AppAddict

Back in the days when Apple still made hardware servers and an operating system to go with them (at $1K a copy) we used to have to deal with hundreds of user home directories in my line of work as a K-12 system admin. Most user’s files got deleted at the end of the school year but some, mostly teachers, got carried over. We would have to back them up and restore them. Invariably there would be permissions errors for some people along the way and the utility we turned to time and again was BatchMod. It’s a GUI for changing permissions on files and folders (including the files in them). I needed to change some file permissions this afternoon and when I went to download the app, I found it still available from third-party sites but the developer is nowhere to be found and doesn’t appear to be maintaining it any longer.

I downloaded it from another site and tested it on files and folders in macOS 14.6.1 Sonoma. It was able to change the read, write and execute for owner, group and everyone on a folder and the enclosed files. Unfortunately, the feature that would force empty the trash is no longer functional. Although the download site claims it was last updated in 2023, the actual date on the files is from 2016.

Don’t download this and attempt to use BatchMod on system files. If you know what you are doing and know how to us chmod (or the Get Info modal in some cases) to change permissions in case things don’t work out, you may get some limited use from BatchMod. The last released edition is 1.7b5. I downloaded it at Softonic.

SilentKnight from The Eclectic Light Company is a free utility to check the security settings of your Mac. it will let you know of any uninstalled security upadtea you may be missing and offer to download and install them from you. It’s often better to run these updates from Software Update in System Settings so you can set SilentKnight to inform onlu mode and it will allow you to download security updates that way.

Silent Knight covers firmware, security settings and data files, and now checks macOS malware scans. It will let you know how often the bulit-in macOS malware scanner has run in the past 24 hours. SilentKnight has both a summary Help page and a detailed reference. The most recent update improves compatibility with Sequoia. There are versions available for download for older versions of macOS.

Don’t be alarmed if SilentKnight says you have reduced security. two features that are off by default can cause this: file vault and secure boot.

You can get the app at the developer’s website and check the entire arsenal of security freeware that is offered there. 

Paletro, by appmakes.io, is a $6.99 utility that gives you a command palette in any app. Large, multifunction apps with many commands like VScode, Sublime Text or Obsidian can have dozens of menu commands and good luck to the intrepid user who tries to remember them all. That’s why those apps have a command palette that lets you summon an alphabetical list to effectively browse for the command you’re looking for. Paletro brings that functionality to any app. Using the default short cut of ⇧⌘P, you can bring up an alphabetized list of the app you’re in. It differs from apps like MenuWhere that allow you to browse the traditional hierchical menu structure in that you don’t need to know where the command is located, you just need to know the name of it. Of course, nothing prevents you from using both utilities in tandem.

You can get a 14-day free trial when you download the app from the developer’s website. You can also get Paletro if you are a Setapp subscriber. 

Type is a menu bar app designed with one purpose in mind, to capture time-stamped notes in plain text or Markdown format quickly and to get out of your way. It’s fast and more versatile than using the fn+Q Apple Quick Note feature which doesn’t time stamp and is available only in Apple Notes which isn’t universally used. I set my shortcut keys to ^+, (control+comma) and I saved my default note as a .md file in my Obsidian vault. Now I have a super quick way to add lines to the note throughout the day. Obsidian doesn’t even have to be open to add to your note, but if it is closed and you want to open it, you can do so from within Type.

You can have more than one active note at the time. The interface allows you to use the mouse or arrow keys to switch between them.You can create a new note at any time. The preferences are pretty utilitarian. You can set you shortcut key, choose to have the app open at login (recommended), choose to have a menu bar icon and select an app to open your notes, as mentioned, that is Obsidian in my case.

You can also set your formatting options for the date and time and choose whether you want new notes to appear at the top or the bottom of documents.

Type comes with a one-week free trial before reverting to read only mode. It is a $4.99 one-time purchase in the Mac App Store. 

Keeping track of current weather conditions and forecasts is a breeze (no pun intended) with the free and powerful menu bar app. Meteorologist, an open-source utility available on Sourceforge. I’ve user Meteorologist for years and have been impressed by a steady stream of updates. 

To save on space, the basic display on the menu bar is just a city name and the temperature, plus an icon displaying current conditions or if there are weather warnings. Clicking on the menu bar display gives you info for up to 12 user configurable cities.

You can also access the following for each city in your list:

• Details on current conditions
• The name of the weather provider
• Current radar
• Hourly forecast
• Extended forecast

The preferences menu is extensive and allows you to control the amount and variety of information presented along with its appearance. Meteorologist is suitable for international users since all of its measurement units are user configurable. There are seven weather information providers available to choose from and you can use different providers for different cities if you want to.

