AppAddict Newsletter

When it comes to file syncing utilities, people have wildly varying needs. They may have a USB drive with a set of files they need for work but want to keep a canonical copy of the same files at home. Perhaps they like to have a full disk clone as a backup or, like me, a regular copy of an Obsidian vault copied to a cloud service.

If you are a master at the terminal, you might be able to make rsync do everything you want, since most file syncing utilities are GUIs for rsync with a few bells and whistles thrown in, but if you are a mere mortal, you probably want to opt for an app.

Free File Sync is an excellent choice. It’s backwards compatible on Macs all the way back to OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It’s free, open source and cross-platform with Windows and Linux. I use it on a Mac (in conjunction with NTFS for Mac) to sync files between a USB drive and a directory an external NTFS SSD. The default settings work for many use cases and it’s a breeze to create and save sync jobs.

The other app I recommend, Sync Folders Pro, is $8.99 in the App Store. It has two features that Free File Sync doesn’t have including a set it and forget it scheduler. I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that launches Sync Folders Pro every day at 1:59am and closes it five minutes later. In the interim, a scheduled sync of my Obsidian vault occurs with a folder on my Google Drive. If you purchase Sync Folders Pro from the App Store, you can download the Plus edition from the developers web site at no added charge. This edition gives you the ability to make full disk clones.

Key Features

• Supports Macs, iPad, iPhone, iPod.
• Bootable backup on an external drive (SSD, HDD)
• Bidirectional synchronization, one-way synchronization, mirroring backup.
• Powerful preview mode. Ability change file operations before sync. "Line by Line" comparison.
• Automatic scheduled synchronization.
• Synchronization any number of pair folders at same time.
• Auto-updating help in the app. Periodically adding answers to frequently asked questions.

Other top choices in the sync and backup field that I've tried and can recommend are Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper.

Back in the olden days, lazy vendors of things like security cameras used to have websites and software that only ran on Internet Explorer because of a proprietary protocol called Active X. Even today you will find certain websites developed for Chromium browsers like Chrome, Edge and Brave that don’t work correctly on Firefox or Safari, which use other browsing engines. Then you have websites than can run in a browser, but work (arguably) better in an app: Zoom, Figma, Discord, Microsoft Teams etc. For web developers and bloggers, the three different browsing options present a challenge, as web pages can look different from browser to browser.  That’s why Raycast has a command to “open URL in a different browser.” To help get this madness under control, the king of open-source software, Sindre Sorhus created the free but valuable app, Velja. Once you install Velja and configure it, your links will open where you want them to. If you’ve created your own progressive web apps with Safari or Edge or using something like Coherence or Unite for sites like Facebook, you can create your own rules to open links that way.

I’ve tried paid apps like Openin 4 Advanced Link Handler, Choosy and Switchbar and found that I liked Velja better.

Open links clicked in a specific app in a specific browser

For example, to open all links you click in Slack in Chrome:

• Open the Velja settings and go to the “Rules” pane.
• Create a new rule and give it a name.
• Select the browser to open. You can even choose a specific Chrome profile.
• Create a new “Source Apps” matcher and select the app you want. For example, Slack.
• Click “Save”.

If you use an outliner to plan, sketch out ideas or help you write and you don’t need the bells and whistles required for heavy academic work, check out Zavala by developer Maurice Parker. A universal app with offline capability and full iCloud syncing, Zavala has some features like custom fonts, not found in more expensive products like Omni Outliner, Cloud Outliner or Bike.

Zavala Features:

• Tagging
• Quick open dialog box
• Full text search
• To do / item completion
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Backlinks
• OPML sharing and export
• Markdown sharing and export
• Printing

Zavala Shortcut Actions

As more and more people grow tired of corporate controlled social media they are turning back the clock to the early days of the web and taking up blogging. There is a growing IndieWeb culture worldwide. Most blogging platforms like Micro.blog, Bear Blog, Tumblr, Pika and various Word Press iterations have online editors for use within a web browser in which you can compose your posts. By and large they are all lacking. You’re locked into using rich text when you’d rather use Markdown or vice-versa or maybe you’re asked to code stuff and you’re not a coder. MarsEdit, the blog editor by Red Sweater software steps in admirably to fill the gap. With MarsEdit you can choose your writing style, WYSIWYG or different styles of Markdown. It provides word processing features like search and replace.  If you choose Markdown, you can get previews of rendered text quickly.  The focus is on writing. There’s even a typewriter mode to keep what you’re typing centered on the screen. There are multiple ways to get images into your blog posts, including from iOS devices, Apple Photos, file selection or drag and drop. No Internet access is required to compose and you can use the built in calendar to schedule posting whenever you’d like.

