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Luuk over at Mac Menu Bar has been busy as usual, keeping up with the latest releases of new Menu Bar apps for the community. Here are my favorites from the recent additions:

AutoShot - Automatic screenshots in set intervals - This app automatically takes a screenshot of your workspace at intervals you specify and even if you are using multiple monitors. You can choose the file format you want to use for the screenshots and where they are kept in your file structure. You can alleviate concerns about excessive disk usage by setting auto-delete parameters. (Free)

Sprinkles – Customize any website - One of the features that Arc browser users like is the ability to apply custom CSS to websites. With Sprinkles, you can bring that functionality to Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Sprinkles runs a tiny webserver on your machine. When you visit a website, the browser extension asks this server for scripts. The server looks for 4 files in your Sprinkles scripts directory:

1. global.js
2. global.css
3. github.com.js
4. github.com.css

When there's a hit, the extension adds the provided JS and CSS. (Free)

Mackernews - If you frequent Hackernews to see the latest goings-on in the tech world, this tiny app makes it easy to see and connect to the latest hot stories. Just choose the headline from a dropdown menu and instantly load the story. (Free)

AutoRun

• Run Apps. Mac App Store - This simple app can be used to launch apps or run scripts at a specific time or at regular intervals. Some possible use cases:

• Run Applescript to eject backup disk before you wake up so you can just disconnect it
• Launch a file synchronization app once a day to back up folders to cloud drives
• Run scripts to start and stop apps you don't want running simultaneously on two computers
• Automatically launch your task manager, calendar, email and browser every morning just before you wake up (Free)

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If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to share you general opinion and ratings of movies, TV shows, games, books or whatever, Quick Reviews, a new app by Indy developer, blogger, YouTuber and podcaster, Matt Birchler can generate a graphic for you in just a few clicks. 

The free version lets you create unlimited reviews and allows you the leeway to control all the design elements: accent color, font, theme, rating icons, light/dark mode, default review type. 

Quick Reviews also has clipboard detection and will use the graphic you’ve copied to automatically illustrate your review. You can also set it to automatically copy your review text out to your clipboard when saving the finished graphic. 

The paid version, a $9.99 subscription, offers to populate your review metadata, including art from The Movie DB, allowing you to even import a suggested rating if you like. You can also import movie reviews from your Letterboxd account. 

Both versions of the app feature filtering by media type, year and rating. 

The current 1.0 release of Quick Reviews is not yet Mac compatible, but it’s on the developer’s roadmap. As for now, creating a quick graphic to share on social media or on a personal blog is supremely easy and quick. Matt is also the kind of thoughtful developer needed in the Mac community. 

Get Quick View in the iOS App Store.

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I’ve been using Rego to bookmark locations for the last eleven years, using seven different iPhones. I have over 600 places saved in various categories, including:

• Restaurants
• Coffee Shops
• Accommodations
• Parks
• Residences (friends and family)
• Bookstores

Whenever we travel, it's easy to find places where we've enjoyed eating in the past. The same with coffee shops and hotels and rental properties. Adding a new location can be done onsite, from an address or pulled from the metadata from a photograph. Bookmarks contain GPS coordinates, street address where applicable, notes, date added and a stock photo or one or more of your own. You can also use custom pin colors and designate any location as a favorite.

You can also use Rego when hiking or fishing offshore.

Rego provides plenty of navigation options, with internal maps or working with external apps like Google Maps or TomTom. Your bookmark collection stays on your device. If you opt in, you can back up to Dropbox. There is not an option to use any other cloud provider, including iCloud.

You can get a free trial of Rego that allows you to add up to 10 locations. To add more, you can subscribe monthly for $2.99, yearly for $9.99 or opt for a lifetime purchase for $24.99.

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This is the third collection of free apps reviewed on AppAddict. Links to the first two collections are posted below. I’ve downloaded and installed each of these on my own laptop. In many cases, I’ve added them to various workflows for my day job and blogging pursuits. 

Previous Collections

A Curated Collection of Free Apps

Another Curated Collection of Free Software

---

Free App List 3

Shareful - A Free App I Use Every Day

Two Free Apps for Mac OS Installation Eas

Recents App for Mac - A Free Intelligent File Launcher

MarkEdit

• A Pure Markdown Editor for Free

Royal TSX for Remote Management

Simplenote

• Free, Rock Solid and Dependable for Over a Decade

SingleFile

• For Safari and Other Mac Browsers

Ente Auth - The Free Authy Replacement for Your Mac and iPhone

Sloth

• Activity Monitor on Steroids

Cronica

• A Free, Privacy Focused  Media Tracker for Mac and iOS

Free Security Apps for Mac

MacTracker

• Can You Call Yourself a Fanboy If You Don’t Have This Installed?

