If you rely on iCloud but don’t have a true backup of that data, BackiGo is one of the simplest ways to create one.

BackiGo is an iCloud backup app I can recommend for anyone looking for an alternative to Parachute. Parachute is a well-known iCloud backup utility that was recently acquired by a company with a solid reputation, but also a history of price increases and subscription transitions.

Who This Is For

BackiGo is particularly useful if you:

• Store large amounts of data in iCloud Drive or iCloud Photos
• Use Optimize Mac Storage, meaning your Mac does not hold full local copies
• Want an off-Apple backup copy of your iCloud data
• Need to back up iCloud data to a NAS, external drive, or another cloud provider

Why You Need an iCloud Backup

Sometimes Apple’s logic escapes me. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the opaque world of iCloud.

If you don’t have a method for keeping a versioned backup of your iCloud documents and photos, you should set one up sooner rather than later.

The simplest approach looks like this:

1. Use a Mac signed into iCloud.
2. Turn off “Optimize Mac Storage” for both iCloud Drive and Photos.
3. Allow all files to download locally.
4. Let Time Machine back up that Mac.

This works because Time Machine will keep historical versions of those files.

Unfortunately, that approach isn’t practical for everyone. If, like me, you pay for 2TB of iCloud storage but your Mac has a much smaller internal drive that can’t be upgraded, downloading everything locally simply isn’t feasible.

Experienced Mac users already understand the core issue: iCloud is a syncing service, not a backup.

If you overwrite a file, the new version replaces the old one everywhere. If you delete a file, it disappears everywhere. If a file becomes corrupted, that corruption syncs too.

Even with Time Machine running, you still won’t have copies of many files if Optimize Mac Storage is enabled, because those files never existed locally on your Mac.

The core idea is simple: get a second copy of your iCloud data somewhere Apple’s sync engine can’t touch it.

One more thing - you can find multiple stories of people permanently losing access to their iCloud accounts through ID theft, malware and Apple’s own policies.

BackiGo Features

This is where BackiGo comes in. The app lets you create a copy of your iCloud data and store it in a variety of locations:

• External drives (USB or Thunderbolt)
• Other cloud providers with versioned storage, such as Dropbox or Google Drive
• A NAS on your home network
• A shared folder on another computer (including Windows machines)
• An FTP server
• WebDAV support is planned

Some of the features I’ve found useful:

• Universal app that runs on Mac, iPhone, and iPad
• Flexible photo organization; mirror your Apple Photos structure or export into folders by device/year/month (for example AmerpieMBA/2026/04)
• Selective backups; back up documents but skip photos, or back up only specific albums
• Multiple cloud destinations, including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, pCloud, and Backblaze
• Incremental and full backups
• Scheduled backups based on time, frequency, and backup type
• Local Photos library support for people who use Photos without iCloud
• Live Photo and shared album support
• Built-in photo viewer to visually confirm what’s included in a backup
• Detailed reports of backup and restore history, exportable as HTML or CSV

Details

Privacy Policy

No data collected.

Developer Website

BackiGo – Complete iCloud Photo backup and restore solution for iOS and Mac

Price

• Free trial (limited to 500 images)
• $14.99 lifetime purchase
• $6.99 annual subscription
• $0.99 monthly subscription

Available on the Mac App Store with Family Sharing enabled.

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I’m always impressed when an out-of-the-box thinker builds an app unlike anything I’ve seen before. Iterating on proven concepts is fine, but after testing enough clipboard managers and voice-to-text apps, they all start to blur together. Give me something new, clever, and useful, and I’ll happily change my workflow to make room for it. a year ago, DoubleMemory caught my attention with its interesting feature set and it's done nothing but improve since then.

DoubleMemory

I sometimes worry that one day my brain will run out of capacity for new hotkey combinations. When that happens, any app that relies on them will be off the table. DoubleMemory neatly sidesteps that problem by baking the instruction directly into its name.

Press ⌘C twice quickly, and the app captures either the webpage you’re on or the text you’ve highlighted. It then drops that content into an aesthetically well-designed, searchable, Pinterest-like interface with some surprisingly useful capabilities.

There’s a setting that allows DoubleMemory to save everything you copy, but I’d advise against leaving that on all the time. It’s not a clipboard manager in the sense that Raycast or PastePal are. For example, it doesn’t capture images.

Where it shines is with URLs. Highlight the URL of any webpage you’re on and press ⌘C twice. DoubleMemory downloads the page content and stores it locally, making it as much a read-it-later tool as a bookmark manager. In practice, it works well as either.

Saved content can sync via iCloud, which means your collection is accessible on your iPhone, iPad, and other Macs.

DoubleMemory also doubles as a lightweight notes tool. Highlight a passage of text anywhere, press ⌘C twice, and it’s saved to your board. From there you can add your own commentary and organize the entry with tags. There’s even optional AI-powered auto-tagging if you want help categorizing things.

One detail I appreciate: DoubleMemory doesn’t require an account, and you don’t need to install a browser extension. If you routinely save URLs from different sources on a specific topic, you quickly end up with a clean, searchable database that works offline.

It’s also refreshingly lightweight. The app uses roughly 10 MB of RAM during normal use. For automation fans, it supports Apple Shortcuts, the macOS share sheet, and drag-and-drop to the Dock (if you enable the Dock icon).

Interesting Features

• Bookmark Imports
  If you want to migrate an existing read-it-later list or bookmarks from another service (for example Raindrop), DoubleMemory includes solid import tools.
• Active Roadmap
  I’ve been following the project for about a year, and development has been steady. Planned features include image and screenshot support and automated imports of saved searches. Personally, I’d love to see it pull in my saved Reddit posts.
• Approachable Developer
  The developer is easy to reach and actively engages with users. There’s a Discord, a Substack newsletter, an active Reddit presence, and a well-maintained website with an up-to-date changelog.
• Freemium Model
  The free tier already allows unlimited saves, notes, bookmarks, and tags. The Pro plan mainly adds more than three saved searches and supports the developer. Future premium features are expected to focus on advanced retrieval, AI-powered organization, and richer content consumption tools.

DoubleMemory has a lot going for it. It’s easy to understand, genuinely useful in daily workflows, and feature-rich without feeling bloated.

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I posted my 500th app review this week. If you keep typing long enough, this is what happens. It makes me super happy and I hope I have helped some of you find apps that you've grown to use and love. If I have, please leave a comment, it will be motivating and appreciated. I want to give a shout out to r/MacApps for all the support and feedback I've gotten there. I also want to thank Scribbles, the blogging platform I've used the entire time.

I recently added a way for developers to alert me to their apps. If you know anyone who has an app that could use some exposure, please let them know they can request a review here.

AppAddict is just me, one old guy with a laptop and a decades old predilection for clicking the download button on just about every app I see. This is my hobby, not a side job. I do it because I enjoy it. I can't tell you how thrilling it's been to interact with developers of some of my favorite apps. I still have a big streak of fanboy.

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Every Mac user eventually ends up with a pile of files that need converting. Screenshots that are too large for the web. HEIC photos from iPhones that need to become JPEGs. Audio recordings saved at ridiculous bitrates. Video files that need to be optimized for sharing.

You can solve all of that with command-line tools like ffmpeg or with a handful of separate utilities.

Or you can just use Picmal.

Picmal is a single macOS utility that handles image, audio, and video conversion and compression. Once installed, it integrates directly into the Dock, Finder, menu bar, Services, and Shortcuts, so it behaves more like a built-in system tool than a typical standalone app.

It works immediately with sensible defaults, but if you want to tweak codecs, formats, or compression levels, the controls are there.

Images

I’ve set up one of my screenshot apps specifically for images I plan to post on the web. It saves those screenshots into a folder that Picmal watches.

When a file lands there, Picmal automatically:

• converts it to my preferred format
• applies a compression level that keeps good clarity while shrinking the file size
• renames the file so I know it’s already been processed

That automation alone has been useful for blogging and documentation.

If you regularly deal with HEIC photos from iPhones or iPads, Picmal can also watch a folder and convert them automatically.

Picmal also handles image resizing and color space conversion (sRGB, ProPhoto RGB, Display P3, and others). If you’re preparing files for printing, you can adjust DPI as well.

Audio

Batch processing works well. I had a collection of spoken-word recordings from events I’d attended, and many of them had been saved at extremely high bitrates that made sense for music but not for speech.

Picmal converted and compressed the entire batch without complaint. The resulting files sounded the same for spoken content while taking up far less disk space.

Video

Video conversion uses simple presets:

• Maximum Quality
• Balanced (Size & Quality)
• Web Optimized
• Social Media
• Maximum Compression
• Custom

Pick the preset that matches the destination and you’re done. If you need more control, the Custom option exposes additional settings.

Clipboard Optimization

Clipboard optimization lets Picmal compress images you copy to the clipboard. Copy a screenshot, a web image, or a file in Finder and Picmal quietly optimizes it in the background.

A small overlay appears so you can immediately replace the original clipboard contents with the compressed version.

If you enable the option, Picmal can automatically copy the optimized image back to your clipboard. One practical advantage: images processed this way can be pasted into Finder as files, which isn’t something macOS normally allows with clipboard images.

A nice touch: if the image is already efficiently compressed, Picmal detects that and skips the process instead of recompressing it.

How It Fits Into a Typical Mac Workflow

If you already use media tools on macOS, you might be wondering where Picmal fits.

ImageOptim
Great for compressing images, especially for web publishing. Picmal overlaps here but adds format conversion, automation via watched folders, and clipboard workflows.