Mars Edit works with WordPress, Micro.blog, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type, and any blog that supports a standard MetaWeblog or AtomPub interface.

A license for MarsEdit will set you back $59.95 or you can get it from Setapp.

If MarsEdit doesn’t suit your style, other editors to consider are Scrivener and Ulysses.

There are a lot of options for screenshot utilities on the Mac, from the built in ability to capture images that’s built in to the OS, to the full featured freemium app Shottr by indie developer Electric Endeavors for still images to even more powerful still and video capture products like SnagIt by TechSmith. The product I personally use, CleanShot X hits the sweet spot in the middle. It may be over kill if you just need to screenshot memes for social media, but if you are a blogger, need screenshots for work documents or deal with tech support regularly, you should take advantage of the 30-day money back guarantee and try it out.

CleanShot X has over 50 features, including several new ones in the just released version, 4.7:

• Annotation
• CleanShot Cloud uploads
• Scrolling capture in any app
• Screen recording with built-in camera overlay
• Background tool (with new and custom background presets)
• Text recognition (with automated cursor sizing)
• Pin screenshots (and toggle them visible/invisible)
• Hide icons and widgets 
• Self-timer

New Features in version 4.7 include:

• Ability to resize screen shots
• Cursor automatically resizes to match text found in the image
• 10 new background gradients wallpapers, as well as custom wallpapers
• Saved presets for screenshots
• Autoformats text when entered on a screenshot
• Hide desktop now hides widgets too
• Pinned screenshots can be toggled visible and hidden

CleanShot X is $29 for the current version with one year of updates and 1GB of cloud storage.  If you need pro features like availability on multiple machines, guaranteed perpetual updates, unlimited cloud storage, custom domain association - a pro version is available for $10 a month, $8 a month if paid annually. CleanShot X is available as part of SetApp.

If you have a Dropbox account, even a basic free one, you’d be well served to install Maestral, an open-source Dropbox client for macOS. It allows you to locate your Dropbox folder wherever you want, not just in your ~/Library/Cloud Storage folder where Apple wants to force you to keep your files. Since it’s not an official Dropbox client, it doesn’t even count against your three-device limit. Having even a basic Dropbox account can be useful if you use IFTTT, want to avoid iCloud for any reason or have legacy apps that require Dropbox. Maestral even allows you to have multiple accounts on the same computer. It has fine grained controls to dial in selective sync however you want. The application has been around for a while and is still under active development. There is documentation available for technical subjects like symlink compatibility and gitignore files. If you don’t feel sufficiently challenged in life, Maestral even has a CLI for you to use. I am not the Dev.

One of my favorite utilities, one I’ve used through several version is Dropzone 4 from Aptonic. It is a menubar app that performs a variety of functions. Similar to apps like Yoink, Unclutter and Dropover, it provides a space to park files you need to copy elsewhere later. You can also create a grid of folders where you frequently copy files to have them always available even if Finder isn’t open. One of my favorite features is shortcut integration. I use a shortcut by Jarrod Blundy over at HeyDingus! to upload images to my blog host (Micro.blog). I get prompted to provide alt-text and after doing so I get a Markdown link conveniently copied to my clipboard. Other features include:

• Shorten URLs quickly using TinyURL shortener. Just select a URL to shorten and press Ctrl+Option+Cmd+S and the shortened URL is automatically copied to the clipboard.
• AirDrop integration lets you drop files or folders from any app and share them with your other Macs over the network.
• Imgur integration lets you share images fast and get a link for pasting.
• Quickly resize and convert images between different sizes and formats.
• Upload files to Amazon S3
• Upload files to your FTP server
• Upload files to your Google Drive
• Download and install add-on actions that let you upload to services like Google Drive, YouTube and many others.
• Powerful multi-tasking engine allows you to run multiple tasks at once and track the progress of each one through the in-grid task status area.
• See how tasks are progressing at a glance in the animated menu item.
• Launch Dropzone actions with the newly added keyboard shortcuts feature
• Add applications, folders or actions to your grid easily by dragging and dropping them on the Add to Grid area.
• Develop your own actions using the updated and massively improved Ruby or Python API

When downloaded from the Aptonic website the app is $35 for a lifetime license. The same license is $39 if you get it from the App Store. If you don’t want to spend that much or just try it out, you can pay $1.99 per month. If you are a SetApp subscriber, you are in luck as Dropzone Pro is included in your subscription.

