AppAddict Newsletter

Anyone looking for a well-designed notes app that’s free and open source, native to the Mac platform and based on plain text files would be well served by checking out Notenik by independent developer Herb Bowie.. Within Notenik you can create numerous types of collections of notes including but not limited to:

• Basic Notes
• Links
• To-dos
• Sequenced list
• Zettlekasten
• Blog
• Commonplace Book (with or w/out lookups)
• Outline
• Web Book
• Website
• Contacts
• Travel Planner
• Code snippets

Each collection of notes lives in a separate folder. The default location for the notes is iCloud but you can store then anywhere you want. You can save them as txt or Markdown files. Even though there isn't a native iOS app, you can use iOS text editors like Taio, iAWriter or 1Writer to access and edit your notes on that platform.

Each copy of Notenik comes with a complete knowledge base in Notenik format to help you use the application. The knowledge base is updated when new features are added and it is available offline.

Like other modern plain text notes apps, Notenik supports tags and other metadata. You can use double bracket wikilinks to connect your notes. For blind and visually impaired users, Notenik is fully voice over compatible.

This is an app that you need to download and experiment with to fully understand its power when it comes to things like creating websites and databases and all the options you have to incorporate personal productivity options into your note taking. The developer is very responsive and publishes a constant stream of new and improved features as well as squashing any bugs. Because Notenik is available from the App Store, it is easy to keep it updated.

I've previously covered Quicklook plugins that let you use your spacebar in Finder to view things like package contents, videos, source code, compressed files and more. Recently the developer of the popular bookmarking app, Anybox, released a free Quicklook plugin for folders, which seems like a feature Apple should have included from the very beginning.

When you have a folder highlighted in the Finder, pressing the spacebar opens a window showing the folders contents. Pressing the spacebar a second time closes the window. When the window is open, you don’t have full Finder access to the contents, but you can use the mouse to open subfolders. You can also set up the default column display with only the columns you want. I tested the plugin with two Finder alternatives, Path Finder and Qspace and it worked with both of them. The contents of the folder display one level deep. The Quicklook interface displays the folder size and gives you access to the macOS share sheet.

The plugin is free and available on the App Store.

One thing I know about apps designed to identify and download updates for the applications on your Mac, none of them are 100% effective. I use a combination of MacUpdater, Latest, CleanMyMac and Topgrade to come as close as possible to updating my Macs. Of those four, MacUpdate has the most features.

MacUpdater maintains a database of over 100,000 Mac apps. The information you can get from within the app includes:

• File size
• Version number
• Release notes
• Developer website
• Price
• User rating
• OS requirements - and much more.

MacUpdater does not require an account to use the program. No data is collected or reported on its users. If you have apps that you do not want to update, you can filter them from appearing in your results. You can automatically back up the apps you have installed so that they are not overwritten, making it easy to go back to a previous version. You can use MacUpdater to identify if which apps on your Mac are Apple Silicon native if you are trying to eliminate any Rosetta apps. Each day MacUpdater reports on all of the programs in it's database that have recently received updates, providing a good opportunity to download new apps to try out. It also has a categorized set of lists of the the most popular apps, all of which you can download directly from within MacUpdater or the App Store.

MacUpdater can be used for free to scan for outdated apps. Updating more than 10 apps requires a license, which cost $8. There is also a pro edition that cost $18 and allows you to automate the identification and installation of updates. You can use it on up to seven Macs. It supports updating audio plugins and there is an Alfred workflow for it. Support is promised on all versions through 2026-01-01.

I wanted to create a central repository for all the personal data I’ve generated over the years in one location, searchable within a single program. I have a Gmail account that’s 19 years old with 144K messages. My Evernote account goes back to 2008 and has over 7K notes. In addition I have an Obsidian vault with another 7K notes plus an archive from Facebook beginning in 2008 and one from Twitter beginning in 2009. I have over 1K bookmarks in Raindrop.io and hundreds of personal documents primarily in Microsoft Office and PDF formats dating back to the mid-90s. The app I chose to create my personal database is EagleFiler by Command-C Software.

Using Google Takeout, I got an .mbox with all my old emails. I requested archives from social media sites. I created export files in Evernote and in Raindrio.io. The initial import process was fairly quick. Subsequent imports have been easy. Eagle creates a folder where you can place any type of document you want to have imported. When you open the program, everything in that folder is added to your primary database aka library.