Permute 
Permute focuses mostly on media conversion with a clean UI. Picmal covers similar ground but adds automation features and deeper Finder integration.

ffmpeg / command-line tools
Still the most flexible option for scripting and complex workflows. Picmal obviously can’t match that level of control, but for everyday tasks it removes a lot of friction.

In practice, Picmal feels less like a replacement for those tools and more like a convenient layer on top of common conversion tasks.

Final Thoughts

At $15.99 per seat with lifetime updates, Picmal is reasonably priced for what it does. There’s also a 15-day no-questions-asked refund.

All processing happens locally on your Mac (macOS 14 or newer), and the developer states that no data is collected. If you want to dig deeper, the developer provides comprehensive documentation on the website.

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I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table.

I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table.

Most of the improvements I rely on come from stitching together tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and a few power-user utilities I discovered at r/MacApps.

None of this is complicated once it’s set up. The goal is just to eliminate little interruptions that happen dozens of times a day.

Here are a few small automations and workflow tweaks that currently make my Mac feel a lot more like my machine.

• I like Safari, but I don’t like how easily it spawns extra windows. I now use an AppleScript tied to Keyboard Maestro. With a mouse click or hotkey, it closes every Safari window except the frontmost one.
• Safari has good AppleScript and Shortcuts support, but it still doesn’t provide a keyboard-friendly way to jump directly to a specific Tab Group. My workaround is an Apple Shortcut that batch-opens groups of URLs that mirror my tab groups: Server, Social, Blogging, Software, etc.
• I set up BetterTouchTool so that fn + Button 3 on my Logitech mouse triggers the New command across roughly two dozen apps. Depending on the app, that can mean a new tab, new note, new document, new Shortcut, new Keyboard Maestro macro, new email, or new message.
• I’m currently using SideNotes as my scratchpad. It stays hidden on the right edge of my primary display until I toggle it with a hotkey or an ExtraBar menu item.

Most of these are tiny things, but they add up surprisingly fast

• I use Rectangle Pro’s layout manager to launch and arrange 10 apps across two displays and eight virtual desktops. Each desktop has a keyboard shortcut, and I tie them together with a single Keyboard Maestro macro. (download link)
• I wrote a small shell script (download link) that reconnects me to Tailscale if the connection drops or fails to start. It runs via launchd, configured through Lingon Pro.
• I use macOS 26’s automation features in Apple Shortcuts to create my daily Obsidian note from a template. The automation also inserts a weather report and the day’s calendar events, so the note is ready when I sit down at my desk each morning. (Requires Actions for Obsidian.)
• When I need a dual-pane file manager instead of Finder, a Keyboard Maestro trigger runs an AppleScript that closes all Finder windows and replaces them with a ForkLift window. (download macro)
• I removed the menu bar icons for BetterTouchTool, Default Folder X, Supercharge, and Rectangle Pro. Their functions are now exposed through ExtraBar instead.
• If a developer doesn’t expose a URL scheme, you can’t deep-link into specific menu items. Finder is a good example; there’s no direct link for Go to Folder. ExtraBar can run scripts, though, so a small AppleScript can send keystrokes to trigger the command. If the feature exists in a menu but has no keyboard shortcut, you can also create your own under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Sample Script

tell application "Finder"
activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "g" using {command down, shift down}
end tell

None of these are huge changes individually, but together they remove a lot of small interruptions during the day.

Curious what small automations or workflow tricks other people here are using.

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I’ve become quite fond of Consul, a relatively new file conversion utility that’s both simple to use and easy to automate. The concept is almost absurdly straightforward: change the file extension to the format you want and the conversion just happens.

You might think you’ll never really need to convert files from one format to another. In practice, that assumption tends to collapse sooner or later. A few situations I’ve run into over the years:

• Switching from one e-reader (for example, Sony) to another (Kindle) and suddenly needing to convert an entire library of books.
• My photography workflow revolves around Canon’s RAW format (CR2). When a relative passed away and I inherited his photo archive, the files were a mix of several other RAW formats.
• After living through the minor apocalypse when Microsoft killed Works, you’d think I would have learned something about proprietary formats. Instead, I spent another twenty years writing in Word before finally switching to Markdown.
• Occasionally grabbing an iPhone photo and realizing it exported as HEIC, which remains incompatible with far more things than it should be.
• Optimizing photos and video for my blog or social media.

There are plenty of ways to convert files. Most of them involve some level of friction:

• Opening an app (Word, for example) and using File → Save As to create another copy in a different format.
• Uploading files to random conversion websites with unclear privacy policies.
• Using powerful utilities like Permute, which are excellent but come with a bit of a learning curve.
• Building your own workflow with Apple Shortcuts if you enjoy assembling that kind of plumbing.

What makes Consul such a pleasure is the complete absence of friction. It runs quietly in the background, and when you need to convert something, it just happens the moment you rename the file. For most conversions, the default settings are fine, but in the settings, you can control exactly how each conversion is handled including the output quality and codec, or whether to strip metadata.

For Mac automation nerds, Consul can be set to watch folders and perform conversions when a certain file type lands there. You can use Consul with Hazel or another automation tool like Crank to route the converted file elsewhere, import it into Photos or upload it to an FTP server.

Consul currently supports 1,391 conversions across 76 file formats, covering images, audio, video, documents, e-books, email, configuration files, spreadsheets, and archives.

The developer’s site suggests more formats are planned. I’d particularly like to see support for Apple iWork files and OpenOffice spreadsheets and presentations. My pie-in-the-sky request would be a PDF → EPUB conversion that performs better than what Calibre currently produces.

Pricing is refreshingly simple. A single license is $14, and a three-seat license is $19, both including a year of updates.

The privacy policy is exactly what you want to see: no data collection. Email support is available, and the developer is active on Reddit and notably friendly when people have questions.

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Some small utilities become so embedded in my workflow that they start to feel like part of macOS itself. When I sit down at someone else’s Mac or a freshly set-up machine and they aren’t there, it genuinely throws me off.

I’m curious what apps fall into that category for you.

Shareful

One of those apps for me is Shareful by Sindre Sorhus.

The Mac share menu has always felt like an afterthought compared to iOS. Many developers don’t bother implementing it, and Apple keeps it oddly limited. Shareful fixes that by adding a few practical actions that save me a surprising number of clicks every day:

• Copy
• Open In
• Save As…
• Save to Downloads

It’s simple, but once you have it, the default share sheet feels incomplete without it.

Start by Innovative Bytes

Even though I’m very much a keyboard-launcher person (Team Raycast), there are situations where that approach breaks down.

Sometimes I need a small, obscure utility whose name I can’t remember. When your /Applications folder is as crowded as mine, scrolling through it isn’t realistic.

That’s where Start from Innovative Bytes comes in. Two features make it especially useful.

• Tagging
  Tagging lets you create categories for apps without any friction. You can even nest them, like Utilities/Screenshots or Utilities/Clipboard, which makes browsing a large app library much more manageable.
• Notes
  You can attach a short description to an app so you remember what it actually does.

A good example is the file-conversion utility Consul, which lets you change an image’s format just by renaming it. Seeing a note like “file rename / conversion” when browsing makes it much easier to find again later.

Honorable Mentions

• Apparency – The App That Opens Apps — a Quick Look extension and inspection utility for applications
• CleanShot X — the screenshot tool whose keyboard shortcuts are permanently burned into my muscle memory; although ScreenFloat is starting to make a case for itself

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Resurf is a clever new app, currently in beta, with a lot of potential. This is one of those “I needed an app to do X, so I built one” projects; the difference is that it was built by a design engineer who clearly understands macOS conventions. The result feels native and thoughtfully put together.

Using it brought back a few workflow habits I haven’t used since the days when Evernote was king.

The entry point into Resurf is a floating capture widget that you trigger with a shortcut. From there you can use either the mouse or the keyboard to capture five types of content, with some overlap:

• Notes
• Links
• Screenshots (using a built-in capture tool)
• Media
• Voice memos

The same widget also provides a Spotlight-style search across your Resurf vault, which is essentially the folder where everything you capture is stored.

Practical Use Cases

There are several ways Resurf can fit into a real workflow.

• Screenshot organizer
  A quick way to capture, store, and resurface reference screenshots without littering your desktop with files named Screenshot 2026-03-21 at 10.43.11.png.
• Bookmarks and lightweight browser
  Links can open directly inside Resurf so you can skim content without switching to a browser. Eligible pages default to Reader View with adjustable font sizes, but you can switch to a standard page view or send the link to your default browser.
• Scratchpad
  If you need a fast place to dump temporary information, Resurf works well as a searchable scratchpad. You can open straight into the notes interface and start typing.
• Quick notes staging area
  Once the shortcut becomes muscle memory, it’s easy to use Resurf for quick capture even if you keep your long-term notes somewhere else. When something turns out to be worth keeping, the macOS share sheet makes it simple to move it into another app.

Organizing Your Data

A Resurf vault can live in iCloud, in another synced folder like Dropbox, or locally on your Mac. If you use iCloud, you’ll be able to pair the Mac version with the upcoming iOS app.

You can also maintain multiple vaults, each located anywhere in your file system.

Within a vault, Resurf provides several ways to organize what you capture:

• Inbox / Later
  If you don’t want to categorize items during capture, everything can go into an Inbox for later triage. There’s also a Later folder for items you want to defer organizing.
• Areas
  Areas function much like folders and can hold any content type.
• Tags
  Tags can be created during capture. The sidebar includes both a tag browser and a dedicated tag view.
• Pins
  Any item can be pinned to the top of its area.
• Voice memo export for transcription
  Voice memos can be exported to the file system, making it easy to run them through a transcription tool and turn them into text documents.