Orange Card - Get Info Easily for Free

Glympse Location Sharing - Free and Secure

Zero Duplicates Free Duplicate File Finder

OpenVibe

• Free Social Thread Aggregator

Resilio Sync - Secure, Private Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

Lossless Cut - Save Time When Editing Videos

Background Music - Per App Volume Control and More

Unsplash Wallpaper App - Free Unlimited Wallpapers at Your Fingertips

FSNotes

• A Free and Open-Source Successor to NValt

Using Google Photos on iOS Makes Leaving Meta Easier

Picocrypt

• Free and Open-Source File Encryption with Simple but Powerful Features

Session

• Free and Open-Source E2E Decentralized Cross Platform Messaging

DEVONagent Lite - Free Tool to Increase Search Productivity

Integrity

• Free Link Checker

Raycast Quicklinks - Power Searching from the Keyboard

RsyncUI

• a GUI for the powerful CLI Utility

RsyncUI is the successor to Rsync OS X. It is a graphical user interface for the powerful command line utility, rsync, a file synchronization utility that has its roots in the Linux world. RsyncUI is an Apple native app, 100% written in Swift. All of the actual work is still done by rsync, buy you can skip much of the learning curve involved in using the CLI.

Pure rysnc can sync files between remote and local servers. Rsync has many options that can help you define the connections you make, and allow you to specify files that should be excluded in a transfer. Rsync is great for complex file syncs and for transferring a large number of files. When used with cron, rsync can also make automatic backups.

Features

• Sync to local attached storage
• Sync to computers on the LAN or the Internet
• Passwordless login by SSH key
• Snapshot creation
• Profiles to organize tasks
• Quick tasks for repetitive file operations
• Data restoration from remote servers

How to get RsyncUI

RsyncUI can be installed via Homebrew or download from GitHub:

brew install --cask rsyncui

There are various Internet search tools available for Macs, but if you are a Raycast user, you can search just about any website without having to install an extension if you take the time to set up Quicklinks. Raycast is a Mac automation tool that extends the power of Spotlight and can replace other utilities, like clipboard managers, emoji pickers and window managers. (See use cases) Raycast offers a few preconfigured site searches in its own library, but you can add your own by adapting the search URL and using a dynamic placeholder.

To configure Quicklinks, open Raycast with your usual shortcut and then press ⌘+, to bring up the Raycast preferences window. Click Extensions > Quicklinks, and you’ll be presented with the interface you need. There is also a Raycast command Create Quicklink. You can get detailed instructions here.

Here are the Quicklinks I use

Google w/out AI - [www.google.com/search](https://www.google.com/search?q=){Query}&udm=14
All Music - [www.allmusic.com/search/al...](http://www.allmusic.com/search/all/*){Query}
Amazon - [www.amazon.com/s](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=){SEARCH}&sprefix=
Bluesky - [bsky.app/search](https://bsky.app/search?q=){Query}
DDG - [duckduckgo.com](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=){Query}
Gmail - [mail.google.com/mail/](https://mail.google.com/mail/)\#search/{query}
Macupdater - [macupdater.net/app_updat...](https://macupdater.net/app_updates/search.html?q=){Query}
HBO/Max - [play.max.com/search/re...](https://play.max.com/search/result?q=l){Query}
Reddit - reddit.com/search?q={Query}
Wayback Machine - [web.archive.org/web/*/](https://web.archive.org/web/*/){query}
[en.wikipedia.org/w/index.p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=){argument name="Article"}
YouTube - [www.youtube.com/results](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=){Query}

If you have online meetings using apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams. Zoom or Google Meet, you can get free noise cancellation via AI as well as meeting transcripts and recordings via Krisp, a business app with a generous free tier. Make sure you clearly understand the privacy policy before doing so.

Noise Cancellation

The AI-powered noise cancellation is bidirectional. It removes any extraneous sounds, background voices and echos. If you elect to use only this feature, none of the data from your calls is recorded on Krisp's cloud servers. Users of the free plan get 60 minutes of cumulative noise cancellation per day. If you purchase a pro ($8 a month)or a business ($15 a month) plan, you get unlimited voice cancellation.

