AppAddict

When you need to share a file with someone, or maybe get a file from you home computer to your work computer, you have a variety of options depending on your needs and security constraints. You can use Airdrop between Apple devices. You can upload to a cloud service. You can use email. There’s another way, and it’s cross platform (macOS, iOS, Windows, Android), encrypted, fast, free and direct. Using the Blip app, your files are sent directly to the target device without being uploaded to someone else’s web server. You can use Blip to send files anywhere there is another device with the app installed. There are no ads and it’s very fast. There is no limit on file size, and it works with folders as well as data on external drives. You can even use it for Final Cut Pro projects.

You can reach the developers at hello@blip.net or on Twitter @blipnet

If you have a lot of date saved in the default Apple Notes app and you aren’t interested in migrating to Obsidian, Notion, Joplin or Evernote, you still don’t have to settle for the limited formatting and back linking options you are provided. ProNotes, a free app, allows you to use standard Markdown syntax, if you choose to, in order to format your text.

You can also choose to use a floating toolbar with formatting tools. You can even use slash commands for titles, headings, code blocks, checklists, numbered lists and even tables.

Bi-directional links

macOS Sonoma introduced the ability to link to other notes. ProNotes allows you to view all notes linking to the current note via the Backlinks feature.

It’s universally agreed upon, even by the most rabid of Mac Fanboys, that Apple has dropped the ball by never providing anything more than basic clipboard management. You get to have one thing on the clipboard and when you overwrite it, it’s gone. Thankfully, there a plenty of alternatives to choose from. I’ve tried many of them and settled on the one that’s included in the free application launcher, Raycast along with the CopyQ extension as my daily driver. The features I want are included:

• Can pin frequently used snippets (like my OpenAI API key)
• Searchable
• Includes copied files
• Includes colors
• Includes images (you can copy text from within images)
• Filtered searching

CopyQ adds:

• Store text, HTML, images, and any other custom formats
• Quickly browse and filter items in clipboard history
• Sort, create, edit, remove, copy/paste, drag'n'drop items in tabs
• Add notes and tags to items
• System-wide keyboard shortcuts with customizable commands
• Paste items with keyboard shortcuts, from menu bar, or from main window
• Fully customizable appearance
• Advanced command-line interface and scripting
• Ignore clipboard copied from specified windows or containing specified text
• Support for simple Vim-like editor with keyboard shortcuts

Since I also use Keyboard Maestro and Better Touch Tool, I can also use their built in clipboard tools.

I also have PastePal, which was my daily driver for a long time.  It is buy once and use forever and has iCloud clipboard syncing with an iOS app.

I own Copy ‘Em which features sequential copying/single pasting.

I have access to Paste through Setapp. It’s a great clipboard manager, although without Setapp is a ridiculous $29.99 a year for the Mac Version. It includes the iCloud synced iOS app.

I also tried out the free open-source app, Maccy which is lightweight and very fast but I wanted more features. Other full featured choices include Paste Queue and Copy Paste Pro.

In the world of text editors for the Mac there are lot’s of choices. I come to the decision making process as a non-programmer who occasionally does some basic scripting with the help of Ai.  Visual Studio Code is the most popular among programmers with an estimated 70% market share. Personally, I don’t care for its non-standard interface and rarely use it. My go to for tasks of any complexity is the free version of the venerable BBEDit, a program whose marketing tagline is “It doesn’t suck.” My most used feature is the global search and replace across files. I routinely point BBEdit at directories containing hundreds of text files (usually in Markdown format) to make changes in my Obsidian vault. It’s also useful to make changes to plist, xml and opml files. In fact, you can open almost any file, including huge ones, in BBEdit. It has extensive text transformation abilities to change case, remove line breaks, etc. It even has a built-in color wheel to generate codes for CSS.

