio with the screen off, and Mira will. Both mobile platforms require iOS/iPadOS 17. One real limitation worth knowing: on iPhone and iPad, a Watch Together session drops if you background the app for more than about 30 seconds, because iOS won't hold the connection open. The Mac doesn't have that problem.

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RegexPilot by developer Kristof Polleunis, is an app designed to protect you and your work from the hallucinations and miscalculations AI can inject into the regular expressions you ask it to build.

Not Voodoo

It took a while, but I finally realized that regular expressions are not the computer voodoo I always assumed them to be. In 2026, even regular (non-developer) users are managing and searching large data sets of movies and tv shows, music, ebooks or even just collections of documents accumulated over the years. If you do find-and-replace in BBEdit, Nova, or Obsidian; clean up messy CSV exports; build filters in Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, or Alfred; or wrangle a marketing list full of inconsistent phone numbers, you are using regex whether you call it that or not.

Regular Expressions for Regular People

Although RegexPilot was built for people who already know how to build regular expressions, it has turned out to be a good tool for teaching the rest of us a thing or two. The way it works becomes quickly understandable. You describe what you want in plain English, get a draft, and then see it drawn out as a railroad diagram: anchors as start and end markers, character classes as colored pills, groups as bracketed branches. You fix the part that is wrong by dragging it, not by counting backslashes in a text field. Hovering over any node tells you what it does, and watching matches appear and disappear as you tweak teaches the difference between \b and \B, or what a lookahead actually does, faster than any reference page.

Why it's Better Than AI Alone

AI models are particularly good at writing regex, until they aren't. They fail, predictably, in a couple of ways. They rely on training data that doesn't differentiate between public and private IP addresses or it interprets all 10 digit numbers as belonging to US telephone customers. AI does pattern recognition. It doesn't think.

AI models also are prone to giving you the wrong flavor of regex. You're looking for something that will work in Python and you get a Javascript friendly version instead. If you're making a living doing this, you can't tell your customers "It worked in ChatGPT."

The honest fix for both is a verification loop: paste the draft into a tester, run it against the real engine, throw your edge cases at it, watch what lights up. RegexPilot is that loop collapsed into one window. The AI is built in (bring your own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and others, or run a local model through Ollama or LM Studio), and anything it generates renders on the canvas and executes against the selected language's actual engine immediately. The "did it hallucinate" check happens before you ever paste back into your code. You are not replacing the AI; you are giving yourself somewhere to catch it.

Worth Exploring Further

Although I've worked in tech for a long time, I'm not a developer qualified to speak on the pros and cons of this app for that kind of work. Suffice to say, the documentation alludes to broad compatibility with multiple flavors of regex and promises that per-pattern recognition happens in milli-seconds.

The Regular Details

Privacy - No analytics, no telemetry, no account, no email list, nothing leaves the machine by default. The voice dictation runs entirely on-device via a bundled Whisper model, and if you point the AI at a local model instead of a hosted key, the app never touches the network at all. The only thing phoning home is license validation.

Pricing - RegexPilot needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer; the core app is about 8 MB, closer to 72 MB once the bundled engines are included. The JavaScript and TypeScript flavors are free forever, which for a lot of web work is the whole job. A single €19 one-time purchase unlocks all 21 flavors with their authentic engines, AI, voice, the full library, and every export format. There is a 30-day trial of everything, and no subscription, which in 2026 still deserves to be said out loud. Download it from regexpilot.com.

Roadmap - VS Code extension and a Raycast plugin are on the v1.1 roadmap, with a step-through debugger slated for v1.2. Bug reports go to his GitHub issues page, and he means it when he asks for them.

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Activity Monitor is one of those apps you open when something is wrong and then quietly resent. It tells you a process called java is eating a core and offers you almost nothing else. No version, no path, no command line, no idea which of the four Java apps you have running is the culprit. For a tool that ships on every Mac, it is remarkably bad at answering the one question you actually have: what is this thing and why is it doing that?

I've spent the last year using ProcessSpy as my answer to that question, and at this point it has more or less replaced Activity Monitor in my day-to-day. It's the closest thing macOS has to Sysinternals Process Explorer, the tool Windows power users have leaned on for twenty years. That's a real gap on the Mac, and ProcessSpy is the first thing I've found that fills it without feeling like a half-finished science project.

The developer, Robert (@rob3rth), tells the origin story better than I can:

I was juggling several Java apps, each using a different JDK version — and I couldn't tell which process was which in Activity Monitor. All I saw was "java." No version, no path, no details. So I built ProcessSpy — a developer-focused tool that shows full command-line info, version details, environment variables, and more.

That's the whole pitch, and it's an honest one. If you've ever stared at three identical process names and had to guess, you already understand why this app exists.

Don't Let "Developer-Focused" Scare You Off

The marketing leans developer, but that framing undersells it. If you regularly install, test, and uninstall software — if you're the kind of person who reads a changelog for fun and wants to know what a sketchy-looking background process actually is before you trust it — this is for you too. Identifying what spawned a mystery helper, checking whether an app is running natively on Apple Silicon, confirming a signature before you grant permissions: that's power-user work, not just developer work.