Recording and Transcription

If you choose to let Krisp record your calls onto its cloud servers, you can get unlimited diarized transcription for free and the paid plans also offer audio and video recordings of your meetings. Krisp technology can generate meeting notes complete with action items. The data is presented to you in a way that makes it easy to share with other meeting participants.

My Experience

Krisp encourages people signing up for an account to use their work email by granting a seven-day free trial of the pro plan to those who do. As part of the sign up procedure I had to give it access to either my Outlook calendar or Google calendar. My organization doesn't allow third-party apps to access anything inside our Microsoft 365 tenant, so I opted to connect a Google account. It asked for access to all my contacts, which I did not grant. It asked for access to my calendar events, which I did grant. Furthermore, it asked for access to all calendars to which I have access. I said no to that. After that, my account was created, and I was provided an opportunity to download the software, which comes as a package installer.

Reading the Privacy Policy

Krisp says that the recordings of your meetings are encrypted and stored on its cloud servers, and that it does not use the content for any business purposes. However, it does collect considerable data about your specific computer, tying the machine identifier to your account identity. It makes that data available to third-party vendors and if you want to know what happens then, you have to find out who those vendors are and what their individual privacy policies are. Krisp also

This site uses Google, Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook remarketing services or tags to advertise to previous visitors to Krisp on third-party platforms such as those mentioned. With the help of cookies or tags, these remarketing services allow it to advertise itself to visitors who may have visited them. Thankfully, they provide opt-out links to every one of the services right from the privacy policy page.

The other thing that jumped out at me about their privacy policy was their clear admission that if the cops come for your data, Krisp is going to give it to them.

I can see a use for the app for areas of my life that aren’t sensitive and that I can wall off from my primary Internet presence. Work related calls don’t give me privacy heartburn and volunteer activities that don’t involve any kind of political engagement are OK too, if I feel like going to the trouble of making a separate Google or Microsoft account for them. Otherwise, I’ll find some other solution.

Use the free tool, Integrity, to quickly crawl an entire domain or subdomain and check every link on each page within. See a report listing the URL of each page and see the server response code for all internal and external links found. From within Integrity you can quickly jump to any page within the domain and with the text of the broken link highlighted.

As corporate owned social media becomes more toxic and advertising invades every space available, more and more people are adopting the ethos of the Indie Web movement and creating their own websites in the form of personal blogs hosted on various independent platforms. Some opt for WordPress sites with complicated plugins and CDN management, while others use services that are basically online editors that operate like word processors with a “publish” button, like Micro.blog. For anyone interested in maintaining their own web presence, the bar to entry is low with domain registrations costing under $10 a year and blog  hosting as low as $1 a month..

One of the things that happens over time to all websites is link rot. Linking to news articles and other bloggers invariable results in links breaking over time as companies go out of business, switch URLs or simply remove content. It can be frustrating to people visiting a site to run into many broken links and if you are interested in appearing in search engine results, you’ll find that sites with link rot get downgraded.

Integrity, an app under continuous development since 2007 and was updated just this week. On a domain I own that contains two blogs, the crawler found 1717 pages and 3498 links. There were about a dozen 404 errors from websites that had closed down and social media posts that had been deleted. I also found an issue with Cloudflare and the way my blog host handles hashtags that led me to open a ticket.

Integrity is a free link checker best suited for personal blogs or smaller websites. The same developer has similar tools for professional use. More features and options such as exporting your data, authentication (logging in), managing multiple sites, sitemap generation, SEO checks, spelling & grammar are all available in two related apps; Integrity Plus and Scrutiny. Here is a comparison of major features

Integrity is available from the developer’s website or the Mac App Store.

If you do much research in your browser, and you’re past the stage where you just use Google everything, DEVONagent Lite gives you keyboard quick access to seventeen different categories of reference material, most of them with multiple sources to choose from. No longer do you need to find your browser bookmark for the website you want to use for search. You type your query right in the menu bar of macOS, choose the category and site you would like to search, and press enter. The resulting page opens in your default browser.

The search categories and some of the most useful sites are:

• Search - Google, Brave, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo
• Apple - App Store, Knowledge Base, Mac Update
• Blogs
• Computer Science - GitHub, StackOverflow
• Dictionaries - Onelook, Wiktionary, Info Please
• Directories - Open Directory, WoW, Yahoo Directory
• Discussion Lists - Yahoo Answers
• Government - USA.gov, Firstgov.gov
• Images & Videos - Google Video, Picsearch, YouTube
• Legal - Google Scholar, FindLaw
• Medical - FDA, HeathFinder, PubMed, WebMD
• News - BBC, Google News, Reuters
• Patents - US Patent Office, Google Patents
• References - British Library, Gutenburg.org, Wikipedia
• Science
• Shopping - Amazon
• Social Networking - Facebook Profiles

You cannot add or remove search sites in the free version, nor can you directly access any type of AI. DEVON offers an express version of the app with a few more features for $4.99 and a pro version for $49.99. You can check out the features for each version at the DEVON web site.

