AppAddict Newsletter

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. 

I’ve tried a variety of task manager apps over the years: Omnifocus, 2Do, Evernote, Apple Reminders, Remember the Milk, ToodleDo, Wunderlist/Microsoft To Do, Google Tasks. I’ve also tried managing things personally and professionally without a task manager and just trying really hard to remember everything, LOL. Sob.

I spent the most time and money on Omnifocus. Not only did I purchase the Mac, iPad and iOS versions, I also bought books, online courses and training videos.  I was managing the computer networks and workstation inventory of five large high schools with multiple work orders per site along with outsourced repairs, AV equipment, supporting the cafeteria POS systems and the front office student information system. My point is my job generated a lot of work for me to keep track of. Unfortunately, Omnifocus was not the right tool. It was too rigid, too technical and just too, too much.

I retired from public education in 2020 and now work in a low stress environment at a private university smaller than some of the high schools I used to manage. I’m not in charge of anything, I just provide end user support. It is glorious. I use Things 3 as a task manager these days. I have it on my personal Mac, my work machine, my iPhone and my iPad. Things 3 is a two-time Apple design award winner. One of the best parts about using a Mac is visually appealing, well-designed software. Reviews for Things 3 are universally positive from respected tech outlets like Mac Stories, The Verge, Wirecutter, The Sweet Setup, Wired, iMore, The Brooks Review and the App Store Editor’s Choice.

Things 3 does everything I need:

• Import from Apple Reminders where I use voice commands and Siri to create to dos, 
• Let me create areas of responsibility (e.g., work home, errands)
• Extensive tagging of tasks and projects
• Different dates for starting and completing tasks
• Repeating Tasks
• Workday/Evening tasks for the same day
• Easy to view upcoming tasks
• Integration with other productivity apps like Obsidian, Drafts, Raycast and Shortcuts
• Keyboard driven
• Easy to use quick find function
• Private cloud syncing

There are three areas to consider about Things 3 that don't cause big smiley faces:

• It does not have location-based reminders via geofencing
• It has not had a major version update in several years
• Each app must be bought separately per OS: macOS- $49.99. iPadOS - $19.99, iOS.Apple Watch - $9.99

And, of course, there is that one guy on Reddit who really doesn't like it. There is a whole community there of folks devoted to it.

But, the Reddit guy is easy to ignore. The lack of geofencing is bothersome but there are work arounds. The product has had numerous incremental upgrades and is in a mature design stage. As far as the cost, well, it is on par with other professional level apps. Omnifocus Pro is $149.99 to cover every platform.

If you want to use technology to manage your life’s task and you want to use one of the best designed Mac programs in existence, get Things 3.

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The macOS finder is a decent enough file manager, but there is a considerable market for file managers with extra features. I’ve been a dedicated Path Finder user for a couple of decades, but every once in awhile a like to try out what else is available from other apps like ForkLift,  Commander One and most recently Qspace,  a controversial favorite of many Redditors.

Qspace is controversial because it is by a Chinese developer, Tian Wenda and because it phones home on occasion, ostensibly to ensure licensing requirements. You can make your determination on your comfort level with either of those factors. Personally, I’m fine on both counts

There are two different versions of Qspace available, an App Store version for $12.99 and a version you can download from the developer’s website for $13.99 which comes with a 30-day trial and extra features like a separate desktop, 100% file manageability, workflow services and certain terminal services. Both versions have aftermarket plugins for a file shelf, advanced batch rename, server connections and enhanced archiver.

Qspace is a full featured and mature application with dozens of features that you really need to use to understand and I suggest taking advantage of the 30-day free trial to do so.

My 10 Favorite Features Are:
1. There are 12 different multi-pane layouts
2. The address bar supports auto-completion of manually entered file paths
3. Quick switching to Terminal to access the current folder (supports iterm and other custom Terminal)
4. Extremely customizable context menu
5. Custom keyboard shortcuts
6. Custom toolbar
7. Custom new file templates
8. Full color labels for file names
9. Browser archive contents like browsing a folder
10. Stash shelf

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For years I used A Better Finder Rename from Public Space for renaming jobs of huge amounts of photos and other industrial sized tasks. It’s a capable app and does the job. It’s also $29.99. Recently I discovered TRANSNOMINO by indy developer Bastiaan Verreijt, a renaming utility that does the job every bit as good for me and its free. It offers renaming based on factors as simple as text replacement to complex replacements based on regular expressions and text-based file attributes.