Nice Touches

A few small details show that the developer thought about real usage rather than just features.

• Share Sheet support
  Resurf stores notes internally as JSON rather than plain files, but exporting content to other apps is straightforward through the macOS share sheet.
• Open In
  Similar to the share sheet; lets you send items directly to another app.
• Instant Markdown rendering
  Markdown renders automatically without switching between edit and preview modes.
• Slash commands
  Formatting can be applied quickly using slash commands.
• Notes about notes
  Every captured item can include an attached note, which is handy for adding context to screenshots, links, or media.
• Chrome extension
  Lets you save links directly from the browser.

Feature Requests

Resurf is still early in development, and there are a few capabilities that would make it significantly more powerful.

• Support for clickable internal links to things like Mail messages or Obsidian notes
• The ability to attach arbitrary documents to notes
• Inline images inside notes (currently you can only add notes about images)
• Shortcuts and AppleScript support
• A Safari extension

Privacy

You can read the full policy here:
https://resurf.so/privacy

Regardless of where your vault lives, your data remains private. The app only contacts Resurf’s servers to validate your license. According to the developer, no identifying information or user content is transmitted during that process or afterward.

The company is based in Canada. Because they never see your data, GDPR provisions around data access, portability, and deletion are largely irrelevant in this case.

Price

$39

• One-time purchase at the early supporter price. Unlimited captures. Any updates we release are free for 2 years after stable release.
• Unlimited captures
• Mac app license (up to 2 Macs)
• All beta updates included
• Any updates released are free for 2 years after stable release
• Priority email support

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I’ve been hearing about Octarine for a while. It’s one of those apps that people whose opinions I respect talk about with a certain level of admiration. After testing it as thoroughly as I’ve tested any app in a long time, I understand why.

Octarine is a tool for creating, editing, and organizing text-based information using connected but independent documents: Markdown files. Without relying on plugins, it supports images, video, PDFs, and files created by other productivity apps. Those files can be linked inside Octarine but still open in their native applications.

Octarine isn’t designed for a single purpose. It’s more like a flexible Markdown workspace you can adapt to several overlapping uses:

• Journaling
• Task management
• Writing and long-form drafting
• Math or science reference notes
• Documentation
• Personal knowledge management (PKM)
• Project planning

Setup

Octarine is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but it’s not a heavy Electron app. The download is just over 30 MB, and it launches as fast as TextEdit; effectively instant.

The interface is tab-based, similar to a web browser. It isn’t strictly native macOS UI, but it’s clean, responsive, and supports customizable themes.

Installation on the Mac is simple:

1. Open the downloaded DMG
2. Drag Octarine.app into /Applications

That’s it.

When you launch it for the first time, Octarine asks you to open or create a Workspace. A workspace is simply a folder of Markdown files; either ones you create or notes that already exist somewhere on your Mac.

Structure

You can download, install, and configure Octarine in well under a minute and immediately start creating documents.

A key design choice is that Octarine uses the filesystem directly. Your workspace is just a folder containing Markdown files with human-readable filenames.

That means:

• You can manage files directly in Finder
• You can open them in any text editor
• Octarine will immediately reflect changes made elsewhere

I verified this by opening a note in Typora, adding a table, and watching it render instantly inside Octarine.

Because everything lives in normal folders and Markdown files, syncing is straightforward. You can use:

• iCloud Drive
• Google Drive
• Syncthing
• GitHub repositories (built-in integration)

The Git support also provides versioning for people who want a real audit trail for their notes.

Like most PKM-oriented tools, Octarine supports wikilinks. Typing [[ opens a searchable list of notes in the workspace. If you bracket a title that doesn’t exist yet, Octarine offers to create the note.

There’s also a knowledge graph showing connections between notes. Just remember: posting screenshots of your graph online costs you several internet credibility points.

Formatting

Most formatting tools are accessible through a slash command menu (/), which exposes a wide range of Markdown and extended elements:

• Headers
• Text styles (bold, italic, strikethrough)
• Callouts
• Code blocks
• Mermaid diagrams
• LaTeX
• Dividers
• Tables
• Colored text
• Dates
• Links
• Templates

You could easily use Octarine purely as a writing tool. It’s a full Markdown editor with live rendering similar to apps like Typora.

Under the hood, however, the file remains a plain text Markdown document. You can open it in BBEdit, import it into Obsidian, or process it with any other Markdown tool.

Octarine also converts pasted HTML into Markdown, preserving elements such as headers, links, bullet lists, and text styles.

Organization

The left sidebar provides a file tree for navigating your workspace. Nested folders work exactly as you’d expect.

When you attach files such as images or PDFs to a note, Octarine automatically creates folders to store them.

Octarine also supports seven types of metadata, which can be used to organize and filter notes.

The most powerful organizational feature is something called Views.

Views are dynamic, database-style tables that display notes based on filters, sorting rules, and custom columns.

Think of them as smart saved searches that update automatically as your notes change.

Tagging is also well implemented. Tags are clickable throughout the interface, and a Tag Manager provides a centralized list of every tag in your workspace.

AI Integration (Pro Version)

Octarine includes optional AI integration.

It works with:

• Local models via Ollama and LM Studio
• Apple Intelligence
• Cloud APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini

AI operates within the context of the current note, allowing it to generate, rewrite, summarize, or refine content.

Like most AI writing workflows, the real learning curve comes from developing reusable prompts that produce consistent results.

Pro users can also download a 90 MB local model that can index an entire workspace to provide additional context-aware features:

• Context indicators

Each message shows the sources used (folders, notes, or date filters). Icons and hover cards reveal the details.

• References

A list shows which notes were consulted to answer your query.

• Export options

Responses can be copied as Markdown or plain text.

• Chat titles

Titles are generated automatically after the first response and can be edited using the Sparkles icon.

• Save the chat

Clicking the Create Note icon in the chat breadcrumb saves the conversation as a note. Your questions become blockquotes, with each Q&A pair separated by a divider.

An Opinion on an Opinionated App

There’s no question that Octarine is powerful.

As someone who has spent years building PKM systems, I can appreciate how much functionality is available without needing plugins or complex setup. Many of the features Octarine includes by default require significant configuration in something like Obsidian.

That simplicity removes a lot of early decisions that intimidate people exploring tools like this.

Octarine is developed by a single developer, which might give some users pause. Personally, it doesn’t worry me much. Some of the most respected Mac utilities come from solo developers, including:

• Keyboard Maestro
• Hazel
• BetterTouchTool
• Rectangle Pro

Looking at Octarine’s update history, development is clearly active and responsive to feedback.

The changelog shows frequent updates, and the roadmap includes plans for:

• iOS and Android versions
• One-click publishing
• Quick capture tools
• Task-management improvements
• Browser extensions

…and quite a bit more.

With the exception of AI features, most of Octarine’s functionality is available in the free version.

The Pro license currently costs $70 (early-bird supporter pricing) and unlocks all current and future features. That isn’t cheap, but it’s roughly in line with other established writing tools like iA Writer ($69) or utilities such as TextSoap ($45).

For users who want a structured Markdown workspace without the plugin rabbit hole, Octarine is definitely worth a serious look.

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When I bought my last new Mac two years ago, I set it up the way I had been setting up my personal computers for years: plug in a Time Machine drive and run Migration Assistant. On a modern Mac with an SSD, even if you have hundreds of apps installed like I do, the whole process takes about 20 minutes. It recreates your Applications folder, brings over preferences, and generally makes the new machine feel finished almost immediately.

Nothing could be easier.

There is a downside, though. Migration Assistant faithfully brings over all the accumulated cruft along with the good stuff. That’s how I ended up with Keychain entries for wireless access points I installed in 2014, and references in ~/Library/Application Support to apps I haven’t touched in years.

UPS is dropping a Mac mini on my doorstep sometime this morning. For the first time in a long time, I’m not going to use Migration Assistant.

Automated App Installation

Thanks to tools like Updatest and Cork, I’ve moved every application that can be managed by Homebrew into that ecosystem. On my current machine that covers 212 GUI apps plus 260 CLI packages and dependencies.

Recreating that environment on a new Mac is trivial.

To back up your current setup:

brew bundle dump

To install everything on a new Mac:

brew bundle install

By default, Homebrew can also install Mac App Store apps using the mas CLI. The generated Brewfile is plain text and extremely easy to edit if you want to remove anything before installing.

A small sample looks like this:

cask "gechr/tap/whichspace"

cask "wifi-explorer"

cask "wins"

cask "xbar"

cask "xnconvert"

cask "xnviewmp"

cask "zen"

cask "zotero"

mas "Acidity", id: 6472630023

mas "Actions", id: 1586435171

mas "Actions For Obsidian", id: 1659667937

mas "Amphetamine", id: 937984704

mas "AppTela", id: 6752568197

mas "AutoMounter", id: 1160435653

If you don’t use Homebrew, you can still automate Mac App Store installs directly with the mas CLI.

To export a list of installed App Store apps:

mas list | cut -d' ' -f1 > mas-app-ids.txt

To install them on a new Mac:

xargs -n1 mas install < mas-app-ids.txt

To identify apps that were installed outside Homebrew or the Mac App Store, run:

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType -json > installed-apps.json

Open the resulting JSON file in a text editor like BBEdit. Any app showing:

_“obtained_from” : “identified_developer” _

was installed directly from a developer download and will need to be reinstalled manually.