For those of you who are regular readers of AppAddict, I changed the domain name to something easier to remember . Old links will still work but if you use an RSS reader, you’ll need to resubscribe. I really appreciate everyone who stops by.

One of the websites I keep an eye on for new to me software is Thriftmac, which currently has a library of 428 categorized free Mac apps with short descriptions and links to developer sites or the Mac App Store. That’s where I found today’s app.

If you need a nice, simple , easy to use GUI front end for FFMpeg, , the free offering from developer Justin Bush, Video Converter - All-in-One Video Conversion is an easy to access choice, Available in the Mac App Store this app has a simple drag and drop interface.

To use the app, first drop the video file to be converted into its holding area. The options are:

• Output formats are suitable for use on AirPlay, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Cast, Xbox, PlayStation, YouTube and web hosting
  • MP4
  • MKV
  • M4V
  • MOV
  • WEBM
  • AVI
  • GIF
• Codecs
  • H.264
  • H.265 (HEVC)
  • MPEG-4
  • VP8
  • VP9
  • Apple ProRes
• Quality
  • Auto (with transmuxing)
  • Balanced
  • Better Quality
  • Smaller Size
  • ProRes Profiles

The app allows you to AirPlay your BluRay movie without sacrificing 4K quality or immersive Dolby Digital Surround Sound. It is capable of handling up to 8K video. If you input a video file with 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound for your home theater system, your output video will retain that ultra-quality format.

User reviews praise the app for its ease of use and speed on Apple Silicon, for which it is optimized. One reviewer noted that the app did not carry over subtitles or chapter markers. It also doesn’t have any features for upscaling.

You can view the source code on GitHub. The most recent update was in November 2024. The app has been in development for three years.

For anyone looking for an anonymous messaging system, that requires no account, email or telephone number to set up, Session may be what you are looking for. With clients for macOS, iOS, Windows, Android and Linux, you can communicate with just about anyone through a network of 2000 decentralized servers. If a server goes down, the network stays up, eliminating any one node as a single source of failure.

Session’s encrypted messages are sent through an onion routing network. Onion networks encrypt messages with multiple layers of encryption, then send them through a number of nodes. Each node ‘unwraps’ (decrypts) a layer of encryption, meaning that no single node ever knows both the destination and origin of the message. Session uses onion routing to ensure that a server which receives a message never knows the IP address of the sender.

Account in Session are created and secured with a mnemonic seed which can be used to restore your existing Account ID to a new device. Your display name can be anything you want it to be. Session does not collect any geolocation data, metadata, or any other data about the device or network you are using. On your local device, Session allows you to encrypt your local Session database with a PIN code. With this feature turned on, your messages cannot be accessed without knowing your PIN code. If the police or a thief have physical access to your device, they still can’t see your messages without your PIN.

Voice and video messaging are current beta features in the app. In early 2025, the back end technology for the app is transitioning to upgraded technology, using crypto-based engineering. Although there are no paid features currently, the non-profit foundation behind the app says that it may implement some in the future, using cryptocurrency. They say the primary private messaging will always be free.

See the Session GitHub site.

The threat from bad actors who seek to access and exploit user data increases every year. The list includes for-profit gangs, unscrupulous developers, the world’s largest social media companies and repressive governments. The information they could potentially use includes, but isn’t limited to, financial records, political or social organizing records, medical records, blackmail material, passwords and personal communications. Those who seek to access your data have increasingly sophisticated methods of bypassing weak security.

A small but powerful free and open-source utility, Picocrypt, weighing in at only 3MB provides easy to use encryption that is powerful enough to withstand attacks from government agencies. With Picocrypt’s simple UI, all you have to do is drag and drop your files, enter a password, and hit Encrypt. There is no need to set up a volume, as there is with other tools like Veracrypt.