The battery on my M2 MacBook pro routinely keeps me going more than 14 hours on a single charge. Because replacing batteries is environmentally disruptive and expensive ($200 or more), I want mine to last as long as possible. To help me achieve this, I use AlDente Pro, a multifeatured battery app that starts at login and keeps my battery from exceeding a 70% charge. Li-ion batteries work best and last longest when they are kept between 20% and 80%. To stay calibrated, they occasionally need to run a full cycle (once a month or so). AlDente can handle this for me. Another feature is heat protection. Charging your battery when temperatures are high can result in damage. High temperatures can happen because of excessive CPU usage or a demand for rapid charging. Heat protection guards against this. If I am going to be away from a power source for a prolonged period of time, I can easily change the app’s settings to allow me to top off my battery at 100%. For automation fans, AlDente Pro has a full range of Apple Shortcuts support. Licensing is three-fold - a free version featuring only charge limiting is available. A full featured one-year subscription costs $10.43 and a lifetime license is $21.97. The program is also available on SetApp.

When I have a question I want to run by a LLM, my first stop isn’t my paid Raycast subscription with AI. It isn’t even the Google Gemini Pro that I pay for. It’s not even any of the AI apps I get with my Setapp subscription. I use a free shortcut that anyone can get from Github. When I set it up, I plugged in my pay as you go API key from OpenAI and in six months of almost daily use, I’ve spent around $5. I have a hotkey assigned to launch the shortcut using Keyboard Maestro but most of the time I just launch it from the menu bar menu Shortcuts provides. It’s not limited to Mac’s only though. It also works in iOS and iPadOS. It’s capable of carrying on a running conversation. The thing I like about it is that it creates a text file in iCloud at Shortcuts/ChatGPT-log and then a folder named by date and time. The text document contains information about the tokens you’ve consumed if you find that information useful. You can choose to configure it to save its transcripts in Apple Notes if you want to. 

The shortcut allows you to create a custom prompt if you want to. It copies the last response to the clipboard automatically. 

Helpful Links

• How to use the API key safely: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5112595-best-practices-for-api-key-safety.
• API keys: https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys.
• API usage: https://platform.openai.com/account/usage.
• API prices: https://openai.com/pricing.
• ChatGPT API FAQ: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7039783-chatgpt-api-faq.

I have a MacBook at home running macOS 14.4. It’s on my home network with Verizon as my ISP. I run Nord VPN 24/7. At a side job, I use a variety of computers including a PC running Windows 10 22H2. They have a FortiGate corporate firewall. I have no problem connecting the two computers using a free utility from Google called Chrome Remote Desktop. With practically the same functionality as more expensive and harder to configure applications like Screens or Jump Desktop, I can establish a password protected connection and control the screen of the remote computer in either direction. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t even get Screens, a $79 program to work for me under the same conditions and I do this stuff for a living. To top it all off, I don’t even use Chrome as my default browser. I use Microsoft Edge, with which this extension/utility is fully compatible.

If you need to access a remote computer, perhaps your parents for tech support reasons, I heartily recommend Chrome Remote Desktop. Before installing at work, check with your IT department for permission.

There are several companies that offer periodic deals on Mac software at huge discounts. I put up with emails from these companies just so that I get notifications when these sales happen. Probably my favorite of these companies is Bundle Hunt. I’ve been buying from them for over a decade. In their last sale, I got a great app, Alarm Clock Pro, the most full featured clock app I have ever used. It’s a vital part of my workflow at my day job. Not only does Alarm Clock Pro alert me at specified times, it also automatically opens a web page to the time clock website my employer uses so that I can punch in or out as appropriate.

You can also have Alarm Clock Pro launch apps at specified times, useful for starting up the file syncing software that backs up my Obsidian vault every morning at 2am. Other features include multiple world clocks, a timer, a stopwatch and scheduling of emails and texts. The alarms can include a custom message in a dialog box or full screen message, custom audio files or music. It will take a photo from a web cam or a screenshot at a specified time. It can log you out, sleep or restart your computer on a schedule. It can even open files and folders at a specified time.

The downside is the price if you don’t get it on sale. A monthly subscription is $1.83. A one-time purchase with no upgrades is $29.99 and a lifetime purchase with upgrades is a whopping $119. One upside is that a license includes both the Mac and Windows version of the program if you live that cross-platform life. You can also get an App Store version for $24.99.