For years, Bean, a free word processor for macOS has been my go-to when I needed to create a document with rich text, tables and images. Weighing in at only 8MB, it starts instantly and places little demands on even my wife’s 10-year-old machine. It reminds me of Microsoft’s WordPad in a way, only better. The developer, James Hoover issues regular updates including one as recently as last month. Hoover has written, “About Bean, some have said, “Why switch from Word? It has everything that I need!” So, keep using Word; I used Word for years and was reasonably happy with it. But Word is a big brute of a program. Sometimes using Word is like going out for lunch and getting this huge platter of greasy food when all you wanted was something light, like half a sandwich.” It’s not a Word replacement, but how often do you need all the bells and whistles?

Bean natively reads and writes these file formats:

• .rtf format (rich text)

• .rtfd format (rich text with graphics)

• .bean format (identical to .rtfd)

• .txt and plain text (Unicode and legacy)

• .webarchive format (Apple’s web archive format)

Bean transparently imports and exports these formats:

• .doc format (MS Word ‘97, minus images, margins, and page size)

• .docx format (Word 2007, minus images and some formatting)

• .odt format (OpenDocument, minus images, margins, and page size)

Bean can export all of the above formats to these formats:

• .html (web page format)

• .pdf

• .doc compatible (with images intact)

Features
• Live Word Count
• Make Template Documents
• Free-Form Headers and Footers
• Page Layout View (Optional 2-Up)
• Dark Mode, Alternate Colors
• Split-Window Editing
• Full Screen / Focus Mode Editing 
• Date-Stamped Backups
• Find Panel with Regular Expressions
• Word Completion and Dictionary
• Inspector for Formatting
• Highlighter
• Select By Text Style
• Floating Window

YouTube in undeniably a force in the modern world. My 77-year-old father watches it daily as does my four-year old granddaughter. If you watch YouTube on a PC running macOS, Windows or Linux, I suggest you do it with FreeTube. FreeTube is a privacy lover’s dream, using no trackers and allowing you to subscribe to your favorite channels without an account. All user data is stored on your machine and is never sent to or stored on the Internet. The data for videos is either scraped or obtained through the Invidious API. The interface is similar to YouTube and easy enough for a child to use. FreeTube is open source and THERE ARE NO ADS. You can even download videos using a one-button interface. You can create playlists and lists of favorites. I honestly do not know why this app isn’t more well known.

Settings

FreeTube has plenty of settings and you can make the interface as spartan as you want by turning off different elements.

The Sidebar

Video Buttons

There are buttons on each video for the following functions:

• Add to playlist
• Add to favorites
• Open in external player (like VLC or IINA)
• Download
• Change media formats
• Share

  

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, you know it’s not the best at letting you know about upcoming new releases. If you are really into music, you may get your news from social media or the entertainment press but there is a better way, the MusicHarbor app. This app will scan your music library to find the artists you listen to and create a list of upcoming albums you may want to put on your calendar. In some cases, you may even find recently released albums you weren’t aware of. It is a versatile app, allowing you to listen to single tracks or whole albums within its interface. You can use it to find videos that will open and play in Apple Music. The interface is extremely customizable as is the search feature. You can add and remove artists at will.  The app is so in tune with my preferences that it let me know about a new Johnny Cash album, and the Man in Black has been dead over twenty years.

