AppAddict Newsletter

I don’t see my desktop during my working moments, but when I lock my computer, I have a different wallpaper displayed on each of my monitors. I also have a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs when I unlock my computer and hides all open apps for privacy reasons in case someone is. standing behind me when I go back to work. For the past eight months, I’ve relied on 24 Hour Wallpaper from Jetson Creative to provide me with full 5K wallpapers with a variety of professional quality images.

The app changes the displayed image to reflect the sunlight conditions outdoors, although it can be offset if desired. There are 125 full-sized 5K images available so frequent repition is not a problem. I get a different image on each monitor, which is the default behavion, but it can be changed. I usually just let the images rotate using the default program settings but there are different categories to choose from for anyone who wants a specific type of photo including:

• Artistic
• Astronomy
• Big Sur
• Catalina Island
• Cityscapes
• Desertscapes
• Fall Colors
• Mojave Desert
• Monterey Bay
• Naturescapes
• Ventura
• Watercolor
• Winterscapes
• Yosemite

There is minimal CPU, GPU, and Battery use. Your computer only engages with the app when wallpaper is download or changing.

You can download 24 Hour Wallpaper for free on the App Store with three images included. More can be purchased through IAPs. The program and the entire catalog of images are available on Setapp. 

Start by Innovative Bytes is an app launcher with extra features that make it different enough from FolderPeek  and XMenu to be worth checking out. Like the other two apps, it offers a way to access your favorite apps, folders, files and URLs from the menu bar. It also lets you access your shortcuts, which is a welcome addition. Like the Apple Menu, you can add recent files, recent apps as well as running apps to your menu choices.

What really makes Start different is its use of tags. It uses Spotlight to assign a few of your apps to tags it creates automatically. For example, it created a tag called Office with subfolders for Microsoft and Apple’s productivity suites. You can rename the tags easily and you can create your own on the fly. You can choose different icons and colors to differentiate them. You can also make comments on any app and the tags and comments are searchable from within the app. Right-clicking on an item in the Start menu also gives you the option of revealing the item in the Finder or copying the path to the item.

You can designate any menu item as a favorite and then opt to have the menu open to those chosen items for quick access. You can also choose to have it open to any to the other submenus. Other view options include the ability to change the menu icon and the size of the program interface. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to any menu or menu item.

Like Folder Peek, you can use Start to browser the folders you include in the menu choice. You can’t perform any functions on the enclosed files beyond opening them, getting the path or adding them to your favorites.

Start is $8.99 on the App Store. It is also available through Setapp. 

Almighty, a collection of tweaks and utilities bundled into one app is by Khoa Pham, the same developer behind the popular low-priced clipboard manager PastePal.  There are 50 different settings and utilities in the app, and you can enable and disable at will. They can be launched from the menu bar or user configurable keyboard shortcuts. 

The utilities I found most interesting are ones that could potentially replace other standalone apps if you need basic functionality and not advanced features. 

• Emoji alias - allows you to type and create Slack-style emojis from the keyboard
• Emoji picker - puts an emoji picker in the menu bar, like Rocket
• Extract Text from images - similar to Text Sniper
• Hide Menu Bar Items - similar to Bartender, Hidden Bar and Barbee
• Increase Brightness - a feature of Better Display
• Keep Mac Awake - similar to Amphetamine
• Mechanical Keyboard - makes sounds like Klack
• Mouse Jiggler - mimics several apps like Jiggler and iShake
• Preview Dock Window - similar to DockDoor
• Snap Windows - similar to Better Snap Tool
• Visualize Keystrokes - similar to Keystroke Pro

The version for sale on the developer's website is full-featured and goes for $19.99. The Mac App Store version has some limitations and is $15.99. It is also included as part of Setapp. The app has no analytics or data collection.

After seeing the developer of FlowVison, a free image viewer for macOS, post about his new app on Reddit, I downloaded it and have been using it for the past week. The app has a Finder style interface similar to what you see when you enable icon view and enlarge the display size. Unlike Finder, you can open individual images within the app and scroll through them using the mouse or keyboard. You can also zoom in and out on the image and perform the “get info” action. You have a choice to run the app in light or dark mode or to match your system settings. When viewing files, you can elect to include or omit camera raw files and videos. The way that FlowVision presents files provides more options than Finder. Finder only shows images in a grid when in icon mode, but FlowVision offers a justified view and a waterfall view.

You can also rename, move and copy files from with FlowVison and open them with the app of your choice. It is compatible with utilities like DropOver.

FlowVison doesn’t provide any image manipulation tools, so it isn’t a replacement for Preview or ToyViewer but it is handy to bring up if you don’t want to change your Finder settings around. 

You can install FlowVison via Homebrew

brew tap netdcy/flowvision
brew install flowvision --no-quarantine

You can also download it from the developer's GitHub site. 

Folder Peek by heroic Indy Developer Sindre Sorhus is the GOAT of menu bar access apps. I liked XMenu from Devon Technologies, but Folder Peek has more features and is just as rock solid in performance. Folder Peek lets you put folders full of whatever you want on your menu bar. You can make a folder with app aliases for your most used apps or add your entire applications folder. Give your documents folder its own menu bar icon or add an alias of it to another folder. My personal setup is a single folder with aliases for:

• Home folder
• Documents
• Downloads
• Screenshots
• Approximately 20 apps

Where Folder Peek Shines is in performing actions on files in the folders you include.

• You can open files or show them in the finder
• You search for files by typing the name when the folder is open
• By using the option key, you can copy a file's path
• By using the option key you can get an image's dimensions
• You can move files to the trash, copy them or access the share menu
• By using the shift key on subfolders, you can get info or change the sort order

You can use Folder Peek to access links too. Drag and drop the URL from a browser address bar into a folder. You will end up with a file with a .webloc extension. When you click that file in Folder Peek, it will open in your default browser.

Folder Peek has an Apple Shortcut to hide folder visibility. This way you can have a folder for work apps and files during work hours and a folder for personal stuff afterwords. You can use shortcut automation to have this occur at a certain time.

It is available from the developer’s website (including older versions) and on the Mac App Store. 

St. Claire software makes an app that can help control heat and fan noise, extend your battery time and increase the amount of CPU power available for you frontmost application. App Tamer comes preconfigured to automatically reduce the CPU and battery usage of Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Spotlight, Time Machine, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word and many other applications when they are idle. It’s similar to the built in Mac feature called app nap. but app nap only works on hidden applications or applications whose windows are completely covered.

App Tamer takes advantage of the Apple silicon processors by transferring background apps to the efficiency cores while keeping active applications on the faster performance cores. You can let App Tamer run automatically or you can set your own parameters for specific apps. If App Tamer detects high CPU usage from an an app, you will be alerted and offered a chance to throttle it. This helps identify apps with bugs that cause excessive CPU use you may not be aware of.

App Tamer is available from the developer’s website for $14.95 and it has a two week free trial. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few other things you can do include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swift Shift is free to download on GitHub.

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

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

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

Use the built in editor to make standard adjustments like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can download WordService directly from Devon Technologies.