Currently TRANSNOMINO supports:

• Find and Replace text with wildcard support
• Find and Replace using Regular Expressions.
• Insert text.
• Prefix, to add text to the beginning of filenames.
• Suffix, to add text to the end of filenames.
• Set, to directly set the filenames to a specific value.
• Numbering.
• Trim, to trim off a number of characters from the start or end of filenames
• Case changes like Upper/lower-case
• Removal of diacritics (e.g. converting é to e).
• Conversion to windows compatible filenames.
• Select, to make a sub selection of loaded files to be used by subsequent renaming actions

TRANSNOMINO has a CLI version. It also has automation features that allow you to use AppleScript and built in Mac native folder actions to automatically rename any and all files you place in certain preconfigured folders. Example scripts and CLI nomenclature are provided on the automation page of the developer's website.

TRANSNOMINO can use file attribute data not only to name files, but also to set up the path and directory structure of files. For example, if you have taken a bunch of photos with a GPS enables DSLR, you can have photos taken at the same location automatically grouped in folders according to latitude and longitude information.

One final killer feature is the ability to save your renaming sequences as recipes to be used later.

Download TRANSNOMINO at the developer’s website.

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In Windows, when you hover over an app on the taskbar, the operating system shows you the open windows for that app, a useful feature missing in macOS until now with the introduction of the free menu bar app DockDoor.

Installing DockDoor requires granting access to Accessibility and Screen Recording settings. You can install if by downloading it from GitHub or through Homebrew. Once you have it installed and running with the proper permissions, you will see a pop-up preview of the apps window (or windows) when you hover over the app in the dock, regardless of where you place the dock in your workspace. I have mine on the left side of the screen.

If you choose to use it, the included window switcher moves between open Windows (not just between apps like the macOS default). I already use an app for window switching (Alt+Tab) and have it configured with shortcuts I like so I turned off this functionality in DockDoor.

When you activate DockDoor from the dock, four traffic light buttons appear in the window pop-up, each with a different function.

• 🟣 Quit the window's app. You can hold the Option (⌥) key while clicking to **force** quit.
• 🔴 Close the window
• 🟡 Minimize the window
• 🟢 Enter the window to full screen

DockDoor is highly customizable as seen in the preference windows below.

Later is a Mac menu bar app that saves and restores any workspace easily. You may want to save a workspace for several reasons:

• To save battery life by closing your open apps while transporting your laptop
• To take a break
• To work on a different project with different apps
• To take screenshots for a document
• To share your screen in a meeting

With Later you can choose to hide or close your open apps. You can exclude system apps (Finder, System Settings, App Store, Activity Monitor) from being affected. There are four presets for reopening your apps (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours) and you can manually restore them from hiding or a closed state with the click of a button.

Later was created by developer Alyssa X who has since turned the source code and the project over the the FOSS community. You can download Later on Github.  There are multiple forks of the original code.

Later triggered a Little Snitch warning by trying to connect to a web address I did not recognize, and it requested permission to access areas of my computer I didn’t see a reason for it to access. I denied all the requests without affecting the functionality of the app. I further inspected the app’s security features and found that it is not notarized, and it has an ad-hoc signature. For these reasons I cannot recommend this app.

I run several updaters regularly as part of my maintenance routine. It may seem redundant, but even my favorite updater doesn’t pick up 100% of what is available at any given time.

The two I use most frequently are

• Mac Updater from Core Code - a buy once (no subscription) app with lots of features including release notes, links to the title's home page, automatic updates for most programs, app store links and more.
• Latest from Max Codes - a free app that catches app updates that Mac Updater sometimes misses.

I occasionally run the app updater in CleanMy Mac X and sure enough, it has found apps that the other two missed.

