AppAddict

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.

When it comes to text expansion, the apps I use regularly provide me with a lot of choices.

Native Expansion

This isn't an option for me because it doesn't have variable support for things like time and date. Mac text replacement is also not available in all apps. For example, it is not supported in Microsoft Word, Outlook, or Firefox. There is also no formatting provided. More info

Raycast

I'm a heavy Raycast user, and it is always running on my Mac. The thing that keeps me from using its highly rated snippets feature is the friction involved in importing my current snippet collection from the app I use. Raycast snippets are searchable and suitable for boilerplate text and code. Raycast supports variables. Alfred, a competing application similar to Raycast, also does text expansion for those who buy the $40 Powerpack. Of course, as of now, there is no iOS support.

Keyboard Maestro

There's not much that Keyboard Maestro can't automate, including text replacement/expansion. One cool feature that Keyboard Maestro has is the ability to add a microdelay so that in apps like VSCode where replacement works sporadically because of too quick triggering, you can slow things down and still get the functionality that you want. You can also kill two birds with one stone and trigger other macros with your text expansion snippet. You can do some pretty high-speed expansion with Keyboard Maestro's "prompt for user input feature." No iOS support.

Better Touch Tool

As with Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool can automate just about anything too, including text expansion. It's a bit more rudimentary than other choices but it beats native expansion by working in all apps.

Text Expander

The reality is, I don't use any of these methods because I have been using Text Expander for over a decade. I have several hundred snippets, and the process of exporting and importing them into Raycast was too laborious for my taste. I also, at some point, qualified for a lifetime discount on my subscription, so it's fairly cheap. As far as functionality goes, it does absolutely everything I could ask for in an app of its nature. My subscription works on Windows and macOS. If you don't mind another subscription, it's a solid choice. There are even libraries of snippets you can download for things like customer support, coding, and Markdown. There's also an iOS version that works through a custom keyboard, currently in Test Flight.

Other Solutions

• Expanso is a free and open-source text expander that works on macOS, Windows, and Linux (but not iOS). It has many advanced features and would probably be my choice if I wasn't so invested in Text Expander.
• Typinator is another advanced choice available for a one-time purchase instead of a subscription. Typinator works across all applications and works with names, dates, formulas, variables, images, calculations, code.

Since Authy deprecated its desktop app and has also been recently hit by security breaches, you may be looking for a replacement two-factor authentication solution. Step 2 from indy developer Neil Sardesai provides you a way to scan QR codes from websites offering two-factor authentication via time based one-time passwords (TOTP) to log in, sites like Facebooks, Evernote, Twitter, Reddit, Notion and others. Using this method allows you remain safe even if your password gets compromised since it’s based on factor one, something you know - your password, and factor two, something you have, your computer with an authenticator app. There are several well-known and widely used authenticator apps for iPhones, Microsoft Authenticator and Google Authenticator are two. Step 2 is iCloud based so it works across devices. Step 2 is an iOS/iPad-based app, so it only works on Apple silicon-based Macs.

Step 2 is free to try in a limited way from the App Store. An unlimited license is $9.99. 

Another player in the field is Raivo OTP, but its latest reviews are very, very poor and I can’t recommend it.

From the very first edition of Mac OS X until Big Sur, Apple provided a tool called Network Utility, a GUI for common CLI tasks as well as an info screen:

• Ping
• Lookup
• Traceroute
• Whois
• Finger
• Port scan

You could use these tools to get an overview of your network connection or to test the availability of remote servers or web sites. You could see if your connection in a hotel or coffee shop was usable or not. You could do the same thing through Terminal, but Network Utility provided a nice clean interface to see the same info.

Devon Technologies has resurrected this beloved utility, added a speed test, and is providing it free of charge on its downloads page. 

Disk Drill 5 by Cleverfiles is marketed as data recovery software to retrieve lost files from internal and external drive media as well as iPhone, iPad and Android storage. Its website goes into considerable detail on its ease of use, its power and its ability to recover files. The free product allows you to preview what data is recoverable, but it takes the $89 paid product to actually recover your data using its full suite of tools. There are some free recovery options too, but they require you to implement some (included) tools prior to use.   