• MusicHarbor website
• MusicHarbor on the App Store

On Macs, the default app for opening disk image files (DMG) is the native DiskImageMounter.app. You are not limited to using this app, however, you can use other tools like FastDMG or Keka to mount these disk images, one of the most common file types for downloaded apps from the Internet. The app that works best for me is RapiDMG. When you make RapiDMG your default app for opening disk images, double-clicking on the file mounts the disk image files, extracts the application contained in it to the Applications folder, deletes the DMG (if that is your preference) and then highlights your new installed app in the finder. It happens fast. If you are really into automation, you can use an app like Hazel or the built in folder actions service to automatically process DMGs in your downloads folder as soon as they are downloaded. RapiDMG is free to try for seven days, and a lifetime license is a whopping $0.99 in the App Store.  No data is collected about your machine during this process. The app was last updated seven months ago.  The developer is on Twitter @branchseer

Feel free to drop me a note with any questions

When you need to share a file with someone, or maybe get a file from you home computer to your work computer, you have a variety of options depending on your needs and security constraints. You can use Airdrop between Apple devices. You can upload to a cloud service. You can use email. There’s another way, and it’s cross platform (macOS, iOS, Windows, Android), encrypted, fast, free and direct. Using the Blip app, your files are sent directly to the target device without being uploaded to someone else’s web server. You can use Blip to send files anywhere there is another device with the app installed. There are no ads and it’s very fast. There is no limit on file size, and it works with folders as well as data on external drives. You can even use it for Final Cut Pro projects.

You can reach the developers at hello@blip.net or on Twitter @blipnet

If you have a lot of date saved in the default Apple Notes app and you aren’t interested in migrating to Obsidian, Notion, Joplin or Evernote, you still don’t have to settle for the limited formatting and back linking options you are provided. ProNotes, a free app, allows you to use standard Markdown syntax, if you choose to, in order to format your text.

You can also choose to use a floating toolbar with formatting tools. You can even use slash commands for titles, headings, code blocks, checklists, numbered lists and even tables.

Bi-directional links

macOS Sonoma introduced the ability to link to other notes. ProNotes allows you to view all notes linking to the current note via the Backlinks feature.

It’s universally agreed upon, even by the most rabid of Mac Fanboys, that Apple has dropped the ball by never providing anything more than basic clipboard management. You get to have one thing on the clipboard and when you overwrite it, it’s gone. Thankfully, there a plenty of alternatives to choose from. I’ve tried many of them and settled on the one that’s included in the free application launcher, Raycast along with the CopyQ extension as my daily driver. The features I want are included:

• Can pin frequently used snippets (like my OpenAI API key)
• Searchable
• Includes copied files
• Includes colors
• Includes images (you can copy text from within images)
• Filtered searching

CopyQ adds:

• Store text, HTML, images, and any other custom formats
• Quickly browse and filter items in clipboard history
• Sort, create, edit, remove, copy/paste, drag'n'drop items in tabs
• Add notes and tags to items
• System-wide keyboard shortcuts with customizable commands
• Paste items with keyboard shortcuts, from menu bar, or from main window
• Fully customizable appearance
• Advanced command-line interface and scripting
• Ignore clipboard copied from specified windows or containing specified text
• Support for simple Vim-like editor with keyboard shortcuts

Since I also use Keyboard Maestro and Better Touch Tool, I can also use their built in clipboard tools.

I also have PastePal, which was my daily driver for a long time.  It is buy once and use forever and has iCloud clipboard syncing with an iOS app.

I own Copy ‘Em which features sequential copying/single pasting.

I have access to Paste through Setapp. It’s a great clipboard manager, although without Setapp is a ridiculous $29.99 a year for the Mac Version. It includes the iCloud synced iOS app.

I also tried out the free open-source app, Maccy which is lightweight and very fast but I wanted more features. Other full featured choices include Paste Queue and Copy Paste Pro.

In the world of text editors for the Mac there are lot’s of choices. I come to the decision making process as a non-programmer who occasionally does some basic scripting with the help of Ai.  Visual Studio Code is the most popular among programmers with an estimated 70% market share. Personally, I don’t care for its non-standard interface and rarely use it. My go to for tasks of any complexity is the free version of the venerable BBEDit, a program whose marketing tagline is “It doesn’t suck.” My most used feature is the global search and replace across files. I routinely point BBEdit at directories containing hundreds of text files (usually in Markdown format) to make changes in my Obsidian vault. It’s also useful to make changes to plist, xml and opml files. In fact, you can open almost any file, including huge ones, in BBEdit. It has extensive text transformation abilities to change case, remove line breaks, etc. It even has a built-in color wheel to generate codes for CSS.