Some of the things I really liked:

• All my tags from Evernote imported along with the original creation date of the notes
• Eagle created web archives for all of my bookmarks, giving me a static copy of many, many articles
• Bulk edits to imported documents make organizing easy
• Folder structure of notes is easy to manage
• I can edit text and RTF files within Eagle Filer
• I can search with Spotlight or using the app's native search
• Built in encryption

EagleFiler is $59.99 on the developer's website, but keep your eyes peeled for sales. It was recently included in Bundle Hunt for under $10.

There are several ways to batch open workspaces for various projects. The built in Apple tools, Shortcuts and Automator can do it for you if you know how to use them and don’t mind doing a bit of fiddling. Commercial apps like Workspaces ($19.99) have lots of features and a price tag. There are a couple of free options that are pretty easy to set up that support batch opening a variety of elements all at once.

Bunch

Bunch by Indy Developer Brett Terpstra uses plain text files to create collections of elements you want to open. On individual lines within a file ,you simply add a list off apps by name, files and folders via their path and web locations via their URL or as .webloc files. To name the workspace, you just enter a comment with a hashtag at the top of the file e.g., #Blogging. If you want to close certain apps when you open the workspace, you add them to the list preceded by an exclamation point, e.g. !Safari. You save the text files into a folder that defaults as a subfolder in your ~/Documents. The primary interface for Bunch is the menu bar icon. It has a few extra features like scheduling, hiding open apps and the ability to create a bunch from elements already open on your computer. Bunch is free and seems to be perpetually in Beta. There is extensive, helpful, well written documentation.

Stapler

A recent addition to the field is Stapler, although it’s based on a 32-year old classic Mac app of the same name. Stapler provides you with its own blank interface where you can add elements via drag-and-drop or from the menu bar. You save that list as a .stapled file and open the included elements by opening the file and pressing enter. Stapler is currently free.

Permute by Charlie Monroe (developer of Downie) makes media conversion simple regardless of whether you need to manipulate images, video or audio. Its simple drag and drop interface instantly identifies the media you are working with and uses presets to convert the file to the format you want.

Permute does not require you to download any plugins for video conversion. It can convert FLV or MP4 files natively into dozens of other formats and vice versa. The current version of Permute is 3x faster than previous versions. If you have multiple videos to convert, the app has a scheduler so that you can do the conversions during off hours instead of pegging out your CPU while you are trying to do other work. Another valuable feature is Permute’s ability to merge videos so that if you have a part one and a part two, a simple right-click > Merge is all you need to make a single file.

Audio files can be turned into Apple Lossless or FLAC using the same simple drag and drop interface. If you have a video that you want to save just the audio portion of, Permute can easily do that as well.

Permute can turn PDFs into multiple image files, one per page if you need that functionality. It can also do the opposite, turning a folder full of image files into a single PDF.

There are so many other great features in Permute - adjust volume of an audio file or an audio track in a video. Batch-resize, rotate and flip images and videos, convert images to text. And more. When used in conjunction with Downie, you can auto format the downloaded videos for the device where you intend to watch them.

Permute is available on the developer’s website and from the App Store for $14.99. There is no current difference in the two versions. It is also available from Setapp.

The built in firewall in macOS only controls incoming traffic. If you want to stop apps from calling home or contacting unknown servers, you’ll need a third-party firewall. You have choices based on the degree of control and the features you need or want. The following area all marketed as consumer firewalls and are designed to provide services on a single Mac.

Little Snitch

Little Snitch from Objective Development offers the most comprehensive set of features. You can set it up so that it notifies you of every new or changed connection forcing you to make a choice to allow or deny it. You can also let it run in silent mode and review the connections later, choosing which ones to prohibit. Little Snitch provides maps and graphs that show you where your outgoing traffic is going with information on IP addresses, ports and protocols. You can import lists of IP addresses and domains from known bad actors to automatically block them but be careful. Sometimes legitimate services like analytics you may have running on your own web sites end up getting blocked. A single license for Little Snitch will set you back $59.