Even if you aren’t in need of data recovery, however, Disk Drill is a worthy download because of the bundle of free tools it includes:

Disk Health
Free S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring Stays Alert for Any Potential Disk Issues. It works on both internal and external drives.

Mac Cleanup
Analyze Disk Space, Locate Unused Files and Space Hogs, Free Up Your Storage Effortlessly.

Duplicate Finder
Easily Find and Remove Duplicate File Locations on Your Drive.

Recovery Drive
Create Your own Bootable USB Drive for Free Mac OS X Data Recovery.

Data Protection
Protect Your Data with Recovery Vault or Guaranteed Recovery. Recover it for Free.

Data Backup
Create Byte-to-byte Disk & Partition Backups for Future Mac OS X Recovery. In my testing of this feature on the internal hard drive of an M3 iMac, Disk Drill said “This drive is encrypted with the Apple M1/2 Security Chip. You can still back it up into a byte-to-byte disk image, but it probably won’t be recoverable.” This leads me to believe that a product like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! is better suited for the task. Disk Drill did fine, however, making a copy of a 500GB external disk.

You can download all of these tools for free from Cleverfiles.

GoodLinks is a dual-purpose app with a lot going for it. It’s both a bookmark manager and a read-it-later app. It’s a one-time $9.99 purchase in the App Store. It requires no account on any web server. Your links and downloaded articles live on your devices and you can choose whether to sync via iCloud. The developer claims “Your reading history and favorite articles should only be private by default. GoodLinks doesn’t track you or your information, and nothing is shared online unless you choose to share it.” It’s a universal app and a single purchase gets you versions for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

If you intend to use it primarily for bookmark management, you’ll be glad to know that it can import from your browser, Pinboard, Raindrop.io or Anybox.  If you want to use the read-it-later functionality, it also imports from Pocket, Instapaper and Readwise. the primary way to add new content to your collection is through the sharesheet. The amount you can save is unlimited.

Managing your links and articles is a breeze. You can classify articles as read/unread. Links can be starred/unstarred.  Tagging is supported and groupings links and articles by tags is the default interface. There are numerous ways to customize the interface, including the amount of content shown and how the articles/links are sorted.

Reading articles is pleasant. All extraneous cruft is removed, including ads, leaving you with just formatted text. You can choose from light, dark, sepia and night themes. You can read in the in app browser or your default browser.

One feature I use a lot is the export feature for saving articles in markdown format into Obsidian for reference material. GoodLinks also exports in PDF and plain text. For automation junkies, GoodLinks lets you have a field day. There is extensive shortcut support, and many shortcuts are available for download on MacStories  and Routine Hub among other places.

Unlike Windows.macOS does not have a built in uninstall utility. Occasionally some complex apps might come with a built-in uninstaller, but for the most part, you are on your own. It used to be that you could just delete the application from the Finder and be done with it, but as applications have grown in size and complexity, their support files have grown too and your ~/Library and ~/Library/Application support folder may have many files with sizes into the gigabytes that need to be deleted along with their apps. Luckily for Mac users there are two excellent free uninstall applications to choose from.

App Cleaner

App Cleaner from FreeMacSoftware is the more bare bones app of the two. Its user interface is a simple window where you drag and drop an application you want to uninstall. App Cleaner quickly analyzes the app, identifies its supporting files and lists them giving you the opportunity to deselect anything you might want to keep (like a plist file in case you want to save your preferences to reinstall the app later). Then you click a button, authenticate and the process is quickly over. App Cleaner’s secret super power is Smart Delete. SmartDelete detects when apps are trashed manually or by other programs and will automatically find and offer to remove related files. In the security and privacy settings, App Cleaner required full disk access.

The app can be downloaded from the developer’s web site.  It was last updated in July of 2023.

Pear Cleaner

Pear Cleaner, by Indy Developer Alin Lupascuhas, has a more detailed user interface. It lists all of the applications installed on your computer alphabetically or by size and gives you their file size. If you click on an app, it gives you more information such as the required processor type. Like App Cleaner, it also lists all the individual files and folders it identifies for deletion and gives you a chance to deselect any of the before clicking the uninstall button. It identifies any progressive web apps you may have installed as well as any iOS apps running on your silicon Mac. Pear Cleaner can scan your computer for leftover files from old uninstalls. In my case, it was unable to find any, probably because I have practiced good computer hygiene since I got the machine.

