AppAddict Newsletter

OpenVibe is a social media aggregator for some of the decentralized networks that use Activity Pub, Blockchain and the AT protocol. In this case, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Nostr. OpenVibe users can see a consolidated timeline from all four services and when they post, the post is sent to each service. You cal alternatively see the timeline from a single service if you choose.

There are some unique benefits to using OpenVibe.

• If you have a comprehensive list of blocked words and phrases built on a single platform, you can use that list to moderate all the services used in the app.
• For apps that let you make custom moderation lists like Bluesky and Mastodon, you can choose to toggle those lists on or off.
• Not only are your feeds are consolidated, your notifications are too, divided into comments and mentions, follows, reposts and quotes and reactions.
• Your OpenVibe profile consolidates the number of your followers and followed accounts across all networks.
• You can choose the font you want to use with OpenVibe, plus choose light, dark or system for your theme.
• You can search across all four networks at once or any one of them for profile names of the contents of posts.
• Viewing a list of your followers in Bluesky and Mastodon offers you a chance to follow anyone back with a single click.

OpenVibe is an iPadOS app that runs on Mac desktops with Apple Silicon. If you have an Intel Mac, you will have to use it on an iPhone or iPad. You can download it for free from the App Store. There are no ads. The app requires no special macOS permissions and it does not sell user data.

I am not the developer. I don’t know the developer, nor was I asked to write this post. If you have questions or suggestions, use the contact information on the App Store.

For years, Bartender was one of the most highly recommended utility apps in the Mac space. There were many highly complementary recommended reviews in the tech press and from satisfied users. All of that came crashing to a halt in 2024 when the original developer cashed out and sold the app to new owners without anyone immediately disclosing the sale. Because menu mar managers like Bartender require screen recording permissions, security minded users were justifiably alarmed but the tin foil hat brigade lost their minds. All kinds of nefarious plots and schemes were pitched (the commies, spyware, price increases, subscriptions and more). Some people even accused the new owners of counterfeiting messages from the original dev. Telemetry was briefly introduced and then removed, sparking more tin-foil hattery. 

Outside of the Reddit and perpetually online bubble, Bartender remained popular. On Setapp, the subscription app service with 1 million users, it is the number one most downloaded app. The reason for this is simple. Bartender is great, and it has been through several versions. I’ve used it non-stop for over a decade. I have over 40 menu bar apps running most of the time and it manages them without a hitch. The program is under active development and even more features are on the way.

What Makes Bartender So Good

Like other menu bar managers, Bartender allows you to select what is visible on your screen during normal operations. With a click on the Bartender menu, you can see a secondary display of icons, called the Bartender bar, which can also be summoned through a variety of user defined actions. You can also specify that certain icons never appear in either the menu bar or the Bartender bar.

Bartender allows you to make a number of aesthetic changes to the appearance of the menu bar, including borders, colors and corners.

You can create multiple presets containing different configuration of icons if you want to show and hide icons depending on your workflow. Any of those presets can contain groups of icons, basically a submenu. I group all of my cloud services into one of these.

Bartender can automatically load a preset using triggers. The current triggers are:

• Battery - trigger when on battery power or charging, or at a specific level.
• WiFi - trigger when connected/not connected to a WiFi network. Or when connected to a specific network
• Location - trigger when at a specific location.
• Time/Date - schedule when to trigger
• Icon Appearance - useful for icons like VPNs that change appearance when connected

You can choose icon spacing using three categories: normal spacing, small spacing, no spacing.

There is a search feature that lets you bring any of your menu bar icons into view. You can open it from the Bartender menu or from a hotkey.

If you would like to test Bartender, you can get a four week free trial at the app’s website.