Every once in a while, an app is so well received that an entire community grows up around it. Evernote used to be like that before it started to suck. Obsidian is like that, just look at the YouTube videos and blogs. I’ve recently discovered that Twos, a combination calendar, to-do, notes plus collaboration and social media app has a devoted following and quite a large community in its built in “Twos World” feature and on Discord.

I have to say that the app is beautifully designed and it’s theme-able. It is free to use . It’s cross platform, so not only can you use it on a Mac, it can be accessed on iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Chrome extensions (for Chromebooks). Unlike Notion, a competitor, Twos can be used offline and will sync when connectivity is reestablished. It generates a new list for “things” every day. That’s what it calls its data points whether they be notes, calendar events, or todos. Its interface lends itself very well to bullet journaling.

It’s todo lists offers tasks and subtasks and it supports Siri shortcuts so you can verbally add data. Unfinished items automatically carryover to the next day. You can set auto-reminders for todos or calendar events.  Its calendars import from Google, Apple and Outlook. They can also write to those calendars. You can share you lists via links even with people who don’t have the app. Twos supports text only data entry via email, texts and WhatsApp.

Some advanced features can either be purchased or earned through the in-app gamification of earning coins by using certain features, referring friends or participating in Twos World, the built in community feature. The purchase price is low though, $1.99 per feature for:

• Hyperlinks
• Alerts
• Weekly reports
• Suggested times
• Sublists
• AI

They also offer a quasi-subscription/donation option to let you gain access to any new features or just to support future development. It's available on the Mac App Store or at the developer's website. If you want to do me a solid, sign up with my referral code. 

Since 2003, Titanium Software has been issuing its free system maintenance and tweaking utility, Onyx for every major release of macOS. Currently there is a mature version of Sonoma and a beta version of Sequoia, although you can still download versions going all the way back to Jaguar, Mac OS 10.2. 

The current version of Onyx features a whole suite of features:

• Verify The Structure of the System Files 
• Run Miscellaneous Maintenance and Cleaning Tasks
• Configure Parameters in The Finder, Dock, Safari, And Some Apple Applications
• Delete Caches
• Remove Certain Problematic Folders and Files
• Rebuild Various Databases and Indexes

A few other things you can do include:

• Delete old media libraries and Xcode files
• Access all of the UNIX man files on your system
• Granular wake, sleep and shut down controls
• Provide easy access to hidden system utilities like Directory Utility and Wireless Diagnostics
• Change the visibility of files, folder and applications
• See status and toggle security tools like Gatekeeper and Firewall
• Advanced file finding
• Info and reports on hardware, memory, volumes and software

Onyx is signed by Titanium Software and notarized by Apple. It is available for downloading from the developer's website.

I need to write to external NTFS formatted drives from my M3 iMac on a regular basis for my job. I investigated the free options, primarily Mounty and found them to have a little too much friction for me on a computer running Sonoma with the aforementioned Apple Silicon. I opted for paid software for this mundane task. My choice was iBoysoft NTFS Mounter for Mac and in the four months since I installed it, I haven’t had a single read/write error.

NTFS Mounter works in the finder and in alternative file managers like Path Finder and Qspace. It adds the ability to format drives with NTFS using Disk Utility. It installs as a startup item and lives in the menubar of your computer. I never need to access its settings, since the defaults work perfectly well, so I used Bartender to hide the icon. It works with SSD drives connected via USB-C and with various thumb drives I access through a USB 3.0 hub. The speed is slower than natively formatted drives, but it is bearable.

The one thing is cannot do that I wish it would - access NTFS drives encrypted with Bitlocker. I still have to use a PC when that need arises, which is seldom.

There is a free trial of 14 days. When that’s over you can purchase it for $49.95 or opt for a yearly subscription for $19.95. You can get it on the Mac App Store as well as the developer’s site.  It’s also available through Setapp which is how I found it.

In my ongoing search for an app to take advantage of the notch on my M2 MacBook Air, I bought Dynamic Lake Pro today after the developer offered a 20% discount on Reddit.  The app provides a variety of information from system controls and applications.

General Controls
You can elect to display a graphic in the notch when you use the function keys to control the screen brightness or the volume. The color of the text is user configurable, and you can toggle sounds to your liking, on or off.

DynaMusiX
The primary display of the app show media controls that are a little fancier than what Control Center shows the added benefit of being always visible.

DynaGlance
By hitting fn+space, you can bring up DynaGance which features date, time and local weather (F or C). With a two-fingered swipe on the trackpad you can switch to a calendar view with appointments listed. Currently the appointments are a little hard to see because they are dimmed with no apparent way to make them brighter.