Pear Cleaner has some extra features. It can identify when a file was installed via Homebrew and update your Homebrew files upon uninstallation. It also has a Finder extension to allow you to uninstall applications right from the finder even if Pear Cleaner is closed. like App Cleaner, it has a feature, it calls Sentinel Monitor, to remove leftover files immediately if an app is trashed manually. Pear Cleaner requires full disk access, accessibility access and automation permission. You can skin the app and choose whether to have it from from the dock, menu bar or both. The app is updated often, almost too often, as I get tired of continuously downloading new versions manually, the only update method.

It can be downloaded from the developer’s GutHub page.

My choice

I use App Cleaner. In testing, it consistently identified files and folders missed by Pear Cleaner and the feature that is most important to me is complete uninstallation. Although it does not have a Finder Extension, you can still right-click on applications and choose Open With > App Cleaner to open it and uninstall an application.

I’d like to talk about a controversial app without a bunch of hot air and over excitement. If you are adamantly against subscription-based software, never intend to subscribe to Setapp or are a Russia loving troll out to disparage a Ukrainian company, skip this review. It is not for you. Additionally, if you are a cold metal systems engineer who helped Steve build the Apple 1 or you have close to that amount of experience, you probably should go to the Apple Forums and tell people who don’t know you how smart you are. If, however, you would like some information on an often recommended and popular software utility for Macs, please, by all means read on. I’m not 100% enthusiastic about it, but I’ll honestly describe it for you.

Clean My Max X is a collection of utilities made by MacPaw, the company that is also behind Setapp.  Do not confuse it with the old Mac Keeper malware program that we  techs fought to remove from machines in years past. It is not that. If you have an old slow Mac with a nearly full hard drive and inadequate RAM, Clean My Mac X is not going to be miracle worker. Don’t get your hopes up. The elements of Clean My Mac X are:

• Mail attachment cleaner
• Automatic trash remover and error resolver
• Malware remover and real time protection
• Privacy enhancer (removed browser and chat history)
• Launch agent and login item manager
• App uninstaller
• App updater
• System extensions manager
• File size manager
• Large and old file finder
• File shredder

As you can see, if you are currently using or thinking of buying utilities like Daisy Disk, MacUpdater, Lingon X, App Cleaner or MalwareBytes, you get similar features in Clean My Mac X.  Each of the single purpose utilities I mentioned is better for its purpose than its matching element In Clean My Mac X.

All of that is on top of Clean My Mac’s most controversial feature, its optimizer

Optimizer:

• Free Up RAM
• Free Up Purgeable Space
• Run Maintenance Scripts
• Flush DNS Cache
• Speed Up Mail
• Reindex Spotlight
• Repair Disk Permissions
• Time Machine Snapshot Thinning
• Verify and Repair "PC Files"

Some of these tasks, like freeing up RAM are only temporary fixes and it's questionable how much benefit it provides. You can flush your DNS cache easily enough with a terminal command. The maintenance scripts will run on their own time if you leave your Mac running, but if it gives you peace of mind to run them more often, have at it. I don't use Apple Mail, but I've never read many complaints about it being slow. It's easy to force a Spotlight reindex without this app. You can use the built in Disk Utility to repair permissions. Time Machine snapshot thinning is pretty useful and the description of verify and repair PC files is pretty vague. Having said all that, running the optimizer is not going to hurt your computer.

Still, it’s a useful product with utilities you will use often if you don’t own or intend to get the alternatives. For 95 cents a week (a year’s subscription is $39.99 for a single Mac), it’s not a bad deal and certainly in line with other products of it’s type. If you have a Setapp subscription, download it and see how you like it.

If you want to see some mainstream press on Clean my Mac X, here you go.