LuLu

LuLu from Objective-See is a free and open-source product. When you install it, it defaults to permitting traffic to all of the apps you already have installed and to all Apple apps. Thereafter, when a new connection is detected, LuLu will ask if you want to grant permanent or temporary access to the app. If you want to block any of your existing apps, you can add or edit rules for them.

Radio Silence

Radio Silence is a well-designed Mac app that operates totally behind the scenes unless you summon it There’s no dock or menu bar icon. When you summon the app and let it run, it keeps a list of every app, daemon and process that accesses the Internet, along with info on ports, protocols and IP addresses. You can go through the list and choose which ones you want to block. Like LuLu, you can also manually add apps to the block list. Radio Silence is $9 and comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. A single license can be used on all the Macs you own.

Lockdown Privacy Desktop

If you want a free, open-source firewall with preconfigured rules that places a minimal load on your computer, Lockdown Privacy Desktop and its companion iOS app Lockdown Privacy Ad Blocker VPN do a great job on both platforms. The setup procedure is minimal, and the basic configuration is done for you. Lockdown also lets you create custom rules and is capable of blocking any site. It does not block apps like the other titles in this review, however you can run it in conjunction with LuLu or Radio Silence. It comes with rules pre-configured to block:

• Amazon Trackers
• Crypto mining
• Data Trackers
• Email Trackers
• Facebook Trackers
• Game marketing
• General marketing
• Google shopping
• Marketing trackers
• Ransomware
• Reporting
• Snapchat trackers
• WhatsApp trackers

German developer Martin Lexow who recently released Polycapture has a couple of other interesting apps for some niche use cases such as screen recording videos for tutorials or other training materials. They may also be useful for anyone doing presentations or extensive screen sharing via Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. These are professional level tools. They are a little costly to fit into the “just cool to have” category, but they could be very useful to add a nice touch when used in the right circumstance.

The first app is Keystroke Pro, an app for displaying on screen the keys you are using on your keyboard. It’s extremely customizable. It’s available in the app Store for $19.99.

• Customize key shapes, colors, and keycap sizes
• Displays keypress animations
• Customizable display duration
• Display modes, like modifier keys only detection
• Predefined positions on the screen, where the app will display your keystrokes.
• Multi-monitor support
• Lightweight menu bar app
• Apple Shortcuts. support
• Quick-toggle: Option-click on the app icon to enable/disable

The second app is Cursor Pro, an app that places a halo around your cursor and has a magnification function (up to 20x) activated by a keystroke. It's available in the App Store for $14.99.

• Select shape, size, and colors
• Choose border weight, style, and glow
• Animations make it clear at first glance which interaction is currently taking place.
• Magnifier. Set up a magnifying key, choose a zoom factor, define magnifier quality and its size.
• Stays out of the way be deactivating when no motion is detected
• Lightweight menu bar app
• Autostart. Launch the app automatically on login.
• Customizable keyboard shortcut
• Apple Shortcuts support
• Quick-toggle: Option-click on the app icon to enable/disable

I was happy when Raycast implemented a feature that would automatically quit apps after a specified period of inactivity. I was not happy when I found that the feature didn’t work reliable on either my M2 MBA or my M3 iMac. Although I had certain apps set to quite after five minutes of inactivity, they would just never quit. After some experimentation, I decided to ignore the feature as it had proved to be a waste of time.

Luckily, I remembered that wunderkind developer, Marco Arment, the guy behind Tumblr, Instapaper and the popular podcast player Overcast once offered a free app that would do what Raycast promised but failed to deliver. The app is called Quitter and it is still available from his website, although it has not been updated since 2021. Never fear, though. I tested it with macOS 15 Sequoia and several apps to see what it would do. 

The Quitter interface is simple. You can add as many apps as you want. With each app you pick a length of time before you want the program to take action. You can choose to hide or quit the app after that the time has elapsed. The Quitter interface is accessed from the menu bar, and it must be running there in order for it to take action.

I wanted to see if it would work on a progressive web app if I was otherwise using the browser and to my great surprise it did. If you can’t get Raycast to perform as promised to quit unused apps for you, Try Quitter.

Reminders Menu Bar

Access your Apple Reminders from the menu bar without having to open the app with this free attractive Swift app that looks like it’s a native.

