AppAddict Newsletter

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.

XnConvert is a free and powerful application for batch editing and conversion of graphics files. It can handle 500 different kinds of input files and it outputs over 70 different formats. It allows you to save any task sequence of combined settings to include edits, output format, naming convention and output location. You can perform batch operations of over 80 actions.

Some of the image modifications include:

• Cropping
• Resizing
• Watermarking 
• Clearing metadata

Mapping edits include:

• White balance
• Saturation
• Contrast
• Sepia

Filters Include:

• Sharpen
• Unsharp mask
• Edge Detection
• Gaussian Blur

Miscellaneous edits include:

• Vignetting
• Borders
• Film Simulation
• Oil painting

I gave it 15 files of various images with formats of jpg, png, and webp. I told it to resize every image to 900 pixels wide, sharpen, vignette and save the final product as webp. It took about 10 seconds. 

It can output files, compressed files, straight to email or to FTP. The program has been converted to over 20 languages. It supports macOS 10.12 and later. It was last updated 10 months ago. The developer’s website has more info. You can download the app from the Mac App Store.

I’ve never found a use for most window management tools. I work on a laptop at home and run most apps maximized. At work I have two gigantic displays and in instances where I need to reference two apps at once, I just slide over to the other display. There are times however when I want to be able to get to my desktop quickly and when I want a single app display with no distraction. Additionally, I have been using an app called DockDoor to view the open windows of apps in the dock, a feature that’s included in Wins.

After downloading and installing Wins, I’m impressed with the way it can be customized and how well it works with keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures. I’m going to experiment with some of the features to see if they will improve my workflow.

Features

• Shake a window to hide other windows.
• Access an overlay of suggested window positions by dragging windows to it.
• Integrates with System Settings.
• Move windows, including to another display, with the keyboard.
• Hide windows with keyboard shortcuts.
• Drag windows to snap.
• Hide all windows with the keyboard.
• Low memory and CPU usage
• Dark mode interface to match system
• Keyboard shortcuts for multiple window positions

A single license for Wins is $13.99. A second license if half off. Educators and students get a 40% discount.

In today’s connected environment notifications can be vital or they can be an unwelcome hinderance. It’s different for each individual. Personally, I don’t get so many that it interferes with my work, and I prefer to find out someone is attempting to contact me as soon as possible. I operate my Macs with the dock hidden, so relying on notifications there isn’t useful to me. Badgeify, a freemium app from Techflow Studio Limited provides a menu bar-based notification system I find useful. Any app that uses the Mac notification system can be added to Badgeify. In my own use case, I chose five apps:

• Apple Messages
• Facebook Messenger
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Outlook (with three email accounts)
• Discord

You can choose how the icons are displayed in the menu bar, always shown, transparent when inactive or hidden when inactive. You can also choose to have the icons hidden unless there is a notification, which is what I went with. Clicking on an icon switches to or launches the app. Only active apps display notifications.

I was satisfied with the default application icons, which display in color. but if matching aesthetics are important to you, you can choose custom monochrome menu bar icons.

Badgeify is free for up to three apps with limited choices on icon display. A single computer license is $19 and a two-computer license is $29. Both of these options feature unlimited apps and your choice of icon display options. It is fully compatible with menu bar management apps like Bartender, Ice and Hidden Bar. Badgeify is compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina and all later versions.

Badgeify is based on Doll, a free app available on GitHub.

When it comes to PDF software, people have very different needs. Some casual users may want nothing more than the ability to make a few notes and occasionally combine documents, while those working in legal offices are very, very particular about how their PDFs look on screen and when printed, with details like fonts, bolding and italics being very important. The corporate king of PDF editors is Adobe Acrobat Professional but it has a number of drawbacks. It’s expensive, huge and like all adobe products invasive and hard to get rid of. I am not a fan.

I am very much a fan of PDF Gear, available for free on the App Store. It’s worth a look for anyone at any level who needs document conversion, merging, separation or merging. If you can overcome dependance on the bloated expensive monstrosity from Adobe, you might end up very pleased.

PDF Gear offers a plethora of features for the average and power user:

• View and Print
• Annotate
• Stamp
• Signature
• Bookmark
• Converter
• Page Editor
• Compress 
• Form Fill
• OCR

It has numerous AI features allowing you to describe what you want to do in natural language and to ask questions about your document. Because it's free, some have concerns about its privacy policy, however the only thing it does is collect usage data not connected to your identity. The developers have stated that they may charge for the use of certain features in the future, but they've been saying that for a while and so far have not acted on it.

Activity Watch is a free no effort time tracker that can keep track of how long you use every app on you Mac while running in the background. You can categorize your apps so that you can see how much time you spent working, gaming, choosing music or watching video. There are browser extensions that work with it to break down your time per tab if you desire that kind of granularity. The app runs in the background and the results can be viewed in your browser at localhost:5600. It is open source, cross platform, privacy first and a great alternative to services like RescueTime, ManicTime, and WakaTime. 

Aside from the informative reports and graphics in the web interface, you can also download all the data collected as JSON files. Other useful features include a built-in stopwatch for you to use as you see fit and a timeline view.

The views available on the report page include:

• Top Applications
• Top Window Titles
• Top Categories
• Category Tree
• Top Browser URLs
• Top Editor Files

One of the more useful Homebrew apps I’ve found is topgrade-rs, the currently maintained fork of topgrade, an updater for Homebrew, the Mac App Store, MacOS, VSCode extensions and Rust. It is supremely easy to use. Just enter the command

 topgrade 

in Terminal and sit back while it does the upgrades, starting with Homebrew, Homebrew formulae and casks. 

Next it moves onto the Mac App Store. You can run Mac App Store commands separately and there are a few bugs to note there. If the MAS database for version number does not match what the app actually has, then the app will download and install every time you run 

mas upgrade 

or topgrade. You can also run 

mas list

 to see everything you have downloaded from the MAS, to include a separate list of apps that are no longer being maintained, useful if you want to remove them from your system.

Next, topgrade checks to see if there are any updates available from Apple for macOS. If so, it stops and offers you the yes/no choice to install the upgrade.

Finally, it moves to Rust and VSCode extensions.

I find topgrade an easy thing to run frequently. There are no fancy commands or switches to remember. Converting as many of my apps as possible over to Homebrew casks was easy enough using the GUI Homebrew App Store, Applite and now keeping them updated is easy using topgrade.