If you are still not convinced, but you need a menu bar manager, here are some more options"

• Ice
• HiddenBar
• Barbee
• Vanilla

If you do a lot of file based work on iOS or you need to consistently connect to network and cloud servers from an iPhone or iPad, FileBrowser Professional might be the solution for you. With it, you can connect to the following cloud storage services

• Microsoft OneDrive
• Microsoft OneDrive for Business
• Microsoft SharePoint 2013 or later
• Box.com
• Google Drive (including TeamDrive)
• Dropbox (including Dropbox for Business)
• Backblaze B2
• Amazon S3
• pCloud
• Digital Ocean
• FileBase S3
• iDrive Cloud S3
• Wasabi S3

Additionally you can connect to

• WEBDAV servers
• FTP/FTPS servers
• SFTP server
• External compatible USB devices

FileBrowser Professional provides backup and sync between your device and any file storage option. You can access your Photo Library from within the app. It has a built-in file viewer for Office files, PDFs, images and video allowing you to access the files in place in their network location. You can open and edit files on the network without copying them to your device.

Other features include bookmarks for frequently accessed locations, a history of recently accessed files and batch renaming. You can select groups of files within a folder for different operations.

FileBrowser Professional is $14.99 on the App Store. It works on iPhone and iPad. It is MDM compatible and has custom features for mass deployment.

Zero Duplicates is a free utility that finds and removes duplicate files based on some smart intelligence features. It finds identical files if the content, file extension and file size are the same regardless of the file name. It has built in safeguards which prevent you from using the program to delete all copies of a file. To use it, you specify the directories you want to scan before initiating a scan. It has a function to auto-select all duplicates in a folder; however, this failed to work for me during testing. Deleted files are removed from disk, not sent to the trash. The program does not scan Apple Photo libraries. You need to use other tools for that task.

Within the app, you can preview files and get size, path and file name information. It works with documents, images, videos, audio/music and more.

You can download Zero Duplicates for free on the Mac App Store. For more information, see the developer’s web site.

When I started working in EdTech, instructors were still using transparency based overhead projectors. When interactive white boards arrived, incorporating connected computers for use instead of grease pencils and plastic, it felt like the future, but the high cost of the easily damaged devices coupled with the need for projectors using replaceable bulbs eventually left schools looking for a better alternative, which in most cases is a cheap, large screen television connected via HDMI. Additionally, since 2020, remote meeting software like Zoom, Google Meet and Teams is now used daily in the business world. Presenters who use either of these methodologies need an affordable and dependable tool to assist them with annotation and highlighting. Presentify by Ram Patra fits the bill.

Featured by Apple on three separate occasions, this app with its menu bar interface offers various shapes, colors and gradients, as well as text entry for anything on your display. Even with an app running in full-screen mode, you can toggle Presentify whenever you wish to add an element. If you wish, you can set any element to auto-erase. If you have an iPad connected via Sidecar, Astropad or Duet Display, you can use that as well as Wacom and other drawing tablets. Presentify has a whiteboard mode that you can use independently of other apps. Control of Presentify is achieved through and onscreen palette or keyboard controls.

The other primary feature of Presentify is mouse cursor highlighting, allowing you to change the color, size and opacity of the cursor, which can be used when it is moving or still.

Presentify is a one-time $6.99 purchase in the Mac App Store, with an IAP option to tip the developer. It is also available through Setapp. It’s a well reviewed app that was received positively on Hacker News and Product Hunt.

Glympse

Glympse is a helpful iOS app that allows you to temporarily, safely and securely share your location with anyone who can receive text messages, regardless of platform. The message contains a URL to a map with an icon representing the locale of the sender. Although there is a paid option for organizations and commercial enterprises, the basic application is free and sufficient for the typical user. 

To use Glympse, you use your contacts or enter a phone number, or multiple numbers. There is a space for a short message, e.g., “On the way”.  You choose the length of time to share your location and optionally, your destination. 

You can save numbers and contacts in the Glympse app if you frequently communicate with the same people. For instance, I have my mom and daughter saved in the app since they both live a few hours away. If contacts both have Glympse installed, they can use the app to request that another user share their location. 