Configuration

Applications are the easy part. Configuration is harder.

Just entering license keys and registration details for my paid apps could easily take hours.

I briefly looked at Mackup, but it doesn’t seem well suited for a GUI-heavy workflow like mine. A more modern tool, chezmoi, looks promising for exporting and restoring my dotfiles, including things like:

• .zshrc

• .gitconfig

• ~/.ssh/config

• .config/nvim/init.vim

For everything else, my plan is simple: build a small set of rsync jobs by hand and move over only what I actually need.

To avoid permission issues and sandbox quirks, I’ll launch each application once before restoring its configuration so macOS creates the necessary directories:

~/Library/Application Support/

~/Library/Preferences/

~/Library/Containers/

~/Library/Group Containers/

Because I run a heavily automated setup with apps like Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Hazel, and Raycast, I’ll rely on their built-in export/import features rather than trying to automate those configs.

It’s technically possible to script the capture of a large number of system settings. In practice, the time it would take to build and debug that script would probably exceed the time it takes me to reconfigure things manually.

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Earlier in my career in edtech, I spent a lot of time doing large-scale Mac deployments. The workflow was simple: build a golden image and deploy it hundreds of times using NetBoot to whatever hardware the district had just purchased.

Later we moved to modern deployment systems like Jamf.

If you need 900 eMacs unboxed and deployed, I’m your guy.

Highly opinionated personal setups like the ones most of us run on our own Macs are a different animal entirely. There’s no universal image for that kind of machine.

But there’s a lot we can learn from each other about building reproducible setups that stay clean over time instead of dragging a decade of digital barnacles from one Mac to the next.

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Independent developers continue to build some of the most thoughtful utilities on macOS. These are small, focused tools that solve real workflow problems instead of trying to become the next all-in-one productivity suite.

Here are a few that recently caught my attention.

Stealthly

For anyone whose workday involves frequent Zoom, Teams, or other online meetings, presenting a professional, distraction-free screen matters. The same is true if you record tutorials or training videos. You want viewers focused on the content; not scanning your Dock, desktop, or menu bar for clues about your life.

I installed Stealthly for both myself and my wife as soon as I heard about it.

Stealthly is a $12.99 utility available directly from the developer (recommended) or on the Mac App Store. It automatically hides desktop icons, application windows, Dock items, menu bar icons, and even your wallpaper when you’re sharing your screen. It also enables Do Not Disturb to silence calls, alerts, and notifications.

When your meeting or recording ends, Stealthly restores everything exactly as it was.

Automation works in two ways:

• Scheduled automation – Stealthly runs at specific times
• Application triggers – Stealthly activates when certain apps launch, such as Zoom or Teams

The app includes a two-week free trial and is available in six languages.

If you regularly share your screen, this is one of those utilities that solves a problem you didn’t realize you had until someone else built it.

File Minutes

When I started doing IT support at a small private university, I was shocked to discover that many students and even junior faculty dumped every document into a single folder and relied entirely on search to find things later.

I still can’t wrap my head around that approach.

I prefer a defined file structure with folders that have clear roles in my workflow. It isn’t complicated, and most of the time I can navigate directly to what I need.

Search still has its place, though.

File Minutes sits somewhere between a search tool and a lightweight file manager. It’s keyboard-driven, easy to learn, and extremely fast when you need to locate images, Markdown files, archives, or other documents across your system.

Once you find the file, you can either open it in its native app or reveal it in Finder.

Some features I particularly like:

• Filter browsing by file type

If I’m looking for a PDF, my view isn’t cluttered with unrelated file types.

• Save favorite folders

Jump instantly to locations you use frequently.

• Bi-directional filtering

Search for files named invoice and narrow the results to Downloads; or browse Downloads and filter results to files containing invoice.

• Keyboard navigation

Up and down arrows browse the current branch of the file tree. Left and right arrows move up or down a directory level.

• File actions

Open, copy, or preview files using keyboard shortcuts.

• Content search

Search inside PDFs, Markdown files, documents, and text files.

File Minutes collects no telemetry and performs no data collection. It runs on macOS 13 or later and costs $10 for a single license or $21 for three seats.

MiddleDrag (Free)

MiddleDrag is a tiny free utility (about 2 MB) that adds natural middle-click functionality to your Mac trackpad; whether that’s your laptop trackpad or a Magic Trackpad.

If you work without a mouse, this can make a surprising difference.

Some places where it really shines:

• CAD and 3D modeling

Pan and orbit smoothly in Fusion 360, Blender, OnShape, FreeCAD, and SketchUp without reaching for a mouse.

• Browsers

Open links in background tabs, close tabs instantly, and auto-scroll long pages with a simple three-finger tap.

• Coding and terminal work

Paste selections in Terminal (Linux style) and interact more naturally with VS Code multi-cursor editing.

It’s small, simple, and one of those utilities that quickly becomes muscle memory.

Workspace+

If you run a multi-monitor command-center setup with several tiled windows, a browser full of tabs, and a dozen apps open at once, recreating that layout every time you switch tasks gets tedious fast.

Workspace+ lets you capture an entire workspace and restore it with a single click.

Apps reopen, windows return to their positions, and browser tabs reload as part of the workspace.

This makes switching contexts dramatically faster.

Some useful capabilities include:

• Keyboard access

Navigate and trigger workspaces entirely from the keyboard using hotkeys.

• Multiple browser support

Works with Safari and Chromium-based browsers including Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Arc, and Vivaldi. Firefox is not currently supported due to technical limitations.

• Automatic triggers

Workspaces can restore automatically when displays connect or disconnect; ideal if you move between a desk setup and a laptop environment.

If you already use a window manager like Rectangle Pro, Snaps of Apps, or Moom, you can approximate a similar workflow. There’s also the free utility Bunch, which comes close but requires some basic scripting.

Workspace+ is easier to configure and requires far less setup.

A lifetime license costs $14.99, or you can subscribe for $2.99 per month with a three-day free trial.

One current limitation: the app does not yet restore windows across multiple Spaces in Mission Control. The developer has indicated that this feature is on the roadmap.

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It’s always such a pleasure to find out when one of my favorite developers has released a new app. That’s how I felt recently, when I read that The Low‑Tech Guys not only had a new app but that it was going to be a pretty strong player in the Mac automation field. That prompted me to approach the lead developer to learn more about the past, present and future of the company. But first, the apps.

Crank

Crank acts on triggers you define to take action without requiring user intervention. It’s more powerful than just Apple Shortcuts or Shortery, but at just €8 for a five-seat lifetime license, it stops short of Keyboard Maestro’s complexity and price.

Crank can do all of this and a lot more:

• Stop notifications from interrupting Zoom calls
• Check and fic quarantine issues on everything you download
• Toggle VPN usage based on the connected wi-fi network
• Move downloaded ebooks right into calibre
• Change the audio output to bluetooh headphones or speakers when they connect
• Automatically adjust your display
• Disconnect Bluetooth devices before closing the MacBook lid

The Portfolio

It was the quality of Low Tech Guys' previous applications that made me happy to hear about their new release. I first encountered one of their apps a couple of years ago when I discovered Clop. Since then, I have systematically gone through their portfolio to take advantage of the extremely useful, free, and low‑priced powerhouses they’ve developed.

• Clop ($15) - Clop automatically optimizes (reduces) the file sizes of images, videos and PDFs copied to your clipboard. Optionally, it can also convert files on the fly. Clop can even feed the results to a shortcut for further processing. You can set it so that it watches specific folders for different file types. - Clop - Image, video, PDF and clipboard optimiser
• rcmd (FREE) - rcmd uses your right command key + a letter to launch applications. You get app-launching hotkeys without having to set them up manually, although you can do that too. You can use the same hotkey to hide an app or cycle through other apps. If you pait rcmd with Hammerspoon, you can even cycle through windows, not just apps. rcmd - Switch apps instantly using the ⌘ Right Command key

• Lunar ($23) - Lunar is the acknowledged leader in display control for all DDC capable monitors, whether it’s a brand new Apple Studio with a Mac Pro, or a no name brand connected to a Hackintosh. It’s features include:
• • Extending keyboard control for brightness and volume to all displays
  • Extra controls on Apple native displays
  • Sync mode to change the brightness of all connected displays based on the built-in Ambient Light Sensor
  • Exceed the brightness constraints on XDR Apple laptop displays
  • Dial screen brightness below the 0% setting (because that’s not really 0%)
  • Selectively black out any connected display
  • Facelight turns a connected display into a a light panel so that you don’t look obscured on video calls from locations with dim environmental lighting
    Lunar - The defacto app for controlling monitor brightness

• Startup Folder (FREE) - Startup folder gives you aw way to open anything at startup, apps. shortcuts, links and files. It can hide anything you wajt running but not on screen even when that’s not a native feature. You can optionally set it up to keeps apps from quitting and if they fo, they will automatically be relaunched. Startup Folder - Run anything at startup by simply placing it in a special folder

• Pipiri (€8) - Pipiri brings picture in a picture functionality to ant macOS window and that has more use cases than you would think"
• • Watching a long-running terminal command while working in another app
  • Keeping logs visible while debugging software
  • Keeping an eye on AI agent progress (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) while browsing
  • Streaming a video that doesn’t support native PiP (Twitter/X, Reddit, Twitch, etc.)
  • Monitoring a dashboard or CI pipeline without switching windows
  • Watching a community chat (Discord, Twitch) while coding or reading
    Pipiri - Picture-in-Picture for any macOS window
• To see everything The Low Tech Guys have to offer, check out this page,

"Low-Tech Guy \#1"

If you’ve ever wished your external monitor behaved more like a MacBook display, you’ve probably encountered Lunar, the powerful monitor control utility from developer Alin Panaitiu. Over the past several years Alin has quietly built a small ecosystem of thoughtful Mac tools including Clop, rcmd, Crank, and others that focus on real workflow problems rather than novelty.