• All interactions happen through the menu bar interface
• Instantly sync with Apple Reminders
• Choose the list you want when creating reminders
• Set due date using natural language
• Toggle reminders complete/incomplete
• Edit, remove or move reminders to different lists
• See upcoming reminders
• Filter using lists or status

You can download the latest version from GitHub or install via Homebrew. There are versions for light mode and dark mode. The first time you use the app you will be asked to grant it permission to access Apple Reminders. For users of Open Core Legacy Patcher, a workaround (detailed on GitHub) may be needed.

Underload

If seeing a long list of to-do items is depressing or overwhelming to you, you might want to try the Mac or IOS version of Underload, an app designed to present you with one task at a time from Apple Reminders. When you open the app, it presents you with a task from your lists. You can choose to work on that task or cycle through your tasks until you find one you want to tackle. Youn narrow the scope to a particular list if you choose to. You can also click a button to be given a task at random. If you want to see a quick overview of everything. you can open Apple Reminders from within Underload with the click of a button. You can also create tasks from within Underload and assign them to a list with a note and a priority (but not a due date). Underload is $2.99 on the Mac App Store.

If your music provider is Spotify, Apple Music, or Doppler, you are in luck because those services are compatible with a delightful heads-up display music player called Sleeve for macOS. Sleeve is an extremely customizable floating interface for controlling and configuring your music playback.

When your music is playing, Sleeve activates, and you can customize almost every element of the player:

• Theme
• Layout
• Artwork
• Interface
• Track Info
• Window position (including a float-on-top option)

Sleeve offers user-definable keyboard shortcuts to play, pause, select tracks, control volume, and mark a track as a favorite. Additionally, it can scrobble your listened-to music to Last.fm when you reach a user-defined percentage of playing a song, defaulting to 50%.

You can buy Sleeve directly from the developer for $5.99 with no subscriptions and no IAPs.

You can also get it on the Mac App Store for $7.99.

If you want a simple and free heads-up player, check out Quick Tune.

This morning, I got a tip from Carlo Zottmann, the developer of Actions for Obsidian. He let my know about Polycapture, a new app he’d just discovered.

Instabuy:

PolyCapture for Mac lets you to record webcams, microphones, screens, and apps — individually or simultaneously.

Record webcams, capture cards, iOS devices, microphones, entire screens, specific screen areas or individual app windows — all within a standout, pristine user interface. Freemium, the full version is a weirdly low $8.99 one-time payment. 

I immediately downloaded the app and put it through its paces. It does exactly what he promised. After launching I had to grant several permissions, including, of course, screen recording and microphone. Setting up a session to include the built in web cam, a portion of the screen (whole screen capture is also an option), the built in microphone and the system audio took less than a minute. Adding my iPhone using the Continuity Camera took seconds more. The resulting recording gave me four files: three .mov files from the two cameras and the screen recording and one audio file in .caf format (core audio file which opens with Garage Band by default.) The combined disk space of the raw files from a 27 second recording session was 47MB. I did not use macOS’s built-in video effects, such as Portrait Mode, Studio Light, Center Stage, and Reactions, although they are all options on supported cameras.

The free version of Polycapture lets you make video up to three minutes long. The IAP opens up unlimited lengths.

As for privacy, the developer states “PolyCapture prioritizes your privacy. Your recordings and all related metadata remain offline, on your device, where they belong. Everything is processed on your Mac.”

The App Store link for Polycapture is here.

The developer’s landing page is here. Polymath was developed by Martin Lexow on behalf of App ahead GmbH.

Dato by indy developer Sindre Sorhus is a powerful multi-featured menu bar calendar app that complements full featured calendars like Fantastical or Busy Cal. Like most apps by this developer, it is remarkable for the customization options and the way it fulfills so many needs. You have your choice of features to enable, and the display can be as feature filled or as minimal as you desire.

Dato's Features Include:

• Video call notifications
• Next appointment in your menu bar
• Full screen notifications
• Floating clock
• World clocks
• Customizable calendars
• Quick entry for new events
• Time calculators
• Multiple icon choices
• Multiple calendar support
• Sound affects optional
• Week numbers
• Reminders support
• Automatically removes duplicate events
• Supports all calendar services that the built-in Calendar app supports (iCloud, Google, Outlook, etc).