DynaSwitcher
Pressing fn+tab bringers up an application switcher in the notch showing your open apps and a small preview window. Like the default Mac app switcher, there is no way to choose a specific window if you have an app that has multiple windows open.

Notifications
You can choose to display notifications from WhatsApp, Apple Mail, Messages and Facebook Messenger in the notch. Presumably you’ll want to turn these off in Notification center. You can reply to messages in the notch as well. It took me a minute to figure out that in order to remove the notification that you need to swipe it away. You can also elect to get calendar and battery notifications in the notch as well.

A single license is $13.90 on Gumroad and entitles you to use the app on three Macs. For a limited time, enjoy a 20% discount with the code: AJHBEDO. You can get more info at the developer’s website. Based on reviews and feedback from other users, it seems that the developer is responsive to bug reports and is working hard to improve the app.

After reading about NotchNook on Reddit and seeing the 35% off offer from the $25 purchase price, I purchased it to test it out. I reenabled the notch on my MacBook, which I had turned off with Better Monitor. The installation was straightforward, requiring access to the camera, microphone and Apple Events.

NotchNook has two feature areas, the nook and the file tray. The nook is where the widgets are located. The currently supported widgets are media controls, shortcuts, calendar and mirror. There is a placeholder for notes, but it is not currently active. The media control widget offered to start Apple Music or YouTube. Once I opened Apple Music, the controls were no different than what is already available in Control Center with the exception of being able to use gestures to move between songs. You can add two shortcuts to the nook, but they do not support drag and drop nor do they act on files selected in the Finder rendering the usefulness limited.The calendar displays the current day and two days prior and after that. There is no way to choose a default calendar and when I added events to my system default calendar, they did not appear. The mirror widget displays an image from your built-in camera that is the literal size of a postage stamp with no way to enlarge it. I did not find it useful.

The second feature area is the file tray. It serves as a place to drag and keep files. Once you have a file there, there are no options to perform other actions, like compression or moving to cloud storage apps or any kind of image modification actions. It is strictly a holding area. There is a place holder that states additional file actions are coming, but as of now, they do not exist.

Because of the lack of depth on the features, I do not recommend purchasing this app right now. Dropover,  $5.99 app provides a huge variety of file actions. You can use Control Center for media control and add shortcuts to your dock or menu bar natively. If you still want to try Notch Nook, you can get it on the developer’s website. Currently you can get a %35 discount if you tweet about the app.

Using keyboard shortcuts you define, Swift Shift allows you to easily move and resize windows without searching for the title bar or waiting for tiny arrows to appear. On my Mac, I set the hyperkey (CapsLock) to activate move mode. Now, when I press the key, whatever window is under my cursor moves along with it. I don’t have to click and drive by the title bar alone. When I press control+option, the window under my cursor resizes, as if I has grabbed an edge or corner.

If you are used to a Linux style window manager that requires you to use a mouse button along with a shortcut key, you can add that as a requirement.

You have the option of using the bottom right corner as the center of all your resizing actions or using quadrants which will move/or resize the window that will edge or resize the windows from the edge or corner closest to your mouse.

Swift Shift is free to download on GitHub.

Musebox, a digital asset (photos, graphics, videos) management application by brushedpixel is a remarkable and affordable (one-time purchase of $15 for now) substitute for multi-featured programs like Adobe Lightroom, Apple Photos or Mylio. It has a variety of import, export, editing and management features.

You can import photos from digital cameras, media cards, Smart Phones, iCloud photo library, internal and external media plus a list of recently edited media via Spotlight. Musebox excels in letting you customize file and folder names across external media. It allows you to create import presets to specify import locations and metadata.

Photographers who take a high volume of photos need streamlined workflows for categorizing and finding photos. Musebox lets you use keyboard shortcuts to rate photos, assign keywords and assign color labels. You can create your own metadata inspectors containing just the data you want to see and omitting what you don’t Use auto-stacks that group photos by time to quickly evaluate winners and losers.

Use the built in editor to make standard adjustments like:

• Exposure
• White Balance
• Highlights and shadows
• Saturation
• Contrast
• Brightness

When you are ready to export your keepers, you can select from various sizes, formats and metadata options to move single photos or batches. You can create presets that ensure your exports are always consistent. You can even share directly to social media via the macOS share sheet or your iPhone's universal clipboard. 

Here are some features that Musebox has that Lightroom does not:

• No subscription
• iCloud and Spotlight imports
• Exporting HEIC and OpenEXR
• Advanced reconnection of moved files
• Monitoring of file changes
• More color labels (7 vs 5)
• List view for metadata properties
• Sorting by any metadata property
• Video and audio split and trim

Musebox is currently $15 on the developer's website. It is compatible with macOS 15.