Installing Picocrypt is simple. Only download Picocrypt from the official site,. Open the container, and drag Picocrypt to your Applications folder. You may need to manually trust the app from a terminal and control-click on the app if macOS prevents you from opening it:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Picocrypt.app

Features

• Uses extra Reed-Solomon parity bytes to protect from file corruption and bit rot
• Built in customizable password generator
• Comments  to store notes, information, and text along with the encrypted file
• Keyfiles, which can be generated and distributed to multiple people if there is joint ownership of information requiring more than one person to authenticate decryption
• Paranoid mode - a double encryption method suitable for government level or whistle-blower secrecy
• File chunking splits large encrypted files into multiple user selectable sized blocks
• Deniability allows encrypted files to appear without identifiable headers so that if they are intercepted, the bad actor in possession of them will have no way to prove what they are. The output volume will indistinguishable from a stream of random bytes, and no one can prove it is a volume without the correct password.

Picocrypt also has Windows and Linux versions, meaning that the recipient of the files does not have to have a Mac to decrypt the files, just the password. Picocrypt is also portable and does not require installation. It can be run from an external drive, such as a USB stick.

Inoreader, the RSS app and service provider, got some new features today with the release of a new browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

• Save and organize content: Collect web pages and social media posts and tag them as you send them to Read later.
• Annotate while you browse: Mark and annotate texts directly in your browser, then revisit your notes anytime in Inoreader.
• Stay on top of your feeds: Monitor account activity, feeds, tags, and Team channels -- all without switching tabs.
• Streamline article sharing: Share content to Team channels or set up rules for automated content distribution.

Existing Features

Custom Monitoring Feeds

My favorite feature, hands down, are the custom monitoring feeds Inoreader allows me to create. It scours the web every hour to search for articles using my keywords. I have monitoring feeds to help me track my favorite software titles for news and tips/tricks. The wizard that creates these feeds lets me decide whether I want to search entire articles or just titles. I can search the entire Internet or just sources from sites whose main RSS feed I follow. As with all feeds on Inoreader, I can set up a highlighter for my search terms (Obsidian, Raycast, Keyboard Maestro, Micro.blog). I can filter out terms I definitely do not find interesting (Android, Apple Vision Pro, Trump). Finally, I can filter out duplicates and near duplicates so my feed doesn’t get inundated on dates when one of my keywords makes the news, for example when updates to a certain title get released. It is possible to place all these keyword monitoring feeds into a folder and to view the output combined. I can even generate an OPML file with the output to share with others!

Newsletter Subscription Replacement

Inoreader allows me to generate email addresses to use in subscribing to newsletters. That way, I get the benefit of their content without having my mailbox clogged up. Like every other feed, these newsletters can be saved to OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. I can export them to Pocket or ReadWise, Instapaper, Blogger, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or a custom location.

Automation

If you highlight text in any RSS article or newsletter, you can use the highlight to trigger an IFTTT applet. You can do the same with any article you mark to read later. In fact, IFTTT has a dozen different triggers for Inoreader and over 2000 services you can connect it to. You can read your feeds in a web browser or in your choice of RSS readers like Reeder or NetNewsWire. I like their web interface so much that on a desktop, I choose to use a stand-alone web app of their site to read my feeds since it has easy access to most of the extra features offered. On my iPhone and iPad, I use their app as opposed to a separate RSS reader. Their iOS and Android apps have an offline mode allowing you to download content to read later, useful for flights and helping you avoid a separate subscription to a read it late service.

Organization and Backup

You can use folders or tags (or both) to organize your feeds. You can set up notifications for different keywords or material from certain sources. In the settings section of the Inoreader you can look at the health of all of your feeds and easily determine if one is down, allowing you to contact the blogger or publisher of the site in question. If you currently have an RSS provider or reader, Inoreader can easily import your feeds and conversely, it can export feeds for you if you want to use them elsewhere. Your feeds get backed up every day, and you can set them to be saved to a cloud folder synced with your computer so you can have ready access to them. I use Dropbox for this.

Other Features

• Built in podcast player
• Turn Google News searches into feeds
• Customize the look with your own CSS if desired
• Get accelerated updates on certain feeds
• Annotate and save articles
• Multi-lingual content
• Sync your YouTube subscriptions
• Filtered Reddit feeds (see Obsidian posts without having to look at pictures of other people's graphs)

Pricing for all the features I mentioned is $7.50 a month, paid annually. You can download Inoreader for iOS and iPadOS on the App Store.