Sometimes you don’t need or want the latest and greatest app. You’d rather have something tried and tested, something venerable or even iconic. ToyViewer, a free graphics viewer and editor, has been part of the Mac ecosystem since 1995. It’s fast, dependable and flexible. On my Macs, I use it as the default app for opening graphics instead of Preview. (I use something else for PDFs) It can open TIFF, GIF, BMP, PNG, JPG, BIE (JBIG), PCX, PCD, PICT, PNM (PPM, PBM, or PGM), XBM, MAG, SUN Rasterfile, JPEG2000 (JP2, JPC, J2K), WEBP and other formats supported by macOS. It supports exporting (save as) as TIFF, PDF, GIF, BMP, PNG, JPG, JPEG2000, BIE (JBIG), PNM, or XBM.

ToyViewer Features:

• ToyViewer can attach a custom icon to any file as well as newly saved image file.
• ToyViewer can read and write GIF or PNG files with transparent color, and also can read and write interlaced (progressive) GIF, PNG, or JPG files.
• ToyViewer can scan (auto-display) image files in a folder.
• You can also display images in full-screen size.
• Displayed images can be scaled (enlarge/shrink).
• You can rotate, flip, or clip images.
• ToyViewer has ability to adjust brightness, contrast, color tone of images, and has some typical operations to images, such as enhancement, embossing, and so on.
• You can replace specified color with other color or transparent color.
• Full color images can be reduced into 256, 64, or 8 colors. Also, each color value of images can be cut down to 4-, 2-, or 1-bit.
• ToyViewer can make images monochrome (8-bit gray, 2-bit gray, or bi-level). Images can be printed.
• You can set ToyViewer to display any image format if there is a filter program to PPM format.
• ToyViewer provides image-conversion filter services for other applications.
• You can add comments to images (comments are written into only GIF, PNG, JPG, or PNM formats).
• You can make Aqua-button-like images.

It hasn't been updated since 2022 but is fully compatible with Sonoma. ToyViewer is available in the App Store. It is not abandonware. 

Since Logitech decided to add their unremovable AI junk to Logi Options+ you may be looking for a new driver.

Turns out BetterMouse can turn your Logitech MX Master into a Magic Mouse. You get two direction scrolling, proper gestures and smooth scrolling. It uses less than 1% CPU and 100MB memory. The Logi AI driver was already sitting at 250MB without it being used once.

BetterMouse is under active development and was just updated last week. For people in the US, its $7.99 for a five-device license, with a full-featured seven-day trial.

Configurable elements of the user interface include:

• Scrolling
• Cursor
• Button Gesture
• Keyboard
• Exception Apps

Other mouse drivers available include Better Touch Tool (also good for trackpads), Linear Mouse (free), and Steer Mouse.

If you are looking for a new mouse to use with your Mac, here are some current recommendations.

If you don’t understand the need for computer backups, then you probably haven’t been using a computer very long. If you are using a Mac, there really isn’t an excuse for not buying a cheap drive like this one (2TB for $69) and configuring Time Machine. It’s dead simple following these instructions. Once configured, all you have to do is plug in your drive and let it run - most of the time. Every so often there is a system glitch that requires a little troubleshooting. Unless you make it a habit to go in and check your settings though, you may not be aware of any problems. That’s where this widget steps in. It lives in your notification center (or on your desktop) and it has one job - to let you know the times of your last successful backup. Just a glance at it and you find out a vital piece of information about your system. It’s a set it and forget app and requires no fiddling once running. You can get it for $3 on Gumroad.

Features

• View the status of your latest Time Machine backups on your desktop or Notification Center.
• Configure the backup disk for which you want to see the status.
• 3 widget sizes to choose from: small, medium, or large.
• See details of a backup disk, e.g., its encryption state.

For the avid app collector there are a few tools available to help catalog and curate the assortment of programs that accumulate over time. You can use Apple’s built in system report to get comprehensive information but it’s rather dense and not illustrated. You can use an app like Apparency, but then you are limited to a single app at the time. MyApplications, available in the app store for 99 cents, serves as both a database and a launcher for your computer.