I asked Alin about how he got started, the challenges of building hardware-adjacent Mac apps, and what he’s working on next.

How did you get started in app development?

I got started in 2017 after buying my first external monitor for my MacBook; an LG 4K display with USB-C.

It was a great monitor, but something felt off. Unlike the MacBook, it had no adaptive brightness. In fact, the brightness couldn’t be adjusted at all.

That sent me down the rabbit hole. I discovered DDC, the protocol used to control monitor settings, and started building Lunar so my external monitor could adapt its brightness automatically.

For about four years Lunar was completely free and open source. In 2021 I took the leap, quit my job as a Python engineer, and started working full-time on the paid Lunar Pro tier.

You can read the full story here:
https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

“I discovered DDC and started building Lunar because I wanted my monitor to adapt its brightness automatically.”

Is Low-Tech Guys your full-time job?

Yes; if you can call it a normal job.

It’s my only source of income and where most of my effort goes. But the rhythm isn’t typical.

Sometimes macOS changes break something important and I end up working 14-hour days. Other weeks are quieter; answering support emails and fixing the occasional bug.

Which of your apps has been the most challenging to build?

Lunar, without question.

It operates very close to hardware; communicating directly with monitors, Raspberry Pis, and ESP32 chips. That’s very different from most macOS software.

Hardware is unpredictable. Firmware quirks, kernel panics, monitors that stall or behave strangely; problems that only occur on a particular user’s setup.

Those are incredibly difficult to debug because they can’t always be reproduced locally.

“Hardware can be unpredictable; stalling, kernel panics, wrong firmware, missing bits. Things that only happen on a user’s very specific setup.”

Which developers do you admire?

Sindre Sorhus for building an enormous ecosystem of Swift packages that macOS developers rely on, including Defaults and Hotkeys.

I also admire Ryan Hanson for creating Superkey, which finally allowed me to ditch Karabiner-Elements.

And Saagar Jha, whose work on macOS reverse engineering taught me a great deal.

You recently released Crank. What are you working on next?

No new apps for the moment. Crank and Pipiri took a lot of effort and I’m a bit drained right now.

Instead I’m focusing on rcmd v3 and Clop v3.

rcmd v3

The next version of rcmd will include:
• Native window switching
• Launching apps by holding rcmd and typing letters
Example: rcmd S P O launches Spotify
• Window search with quick typing
Example: rcmd X C jumps to Xcode → Crank window
• Searching windows by title
• Stages; saving sets of apps and windows as workspaces
• Instant switching between stages using rcmd + letter
• Optional trigger keys such as Caps Lock or Fn

Clop v3

Clop is moving toward a pipeline-based optimization system where multiple file operations can happen without repeatedly re-encoding data.

Example workflows might look like:

Images dropped into ~/Desktop/blog
• optimize
• resize to 1600px width
• convert to WebP
• move to ~/Projects/blog

Videos dropped into Dropzone
• optimize using a high-quality encoder
• speed up to 1.5×
• remove audio
• upload with Dropshare
• copy the URL to the clipboard

PDFs dropped into an Invoices folder
• optimize
• crop to A4
• extract text to a file

Other improvements include a dropzone that appears near the cursor and better support for external storage.

I wrote a review of Cling that was a bit tough on it. You handled that gracefully. What’s the current state of Cling?

You can read that review here:
https://appaddict.app/post/new-file-finding-app-cling-is-not-everything

Cling is something I still want to develop further, but time is the limiting factor.

I started building a custom fuzzy indexing engine for it and got about 90% of the way there. As usual, the last 10% is the hardest.

The goal is to remove external tools like fzf and fd and bring everything directly into the app with faster and more accurate results.

Right now the fzf scoring algorithm simply isn’t well suited to what Cling is trying to do.

Why did you remove Clop from Setapp?

My original Clop review:
https://appaddict.app/post/clop-copy-big-paste-small-send-fast

Tax laws in my country changed significantly, forcing me to move from an LLC to a sole proprietorship.

To simplify accounting I consolidated everything under Paddle.

That meant ending contracts with Setapp, Apple distribution agreements, and other marketplaces. As a result, my apps are now free on the App Store, while paid licensing is handled through Paddle.

I don’t expect that arrangement to change anytime soon.

Closing Thoughts

Talking with Alin, a theme keeps surfacing: the most useful Mac utilities often come from developers scratching their own workflow itch. Lunar began with a simple frustration; an external monitor that couldn’t adjust its brightness.

Since then that curiosity has grown into a small but influential set of tools used by Mac power users around the world. And if the roadmaps for rcmd v3, Clop v3, and eventually Cling are any indication, Alin is far from done refining the Mac experience.

For users who care about thoughtful utilities and deep macOS integration, his work is well worth watching.

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I get a lot of use out of my Elgato Stream Deck. It’s one of the best hardware purchases I’ve made in a long time.

It didn’t start that way.

Shortly after I bought it, I discovered that the device falls under the privacy policy of its parent company, Corsair. The policy reads like it was written by lawyers trying to cover every possible future use case.

According to the policy, potential data categories include:

• identity information (name, account ID, email)
• device identifiers and serial numbers
• IP address and network data
• usage data and clickstream behavior
• crash diagnostics and performance metrics
• location information
• audio/visual content uploaded through services
• inferred behavioral profiles based on collected data

That’s a lot of potential data collection for what is essentially a programmable USB button panel.

The Stream Deck itself doesn’t need the internet to do its core job. At its heart, it’s a USB device that sends keyboard shortcuts, launches apps, and runs scripts. None of that requires a network connection.

However, the official Elgato software integrates a plugin marketplace and update system. Plugins can call APIs, communicate with remote servers, and run Node.js components. That’s where the network traffic starts.

The Practical Privacy Fix

The simplest solution is to block the Stream Deck software from accessing the internet.

A Mac firewall utility like Radio Silence, Lulu or Little Snitch can block outbound connections for:

• Stream Deck.app
• com.elgato.StreamDeck

Once that’s done, the device works exactly the same for local automation.

Two additional precautions:

• Avoid marketplace plugins
• Consider replacing the official software with BetterTouchTool, which can control the Stream Deck directly

With that out of the way, you can focus on what the hardware is actually good at: triggering useful automation.

Here are the ways I use mine.

How I Actually Use My Stream Deck

Buttons that create new things

One press creates a new working object in the app where I need it:

• email message
• text message
• Things task
• calendar appointment
• BBEdit document
• Drafts note
• Obsidian note
• Dropover shelf
• Apple Shortcuts
• Keyboard Maestro macros
• new Finder window

This removes the friction of navigating menus or remembering shortcuts.

Window layouts

One tap moves the current window to a specific layout:

• left half
• right half
• top half
• bottom half
• full screen
• quadrant layouts

It’s faster than dragging windows or remembering a dozen keyboard shortcuts.

Morning checklist

One page of buttons is dedicated to my daily startup routine.

Each button jumps directly to the next task:

• email
• messages
• social feeds
• backups
• updates
• Obsidian daily note

It sounds simple, but it prevents the usual morning “where should I start?” drift.

System and shell scripts

The Stream Deck is also a convenient launcher for scripts I run regularly:

• Topgrade updates
• SSH into machines in my home lab
• Homebrew backup
• restart Finder
• mount network drives
• move downloaded media to backup locations

For repetitive maintenance tasks, a physical button beats digging around in Terminal history.

Clipboard tools

Several buttons interact with the clipboard:

• convert text to title case
• lower case
• upper case
• open Raycast clipboard history
• display clipboard contents onscreen
• create a Markdown link from the current URL

These are tiny actions that happen constantly during writing.

Quick links

I keep a page of buttons for frequently visited sites and tools.

Another page opens my favorite YouTube channels directly in the external viewer I use instead of the browser.

Screenshot tools

The Stream Deck is also a control surface for CleanShot X:

• region capture
• window capture
• OCR
• scrolling capture
• screen recording
• open screenshot history

This turns screenshot workflows into one-tap actions.

Spaces navigation

Dedicated buttons jump directly to specific macOS Spaces.

That’s faster than swiping or using Mission Control when switching between focused workspaces.

System control panel

One page acts as a control menu for system actions:

• quit all apps
• Mission Control
• toggle desktop widgets
• screen share to other Macs on my network
• Raycast “Kill Extension”
• log out
• restart

Think of it as a customizable hardware control panel for macOS.

The iOS Companion

I also use the Stream Deck iOS app.

It’s subscription-based, but it gives me a second Stream Deck surface on an iPhone or iPad. That’s useful when the physical device is already full or when I want a secondary control panel on another screen. You have to own a physical Stream Deck in order to use it.

For something that started out looking like an overengineered YouTuber gadget, the Stream Deck has quietly become one of the most practical automation tools on my desk.

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Where We Are… And Why

macOS 26 (Tahoe) is now months into its lifespan. The UI chaos it caused for menu bar management apps has calmed down a bit, but the situation is still far from stable.

A combination of API limitations, OS-level redesigns, and tighter security controls broke many of the assumptions apps like Bartender, Ice, and Barbee relied on. As a result, behavior that used to be predictable is now anything but.