After an unexplained failure of a previous workflow, I used the free keyboard mapping utility, Karabiner Elements, to reenable my hyperkey and turn of CapsLock when macOS baled at letting me do it.

I use the hyperkey concept heavily in my various workflows.  A hyperkey is when you change your keyboard mapping so that pressing the CapsLock key acts the same as simultaneously pressing the Shift+Control+Option+Command keys. It essentially creates a new modifier key you can use for keyboard shortcuts. I use my hyperkey+a letter to launch a great many apps and to access things like the Bartender menu. I normally set it up through Better Touch Tool but there are stand-alone apps that will do it too, like Superkey. Tonight, out of the blue, my hyperkey stopped working and CapsLock, which I had turned off in System Settings was turned back on. I managed to get my hyperkey working again, but my M2 MacBook Air ignored system settings and would not disable CapsLock. 

The solution for me, was Karabiner Elements, a powerful keyboard customizer for macOS. Karabiner Elements supports a great many customizations, including things like:

• Creating a diamond cursor
• Emacs key bindings anywhere
• Vi key bindings
• Preventing accidental command+q app quitting
• Mouse keys

It also has a large library of keyboard customizations written by its community of users that you can download and install.

Karabiner Elements is free. You can download it from the developer’s website. 

Devon Technologies charges a pretty penny for their signature app, Devon Think with a standard license going for $99 and a pro license for $199. Still, the app is popular and has been around for a while. Devon also makes and gives away a suite of free utilities, like Xmenu, Neo Network Utility, Easy Find and others. One little known addition to their give aways is WordService, a collection of text manipulations made available through the services menu in any Mac app with text capability. Devon describes WordService thusly, “provides a large number of commands for working with selected text. Extend your favorite word processor, email app, or web browser e.g. with functions for reformatting text paragraphs, cleaning up tabs, quotes, or line endings. Remove unwanted text parts, sort lines or paragraphs, change case, and do much, much more with text.”

Once installed, head to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Text to turn on the elements you want to use. If you do any writing and text manipulation from the web or other sources, you will end up using this free addition to your toolbox more than you think you will.

You can download WordService directly from Devon Technologies. 

Rocket, by indy developer Matthew Palmer is a free app to help you quickly insert emoji into your typed communications via Slack style shortcuts. By default, if you type a colon and the begin typing the name of an emoji, matching emojis will appear in line with the text for you to choose the one you want to use. You can opt for a different trigger if you want or choose to use a double trigger (e.g., double colons). I find it to be more reliable and easier to use than the default Mac emoji picker of ^+⌘+space.

Further customizations include: 

• Your Choice of a Default Skin Tone
• Apps In Which Rocket Will Be Disabled by Default
• Fuzzy Search
• Light And Dark Themes
• Websites Where Rocket Will Be Disabled by Default
• Changing The Default Size of Emojis
• Accessibility Settings for Blind Users

For a one-time fee of $10 you can upgrade to Rocket Pro and add the following features:

• Scroll And Search Your Way Through Every Emoji in the Search & Browse Window
• Use Rocket to Send and Store Gifs, Images, And Memes
• Set Custom Emoji Shortcuts and Add Your Own Emoji
• Add Text Expansion Snippets to Rocket
• Check Out Your Emoji Stats

Your Rocket Pro license is good for two Macs, but you can ask the dev to add more computers. You can buy Rocket Pro from within the app or at the developer's website. 

Every once in a while, we are going to find ourselves in need of the Internet in a place where there is no Wi-Fi and we have to turn on tethering to our phones. Even if you have a so-called unlimited plan, you will soon find out that there are all kinds of gotchas when it comes to the amount of data you can use. TripMode, from developer Alix SARL, is a must have app to monitor and control data use whenever you are concerned with bandwidth consumption.

• Only allow apps that you specify to use the Internet
• Rules kick in as soon as tethering is detected
• Monitor each app's data usage in real time
• Use profiles to set custom rules for different scenarios
• Automatically cut traffic when data limit is reached
• Identify where any app is connecting to
• Scheduler limits data consumption except at times you specify
• Simple firewall allows binary connection choice for all apps
• Use AppleScript for advanced customization
• Privacy controls all you to erase your domain history
• Always-on mode filters traffic regardless of connection type

Trip mode is a subscription app on the Mac App Store. It is $14.99 a year for a single user, $17.99 a year for family sharing and if you only need it for a short time, it's $4.99 a month. It comes with a seven day free trial and is also available as part of Setapp.