A Python script that will count the words in a folder of markdown files. #Obsidian #ObsidianMD #PKM

I use Obsidian to write a minimum of three blog posts every day as well as technical documents for my job.  Of course, I also compose and edit notes in it too. At the end of 2024, I was curious to see how many words I’d written on each blog during the year. Unfortunately, I could not find a plugin that could do this, but I suspected that Python probably could. After working on it for a while with the help of Google Gemini, I had an easy to run script that would work on any folder in my vault.  If you have any Python experience, you won’t find this difficult at all to use. The only edit you need to make is for the path of the folder you want to evaluate. Just save this in a text editor like BBEdit with a .py extension. Change the permissions on it using chmod and it will be ready to run.

chmod +x pythonScript.py 

NOTE: A kind person on Reddit pointed me toward a plugin that has this functionality if you'd rather go that route. It is called Novel Word Count.

The Script

\#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
def count_words_in_markdown(filepath):
"""Counts the number of words in a markdown file.
Args:
filepath: Path to the markdown file.
Returns:
The number of words in the file.
"""
with open(filepath, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
content = f.read()
\# Simple word counting by splitting on whitespace
words = content.split()
return len(words)
def count_words_in_directory(directory):
"""Counts the total number of words in all markdown files within a directory.
Args:
directory: Path to the directory containing markdown files.
Returns:
The total word count across all markdown files.
"""
total_words = 0
for filename in os.listdir(directory):
if filename.endswith(".md"):
filepath = os.path.join(directory, filename)
total_words += count_words_in_markdown(filepath)
return total_words
if __name__ == "__main__":
directory_to_search = "PUT THE PATH TO A FOLDER HERE"  \# Replace with your directory
total_word_count = count_words_in_directory(directory_to_search)
print(f"Total words in markdown files: {total_word_count}")

These are the different categories and the products nominated by the community for the 2024 Obsidian.md Gems of the Year, an annual tradition on Discord. Have fun investigating the favorite new and existing complements to what, I think, is the best app to come along since the invention of the browser. 

1. Best content
2. Best template
3. Best tool
4. Best existing plugin
5. Best LLM integration
6. Best third-party integration
7. Best new theme
8. Best new plugin

Best content

• 🇦 Arabic Obsidian Crash Course — by Khaled Mohamed
• 🇧 Bag of Tips YouTube — by Bag of Tips
• 🇨 Beginners Guide Series — by Paul Dickson
• 🇩 David Hurtado Obsidian Publish site — by David Hurtado
• 🇪 Form, Function, & Fun! Obsidian Vault Tour — by CyanVoxel
• 🇫 LeanProductivity — by Sascha Kasper
• 🇬 Love Letter to Obsidian — by Andrej Karpathy
• 🇭 Marco Serafini YouTube — by Marco Serafini
• 🇮 Obsidian Observer — by Nuno Campos, TfTHacker, Theo Stowell
• 🇯 Obsidian: The King of Learning Tools — by Odysseas
• 🇰 Reflections on 4 years of Writing with Obsidian — by Junaid Rahim
• 🇱 Sébastien Dubois Blog — by Sébastien Dubois
• 🇲 TTRPG Tutorials — by Josh Plunkett
• 🇳 Zsolt's Visual Personal Knowledge Management — by Zsolt Viczián

Best template

• 🇦 Automators Podcast Vault — by sylumer
• 🇧 Bag of Tips TTRPG Template Vault — by Bag of Tips
• 🇨 ChatGPT Web Clipper — by ljavuras
• 🇩 Clipper Templates — by kepano
• 🇪 Dusk Vault — by DuskWasHere
• 🇫 LifeOS for Obsidian — by quanru
• 🇬 Starter Kit — by Sébastien Dubois
• 🇭 YouTube Web Clipper template — by harr

Best tool

• 🇦 Actions For Obsidian — by Carlo Zottmann
• 🇧 Browser Search Extension — by Jakob Osterberger
• 🇨 Callout Emojis — by rivea0
• 🇩 Funnel Quick Capture — by NoteSight Labs
• 🇪 Git Sync — by ViscousPot
• 🇫 Obsidian Stats — by Moritz Jung
• 🇬 Plugin Stats — by Ganessh Kumar
• 🇭 Quick Capture for Obsidian — by Pradeep Burugu
• 🇮 Timeline reminders — by LeslyeCream