• CleanMyMac Review | PCMag
• CleanMyMac X review | Macworld
• CleanMyMac X - BrettTerpstra.com (this is an old review, but he still uses and recommends it)

If you want to download video from YouTube, there are a variety of ways. There is a Raycast Extension. There is the great free YouTube muti-action app, Freetube. For CLI folks, there is yt-dlp.  Finally there is Downie from Charlie Monroe. Downie not only downloads from YouTube, Youku, Bilibili and Vimeo it can download from more than 1,000 sites with more being added bi-weekly. You can even write to the developer and request that a site be added and chances are he will act on it. He even offers to help if you run into a problematic video on a site already in the supported list.

Downie can download 4K video, which not all downloaders can do. It can also convert to MP-4 (for iPad and iPhone use) or do only audio extraction on the fly. It supports iCloud synchronization to maintain your download history over different devices. The app has muli-language support and the developer offers free licenses to anyone who adds a new language to the support library. If you have a legacy operating system, past versions of Downie can be downloaded.

Downie is a one-time purchase of $19.99 from the developer’s website and a single license is good for all the computers you personally own, although if that is greater than three you need to contact the dev for an accommodation. Downie is also available on Setapp.

There was a minor controversy some time back when the developer left empty threats in his code to delete files from the computers of those running pirated versions of the software. He has since apologized for doing that and no files were actually deleted from anyone’s machine. 

Clop is a Mac utility that runs in the background or in a floating GUI allowing you to resize images, videos and PDFs on the fly merely by copying and pasting. The size reductions result in minimal to zero loss in quality and when working with images, you can paste into any app. Video size reductions begin as soon as screen recording ends and you can pre-select the type of output file you want, including GIF. You can use hotkeys or floating buttons to downscale images and videos from 90% to 10% of the original size.

One of my favorite features is the ability to set watched folders for optimization. That way when I download a stock photo from Unsplash or another service into my downloads folder, it is immediately optimized for use on my blog. I can even create my own template to rename the optimized files.

For uploading optimized files, Clop integrates directly with Dropshare. Clop can remove or preserve EXIF data and preserve file creation and modification dates.

Clop has some free features that you can use forever without paying. Clop Pro is a one-time purchase of $15 directly from the developer, The Low-Tech Guys. It is also available as part of SetApp.

The journaling app, Day One by Bloom Built Software, a subsidiary of Automattic, has been downloaded 15 million times and it has 200,000 five-star reviews. It is a consistent design award winner. I’ve been using it for 10 years; I have five journals and nearly 18,000 entries. 

My journals are:

• Exercise - auto entries from the calendar created by my exercise app
• Gratitude - manual entries of three bullet points a day
• News - auto entries created by tagged read-it-later articles
• Eating Out - manual entries
• Journal - a mix of manual and automated entries from many different sources

My automated entries (via IFTTT) include:

• Daily weather report
• TV shows and movies watched
• My Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon posts
• The RSS feeds from my different blogs

I use a Keyboard Maestro macro to copy a Markdown version of my daily note from Obsidian into Day One each night. All of the formatting transfers over. I feel confident in the privacy of my entries based on Day One's end to end encryption. The introduction of Apple's Journaling App did nothing but add to the functionality of Day One, as it now has the same prompting features.

I routinely add photos of my grandchildren texted to me by my kids using the share sheet on the iOS version. I have nearly 20,000 saved locations in my history and it’s easy to create a backdated entry from one of them. I have several templates ranging from restaurant meals, to daily reviews. I have exported PDF yearly journals that I’ve created through the Day One export feature. Although I’ve never purchased a printer journal, they are very popular.

Day One is FREE to use forever with unlimited entries. Additional features, including unlimited photos, videos, and sync are available with a Day One Premium membership. A yearly subscription to Day One is $35. It’s a universal app with availability on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. I’ve never lost any data.

One of my favorite features is “On This Day”, a look back at what I was doing on this date in years past. It gets better every year as I increase the number of entries I have recorded in the app.

OnlySwitch is a free menu bar app that offers a quick on and off toggle for many Mac settings as well as a few mini applications whose controls run from the same menu. You can assign hotkeys to many of the actions and use your keyboard to do thing that previously required your mouse and drilling down into the System Settings application. You can also add macOS shortcuts to the OnlySwitch menu, eliminating the need for a separate icon to access them. Using Shortcuts lets you turn OnlySwitch into an app launcher since you can launch single or multiple apps, websites and documents all from a single shortcut, allowing you to set up a workspace. You can add and remove switches from the main interface, and you can reorder them to suit your needs.