The Features That Earn Their Keep

A year of updates has turned this from a clever utility into something genuinely deep. The ones I actually use:

Click-to-identify. Hit a shortcut, click any window on screen, and ProcessSpy jumps straight to the process behind it. This is the feature I didn't know I wanted and now use constantly. It's the fastest way to answer "what is this window and what's it tied to?"

The Inspector pane. Select a process and you get the full picture: command line and path, digital signature and signing organization, whether it's sandboxed or hardened-runtime, native vs. translated, memory footprint with peak tracking, and live disk read/write rates. This is where ProcessSpy stops being a nicer Activity Monitor and starts being a diagnostic tool.

Advanced Tree View with aggregate totals. Modern Mac apps spawn a small army of helpers and XPC services. ProcessSpy groups them, links related XPC services by their responsible PID, and rolls up CPU, memory, and thread totals so you can see an app's real footprint instead of its main process pretending to be lightweight.

Finished process recall. This one is genuinely uncommon. ProcessSpy remembers processes after they exit — their command line, environment variables, and history — and even shows a countdown of how long until it forgets them. If something flashes up, misbehaves, and vanishes before you can inspect it, you can still catch it after the fact.

History recording with CSV export. It logs CPU, memory, and thread usage over time on visual timelines, marks when an app was active, and exports to CSV. Transient spikes stop being a mystery you have to reproduce live.

Multi-property regex search and JavaScript filters. Quick search handles regex (wrap it in slashes, /java|node/) across multiple properties at once, so you can match "java" in the name and -Xmx in the command line in one go. For anything more involved, you can write real filters as JavaScript expressions with multiple conditions.

Menu bar dashboard and status bar indicators. A compact popover gives you live system health and the main-window tools without leaving what you're doing, and the status bar can show CPU, GPU, memory, and disk usage at a glance.

Run Shortcuts on process events. You can trigger a macOS Shortcut when a process starts or finishes. Niche, but if you live in automation it opens some genuinely useful doors.

There's also the quieter stuff that makes daily use pleasant: a Version column right in the main table, context-menu actions like Show in Finder, copy path, and search-this-process-online, and deep inspection of entitlements, Info.plist, and bundle ID. Several of those — environment variables, entitlements, the full history features — live behind the paid license.

What People Are Saying

There isn't much independent press on ProcessSpy yet — it's an indie tool from a solo developer, not a venture-backed launch — but the buyers who've left feedback on Gumroad are blunt in the way satisfied power users tend to be. One verified buyer, Arie Stavchansky, put it the way I would have:

I was looking for an equivalent to SysInternals ProcessExplorer for Windows. This is it — it has all the features. I love me a native macOS app!

Another, Daniel Jarusch:

All the information in one clear and intuitive interface — brilliant work, thank you very much!

That "native macOS app" point matters. ProcessSpy is built on native APIs and AppKit rather than some cross-platform wrapper, and it shows in how fast and responsive it feels.

Pricing and Availability

ProcessSpy runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer, and it already supports macOS 26 Tahoe. It's distributed as an Apple-notarized, signed .app inside a roughly 4 MB .dmg, or through Homebrew:

brew install --cask processspy

The free version is fully functional for core monitoring. The paid license unlocks the deep-inspection features (environment variables; entitlements, Info.plist, and bundle ID), the history and CSV export tools, and removes the startup countdown screen the free version makes you sit through.

The license is a one-time $34.99 on Gumroad, good for one user across unlimited personal devices, with lifetime updates. That's up from the $24.99 some listing sites still show, so the price has climbed — but for a tool I open this often, and one that's shipped this many real updates in a year, it's an easy call. There's no subscription, which in 2026 is worth saying out loud.

If you've ever lost twenty minutes to a process you couldn't identify, ProcessSpy pays for itself the first time it hands you the answer in one click.

ProcessSpy is made by Robert (@rob3rth), who also builds Restretto (a REST client) and a couple of other focused Mac utilities. Worth a look if this one lands for you.

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If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor for most tasks.

Here to Stay

The first version of SmoothCSV shipped in 2011. The current v3 release came out last year; it's a complete rewrite built on Tauri, which is why it weighs in under 80 MB and opens a 100 MB file remarkably fast. The dev claims it's 12x faster than Excel. I can't verify that number, but I have some genuinely huge CSV files and it never blinked when I threw them at it. Cheers for speed, and for not being another Electron monstrosity.

The Features That Actually Matter

Most of the feature list is what you'd hope for and rarely get in one place:

• A real grid editor with row and column tools: insert, delete, move, hide, dedupe.
• Find and replace with regex support.
• Filtering through either a visual condition builder or SQL-style expressions.
• Multi-column sorting by text, number, date, or length.
• Multi-cell editing, the way multi-cursor works in a code editor.
• A command palette, so you can drive the whole app without hunting through menus.

For those who live in CSV files, it also has extras that make it more than a text editor with a few tricks:

SQL Console: Run SELECT queries directly against your CSV. If you've ever exported a table just to ask it one question, this collapses that round trip into the editor.