Glympse also allows the creation of private groups. “Glympse Private Groups is a feature of the Glympse app that creates a private, invite-only Glympse Group. Members of a Group can share their location to and request the location (within the group) of other members. Any member of the group can see the location of everyone that is actively sharing within the group. They are perfect for sharing with family, carpool, teams, or a group of friends. The Group is private and not accessible by others, unless they are signed in to Glympse, and have received an invite from an existing member.”

Then there are public groups. “Glympse Public Tags is a feature of the Glympse app that allows you to quickly view and share your location with multiple people on a single, shared Glympse map. Anyone who knows your Glympse Public Tag name can view the tag map and add themselves to the map. When you view a tag map, what you are seeing is a map of people who have chosen to join the Glympse Public Tag map.”

I’ve used Glympse for years. I find it simple and easy to use for even technically challenged folks. 

Orange card is a tiny (less than 1MB) free utility, available on the Mac App Store. It has a simple drag and drop (or paste) interface. It’s used to get extended metadata information from the objects you provide it.

• Drives - Drag a Volume (Hard Disk, Solid State Disk, Compact Disk, Digital Video Disk, Network Server, etc.) onto OrangeCard to get detailed information:
• URL - Drop a HTTP or HTTPS URL and OrangeCard will send a HEAD request:
• Files and Photos - For photographs and other file formats with extensive metadata support, OrangeCard provides detailed information about the camera, dates and times, geographic location and more:
• Applications - App bundle info, all the file system attributes and spotlight metadata are displayed on the card when you drag in an application

Orange Card presents you with several small reports to copy out of the program. Choose the one you want

For anyone who collects and shares links regularly, Bridges Link Sharing is a great tool to increase productivity by making the process easier. If you are collecting a list of apps to share on Reddit or links for a blog post, news letter or bibliography, this is a great tool to have.

You can add links to Bridges through the share sheet or the program’s interface. When you save a link, you can accept the default title or create one of your own. Links are saved into folders which are housed in collections for a more granular differentiation. In the Bridges interface, you see a rich preview of the page, its favicon and hero image. It is possible to preview the entire saved page within the app.

When you’re ready to export links, you can do it one at the time or by folder. The export choices are:

• Hyperlink
• Markdown
• JSON
• HTML
• URL

There is also an iOS app for Bridges (priced separately) and all the data resides in a shared secure iCloud folder and syncs between devices. Bridges is $1.99 on the Mac App Store.

The apps on this list are either free or buy once and use on multiple platforms with just a couple of exceptions. The links are to reviews of the apps that contain pricing information and download links either to the developer’s website of the App Store. (or both)

• Clipboard Fusion - The Windows to iPhone Solution
• Text Shot
• Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots
• Streaks: The Classic Habit Tracker
• MusicBox : Read-It-Later for Music
• Scrap Paper
• Sequel Entertainment Database
• Keka: Free File Compression/DeCompression
• Due, A Hybrid Reminders Alarm Clock App
• AppRaven - Apps Gone Free (and more)
• Listy - A Private List Manager
• Lockdown Privacy Desktop
• Just Press Record
• iA Writer
• Zavala - Free, Open-Source Outliner for Mac, iPhone, iPad
• MusicHarbor - The New Release Finder
• Day One Is Popular for a Reason
• AnyList for Recipes, Shopping and More
• Play: Save Videos, Watch Later
• Cryptomator Free and Open Source Cloud Encryption
• GoodLinks
• NextDNS for Mac
• Things 3, Maybe the Pinnacle in App Design
• Try PDF Gear, It's Good, It's Free
• Apple Password App Is OK I Guess
• Mind Node for Mind Maps
• Yonks - A Well Designed Day Counter
• Elephas Did What Others Wouldn't
• Connect Your Mac Apps with IFTTT
• Fedica - Post to Multiple Social Networks at Once, On a Schedule - For Free
• Kiano - A Unique Image Sorter and Viewer for Apple Photos
• Scratchpad - Floating Notes But Better
• Ente Auth - The Free Authy Replacement for Your Mac and iPhone
• Cronica - A Free, Privacy Focused Media Tracker for Mac and iOS
• Access: Secure Passwords Companion

When I began my career in Mac support, my first task was replacing hard drives in hundreds of Mac LC 575s along with adding an Ethernet card because we were getting Internet access in every classroom. It was a heady time. The new computers we were purchasing were Bondi Blue first generation G3 iMacs. Having come from the PC world, I needed reference material for all the new hardware I was being presented. One of my co-workers told me about MacTracker and for the last quarter of a century I’ve had a copy of this great app installed on every Mac I have ever owned or been assigned.