The battery on my M2 MacBook pro routinely keeps me going more than 14 hours on a single charge. Because replacing batteries is environmentally disruptive and expensive ($200 or more), I want mine to last as long as possible. To help me achieve this, I use AlDente Pro, a multifeatured battery app that starts at login and keeps my battery from exceeding a 70% charge. Li-ion batteries work best and last longest when they are kept between 20% and 80%. To stay calibrated, they occasionally need to run a full cycle (once a month or so). AlDente can handle this for me. Another feature is heat protection. Charging your battery when temperatures are high can result in damage. High temperatures can happen because of excessive CPU usage or a demand for rapid charging. Heat protection guards against this. If I am going to be away from a power source for a prolonged period of time, I can easily change the app’s settings to allow me to top off my battery at 100%. For automation fans, AlDente Pro has a full range of Apple Shortcuts support. Licensing is three-fold - a free version featuring only charge limiting is available. A full featured one-year subscription costs $10.43 and a lifetime license is $21.97. The program is also available on SetApp.

When I have a question I want to run by a LLM, my first stop isn’t my paid Raycast subscription with AI. It isn’t even the Google Gemini Pro that I pay for. It’s not even any of the AI apps I get with my Setapp subscription. I use a free shortcut that anyone can get from Github. When I set it up, I plugged in my pay as you go API key from OpenAI and in six months of almost daily use, I’ve spent around $5. I have a hotkey assigned to launch the shortcut using Keyboard Maestro but most of the time I just launch it from the menu bar menu Shortcuts provides. It’s not limited to Mac’s only though. It also works in iOS and iPadOS. It’s capable of carrying on a running conversation. The thing I like about it is that it creates a text file in iCloud at Shortcuts/ChatGPT-log and then a folder named by date and time. The text document contains information about the tokens you’ve consumed if you find that information useful. You can choose to configure it to save its transcripts in Apple Notes if you want to. 

The shortcut allows you to create a custom prompt if you want to. It copies the last response to the clipboard automatically. 

Helpful Links

• How to use the API key safely: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5112595-best-practices-for-api-key-safety.
• API keys: https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys.
• API usage: https://platform.openai.com/account/usage.
• API prices: https://openai.com/pricing.
• ChatGPT API FAQ: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7039783-chatgpt-api-faq.

I have a MacBook at home running macOS 14.4. It’s on my home network with Verizon as my ISP. I run Nord VPN 24/7. At a side job, I use a variety of computers including a PC running Windows 10 22H2. They have a FortiGate corporate firewall. I have no problem connecting the two computers using a free utility from Google called Chrome Remote Desktop. With practically the same functionality as more expensive and harder to configure applications like Screens or Jump Desktop, I can establish a password protected connection and control the screen of the remote computer in either direction. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t even get Screens, a $79 program to work for me under the same conditions and I do this stuff for a living. To top it all off, I don’t even use Chrome as my default browser. I use Microsoft Edge, with which this extension/utility is fully compatible.

If you need to access a remote computer, perhaps your parents for tech support reasons, I heartily recommend Chrome Remote Desktop. Before installing at work, check with your IT department for permission.

There are several companies that offer periodic deals on Mac software at huge discounts. I put up with emails from these companies just so that I get notifications when these sales happen. Probably my favorite of these companies is Bundle Hunt. I’ve been buying from them for over a decade. In their last sale, I got a great app, Alarm Clock Pro, the most full featured clock app I have ever used. It’s a vital part of my workflow at my day job. Not only does Alarm Clock Pro alert me at specified times, it also automatically opens a web page to the time clock website my employer uses so that I can punch in or out as appropriate.

You can also have Alarm Clock Pro launch apps at specified times, useful for starting up the file syncing software that backs up my Obsidian vault every morning at 2am. Other features include multiple world clocks, a timer, a stopwatch and scheduling of emails and texts. The alarms can include a custom message in a dialog box or full screen message, custom audio files or music. It will take a photo from a web cam or a screenshot at a specified time. It can log you out, sleep or restart your computer on a schedule. It can even open files and folders at a specified time.

The downside is the price if you don’t get it on sale. A monthly subscription is $1.83. A one-time purchase with no upgrades is $29.99 and a lifetime purchase with upgrades is a whopping $119. One upside is that a license includes both the Mac and Windows version of the program if you live that cross-platform life. You can also get an App Store version for $24.99.