Customizable file formats: Control delimiter, quotes, encoding, and line endings per file, with rules you can save and apply automatically. This is the fix for the semicolon-delimited, Latin-1-encoded, Windows-line-ending file that some other tool flatly refused to open correctly.

Copy/Paste As: Copy a range as Markdown, HTML, JSON, SQL, or LaTeX. Handy for documentation or moving tabular data between formats.

Excel import/export, aggregation, transpose, auto-fill, and a CLI: These round out the functionality. The CLI lets you launch a file and jump straight to a specific row and column, and smoothcsv:// deep links let you wire it into larger workflows.

Licensing I Respect

You can download and use the fully featured version of SmoothCSV from the dev's website, for as long as you'd like, with no limits. The occasional nudge to buy a license is non-modal on purpose, so it doesn't interrupt your work. Like a few other stalwarts (Shottr and Immich come to mind), it's the kind of app you end up paying for because you're grateful and want to support the developer.

Who It's Not For

It's closed source, though that may change one day. If you're FOSS-only, this isn't for you. And if you're after spreadsheet functionality, look elsewhere: formulas across a living workbook, charts, pivot tables, collaborative editing. This is the wrong tool, and it isn't pretending otherwise.

See Also

A few other CSV editors worth a look if this one doesn't click:

• Delimited
• EasyCSV
• ModernCSV

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Most technically oriented people who value privacy do so because privacy is, and should be, a human right, not because they have something to hide.

Maintaining privacy in the current technical environment requires a real strategy and almost constant attention to an evolving landscape.

It is no longer enough to block trackers, ads, and cookies. Browser fingerprinting has become one of the primary privacy-violating mechanisms used by companies that want to identify, profile, and monetize you across the web.

One strategy many people use is spreading their work across multiple browsers. That has a second benefit: it lets you match the strengths of a particular browser to the task at hand.

Privacy and Productivity

The downside becomes obvious pretty quickly: you take a real productivity hit when your history, bookmarks, and open tabs are scattered across multiple places.

There are several tools that try to help with this. The one I like best is SupaSidebar, by developer Kshetez Vinayak. He stands out for being responsive, helpful, and clearly invested in fixing bugs and expanding the app’s usefulness. I bought SupaSidebar during the 2025 Black Friday sale and have been using it ever since.

SupaSidebar operates at the OS level. It is not a browser extension. It is built for exactly this use case: people who use multiple browsers and need a way to consolidate browser context without paying a constant productivity tax every time they switch.

Arc was a favorite of many Mac power users, and for good reason. Although it is still maintained for security, active feature development effectively stopped in early 2025. Arc introduced a genuinely useful way to manage browsing around spaces, context, and workflows. SupaSidebar recreates much of that experience, but does it across multiple browsers instead of inside just one.

The power of SupaSidebar becomes obvious when you take the time to create spaces that match how you actually work. You might have a space for research, one for personal browsing, one for work, and separate spaces for projects that need to stay isolated.

Within a space, SupaSidebar aggregates tabs and bookmarks from every supported browser you have open. It pulls in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, and others. You get a vertical, organized, searchable interface showing your open tabs across browsers.

If your browser use is simple, the free version may be enough. It supports three spaces. Paid users get unlimited spaces.

SupaSidebar also has a command panel with fuzzy search across tabs, bookmarks, history, folders, and spaces. It works like a specialized version of Spotlight for your internet life.

Features

Some of the most useful features include:

• Recents tab: shows recently visited tabs across browsers, which is useful for recovering something without keeping every tab open and burning RAM
• Multiple ways to save links: right-click, drag-and-drop, command panel, auto-routing rules, and more
• Notes for saved links: add context to a link without leaving the app
• Browser profile linking: connect a space to a specific browser profile so links open in the right place automatically
• Auto-routing rules: send links to specific spaces or browser profiles based on conditions
• AI chat mode: integrates with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini directly in the panel, with Markdown rendering and slash commands

Yes, But...

SupaSidebar is still, at its core, a beta app. But it has a clear purpose, it is actively developed, and it solves a real problem that many multi-browser power users have simply learned to tolerate.

The spaces model gives it more depth than simple tab aggregation. The pricing is also reasonable, and the free tier is actually useful.

Free: 0-3 spaces
Pro: $13.99/year with unlimited spaces, early access, and priority support
Lifetime: $34.99 one-time purchase, 5 devices, lifetime updates

Use BETA30 as a discount code for 30% off both paid options.

There are bugs and rough edges. I have seen tab synchronization inconsistencies, occasional lag when opening folders, and occasional page reloads when clicking tabs. The command panel also has some edge-case quirks around keyboard navigation.

But even with those issues, SupaSidebar is one of the more useful workflow apps I have added to my Mac setup recently.

If you stick with one browser for everything, you probably will not get much out of it. But if you live across Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Arc, and browser profiles, SupaSidebar fills a gap that Apple, Google, and Mozilla have not bothered to solve.

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