Dato offers extensive time zone support. You can set as many time zones as you want in the settings and you can label them however you want. Time zones can be made visible in the menu bar or in the drop down. There are 15,000 cities in Dato's time zone database and it is available even if you are offline.

Dato offers a free trial here. If you decide you like it and want to purchase it, then you’ll need to get the App Store version, which will cost you $14.

If all you want is another clock in your menu bar, try Second Clock. If you want a simple and free menu bar calendar with fewer features, try Itsycal.

I have been installing VLC on computers at work for over 20 years, it's been a standard part of the image in K12 and higher ed schools for such a long time because it just works. You can throw just about any type of video file at it and VLC will play it. Whenever someone tries to use something else and runs into a problem, I generally won't help them unless they try to use VLC first. So, you can imagine that I was rather dubious when I first encountered IINA, a free and open-source video and audio player. I do have to admit that it is way better looking. VLC is still rocking that Windows XP vibe and IINA has a sleek, post-Yosemite native macOS design aesthetic. It is lovely to look at. When I looked into it, I found that it is a front end for two rock solid CLI video platforms ff-mpeg and mpv. It can play just about anything VLC can play.

Other IINA Features

• IINA is easy to customize. You can control playback speed, video rotation, aspect ratio adjustment, deinterlacing, and more.
• IINA plays online videos easily through URL support
• It has very strong sub-title support with built in search, language choice (be sure to set a default language in settings), size and adjustable timing
• Although it doesn't do editing, it can serve as a Quicktime replacement for playback
• Gesture control using a trackpad or Magic Mouse for most program features
• Supports picture in picture mode for multi-tasking

You can get IINA on the project's website or on GitHub.

When it comes to downloading from the internet there are several different scenarios. There is downloading torrent files and their payloads which requires a special application like Folx or qbittorrent to manage. Then there are specialized downloaders for video/audio content like Downie and ClipGrab. Then there are the run of the mill downloads usually handled by your browser. In some instances, though, you may want to consider an app like Neat Download Manager to gain a few benefits. Here is what Neat can do for you:

• Speed up downloads by segmenting the file and using your total available bandwidth
• Resume interrupted or crashed downloads
• Add pause/resume to your capabilities
• Integrates with browsers to begin downloads immediately, saving you a click
• Set bandwidth limits on downloads
• User interface to sort downloads into categories, record complete and incomplete downloads

With the browser extension installed, Neat has some limited functionality to detect audio and video files on web pages, where it will add a small window allowing you to select available files for downloading. In my testing with Chromium browsers and Firefox, it did not work on YouTube and was hit or miss on other sites. Using a dedicated media downloader will provide better results.

I have been using a Backup Status widget to keep track of my Time machine backups but with the release of Sequoia it has stopped functioning. The next best tool in my arsenal to monitor backups is The Time Machine Mechanic, a free utility from the Eclectic Light Company. The Time Machine Mechanic is designed to work on computers with an attached Time Machine Drive performing hourly or daily backups. It translates system logs and gives you information on:

• Errors
• Backup regularity
• Free space
• Number and size of files backed up

If you download from the website, you also get a PDF with detailed information on reading the report if you need it. You can also install via Homebrew using the command 

brew install --cask thetimemachinemechanic

Evernote was once a giant of an app, beloved by millions and one of the first cross platform tools to achieve widespread use. The productivity culture adored it and people like Tiago Forte, the author Building a Second Brain, made it central to their methodology. The company was sold to Italian developers Bending in Spoons in 2022, firing almost all of the US staff. It went incommunicado for months. Evernote’s dwindling user base didn’t know what to do.

When the company did begin to communicate again, it was to announce a gargantuan price hike and the gutting of their once extremely popular free plan. Today, the cheapest plan is $130 a year. The free plan is limited to 50 notes on one device. Although legacy users can still access all the notes they created in the past, many complain that the user experience is marred by constant pop-ups asking them to become paying customers. The Evernote subreddit is almost all complaints and people asking for ideas on alternatives.