MacTracker is a stand-alone hardware and software database of every Mac model that’s even been made. It gives you info on:

• processor speed
• memory
• graphic cards
• supported OS versions
• price
• storage
• expansion options

MacTracker provides information on more than just laptops, desktops and servers. It also covers:

• iPhone
• iPad
• Apple Watch and
• Apple Vision Pro
• Newton
• Apple TV
• Apple accessories
• audio displays
• modems
• printers scanners
• storage
• Wi-Fi products
• operating systems

If you have even a passing interest in Mac history, you owe it to yourself to download and peruse this free app. If you are considering tinkering with vintage models, you definitely need this. The program lets you add computers to a section called "My Models" if you want to compare the different Macs you own or have used. It has limited serial number lookups if you are unsure of the model you are working on. You can link to MacTracker from other apps. Each model listed has information on whether it is considered still in support, vintage or obsolete.

There are lots of read it later apps and services available for Mac users. Some, like Instapaper and Pocket require you to create an account and in return give you web access to your saved articles. Others, like Goodlinks don’t have web access but offer you more privacy by syncing your saved articles through iCloud. A relatively new and rather elegant addition to this space is Flyleaf by Max Melzer.

Flyleaf strips everything from web pages except the text of the article and images. It provides an interface similar to the Kindle experience by paginating articles and letting you move through them by swiping. If you prefer scrolling, you can turn the option off. For those into aesthetics, Flyleaf has themes, some of which are behind a paywall. It also lets you control the line spacing, font, margins and alignment (justified text or not).

If you currently use Goodlinks, Instapaper or Later, you can import your current collection into Flyleaf. Flyleaf also has an export feature to import into other apps. Your list of saved articles has various display options, including publication name, reading time, article image, and your reading progress. You can choose to see just a list of titles or a long or short summary of the article. For automation fans, Flyleaf has Shortcuts and x-callback URL support. Articles in Flyleaf are searchable. You can archive them when your done reading and also mark them as favorites to find again quickly.

Flyleaf is an iPad app that runs on Macs with Apple Silicon. If you gave an Intel machine, you’ll have to use it on an iOS device.

Everything in Flyleaf is free to use with two exceptions, extra themes and tagging. If you want those features, a subscription is required. It’s $2.00 mo/$17.00 yr, but in all honesty, those are such minor features for most people that the primary reason for subscribing is to support the developer.

I do almost all of my writing in Markdown, a lightweight and human-friendly markup language used for formatting plain text. Created in 2004, it uses simple punctuation and characters to denote headers, links, emphasis, code blocks, lists and other styles. Markdown is often used for writing README files, documentation, or content for websites. The language was designed for easy reading and writing. One issue with Markdown is that it must be rendered before it looks ready for mass consumption, including printing. Another issue is converting text into other formats, like .docx and .rtf.

There are plenty of tools for those who use Markdown. For creating documents, I often use Obsidian or MarkEdit, both of which are free. Obsidian is a hugely powerful app that has over 2000 plugins and can be overly complicated for some. It’s also an electron app that some people avoid for that reason.

Marked 2

My recommendation to render and print Markdown files is Marked 2 by the great Mac developer, blogger and podcaster, Brett Terpstra. Marked 2 works with many different flavors of Markdown and is really great for developers writing GitHub documentation because it is capable of handling fenced code blocks, line break preservation and automatic hyperlinking. You can even get a spelling and grammar checker through IAP for Marked 2. It works with Obsidian, Scrivener, Ulysses, MarsEdit, Highland 2, iThoughtsX, MindNode, and other third-party apps. Aside from rendering and printing, Marked 2 also has impressive exporting features natively, including:

• PDF (continuous or paginated)
• RTF
• RTFD
• DOC
• DOCX
• ODT
• OPML

Marked 2 is not an editor. It only renders files.