Common symptoms include:

• icons disappearing and reappearing randomly
• the OS overriding the order of icons
• management apps losing track of icon positions
• items reindexing themselves
• settings resetting
• hidden items suddenly reappearing

Even something as basic as determining whether a menu bar icon is visible has become unreliable. For example, NSStatusItem.isVisible can return true even when the icon is hidden behind the notch or pushed offscreen by menu titles.

The new OS-level menu bar controls are also incomplete. Tahoe will quietly hide items when the bar gets crowded, and apps receive no notification when that happens. From a developer’s perspective, the OS is moving the furniture around without telling anyone.

To work around this, some menu bar managers now request:

• Screen Recording permission
• Accessibility access
• Event monitoring

That understandably makes some users uneasy. Worse, Tahoe’s restrictions on these permissions sometimes cause side effects such as ghost clicks, cursor interference, or other input glitches across the system.

None of this is malicious; it’s just what happens when an ecosystem built on clever workarounds collides with a new security model.

What the Future Probably Looks Like

Long term, the situation likely resolves in one of three ways:

1. Apple ships a real menu bar overflow manager
2. Apple exposes proper status-item APIs for developers
3. The category slowly fades as launchers replace menu bar workflows

The third possibility is already happening.

Launchers are increasingly taking over tasks that used to live in the menu bar. The bar itself is drifting toward a status display, not an interaction surface. You glance at it to see whether something is syncing or connected. When you actually want to do something, you open a launcher.

Accepting a Partial Solution

Over the past few months I’ve tested most of the menu bar managers currently available. Like many power users, I ended up choosing the option that annoys me the least. That is not the same thing as finding a solution that makes me happy.

Different setups behave differently. The manager that works well for Power User A might be completely unusable for Power User B depending on hardware, display configuration, and which menu bar apps are installed.

Here’s where things landed for me:

• Hidden Bar
  Too minimal and largely unmaintained.
• Ice / Thaw
  Interesting ideas; still plagued by the usual Tahoe bugs.
• Barbee
  Visually polished but inconsistent in day-to-day use.
• Sanebar
  Promising; currently suffers from the same underlying instability.
• Bartender
  Still buggy, but actively maintained and responsive to user feedback.

For now, Bartender still wins in my setup because nothing else matches its feature set:

• The Bartender Bar, which shows active but hidden apps
• Three icon states: Menu Bar, Bartender Bar, and Hidden
• Adjustable menu bar spacing
• Icons that appear only when an app changes state (great for cloud sync indicators)
• Presets for different icon layouts
• Automations triggered by conditions; for example, hiding the battery icon unless charge drops below 50%

To keep things stable, I avoid several features that add extra system hooks:

• Appearance customization
• Menu bar search (Raycast handles that better anyway)
• Automatic icon reordering
• Complex trigger rules

Changing the Workflow

One tactic that has helped a lot is simply reducing my reliance on menu bar interfaces altogether.

Many tasks I used to perform through menu bar icons now live elsewhere:

• Raycast for launching and quick actions
• ExtraBar for custom shortcuts
• BetterTouchTool triggers
• Apple Shortcuts automations

In some cases I just disable icons entirely using the menu bar controls in System Settings. A few functions have migrated to Control Center as well.

The result is a much quieter menu bar.

Back in August 2024 I wrote a post about everything living in my menu bar at the time:

I had 43 icons.

Today I have six:

• Alter
• ExtraBar
• Dato
• Bartender
• MountMate
• Ollama

And honestly, that feels about right.

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I only recently realized that my use of screenshots falls into two very different categories.

On one hand, I use screenshots to illustrate blog posts and social media. That usually amounts to two or three captures a day.

On the other hand, I take screenshots constantly for technical reasons; learning a new application, documenting my self-hosted server configuration, keeping track of network settings in my home lab, or simply capturing information during everyday tech work.

For the past couple of years, I’ve relied almost exclusively on CleanShot X for screenshots.

Recently I discovered ScreenFloat, which is designed for the second scenario. It’s not really an app where you capture a screenshot and file it away. Instead, the screenshots you take stay visible while you work so you can reference them.

If the screenshot contains text, that’s not a problem. ScreenFloat includes some of the strongest built-in OCR capabilities I’ve seen in this category.

Capture

Capturing screenshots is straightforward. You can grab a static region of the screen or use a timer when you need to trigger some UI element before the capture occurs.

ScreenFloat also supports screen recording with microphone and system audio.

You can start a capture from:

• a keyboard shortcut
• the menu bar
• a widget

One small but practical detail; unless you change it, the next capture will reuse the same screen region as the previous one. When you’re repeatedly documenting the same part of an interface, that saves time.

Floating Screenshots

Floating screenshots are surprisingly useful when you treat them as working references.

Typical examples:

• coding or scripting while referencing documentation
• technical writing while capturing UI elements
• design work where you need to sample colors or inspect visual details

Anyone working in a screen-heavy workflow quickly understands the value.

ScreenFloat works well here for two main reasons.

First, it includes a solid set of built-in editing tools. You can crop, rotate, resize, annotate, and redact sensitive information such as text or faces. Screenshots can also be folded (collapsed) so they stay available without taking up much screen space.

The text tools go beyond simple OCR. ScreenFloat can detect and interact with:

• links
• phone numbers
• barcodes

Second, the app is designed around the idea that screenshots are reference material, not just disposable images.

Every capture is stored in a built-in library called the Shots Browser. It includes:

• smart folders
• tagging
• favorites and ratings
• full-text search

If you run ScreenFloat on multiple Macs, you can access the same Shots Browser from other devices. That’s a genuinely useful feature. Most competing tools simply dump screenshots into Finder folders and leave organization up to you.

What’s to Like

Aside from the feature set, the one-time purchase price of $17.99 is refreshing.

ScreenFloat also supports Mac automation tools such as:

• Shortcuts
• AppleScript

That makes it much easier to integrate into an existing automation workflow.

The developer, Matthias Gansrigler-Hrad, has a long-standing reputation for maintaining his apps and responding to users. I bought my first app from him more than a decade ago; the long-lived shelf utility Yoink.

ScreenFloat has also seen frequent updates since version 2 was released.

Version 2.3.5 (March 2026) added:

• improved search results in the Shots Browser
• ability to capture the mouse cursor in timed shots
• drag-and-drop support in the markup editor
• improved widget appearance
• easier access to image-copy options

Possible Drawbacks

Like any feature-rich tool, ScreenFloat has a bit of a learning curve. The interface is well designed, but it still takes some time to understand everything it can do.

My recommendation is simple; start with one feature and build from there.

Another practical consideration is that floating screenshots are still windows. If you leave a few dozen of them open, you can expect some impact on system resources.

And if you’re looking for a full-blown screen recording and media production suite, this isn’t that kind of tool.

Conclusion

ScreenFloat isn’t just another screenshot utility. There are plenty of good ones.

What makes ScreenFloat interesting is that it treats screenshots as working references, not just images you capture and forget.

For developers, designers, writers, or anyone else who spends their day juggling information across multiple windows, that idea turns out to be surprisingly powerful.

Requirements: Requires macOS Monterey 12.3 or newer

Privacy Policy: The developer does not collect any data from this app.

Price: 19,99 € / $17.99 / £17.99

Website: https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/

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I’ve long been in the habit of using third-party file managers on macOS. I used Pathfinder for years, then switched to Qspace Pro a couple of years ago. I also bought Bloom during a Black Friday sale last year to see what it could do.

Recently, though, I’ve grown tired of paying the RAM tax these apps demand. Both Qspace and Bloom routinely use over 1 GB of memory. In my setup, they are often the most RAM-hungry applications running other than Chromium- or Gecko-based browsers.

I still don’t understand why Apple hasn’t implemented an optional dual-pane interface in Finder. But if the goal is freeing up system resources, there are workable alternatives.

The approach that’s been working for me is simple: keep using Finder, then add a handful of small utilities that extend it. Apps with Finder extensions can restore many of the features people install full replacement file managers to get in the first place.

You won’t replicate every feature found in Qspace Pro or Bloom, but you can get surprisingly close by layering a few focused utilities on top of Finder.

Supercharge

Supercharge adds optional buttons to the Finder toolbar for actions like toggling hidden files or opening the current folder in Ghostty. It also extends Finder’s right-click context menu with a number of genuinely useful commands.

Examples include:

• Cut & Paste
• Copy Path
• Copy To…
• Move To…
• Open in Ghostty
• Toggle Hidden Files
• AirDrop
• Inline Share Menu
• Show File Size
• Show Image Dimensions
• Open In App

It also adds a set of Finder behavior tweaks, such as:

• Allow quitting Finder with ⌘Q
• Open files with the Return key
• Create new text files
• Invert Finder selection
• Automatically resize columns

None of these features are individually groundbreaking, but together they noticeably improve day-to-day Finder usability.

Menuist

Menuist is primarily a right-click context-menu extender, though it includes a few extra utilities as well.

It overlaps somewhat with Supercharge, but it also adds capabilities that normally require separate utilities. For example:

• Folder history
• Run shell scripts on selected files
• Remove files from disk (bypass the Trash)
• Create many types of new files
• Set folder covers
• Favorite folders submenu
• Copy file or folder name without copying the full path

Menuist also replaces a couple of small utilities people often install just to color folders or paste clipboard images as files.

Other apps in this category include MouseBoost, which is fairly capable, and MagicMenu, which in my experience is best avoided.