Mac Setting You Can Control

• Dark Mode
• AirPods
• Bluetooth
• Mute
• Screen saver
• Night Shift
• Autohide Dock
• Show hidden files
• Keyboard lights
• Empty trash
• Clear clipboard
• Show file extensions
• Mute microphone
• Eject disks

Mini Applications Included

• Hide notch
• Keep awake
• Pomodoro timer
• Internet radio
• Spotify
• Apple Music
• White noise with multiple options
• Hide menu bar icons
• Sticky Note

You can download OnlySwitch from the developer's site on GitHub.

Plus AI from MacPlus Software, an AI app that lives in the background, works on selected text and can be used it any app, is a convenient and easy to use way to incorporate the parts of AI that don’t rip people off into your workflow. It comes with several preconfigured prompts but you can compose your own. The built in prompts are: 

• Explain a random Wikipedia term
• Summarize
• Improve writing
• Fix spelling and grammar
• Simplify language
• Paraphrase
• Translate to English
• Translate to German
• Explain this

You can write your own prompts in the following style of the Improve Writing prompt

I will give you text content, you will rewrite it and output a better version of my text. Keep the meaning the same. Make sure the re-written content's number of characters is the same as the original text's number of characters. Do not alter the original structure and formatting outlined in any way. Only give me the output and nothing else. Now, using the concepts above, re-write the following text. Respond in the same language variety or dialect of the following text:
"""
{{ SELECTED TEXT }}
"""

Some of the things Plus AI can do are chatting with PDFs and translating content from one language to another.

To use Plus AI, you will need to get your own API key from Open AI at this website.   The app requires accessibility permissions enabled. It is available in the MacPlus website for a one-time payment of $6.99. The developer’s site is here. It is also available on SetApp.

If you are the kind of Mac owner who likes to track what the various components on your computer are doing, iStat Menus from bjango Software has long been a popular choice know for a variety of menu bar based charts and graphs. Stats, by indy developer Serhiy Mytrovtsiy is a free to use privately or commercially app available on GitHub. 

Stats is an application that allows you to monitor your macOS system.

• CPU utilization
• GPU utilization
• Memory usage
• Disk utilization
• Network usage
• Battery level
• Fan's control
• Sensor information (Temperature/Voltage/Power)
• Bluetooth devices
• Multiple time zone clock

The Stats dashboard provides much of the same information one used to see in the "About This Mac" window in previous operating systems. It includes Mac make, RAM and storage specs, model number, serial number, and which version of macOS is running, core count, uptime and on Silicon models, the number or performance and efficiency cores.

The clear and colorful graphics within Stats are not just decorative. You can mimc some of the behaviors of activity monitor by killing apps from within the program. The interface offers customization options that allow you to craft the look and feel you want while seeing just the information you need.

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Trickster is one of those apps you have to use consistently in order to appreciate what it can do. It takes some thought to set it up and you may even need to refine that after some use. But, once you get it dialed in and are used to using it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. Trickster is for people who work with files, whether they be photos, or word-processing documents, spreadsheets, screenshots or whatever. If your computer usage is limited to using your browser and gaming this is not an app you’ll get much value out of, but if you do much writing, design, development or photography, you should take advantage of the 14-day full featured trial on the developer’s website to see if it will improve your workflow.

The developer describes Trickster like this - “Trickster keeps track of recent files you’ve been using on your Mac and gives you super easy and lightning fast access to them.” It’s easy to summon and navigate using the keyboard. It’s a menu bar app that opens a window with access to different file lists when summoned. You can perform many Finder functions (delete, rename etc.) right in the Trickster interface. It supports drag and drop functions too. Trickster makes it easy to find files, especially if you make use of its advanced filtering options. You can include or exclude any file type or folder in your search criteria. You can set up favorite locations if your don’t match the preconfigured favorites. It works fine with multiple cloud services even if you have more than one account per service (e.g., work and personal One Drive accounts).