Best existing plugin

• 🇦 Another Quick Switcher — by tadashi-aikawa
• 🇧 Better Export PDF — by l1xnan
• 🇨 Calendarium — by javalent
• 🇩 Export Image — by zhouhua
• 🇪 File Cooker — by ivaneye
• 🇬 Graphs — by DylanHojnoski
• 🇭 Homepage — by mirnovov
• 🇮 Hover Editor — by nothingislost
• 🇰 LaTeX Suite — by artisticat1
• 🇱 List Callouts — by mgmeyers
• 🇲 Local Backup — by ifgris
• 🇳 Multi Properties — by technohiker
• 🇴 Natural Language Syntax Highlighting — by artisticat1
• 🇵 Pomodoro timer plugin — by eatgrass
• 🇶 Spaced Repetition — by st3v3nmw
• 🇷 TagFolder — by vrtmrz
• 🇸 Text Format — by Benature
• 🇹 Webpage HTML Export — by KosmosisDire

Best LLM integration

• 🇦 Cannoli — by DeabLabs
• 🇧 Copilot — by logancyang
• 🇨 File Organizer 2000 — by different-ai
• 🇩 InfraNodus — by noduslabs
• 🇪 Local GPT — by pfrankov
• 🇫 Local LLM Helper — by manimohans
• 🇬 Mesh AI — by chasebank87
• 🇭 Ollama Chat — by brumik
• 🇮 Smart Composer — by glowingjade
• 🇯 Smart Connections — by brianpetro
• 🇰 Text Generator — by nhaouari

Best third-party integration

In this category we’re highlighting the work of individuals and teams creating plugins that rely on other services, including paid services.

• 🇦 Are.na — by javierarce
• 🇧 Enveloppe — by Enveloppe
• 🇨 Harper — by Automattic
• 🇩 Instapaper — by Instapaper
• 🇪 Légifrance — by carnetdethese
• 🇫 Relay — by no-instructions
• 🇬 Typefully — by Sébastien Dubois
• 🇭 Yanki — by kitschpatrol

Best new theme

• 🇦 Cupertino — by aaaaalexis
• 🇧 Fancy A Story — by ElsaTam
• 🇨 Halcyon — by dbarenholz
• 🇩 Lagom — by LeslyeCream
• 🇪 Minimal Edge — by Elhary
• 🇫 Prime — by rivea0
• 🇬 Underwater — by Seniblue

Best new plugin

In this category we’re highlighting the work of individual developers creating standalone plugins.

• 🇦 Advanced Canvas — by Developer-Mike
• 🇧 Auto Embed — by GnoxNahte
• 🇨 Block Link Plus — by Jasper-1024
• 🇩 Chronos Timeline — by clairefro
• 🇪 Continuous Mode — by gasparschott
• 🇫 Dataview Publisher — by udus122
• 🇬 Featured Image — by johansan
• 🇭 Heatmap Tracker — by mokkiebear
• 🇮 Iconic — by gfxholo
• 🇯 Image Converter — by xRyul
• 🇰 Ink — by daledesilva
• 🇱 Lazy Loader — by alangrainger
• 🇲 Lineage — by ycnmhd
• 🇳 Note Toolbar — by chrisgurney
• 🇴 PDF++ — by RyotaUshio
• 🇵 Pixel-banner — by jparkerweb
• 🇶 Quadro — by chrisgrieser
• 🇷 SQLSeal — by h-sphere
• 🇸 Vault Explorer — by decaf-dev
• 🇹 Vertical Tabs — by oxdc

The extensible tracking service, Trakt, for keeping up with your TV and movie watching habits has been around a while. You can use Trakt in a browser, but It has an API that allows app developers to incorporate the Trakt database into their products. Recently, Trakt got a significant new feature with the introduction of scrobbling, the automatic addition of shows watched to your personal database from five of the largest streaming services:

• Netflix
• Max
• Hulu
• Amazon Prime
• AppleTV+

It also added scrobbling from several popular media centers and players, like Plex, Kodi and VLC

The features in the Trakt API and companion apps allow you to track what you’re watching, add to lists, discover, find where to watch (via a partnership with Just Watch), see what’s up next and get recommendations. Trakt has a free tier and a pro tier. I’ve had a pro membership for a decade. It provides a lot of value, and I’ve recommended it to everyone in my family. If you would like a free one-month pro trial, use this link.

Mac Apps

My current choice of apps for Trakt integration is Sequel Entertainment Database, an app that also provides lists and tracking for print and audiobooks as well as games. It is in iOS/iPadOS app that runs on Macs with Apple Silicon. There are several other well regarded apps that run natively on the Mac.