HoudahSpot

One of the traditional advantages of third-party file managers is a more capable search interface.

Finder’s built-in search is decent but limited. Pairing Finder with HoudahSpot gives you something much more powerful.

HoudahSpot can add an optional toolbar button to Finder that launches complex saved searches or lets you build new ones on the fly. If you regularly search by metadata, file attributes, or nested criteria, it’s a major upgrade over the standard Finder search UI.

Default Folder X

Default Folder X is best known for enhancing file-open and save dialogs, but it also integrates tightly with Finder.

It adds a navigation toolbar that gives quick access to:

• Favorite folders
• Recent folders
• Recent files
• Open Finder windows
• A fast inline search

It can also add a file shelf to Finder windows. This acts as a temporary staging area where you can collect files before moving them to their final destination. If you frequently reorganize files across multiple folders, this feature is surprisingly useful.

Keka

Keka is a free, powerful compression utility that integrates with Finder. Once installed, its compression and extraction features appear directly in Finder’s context menu and toolbar.

It supports common archive formats and can encrypt archives when needed, which makes it more capable than macOS’s built-in compression tools.

BetterTouchTool

BetterTouchTool is primarily known for input automation, but it can also extend Finder.

You can add custom actions to Finder’s toolbar or context menu and trigger scripts directly from them. In practice, this turns Finder into a launch point for your own automation.

For example, I use BetterTouchTool actions to:

• Remove quarantine flags from apps
• Fix the “damaged app” warning macOS sometimes shows for unsigned software
• Run quick file-management scripts on selected items

At that point Finder stops feeling like a limited file manager and starts behaving more like a programmable front-end for your own workflows.

The bigger realization for me was this: many of the reasons people install heavy file-manager replacements are really just missing Finder conveniences. A handful of small utilities can fill those gaps while keeping Finder itself lightweight.

If your main complaint about Finder is the lack of a dual-pane interface, this approach won’t solve that. But if what you actually want is faster navigation, better search, stronger context menus, and automation hooks, extending Finder can get you surprisingly far without the 1 GB memory footprint.

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Why NeoFinder Matters

NeoFinder is a macOS app that catalogs disks and media, creating a searchable database of your files no matter where they live: internal drives, external drives, NAS volumes, shared network drives, removable media (CDs, DVDs, USB drives), and even inside archives.

The real magic is its ability to search offline drives; drives that aren’t currently mounted. NeoFinder does this by maintaining an inventory of file names, folder structures, and a surprisingly deep set of metadata. It can even generate thumbnails and previews for many media types, so you can visually identify files without connecting the original drive.

For anyone with a long digital history spread across multiple devices and storage formats, that capability alone makes NeoFinder worth paying attention to.

Who NeoFinder Is For (and Who It Isn't)

NeoFinder's User Base

• Families and couples with merged or parallel photo libraries
  This is where I fit in. My wife and I are longtime iOS users who also shoot plenty of photos with DSLRs. We’ve worn out multiple photo scanners over the years and still have photo discs dating back to the 90s.
• Cold-storage users
  If you have stacks of USB hard drives, binders full of flash cards, or a NAS that only gets powered on occasionally, NeoFinder becomes extremely useful.
• Multimedia digital packrats
  Tens of thousands of music tracks? A serious movie or TV collection? Huge ebook libraries? NeoFinder shines when that media is spread across multiple volumes.
• NAS-centric setups
  Especially when the built-in search tools on your NAS aren’t good enough or when you want to catalog everything before reorganizing storage.
• Small teams
  NeoFinder can run with a shared catalog database on a NAS or network share so teams can work from a common media index with consistent tags. (Different license tiers apply.)

People Who Probably Don't Need NeoFinder

• If your entire media collection lives on a single always-connected cloud service and you rely on its built-in search, NeoFinder probably adds little value.
  NeoFinder becomes valuable when storage is fragmented across multiple drives, and some of those drives are offline, archived, or only occasionally connected.
• It’s also not for someone simply looking for a replacement for Apple Photos without investing time in metadata. NeoFinder works best when you’re willing to use keywords, captions, people, locations, and other structured metadata.

What Makes It a Good Choice

• Offline search, even accessible from an iPhone or iPad.
• Extremely powerful metadata support, especially for media collections.
• Deep macOS integration, including Finder context menus, AppleScript, Quick Look, and compatibility with apps like FileMaker and Roxio Toast.
• Media-specific previews, including:
• • Photo thumbnails
  • Video metadata extraction via FFmpeg
  • Audio metadata including cover art, lyrics, and previews

The AppAddict Test

I’m exactly the kind of user NeoFinder was built for.

My photo library is huge and messy. My music collection goes back to the Napster era and includes everything from original Carter Family recordings to spoken-word tracks from Gil Scott-Herron. My movie and TV collection is a mix of rips, downloads, digital purchases, and the occasional file that mysteriously “fell off a truck.”

My ebook library alone contains more than 18,000 titles in twelve different formats.

NeoFinder helps bring order to that chaos.

It can identify duplicates, normalize metadata, and organize photos using standardized metadata fields including geotagging. Finding photos from past trips or events becomes dramatically easier. We photograph a lot of ultramarathon events, and locating images from an obscure mountain race in 2018 used to be a real chore.

NeoFinder’s filtering tools also help with technical housekeeping. For example, you can identify videos using outdated codecs, unusual bitrates, or missing subtitle tracks. That makes it easier to modernize large collections over time.

Even ebook organization becomes simpler; building subject-specific libraries or collections for particular people takes minutes instead of hours.

Similar Apps

• DiskCatalogMaker (macOS)
  A macOS cataloging utility that scans disks and folders to build searchable offline indexes of files, making it easy to locate content stored on external drives or archived media without mounting them.
• iView MediaPro / Expression Media (legacy)
  Once one of the dominant professional digital asset managers, used to organize large photo, video, and document collections with rich metadata and powerful cataloging tools.
• Extensis Portfolio / Canto Cumulus
  Enterprise-grade digital asset management platforms designed for organizations to catalog, tag, search, and distribute large media libraries across teams.
• WinCatalog (Windows)
  A Windows disk cataloging tool that indexes external drives, network shares, and removable media so files can be searched even when the original storage is offline.

Links

• Product page: https://cdfinder.de/
• Pricing: https://cdfinder.de/store.html
• Release notes: https://cdfinder.de/news.html

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Every text expansion app promises the same core trick: type a short trigger; get a longer block of text. What actually matters is reliability, friction, and whether the app helps you build real workflows instead of just automating ⌘V.

Rocket Typist is a one-time purchase Mac text expander from Witt Software. It focuses on dynamic snippets built with simple macros, all managed from a centralized library that lets you preview exactly what will be inserted before you commit.

It’s normally $19.99 for the Pro version; it’s currently on sale at BundleHunt for $3.50. It’s also available through Setapp, although some users report bugs in the Setapp version that don’t appear in the standalone release.

The Mac text expansion space is crowded: TextExpander, Espanso, aText, PhraseExpress, and even Raycast Snippets all compete here. Rocket Typist positions itself as a middle ground: more capable than lightweight snippet tools; less complex and less enterprise-heavy than the big subscription platforms.

What Rocket Typist Actually Does

 I’ve used text expanders for years, and the real value shows up in boring, repetitive work:

• Standardized responses to common questions, including troubleshooting steps.
• Email templates for replies I send every week.
• Frequently used URLs, addresses, and signatures.
• Blog post scaffolding, AI prompt templates, and structured note headers.
• Custom autocorrect for words I still can’t seem to type correctly.

Rocket Typist treats snippets less like a warehouse of static text and more like reusable building blocks. That distinction matters once your library grows past a couple dozen entries.

 Macros Are the Real Feature

Rocket Typist’s dynamic elements are called macros. These let snippets adapt at insertion time instead of being fixed text.

From the developer: 

“Use macros to add dynamic elements to your snippets… The Labeled Macros Hub provides you a central location to edit and apply macros consistently across multiple snippets… preview your snippets, complete with all macros applied, before inserting them.”

Marketing language aside, three things matter in practice:

• Multiple macro types: date, time, text input fields, clipboard content, cursor placement, key functions, and more.
• A centralized Macro Hub for managing and reusing them.
• Live preview before insertion, so you see exactly what will be generated.

That preview feature is underrated. When you’re inserting variable content into a live email or ticketing system, being able to confirm the output before it hits the page prevents sloppy mistakes.

 How It Works in Real Workflows

Static snippets are useful. Macros turn snippets into a lightweight automation layer.

Concrete examples:

• Consistent date formatting across tickets and reports.
• Templates that prompt you for name, ticket number, location, or device type.
• Standardized headers for blog posts or Obsidian notes.
• Support responses that insert today’s date, your signature, and a preformatted checklist.

Rocket Typist’s macro library also supports batch editing. If you need to update a common element across multiple snippets, you don’t have to touch each one manually.

Compared to Espanso or PhraseExpress, Rocket Typist feels less like you’re configuring a YAML-driven mini-programming environment and more like you’re using a Mac app. For many users, that’s a feature, not a limitation.

Who It’s Built For

 Rocket Typist makes the most sense for solo Mac users. It’s not trying to be an enterprise collaboration platform. 

1) Writers and Bloggers

You can create consistent document layouts with dynamic fields for titles, dates, categories, or boilerplate disclosures. It’s especially useful if you publish frequently and want structural consistency without copying old files.

2) Support Specialists and Repetition-Heavy Roles

In my tech support days, snippets handled:

• Self-service password change instructions.
• Campus Wi-Fi connection steps.
• Clarifying which ticket type users should submit.
• Equipment loan and purchase procedures.