Trickster is $29.99 on the developer’s website where you get a two-week free trial or you can get it from the Mac App Store for the same price. It’s also available as part of Setapp, the Mac app subscription service with over 240 apps for $9.99 a month. It was last updated one month ago, and its privacy policy states that it collects no data on users at all.

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Preventing your Mac from going to sleep is as easy as opening a terminal window and entering the caffeinate command. If you do that, your Mac will stay awake until you type the uncaffeinate command. Easy right? If you want more control, however, I suggest getting the free Mac utility by William Gustafson, Amphetamine for its granular settings. In its most simple iteration Amphetamine keeps your Mac awake until you turn it off, until a file finishes downloading or for a given duration. You can build complex triggers in the settings using criteria like whether a certain drive is plugged in or what the battery level is. There are some interesting extras, like keeping spinning hard drives awake or simulating mouse movements. If you are disturbed by the menu bar icon resembling a pill, there are several to choose from including the classic coffee cup used by the deprecated app Caffeine from Amphetamine is descended.

My personal favorite use case is one I use every two weeks when my house cleaning service comes in. That’s the only day I close my MacBook. I use the setting to keep my Mac awake while closed until 5:30 PM. That way if I need to remote into it during the day, it’s available without me having to leave it out in the way of the housecleaner.

Amphetamine on the Mac App Store

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With the existence of Live Text recognition as a built-in feature of macOS, folks may wonder if there is still functionality to be gained through the use of TextSniper an OCR app for YouTube videos, PDFs, images, online courses, screencasts, presentations, webpages, video tutorials, photos, etc. The answer is unequivocally, yes.  If you don’t want to make screen captures and open them in Preview to grab text, TextSniper will do the trick. In my experience it works better than alternatives like PDF Pen, Adobe products, Google Docs etc. As long as you can draw a rectangle around the text, it doesn’t matter if it’s rotating, angled or shadowed. There is a setting to remove line breaks and you can use built-in text to speech if that is your use case. Text Sniper has an additive clipboard feature if the text you are trying to capture can’t obtained on one go. Another thing that Text Sniper offers that Live Text does not is removing hyphens from words divided across a line.

TextSniper will also decode standard bar and QR codes. Enabling a keyboard shortcut lets you turn those into numbers.

On the developer’s website you can purchase a single license for $7.99, three Macs for $9.99 or unlimited macs for $11.99.  On the App Store, Text Sniper is $11.99 and family sharing is available. It is also available as part of SetApp.

Pay attention around the holidays because the developers occasionally give it away for free. That’s how I got my copy.

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When I started a new job a couple of years ago doing end user IT support at a small, private university, I was assigned a Dell all-in-one PC with Windows 10 after being primarily a Mac user at home and work for over two decades. There are a few Macs on campus but overwhelmingly our users are PC based. When I started, I intuited that Edge had good integration with Microsoft 365, so I chose to use it despite having been primarily a Safari and Chrome user in the past. I can use any browser I want. My coworkers in the IT department use Brave, Firefox and Chrome but after my initial choice I decided to stick with Edge and in fact made it my default browser on my iPhone and my personal M2 MacBook Air. I recently started using an M3 iMac at work, but I’m sticking with Edge.

Why, you ask? Because despite what the world seems to believe, Edge really doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s variety of features make it one of my favorite pieces of software to use. Is it perfect? No. Like most Chromium based browsers it could use less memory, although it is much better than Chrome. As a heavy user of Apple’s Shortcuts app on my phone and Mac, I find that most browser related workflows are written for Safari and don’t work as well in Edge. Still, the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad. Edge has quite a few features that are cutting edge, if not unique.

Profiles

I have separate profiles for home and work. At work Edge, when signed into Microsoft 365 is managed, meaning I can install no extensions and save no passwords, but I do have ready access to all my documents in OneDrive, my Outlook email accounts our campus Intranet and more. I have a set of work-related bookmarks I use with this profile. I simultaneously open another browser window signed into a different Microsoft account and voila, I then have access to all my extensions, a different set of bookmarks and my bookmark manager of choice, which also holds my credit card info in case I need to buy anything through the browser. I use the same personal profile at home so I can save things I want to reference at work in my extra browser window.