To its credit, Bending Spoons has made a valiant effort in 2024 to add extra value for its remaining subscribers. Calendar integration now includes Google and Outlook. Other new features include:

• Table of contents
• Daily Notes
• Slash commands
• Quote blocks
• Collapsible Notes
• Revamped mobile app
• Redesigned tasks
• File management
• Voice-to-text
• Improved import features
• Metadata improvements

Many former users have moved to free and low-cost alternatives like Obsidian, Joplin, Notion and One Note. I am currently in what will be the last year of an Evernote subscription. I migrated most of my 7000 notes accumulated since 2008 to Obsidian months ago. It's nice to see what Bending Spoons is doing with the app, but it's not worth what they ask for a subscription.

I’ve been experimenting with GUI apps for Homebrew this year. Whenever I’ve posted about them, other have encouraged me to try Cork, by independent developer David Bureš, and so I purchased a license a few weeks ago and I have been using it ever since. Installation was straightforward but I learned as I was setting it up that even though I have an M2 MBA, I was still running Homebrew for Intel because I used Migration Assistant from a 2020 MBP Pro to set things up when I first got the MBA. I was able to generate a brewfile (a type of backup record) from the old setup and import it into the ARM version of Homebrew and Cask confirmed that I had the same number of formulae and taps. Getting the casks (GUI apps like Firefox, Notion, Alt+Tab) was a little more labor intensive but didn’t take long. The Cork developer helped me figure all this out via email.

Once I had Cork set up, I was able to see all its features, which are plentiful. The first thing you notice is the Cork home screen which lists the number of formulae, taps and casks you have installed. When you launch the program, it checks for any available updates, and you can choose to install them or not on an individual basis.

When you click on a formula the in sidebar, you are given info on the currently installed version number, what it is a dependency of, which tap it came from, the homepage where more info can be found, when it was installed and its size. You can also uninstall the formula from this screen or choose to lock yourself to the current version number if you don’t want it to check for updates. You can also right-click on the formula in the sidebar to get options to view the Finder location, purge the formula or tag it.

You can click on the plus sign in the menu bar to add a formula or cask, which you can search for by name. If you don’t find what you are looking for, you can add the tap by name where your package resides.

Cork has a built in maintenance feature that uninstalls orphaned packages, purges the Homebrew cache, deletes downloaded installation files and performs a health check on your installation.

You can get more information about Cork on its GitHub page.

You can download a demo of Cork or purchase it for €25 at the dev’s website. 

I’m not a developer  but I do like to use Homebrew and make tweaks to my system that require frequent use of the Terminal. I’m a long-time user of iTerm 2 which is perfect for a user like me.

Some of the features I enjoy are:

• Finder integration via Services menu
• Split panes (inactive pane is dimmed)
• Open a dedicated Terminal window with a hotkey from within any other app
• Robust search with highlighting and regular expressions
• Autocomplete
• Copy mode (with keyboard)
• Paste history
• Replay mode to see text erased from what's in view
• Configurability
• Color implementation
• Mouse Integration
• Notification Center integration
• Profiles for connecting to different hosts
• Timestamps for every line it terminal
• Built in password manager

iTerm 2 is free and the source code is available on the developer's website.

I recently discovered an app that I use on my iMac at work for background sounds. Noizio, an app from developer Kyrylo Kovalin has a free and paid version. the free version offers five nature sounds that can be combined into 25 distinct tracks. The paid version is $9.99 in the Mac App Store (also available on Setapp).

The paid version has 40 different sounds: Birds in Park, Blue Whales, Campfire, City Street, Clock, Deep Space, Desert, Farm, Frogs and Crickets, Ghosty, Heartbeat, Inside Train, Keyboard Typing, Kitty Purr, Magical Chimes, Night Owls, October Rain, Old Typewriter, Paris, Cafe, Pink Noise, Playground, River Stream, Sailing Yacht, Sea Waves, Ship Hull, Space Drone, Subway, Summer Night, Sunny Day, Thunderstorm, Tropical Birds, Vinyl Cracks, White Noise, Wind Chimes, Winter Wind, Alpha Waves, Beta Waves, Gamma Waves, Delta Waves, Theta Waves.

You can choose a single sound or any combination and save the mix as a custom loop. Noizio has a master volume but each sound also has it’s own volume control so you can really fine tune what you hear. The mixes are played in a continuous loop, although you can set a timer to have them quit whenever you want. You can use the app offline, so it’s perfect for providing background noise even when you are away from wi-fi.

Noizio has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times and has a 4.8 satisfaction rating in the App Store. It does not collect any data about you.