The Mac App Store is supposed to update apps you purchase there automatically but most find that it sometimes runs days and days behind. Both Mac updater and Latest check Mac App Store Apps so I was really surprised recently when I discovered even they miss some releases. The best way to find these missed apps, is through the CLI for the Mac App Store (MAS), which I run through a great, free tool called Topgrade. Topgrade also updates all my Homebrew packages, runs the update command for the MAS and check for any OS updates.

I now have a weekly reminder in Things 3 to fire up iTerm to run Topgrade.

To double check that no Homebrew updates are still pending, I use the Brew extension in Raycast.

I make use of SSB (site specific browsers) for several websites: Gmail, YouTube and most frequently, Inoreader, the great RSS provider whose web site is better than any RSS app I have ever used. These days, mainstream browsers like Safari and Edge have native SSB functionality, but it is rudimentary and lacking in bells and whistles.

The benefits of using an SSB are many:
Simplified user experience

Focused interface
Streamlined navigation

Improved performance

Reduced resource consumption
Dedicated processing

Security and privacy

Reduced surface attack
Isolated browser experience
Controlled access

I have experimented with two titles from BZG apps, Unite 5 and Coherence X 4. 

Unite 5 is based on WebKit and turns websites into native Mac apps. It offers deep customization, including ad blocking, colors, fonts, titles, buttons, icons and more. The apps it creates are typically in the range of 15mb. By itself, Unite 5 is $29.99.

Coherence X 4 is based on Chromium. It uses the engine from Chrome, Brave, Canary Edge and Opera.It can use some (but not all) extensions and bring in your prferences from your the profiles you have already created in the browsers. SSBs usually weigh in at 90mb or greater, especially if you bring in many extensions and settings. By itself, Coherence X 4 is $29.99.

Both apps can be purchased in a bundle for $49.99 or they can both be obtained through Setapp. The developer’s web site is here.

I have long relied on the Mac power user’s file management automation app Hazel by Noodlesoft to handle tag related tasks for me, but at $42 for a single user license, it might be a little rich for some who don’t need all of its functionality.  For those who simply want to automate some of their basic tagging chores, Little Tagger by indy developer Dennis Schäfer, which I just learned about, might just do the trick but read carefully.

Little Tagger works from saved profiles you create based on a menu-based interface. The profiles are saved presets that are reusable. Tagging works in single files or on whole folder trees you drag into the program interface or import via a keyboard combo. It defaults to the last used profile, but you can easily delay execution to edit the profile or select a different one. Not only can Little Tagger add tags to files, it can also remove them. It uses your already created finder tags as a base but allows you to create new ones with having to go to Finder to do so. Little Tagger features a tag cloud feature that you can activate and use to drag and drop files onto. If you’re partial to a keyboard centric workflow, you can do almost every action in the app without touching the mouse.

One drawback to the program is that it has not been updated since 2022. The developer’s web site has information about a fuller featured product he’s working on, but it appears to be separate app and not an upgrade. No pricing info for the new app is offered, but there appear to be beta invitations available. Little Tracker’s privacy policy states that the developer does not track any data at all from the app. It is an $8.99 one-time purchase in the App Store.  My recommendation would be to see if you can get in on the beta of the developer’s app in progress unless he updates this one before then.

Each of us gets to decide how to protect our privacy on the Internet, and no one’s opinion matters but our own. If you are looking for tools to enhance your security and use mainstream cloud storage, you should download and install Cryptomator. This tool provides end-to-end file encryption for files in any cloud service, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, etc. Without encryption, the cloud provider can potentially access and share your files with third parties by simply changing their privacy policy. In the event of a security breach, all bets are off.

Cryptomator is a free and open-source app that allows you to create a secure vault on your computer using 256-bit AES encryption. You can add this vault to the files you sync with your cloud provider. When you need to access the files, you do so from your mounted vault, and Cryptomator decrypts them on the fly for you. On your computer, the vault appears as a new volume in the file system, while the cloud provider only sees the encrypted vault.

The Mac version of Cryptomator is free, as are the Windows and Linux versions. The iOS version is free for read-only access and costs $12.99 for all features, including the ability to write files.