Workspaces

Within a profile, users can create collections, browser setups for unique use cases. I have one for general browsing with my go to collection of bookmarks in the bookmark (or favorites as Edge calls them) bar. I have another setup for blogging with a different set of bookmarks available in the bookmarks bar. Both workspaces share the same general set of bookmarks from the menu bar or toolbar button, so I don't have to worry about syncing two collections. Tabs can be set to be remembered between sessions, so when I'm ready to work on a blog entry, I have tabs for Micro.blog, omg.lol, and my Mastodon account. It's all really handy and allows me to just open up the browser and go to work.

Extensions

Edge can use the same extensions available to Google Chrome and there's a vast selection to choose from. I don't find that running all the extensions I need slows Edge down appreciably, so I install what I need. Extensions are specific to the profile you are using, but workspaces within the same profile share the same extensions. You can create a different Mac and PC profile is you find yourself using extensions that are platform specific. Here's what I use:

• Omnivore - It's the best read it later service around these days, featuring a mobile app with read aloud capability, newsletter subscription service, RSS feeds and a browser extension.
• Obsidian Web Clipper - I primarily use a bookmarklet for saving web content into Drafts on my Mac, but I use a different vault at work on my PC where Drafts isn't available.
• Raindrop.io - I have a subscription and heartily endorse Raindrop.io for its cross-platform support
• Aboard - This is the extension for the app my wife and I use to share links with each other. When I find an app, a TV show, a news story or whatever, I put it into Aboard and she gets a notification and can check it out when she has time. It's free and useful.
• Chrome Remote Desktop - This allows me to access my home computer from other locations. It's free, easy to set up and use and reliable. I don't know what people pay for Screens or TeamViewer subscriptions.
• UBlock Origin- The best ad blocker on the planet. 31,000,000 downloads can't be wrong.
• Toby - My new tab extension. It makes it easy to save and open windows full of tabs on the go. I use the free version and even though I maintain my start.me page, I stick with Toby for new tabs.
• Velja- Works in conjunction with the Mac app of the same name to open URLs in other bowsers and apps (e.g., Slack, Teams, Zoom, Freetube etc)

Collections

One of the features in Edge I find really useful is available on the desktop and mobile version of the browser. You can create collections of bookmarks on the fly for things you want to investigate later but don't necessarily want to save forever. I have five collections:

• Shopping - this is mostly a collection of Amazon pages I can keep separate from my Amazon wish list so my wife can't see what I was thinking of getting her for her birthday
• Software - I'm an unembarrassed software nerd, always looking for the latest cool program to try out. I keep a running collection of pages of programs I want to look at.
• Windows - Most of my leisure browsing happens on my mac, but when I find something that might be useful on my day job, I save it to my Windows collection to investigate at work
• TV - When I come across a review of an upcoming television show, I add it to this collection. Once a week I read all the emails from streaming services and the web pages I've collected and i cultivate the viewing list for my wife and I
• Reading List - I use a read it later app (Omnivore) but sometimes I just add a news article or How-to guide to my reading list collection if it's something I know I'll just read in my browser.

Other features I like

As I mentioned earlier, one of the best kept secrets of using a computer in 2024 is the free access to Chat-GPT4 built into Bing/CoPilot. There are people out there paying $20 a month to do what they can do for free with CoPilot and it's built right into Edge. I personally have an API subscription to Open.AI, which runs me about a dollar a month so I can use the API key in other apps like Raycast and Obsidian.

The mobile version of Edge is good enough to be my default browser in iOS 17. Edge has a feature to send tabs to other devices and I use it all the time between my work computer, phone and MacBook at home. I have full access to my browser bookmarks on my phone as well as my history. Since I use a separate app for passwords, I don’t worry about browser saved passwords.

I know that Safari introduced profiles last year with the release of Sonoma and I know Chrome has access to the same browser extensions, but I just find that in my environment - supporting Windows at work, Mac at home and consistent iPhone use, Edge has a set of features that work reliably for me. The browser receives constant updates and allows users to download separate beta and canary versions if they want. Hopefully you’ve found something in this review that might give you a reason to give Edge a tryout.