• Television Time
• Rippple for Trakt
• Trakt TV Tracker: FilmNoir on the App Store

iOS Apps

I've used various iOS apps with Trakt over the years, and my favorites are:

• Watcht for Trakt
• Sofa Time
• Trakt Official App

When using a Mac for writing, I’m all in on the notes app Obsidian, a plain text/Markdown editor. With it, I use various plugins to create a personalized workspace that provides me with all the tools I want. I use

• The editing toolbar
• Better word count
• Reading lever indicator
• Language Tool, a freemium grammar checker
• Paste URL into selection

On iOS, however, I prefer to write using Drafts, also a plain text tool, but one designed as a temporary holding spot until the text is moved to its final home. Drafts has an online directory where you can find extensions that add to its capabilities, making it useful with various apps, not just Obsidian. I use it with Things 3, Google, Dropbox, Google Drive, Day One, Gmail and ChatGPT. There are also extensions to format Markdown and for other text manipulation actions.

My problem with Obsidian on iOS is that although the program now opens much quicker than it used to, it is slower than I’d like to sync, even though I am a paid Obsidian sync user. It’s also prone to crashing and restarting if I try to do certain things while it’s syncing. Sometimes, if I’ve started my daily note on my Mac and I if try to open it on my phone before the sync finishes, my existing content gets overwritten or a duplicate file is created. To avoid creating content on the phone with Obsidian. I just use it as reference tool.

Both Obsidian and Drafts are universal apps. Anything you create on one hardware platform eventually becomes available on all platforms, Mac and iOS. Here are my different use cases for Drafts with Obsidian.

Send to Obsidian (link)

This action creates a new note in the inbox of my vault with the contents of the Draft. I only use one vault, but if I used more than one, I could use different versions of this Drafts extension to send notes to different vaults.

Append to Daily Note (link)

If I have information in a Draft that I want to add to my daily note, this extension appends the information to the bottom of the note verbatim. It's best not to run the extension until after opening Obsidian for iOS and letting it sync.

Append to Daily Note With Time and Place (link)

This action adds a time stamp and the GPS coordinates to the text appended to the bottom of my Daily Note. I use this a lot when traveling.

Notes Created from Vivaldi with an Apple Shortcut (link)

The Obsidian web clipper works with Safari but not other browsers. I use a shortcut available through the sharesheet to send web pages as Markdown files to Drafts. Then I can send them on to Obsidian, from my phone if I need to, or I can just wait until I am back at my Mac.

See More Obsidian Posts

Trying to capture high-quality images from a video can be a frustrating and time-consuming ordeal, requiring the use of multiple apps , the limitations of your screenshot utility, inexact dimensions and extra post-production work. Or you could just use SnapMotion from developer Needed Apps.. SnapMotion can load and play any video format compatible with Apple’s QuickTime Player: MPEG-4, HEVC and MPEG-2, MPEG-4, HEVC, H.264, H.263, H.261, Apple Pro Res, DV, Motion JPEG. It can easily handle 4K and 8K videos without bogging down.

To use the app, you can load a video from one of three sources:

• A file on your drive
• A video in your photos library
• A video from a URL, if the site allows it. The promotional material claims that SnapMotion works with YouTube URLs, but in testing, that turned out not to be accurate. Still, You can use an app like Downie to easily download about any video you can access online.

You can scrub through the video until you find the scene you want to capture as a still image, Then you can advance in increments as small as one frame at the time until you find the exact image you want. If our prefer, you can use the batch capture feature to generate thousands of images, which you can then evaluate individually.

SnapMotion captures images in four formats: PNG, JPEG, TIFF and HEIF. You can adjust the DPI up or down from the default of 72. If your source video contains metadata, you can elect to import that along with your images.

You can download a free trial of SnapMotion on the developer’s website.  It is also available for purchase on the Mac App Store for $8.99. Purchasing it from the App Store also provides you with access to the iPad and iPhone version. If you have a Setapp subscription, it is included.

In this post, I show you how to automate the installation of Mac apps in the two post popular formats ZIP and DMG, so that all you have to do is download a file from a developer’s website and with no further action from you, the app will end up in your Applications folder just like if you’d downloaded it from the App Store.

Typically, when you download a Mac app from a developer’s website, it will come in one of three formats

1. ZIP Archive
2. DMG Disk Image
3. PKG - Package Installer (requires manual installation)

You can automate the installation of ZIP archives and DMG dish images with Hazel and a ninety-nine cent app from the Mac App Store.

DMGs

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. To automate it, create the following rule in Hazel for your downloads folder.

ZIP Archives

You don’t need any additional software to extract and move applications. Everything is built into Hazel. You’ll need to add two rules for your downloads folder. The first will extract the app from the archive. The second rule will move it to the Applications folder.