Macros let you personalize these without rewriting them from scratch.

3) Users Who’ve Outgrown Lightweight Tools

Raycast Snippets are convenient but intentionally minimal. Rocket Typist offers:

• Rich text and formatted snippets.
• A dedicated snippet management interface.
• More robust macro support.
• Better scaling as your library grows.

If you’ve hit the ceiling with basic snippet tools but don’t want a subscription platform, this is where Rocket Typist fits.

 Rocket Typist vs. the Competition

Espanso

Powerful, cross-platform, highly customizable. Also more complex to set up and maintain. Great for tinkerers; heavier lift for everyone else.

 TextExpander

Strong team features, snippet sharing, and administrative controls. Subscription pricing reflects its enterprise focus.

aText

If it already works for you, there’s no urgent reason to switch. Rocket Typist offers a more modern interface and stronger macro tooling at a low one-time cost.

PhraseExpress

Feature-rich and powerful; also more configuration-heavy. Rocket Typist feels simpler and more Mac-native.

Raycast Snippets

Excellent for lightweight expansions inside an already great launcher. Limited dynamic logic and no centralized macro h

Pricing and Versions

 Rocket Typist’s pricing could be clearer. The website describes the upgrade in vague terms:

“Rocket Typist is free to use with a basic feature set. Upgrade to Rocket Typist Pro for the full experience.”

 You shouldn’t have to install an app to understand the feature split.

Rocket Typist Pro (as described in-app)

Upgrading unlocks:

• Unlimited snippets
• All snippet types:
• • Formatted text
  • Images
  • Smart snippets
  • Code snippets
• All macro types:
• • Date and time
  • Text
  • Clipboard content
  • Cursor placement
  • Special key macros
• Access to future Pro features.

Unlimited snippets plus full macro support is the real value here.

Tiers in Practice

• Free: Basic feature set with limits.
• Basic purchase ($9.99): App Store version that adds iOS and iPad compatibility.
• Rocket Typist Pro for Mac ($19.99; currently on sale for $3.50): Full Mac feature set with unlimited snippets and all macros.

 If you’re considering it, the BundleHunt price significantly lowers the barrier to trying it seriously. 

 Final Thoughts

 Rocket Typist isn’t trying to dominate the enterprise. It’s not trying to turn snippet management into a side hobby. It’s a practical tool for people who type the same structured content over and over and want dynamic flexibility without a subscription.

If you live in email, ticketing systems, documentation tools, or Markdown editors, and you care about consistency and speed, Rocket Typist earns a serious look

Links

• BundleHunt Sale
• Developer Website
• Mac App Store
• Privacy policy: no data collected by the app.

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Typora is a long-established Mac Markdown editor that renders as you type; no dual-pane preview, no “toggle to see what it really looks like” mode. It’s especially strong with tables and code blocks. If you write with math, it’s one of the cleanest LaTeX experiences on macOS. Mermaid diagrams are also straightforward.

It doesn’t try to be everything. It’s not a platform. It’s not a note system It’s not an IDE. It’s a text editor for creating production ready documents.

What It Does

Typora is a Markdown editor built around a single-pane, live-rendered approach. You write Markdown You see the formatted document as you go.

In practice, it feels closer to a word processor than most Markdown editors, but your files stay portable. Typora also exports to a wide range of formats (including HTML, DOCX, PDF, and ePub); if your workflow ends in a CMS, a PDF, or an ebook, that matters.

Where it Fits

Most Markdown apps push people toward two extremes:

1. Heavy systems: great for linking, research, and long-term knowledge management; sometimes overkill for drafting. Think Obsidian.
2. Minimal editors: great for flow; often too limited once you want real structure. Think MarkEdit.

Typora sits between those two. It gives you a calm writing surface, but it also handles publishing-oriented Markdown without drama: headings, lists, code blocks, tables, images, and exports.

If you bounced off “note system” complexity but still want more than plain-text minimalism, Typora is the middle ground.

Feature List (What Writers Actually Care About)

1. Live rendering in a single pane; structure stays visible while you draft
2. Clean themes and readable typography; long posts are less fatiguing
3. Document outline; useful for checking structure before you hit publish
4. Solid support for code blocks, tables, and math (when you need it)
5. Practical image handling for posts that involve screenshots

Typora isn’t trying to compete with a PKM ecosystem or a full writing suite. It’s trying to be the editor you open when you want to write.

What I Like

A Mature Editor that Stays out of Your Way Typora feels like software that knows what it is. The interface stays quiet; the feature set stays focused. You can move from outline to draft to polish without living in sidebars, plugin browsers, or “workspace” metaphors.

Live Rendering Reduces Formatting Mistakes For review writing, quality comes from structure. Typora makes it obvious while you’re still drafting whether the post will scan:

1. Headings are consistent
2. Lists read cleanly
3. Emphasis stays under control
4. Code blocks look like code blocks

It Works Well with Markdown as a Source Format If you care about plain files, Typora fits the “future-proof drafts” mindset. You keep Markdown portability without forcing yourself into a spartan writing experience.

It Is Not a Note System If you expect backlinks, daily notes, tasks, or a full “second brain,” Typora isn’t built for that. It’s a document editor.

Export Quality

The real question isn’t “can Typora export?”. It's whether it works with the tools in your workflow.

Typora can export HTML, but paste behavior varies by web editor. Some preserve semantic HTML. Some strip styles; some mangle lists and code blocks. If export matters, test it like you actually publish:

1. Write a short post with headings, a table, a code block, and an image
2. Export to HTML
3. Paste into your CMS/editor
4. Check what breaks (lists, spacing, code formatting); decide based on that

Details

Latest update highlights — The last major update (September 2025) brought macOS 26 Tahoe compliance and enabled the Share Sheet on all supported systems.

Privacy — Typora is primarily local; your content stays on disk unless you put it in a synced folder. Privacy is mostly determined by your sync choice; not the editor.

System Requirements — Optimized for Apple Silicon and supports macOS v11 and up.

Price — 14.99 for a three seat license. (No subscriptions)

Download — Direct from typora.io.

Similar apps

1. iA Writer - focused drafting; different philosophy
2. Bear - excellent notes app; different model than plain Markdown files
3. Obsidian - outstanding system; heavier for pure drafting
4. VS Code - capable; feels like the IDE it is unless tailored

Conclusion

Typora is worth revisiting because it stays focused. It’s stable, writes clean Markdown, and helps you ship well-structured posts without turning writing into an app-management hobby.

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Veteran Mac developer Amy Worrall of Double and Thrice Ltd. recently released Octavo, a focused macOS app for booklet printing and imposition.

If you’ve never dealt with imposition, here’s the short version: it’s the process of arranging individual pages on a larger sheet so that, once printed, folded, cut, and bound, everything lands in the correct order. When you see a press sheet with page 1 next to page 16 and page 2 upside down on the reverse, that’s not chaos. That’s math doing its job.

Historically, tools that handle this well have been aimed at print professionals and priced accordingly, often in the several-hundred-dollar range. Octavo does the same core job for $25. It’s available on the Mac App Store.

You can test it for free. The trial version watermarks output with Octavo branding, so it’s fine for evaluation but not for production runs.

How It Compares

Octavo occupies similar territory to Create Booklet 2, but the experience feels more modern and hands-on.

The multi-pane, task-based interface keeps the workflow linear and visible. You can visually drag margins instead of typing numeric values and guessing. There’s also a source cleanup step before layout, which is especially useful if you’re working from imperfect scans or PDFs that need minor correction before printing.

Compared to something like InDesign, Octavo is refreshingly direct. You’re not jumping to a separate properties panel filled with abstract numeric fields that feel disconnected from the page. You’re also not importing content into a full layout suite just to produce a folded booklet.

This is not a layout engine for designing the book. It’s a tool for correctly imposing a finished PDF so you can print and bind it without gymnastics.

Printer Compatibility

If you’re wondering whether this will work with a consumer-grade printer, the answer is yes.

Octavo doesn’t require a PostScript device or specialty hardware. If macOS can print to it, Octavo can use it. The app relies on standard macOS printing APIs; it reads available paper sizes, margins, and printer capabilities from the system. It can also control relevant print settings such as duplex edge binding where appropriate.

It does not talk directly to the printer firmware. That’s a good thing. It means you’re working within Apple’s printing stack rather than some proprietary workaround.

In practice, that includes:

• AirPrint printers
• Basic home inkjets
• Office laser printers
• PostScript-enabled devices

If it shows up in your macOS print dialog, it’s fair game.

Design and Fit

Octavo feels like a traditional Mac app in the best sense. It’s focused, single-purpose, and built for desktop workflows rather than a cross-platform abstraction layer. There’s no subscription pitch and no unnecessary feature creep.

Even the icon shows care. Worrall built it in Fusion 360, textured and rendered it in Blender, then finished it in Photoshop. That attention to detail tracks with the rest of the app.

Who This Is For

If you:

• Print short-run booklets at home or in a small office
• Produce documentation that needs to be folded and stapled
• Make zines or event programs
• Regularly wrestle with page order and duplex settings

Octavo is a practical tool that removes friction from a very specific workflow.

If you’re laying out a 200-page art book with complex typography and bleed control, you’re still living in InDesign or Affinity Publisher. Octavo is for the step after layout, when you need the pages imposed correctly and printed cleanly.

For $25, that’s a niche tool that earns its keep quickly if you actually print booklets.

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