The MyApplications general interface includes a count of the number of apps you have installed, 414 in my case. It breaks the apps down into publishers, for example I have 92 apps from Apple itself and six from the wonderful developer Sindre Sorhus. Apparently, many apps don’t provide publisher information because I have a lot that are not listed. It also breaks the apps into categories such as utilities, productivity, developer tools, graphics and design etc. The categories, while helpful, are a little too broad for my taste, for example I have 124 labeled as utilities and it seems that could have been further narrowed into categories like disk utilities, archive utilities, etc.

The app interface lets you choose sorting by name or last launched. It tells you how many apps you currently have running and how may you have launched in the past day. If you click on individual apps, you have the option to launch them or to get more information regarding size on disk, location, language localizations, download date and date of last update. A complete permissions report is included. The package contents are listed as is a complete description, apparently from the App store or developer’s web site if provided. There are even screen shots provided.

Path Finder, an alternative file browser by Cocoatech, has been around as long as Mac OS X. It introduced features later adopted by the Mac Finder such as a tabbed interface and smart sorting (showing folders before files). It offers dual file panes reminiscent of other power browsers, like Norton Commander. Features include:

• Breadcrumb navigation
• Drop shelf file copying
• Root access
• Terminal Emulation
• Bookmarks
• Folder comparison and synchronization
• Active process viewer
• Graphical ACL
• Built in text and hex editors
• File compression tools

Path Finder is available through Setapp, subscription or one time purchase w/out upgrades.

Most people realize that one of the secrets to becoming more productive on a Mac is the ability to control the computer and its applications from the keyboard using the shortcuts native to most programs. Most people also realize there is no way in hell they can remember more than a handful of their most used shortcuts without help. That’s where KeyClu steps in. Once installed and running, all a user has to do is press the command key twice to bring up a cheat sheet with all the keyboard shortcuts for the app listed on the display. KeyClu is available for download on Github.

Custom Shortcuts by Houdah Software is a free application that allows you to assign your own keyboard shortcuts to any menu item in any application. In these days of do-it-yourself progressive web apps, you may have many applications without any native keyboard shortcuts and this small utility is the solution to that problem. Its features include:

• Auto-completion to help you navigate menu hierarchies
• Making sure you get menu titles exactly right
• Checking for ambiguous menu items
• Copy & pasting shortcuts between applications

If you are a KeyClu user, you'll find that Custom Shortcuts is 100% compatible and accessible from the KeyClu interface, a simple and handy overview of applications shortcuts. Easy to use: just press ⌘ twice and hold to see the list.

Back in the days of Classic Mac OS (pre OS X), the Apple menu offered a way to launch applications and access folders. The closest you can get to that today is through Devon Technologies free menu bar app, Xmenu. It provides six pre-defined categories of accessible shortcuts:

• Applications
• Developer Applications
• Home
• Documents
• User-Defined
• Snippets

The interface has different custom options for sorting, font size, icon size and menu titles. Xmenu is a real app, not a hack and works best when added to you login items. Xmenu on the App Store

For technically inclined Mac aficionados, Apparency by Mothers Ruin Software is an app that also serves as a plugin for the macOS QuickLook feature. After installing Apparency, you can select an app in the Finder, press the spacebar and get a variety of information in the resulting window. You can take it one step further and choose to open the app in Apparency to answer even more questions including:

• What did Gatekeeper say?
• Was it notarized?
• Is App Sandbox enabled?
• Inspect the code signature
• Browse entitlements
• Browse the Info.plist
• Find the executable
• See macOS version info
• Inspect linked frameworks
• See identifiers and versions
• Browse “components” inside
• See document types and URLs

Apparency is a free app and currently supports Intel and Apple silicon processors on Mac OS versions 12, 13 and 14. Download here

Apparency was updated to v2 on 2024-04-24. The major changes were:

• You can now use AppleScript to automate Apparency. Read about what you can do with AppleScript and Apparency or use Help > Open Scripting Dictionary to browse Apparency's terminology, along with many example scripts.
• Improved performance when opening components, especially for large or complex apps. Apparency now does more of its analysis in the background, which means the window will open more quickly, and the app shouldn't SPOD while doing analysis. Also, the top-level component is now given priority to start signature verification, so that this most-likely-to-be-interesting information is shown as soon as possible.
• When opening a Developer ID-signed app, Apparency will now request an updated notification ticket from Apple servers before evaluating the Notarization and Gatekeeper status. This is to avoid a misleading Unnotarized Developer ID status on an app that actually is notarized, but that wasn't “stapled” and hasn't been launched yet. https://www.mothersruin.com/software/Apparency/relnotes.html

Opener is so integrated into the way I use my phone that I forget it’s an app and not built into iOS. When you’re browsing the web in your iOS browser and you come across a link you want to open, usually you have to copy and paste the address to get it into the app you want. Using Opener, you can go straight to the app from your browser or any app that allows sharing a URL. If, like me, you use an iOS browser other than Safari, Opener lets you send links to the browser of your choice. In fact it supports over 40 browsers! It’s fully integrated into the share sheet and I have it at the top of mine. Out of the box it supports 240+ apps to include YouTube, Twitter, Ivory, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit and more. You can see a complete list on the developer’s web site. It’s $2 and well worth it in the App Store.

In the example below, I have an App Store Link on the clipboard. Opener presents all of these options for opening it.

Shortcuts on the Mac is missing the built-in automation features offered in iOS but Shortery from UnitNo5 steps in admirably to fill the gap. With a comprehensive list of 17 triggers, Shortery can automatically launch shortcuts to accomplish all sorts of tasks. Some of my use cases are:

• Launch my five "morning apps" at 4am so that my computer is ready to use when I wake up
• Automatically convert RAW and HEIC photos to JPEG when I export from Photos app
• Minimize all open Windows on my work iMac when I unlock the screen to hide  everything from prying eyes
• Automatically eject my backup drive every morning so that all I have to do is unplug it from my laptop
• Launch a file syncing app every day at 2am to back up my Obsidian vault

Triggers

• Appearance - Run a shortcut when your Mac changes dark and light mode
• Application - Run a shortcut when you start or quit an app
• Audio - Run a Shortcut when you start, stop or record audio.
• Calendar events - Run a shortcut when a meeting starts/ends
• Camera - Run shortcuts when your webcam is switched on/off
• Devices - Run a shortcut when you connect/disconnect any USB or Bluetooth device
• Focus mode - Trigger a shortcut when focus mode on your Mac is enabled
• Folder Contents - Run a shortcut when the content of your folders change
• Keyboard - Define a global hotkey for your shortcut
• Login & logout - Use the login-trigger to get your day started
• Monitors - Trigger a shortcut when you connect/disconnect a monitor
• Power - Run a shortcut when you plug in a power adapter
• Screen - Trigger a shortcut when you lock or unlock your screen
• Sunrise & sunset - Run shortcuts when the sun sets or rises
• Wake up & sleep - Run Shortcuts before your Mac goes to sleep or wakes up
• Time - Set a time when the shortcut should run and define how often it should be repeated
• WiFi - Run a shortcut when your WiFi connection changes

Shortery has a free version, but you get full functionality for $9.99 a year in the App Store.

Better Display is a menu bar app that lets you do things with your built in or connected displays you never thought possible. It does: 

• Custom Resolutions - Define favorite resolutions and reach them using the app menu, resolution slider or keyboard shortcuts.
• XDR/HDR Extra Brightness - DR brightness upscale to 1600 nits, external HDR display brightness upscale depending on the display's capability. Native XDR, color table (Apple Silicon) and Metal (Apple Silicon and Intel) methods are all supported.
• Virtual Screens - Including custom displays for headless Macs (servers)
• Picture in Picture
• Display Disconnect and Reconnect
• Display and EDID overrides 

It even gets rid of the notch on MacBook displays! The free version offers access to many features and full access is $18.