Objective-See is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation that develops free and open-source security software for the Mac. Two of its better-known programs are BlockBlock and KnockKnock, utilities to monitor any persistent applications installed on your device and to provide real time scanning for malware. It’s free firewall, Lulu, is also very popular. See this review from Oliver Pifferi.

Two other worthy apps to download and use are ReiKey and Task Explorer.

ReiKey

 
Malware and other applications may install persistent keyboard "event taps" to intercept your keystrokes. ReiKey can scan, detect, and monitor for such taps. In other words, it looks for and detects keystroke interceptors installed on your device. it will find and report legitimate software like Better Touch Tool, Keyboard Maestro and Text Expander but it will also find malware like Xcode Spy and other keyboard hijackers.

Task Explorer

Task Explorer is like Apple's Activity Monitor on steroids. it explores all the tasks/processes running on your Mac and shows:

• Signing status
• VirusTotal integration
• Loaded dynamic libraries
• Open files
• Network connections
• Global search

I’ve been on a hunt to find the best application switcher. I’ve used Keyboard Maestro’s for a while and I like it because it shows you not only running apps but also any user defined apps you want to list, allowing you to ⌘+tab to your favorite applications no matter if they are running or not. Alas, the Keyboard Maestro window switcher has a poor interface and doesn’t do what I want.

I moved on to the free and open-source app, Alt+Tab which does a great job on one of my two macs showing me all the open windows, not just apps, on my machine in a way that resembles Windows 10. But it is missing the one killer feature I wanted, the ability to switch to a specific open tab in my browser. And, on one of my machines, it randomly stops functioning.

I tried Contexts, a Reddit favorite but it doesn’t have the open tab feature.

Witch, from Many Tricks does have the ability to find and switch to open browser tabs, via search. In fact it has a ton of features:

• Menu bar app listing all open Windows
• Different switchers - app switcher, window switcher, frontmost app's windows and more
• Different layouts (vertical, horizontal etc.)
• Spring loaded (expanding) menus
• Show hidden windows (toggle on or off)
• Set the app's color and fonts
• Control windows with keyboard shortcuts (Hide, Close, Quit)

Witch is a onetime purchase of $14 on the developer's website, which is valid forever and entitles you to free updates for a minimum of a year. Discounts are given to owners of previous versions.

MenuWhere, a utility from versatile indy developers, Many Tricks. Menuwhere’s single purpose is to pop up the frontmost app’s menus at the current mouse location. By default, it is activated by ⌘ + Right Click, but you can use the built in preferences to activate it totally with the keyboard if you want to. If you are technically proficient and also have apps like Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool or Karabiner Elements, you can use them to assign a mouse button or gesture to activate the menus.

MenuWhere lets you customize the menus you see. You can opt to include or exclude the Apple Menu. You can choose to always see menu items that are normally hidden unless you press the option button. You can exclude entire menus (e.g., Help or Edit) from what you see when you activate Menuwhere. One choice I highly recommend making is turning off all inactive menu items so you never see parts of the interface that are not currently available.

For users who need a visual boost, MenuWhere allows you to upsize the menus to make them easier to see. If your vision is quite fine, thank you, and you just want more screen room, you can also shrink the size of the menus.

You can even add an additional keyboard shortcut and see not only the menu of the frontmost application, but also the menus of other running apps.

MenuWhere is available on the developer’s website for the grand sum of $3.

Indy developer Michael Tigas has a productivity boosting app, focusedOS that combines elements of other productivity enhancers into one app. The app is focusedOS and it has five distinct enhancements to boost productivity:

Behavior
This feature is similar to the HazeOver app in that it allows you to dim all apps but the current one. If you need more than one app at the time you can specify which ones to show. You can add text to the menu bar to remind you of your focus and you can remove menu bat icons. You can even hide the wallpaper and turn off the Wi-Fi.

Ambience
The app has numerous built in ambient sounds to play while you work including: cafe, fan, fireplace, light rain, binaural beats and white noise among others.

Apps
You can list apps you want to block, or conversely, list all the apps you want to allow.

Websites
You can list an specific web sites you want to block, or select entire categories of sites like social media, games, music or news.

Automation
You can launch any shortcuts as part of setting up your focused environment to include things like Pomodoro timers or turning off notifications.

focusedOS lets you set a single set of parameters, it calls them environments, for free. That’s a single workspace you can edit as you need to. Once configured, you can turn the environment on with one switch in the menu bar. If you want to have more than one pre-configured environment, then the app is available for $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year.

There are versions of the app for iOS and iPadOS as well.

You can get more info on the developer’s website.

You can download focusedOS from the App Store.