Texts

If you want a WYSIWYG editor for Markdown with considerable exporting features, you can use Texts, a free app. Texts has great table support. What makes Texts special is its ability to import (and convert to Markdown) DOCX, OPML, HTML and LaTeX. It supports the same export formats as Marked and also adds

• HTML
• HTML Presentations
• EPUB2
• EPUB3
• XeLaTex

You can also print from Texts.

Clyde is an app that sounds an alarm when someone shuts your laptop, so that when you walk away from it to order coffee or look for a book and it gets tampered with, everyone will know. The paid version will also send an alert to your watch and phone

• ---

• Reikey is free software from Objective-See that alerts you to any installed keyloggers on your computer. It's from the same suits of apps as Lulu, Knock-Knock, Task Explorer and Block-Block.
• ReiKey and Task Explorer from Objective-See
• BlockBlock and KnockKnock from Objective-See
• Objective-See: OverSight - lets you know when your microphone or webcam is in use by any app.

LinkLiar - a free app for spoofing the MAC address of your Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces to add an extra layer of protection on public networks.

@home - is a free app that will keep your laptop from locking on your home network but enable locking when you are away. It works from the name of the network to which you are connected.

For new users, Drafts Pro is 50% off the first year.

Drafts was the first app I installed when I became interested in iOS and Mac automation. The power users of the world explained it to me as the universal quick capture app for my phone. I was advised to always enter text into Drafts no matter where I eventually wanted it to end up. I dutifully put it into my dock, and it’s been there ever since. In this post, I’m going to go over eight different ways I use Drafts. It’s important to note that it pays off to give it a prominent place in your iOS sharing setting for ease of use. On macOS it should show up in the share settings by default.

1. Copy to Obsidian Inbox

I am all in on Obsidian the massively popular note’s app with a robust 1600+ plugin architecture. It does a lot of things amazing well but mobile quick capture is not one of them. To solve that, I use this Drafts action which saves the text to the default save location in my vault and uses the first line of the text as the note title/file name. I use a couple of other Drafts to Obsidian actions including Add to Obsidian Daily Note and Add to Daily Note Plus which add text to my daily note in different ways using a time stamp and a geolocation.

2. The Things 3, Fantastical, Day One Combo

The Quick Journaling Action Group lets me keep one running note that I can process at day’s end to send the individual lines as entries into Fantastical, Things 3 and Day One.

• Lines starting with "-" are collected and sent to Day One as a journal entry
• Lines starting with "⁎" are sent to Things inbox
• Lines starting with "@" are sent to Fantastical

3. Things Parser

Using Task Paper syntax I can create a note in Drafts complete with due dates, areas, projects and tags that get correctly imported into the Things 3 task manager using the Things Parser. I use this with a Drafts template to create daily and weekly checklists for reoccurring tasks. I also use the action group, Things for Things which includes actions for:

• Inbox
• Today
• This Evening
• Tomorrow
• Pick date
• Work
• House
• Personal
• Pick a Project
• Make a Project
• Selection to things
• Bunch of todos
• Process notes from
• Prompt for new task

4. Mail to Evernote

Yep, I still use Evernote for some tasks. Old habits die hard. Evernote eliminated AppleScript a while back and their API has become more and more problematic , but one feature they still support and that works equally well on iOS and macOS is the mail to Evernote feature and this Drafts action accomplishes that without you ever having to use your mail client.

5. Micro.blogging

This blog is hosted by Micro.blog and I can create entries in Drafts and have them posted online by running an action. I use the action Post to Micro.blog with Title by the great blogger Matt Birchler.

6. OMG.LOL Status

I am a big fan of the almost indescribable web community at OMG.LOL. One of the fun features there is a status board you can share with other members, post on your website and cross-post to Mastodon (where all the cool kids hang out). The OMG.LOL Status action does it all.

7. Run Shortcut to Save to Thoughts Inspiration Manager

One of my favorite things to do online is to collect quotes from various sources, I save my quotes in an app called Thoughts Inspiration Manager. I don’t have a Drafts action to write directly to Thoughts but it doesn’t matter because I have a Shortcut that does. I just need to run the Drafts shortcut action explained in the user guide.

8. Personal Assistant

Drafts can serve as an interface with OpenAI by using the Personal Assistant action. (using your own API key) It’s a helpful action to run when you know you are going to use the AI generated text in another app. This action allows the user to get an AI-assisted response to a prompt:

1. The user is prompted to enter input, which can be pasted from the clipboard or manually entered.
2. The input is then sent to the OpenAI API, and the response is inserted into the current draft 3 lines after the cursor.
3. If there is no selected text in the draft, the user is asked if they would like to use text from the clipboard. If the prompt is canceled or the input is empty, the action cancels.
4. If there is no response from the API, the output is set to "No reply received."

One big feature missing from Apple’s new Passwords App is secure notes to store data besides passwords. While you can make notes within the app, it isn’t designed to store that kind of info. You could opt for the Apple Notes app since it’s secured by the same security and allows you to password protect individual items with a password. It even supports templates, but you would have to build them yourself. If you want a secure, ready-made solution you can use on iOS and macOS, Access may be right for you.

Access has templates for the following kinds of data:

• Payment card
• Bank account
• ID
• Document
• Driver's License
• Insurance
• Passport
• Medical Record
• Rewards program
• Membership
• Software license
• Gift card
• API keys
• Secure personal entries (address book format)
• Notes (useful for all those 2FA code backups)

Every entry has room for user-defined custom fields and attachments, so not only can you have easy to copy info from your important documents, you can also have a photographic copy of them as well.

The layout and appearance of Access is identical to that of the Passwords app. Since privacy is paramount considering the types of data stored in Access, the developer goes into great detail to explain it “Your information is backed up and kept up-to-date across your devices via iCloud. Access is using Apple’s industry-leading iCloud Encryption to protect your information. No data is ever sent to any server other than iCloud. The app doesn’t create, access, or store keys for any encrypted data. With Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, all Secure Data stored in Access is end-to-end encrypted and is inaccessible to the Developer, Apple, or any third party at all times. For an added layer of security, Access supports authentication with Touch ID. All data stored in Access on your device is automatically encrypted and decrypted by the system.”

Access has a free version with limited functionality, but to get access to every feature, you’ll need to purchase lifetime access for $29.99 or subscribe for $9.99 yr/$3.99 mo.

There are many paid options to discover and track movies and TV shows, most of them being subscription-based. Cronica, donation-ware from Egger, Inc., full-featured right out of the box, with no limit on usage. The app can be employed for various purposes:

• Tracking episodes of TV shows or movies you've already seen
• Discovering new movies and shows through trailers and descriptions from The Movie Database (with an option to watch the trailers via YouTube)
• Notifications when movies are released or new episodes of shows air
• iCloud syncing between your Mac and iOS devices - no account required with the app's developers
• Get suggestions based on your watch history
• Share links with others from within the app, using The Movie Database
• Suitable for international audiences. Allows users to choose a region.

Cronica is available for download from the Mac App Store.

Sloth is a free and open-sourced app that’s been around for twenty years. It provides an app by app breakdown of all open files and sockets in use by all running processes on your system. This makes it easy to inspect which apps are using which files and sockets. In activity monitor, you get information on processes, but not on what app they belong to or where they are located on disk. Every so often, when you are troubleshooting an obscure problem, you need that information. I recently had to track down what app was causing my Mac to slow to a crawl every time I encountered an open/save dialog box. Sloth was helpful during that process.

You may end up surprised at some processes running on your box. Despite everything I have tried, the inescapable Adobe virus insists on running some process whenever my computer is on, despite having all their apps set to not run at login.

Features

• View all open files, directories, IP sockets, devices, Unix domain sockets and pipes
• Filter by name, access mode, volume, type, location, or using regular expressions
• Sort by name, process ID, user ID, process type, bundle identifier, etc.
• View IP socket status, protocol and version
• View sockets and pipes established between processes
• Inspection window with detailed macOS and Unix file/socket/process info
• Powerful contextual menu for file operations
• In-app authentication to run with root privileges

Sloth is available on GitHub and can be downloaded via Homebrew. 

$ brew install --cask sloth

If you miss the Authy 2FA desktop app, and you would rather not use Apple Passwords, since if you were to lose access to your Apple account, you would lose access to all your codes, Ente Auth is a free and open-source option. You have the option to create an account if you want to sync your codes between devices, or you can skip that if you just want to use it on a single device.

The desktop version of Ente Auth has some nice features I haven’t seen elsewhere. Not only does it show you the current 2FA code for your app, it also shows you the next code in the sequence. This eliminates the aggravating wait for the codes to change when there are only a few seconds left in the lifetime of the current code. You can also configure the desktop app to open directly to the search field, so you can immediately begin searching for the code you need.

It can be a hassle to set up a new authenticator, since you have to manually add sites. Most do not allow you to use more than one app to do 2FA. Still, it is a one-time chore and worth it for the convenience of having a secure desktop app with end-to-end encryption.

Thanks to Justin Pot for his article on Lifehacker about Ente Auth.

Attempting to save a web page to your local computer often results in multiple files and folders downloaded. A recently updated plugin for Safari, Chromium browsers and Firefox provides an elegant way to get everything you need in a single HTML file, downloaded with the click of a button in your browser’s toolbar. You can choose to download only the selected text or a single frame from within the page. Any page that you download can be annotated with tools included within the plugin. The annotation tools also allow you to remove content you don’t need or want.

Not only can you download a single page and its elements, you can select multiple tabs at once and download them all with a single click. Another option saves a local HTML files of any page that you bookmark. You can control the destination of the saved files, saving them to a cloud drive like Google Drive or iCloud.

You can get SingleFile from wherever you obtain extensions for your particular browser type. The overall project is on GitHub where you can get support.

Most modern browsers have multi-language translate built in. Vivaldi even has a separate panel for it. Sometimes, though, we encounter text in other languages in books and documents or when we aren’t connected to the Internet. Then it’s not possible to use a browser. Also, even though Google Translate is the de facto standard, there are other translation engines that some feel are better. Here are a few options.

Translator - Offline Translate

If you want a tool for Mac that works when you don't have a connection, this is what you need. It's only 3.99 in the Mac App Store. It is a one-time purchase, not a subscription and installs as a menu bar app. One drawback is a limited number of supported languages when compared to online versions. It supports:

• Arabic
• Chinese (Mandarin - China Mainland)
• Chinese (Mandarin - Taiwan)
• Dutch
• English (US)
• English (UK)
• French (France)
• German (Germany)
• Indonesian
• Italian (Italy)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Russian
• Spanish (Spain)
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Google Translate Web View

This free app is a web view wrapper for Google Translate that operates from your menu bar and can be summoned with a hotkey. It is available on Github. It has a limit of 5,000 characters at a time. It does have built in OCR for images, so you can upload those to have them interpreted. Google Translate offers automatic language detection if you are unsure what you are dealing with. This is an unsigned app, so you will have to give permission to bypass Gatekeeper. Google supports translation into 108 languages.

DeepL

Some feel the private company, DeepL, offers a product with superior translation abilities when compared to Google. It's paid services offer the ability to upload and translate large documents, including PDFs. The free service provides you with three documents a month of up to 5MB and, like the other apps in this review, provides real-time translation from the menu bar. DeepL supports the following languages:

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Chinese (simplified and traditional)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (American and British)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazilian and European)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian