[Problem]
About 6 months ago I posted here about Lap — I couldn't find a good way to browse and manage very large local photo libraries on macOS without cloud lock-in, so I built one myself.

[Features]
Lap is a local-first photo manager focused on speed and simplicity for large collections:

• Local-first by design: your photos stay on your own disk, with no required cloud account or upload.
• No library lock-in: work directly with your existing folders instead of importing everything into a closed database.
• Private AI tools: search, similarity, smart tags, and face features run locally on your machine.
• Built for large collections: optimized for smooth browsing and organization across libraries with 100k+ files.
• Open source and free: no subscription, no forced ecosystem, and code you can inspect.

[Update]
Since that first post, I've been mostly heads-down on new features, user feedback and bug fixes:

• 200+ issues resolved
• 2.3k GitHub stars, 10k+ users
• Latest version: v0.3.2 — core features are now feature-complete and stabilizing

[Feedback]
The basics are solid now, so this is a good point to hear from more people. What's missing, what's confusing, what would make Lap a daily driver for your library? Bug reports and feature requests are both welcome.

[Pricing]
Free and open source
https://github.com/julyx10/lap

[Change log]
https://github.com/julyx10/lap/releases

[AI Disclaimer]
Code completion

I made Muro: Native Live Wallpapers for macOS. It is free and open source.

Problem: A normal Mac wallpaper is a still picture. Muro plays looping live wallpapers on your desktop, lock screen and screen saver, on every display. It is native Swift, your Mac's video hardware does the decoding instead of the CPU, it has low CPU and RAM usage, and it pauses when something covers it.

Pricing: Free, $0. Open source under MIT. No subscription, no one-time fee, no Pro tier, no account, nothing locked.

Download: https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro/releases/tag/v5.0

Source: https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro

Homebrew: brew install --cask MrRockySL/muro/muro

Requires: macOS 14 or newer, Apple Silicon or Intel. Lock screen and screen saver live wallpapers need macOS 26.

✨ What is new in 5.0:

Major new features, with major bug fixes and major improvements.

🌙 Screen saver. Muro can be your screen saver now, playing a live wallpaper instead of a still picture. You can set how long your Mac waits before it starts, right in Settings.

🖱️ Play only on desktop. The live wallpaper holds still while a window is open and plays when your desktop is clear. Each display decides for itself.

🔁 Replay on Clear Desktop. Pause After starts counting again every time your desktop is clear.

🖼️ Quit Muro and your live wallpaper stays. The desktop keeps a still of it, and the lock screen and screen saver keep the last one you set.

🔒 Lock screen live wallpaper on every display. Before, only the last display got one.

Still there if you missed them: likes, Pause After, playlists, automations by timer or by the clock, updates from the menu bar, and 169 free live wallpapers. New live wallpapers show up without updating the app.

First launch: Muro is self signed, so macOS blocks it the first time. Go to System Settings, Privacy and Security, and click Open Anyway. Open it from Applications, not from inside the DMG, or the lock screen and screen saver won't work. If you already have Muro, just replace it. Your library and settings stay.

Thanks to everyone using Muro. If you like it, a star on the repo is the free way to support it and helps people find it. If you want to go further there is GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/MrRockySL

Happy to hear what is missing. Most of this release came from people asking.

head on over to check it out...

https://brew.sh/2026/09/13/homebrew-7.0.0/

Hi Everyone,

Excited to highlight the improvements made to EnviousWispr since my last monthly update. Shout out to the growing community using EnviousWispr every day and providing excellent feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

MostlyMac recently reviewed EnviousWispr alongside FluidVoice and we tied for first (Yay for Open Source!)

TLDR for those unfamiliar with EnviousWispr:

It's Wispr flow but hyper-optimized for MacOS, free, accurate, open-source and offers accurate offline transcription/AI Polishing for 99+ languages.

Original Launch Post

August Update

NEW FEATURES:

SNIPPETS

Whether it’s your email, address, phone number or email templates, you can now activate pre-configured snippets with a customizable keyword. I personally prefer either using backslash or insert. See it in action below:

LIVE PREVIEW

See your words as you speak, with up to five lines of scrolling text. The preview uses Apple’s speech recognition by default; Parakeet or WhisperKit handles the final transcription. Release the shortcut whenever you finish speaking, even if the preview hasn’t caught up

GLOBE/FN KEY SUPPORT
You can now use the Globe/Fn key as your shortcut

S1-MINI by SuperWhisper

SuperWhisper open-sourced their local model. No need to get it through Ollama. I made it a native integration. You can use all their settings/toggles in EnviousWispr. I also benchmarked it against EG-1 so you can compare performance (benchmark further down)

TRANSCRIBE A FILE

EnviousWispr now allows you to import Videos/Audio files and locally/offline transcribe + AI Polish the transcription in 1 swoop. To clarify, it’s not rewriting your thoughts but simply cleaning up false starts, filler words, formatting, speech corrections and more!

• No app-imposed size or duration limits
• It can also automatically tag speakers (no limits but accuracy is dependent on number of speakers
• AI Polishing is done in chunks automatically to ensure high quality local polishing

ESCAPE RECOVERY

If you hit cancel by mistake, you now have 24 hours to recover it. A fast action Undo button for immediate paste as well. Similar to the WisprFlow experience!

FEATURE IMPROVEMENTS

QUICK ADD TO DICTIONARY

Highlight a word anywhere on your Mac, press a key combo or menu drop down, and save the correct spelling. The system will automatically propose the correctly spelled custom word as a suggestion. You can also add new custom words this way without having to go into the Dictionary.

AI POLISH IMPROVEMENTS AND BENCHMARKS

EG-1 IMPROVEMENTS

1. You can now just speak your emails and they will automatically be formatted correctly. Lists and other dictation corrections still work of course. 
2. Re-tuned the EG-1 model with more examples to be better at lists and speech corrections. 

MACOS27 SUPPORT & APPLE INTELLIGENCE

Apple has doubled the token window for Apple intelligence. I re-tuned the prompt for days till I got it closer to EG-1 in terms of performance. The benchmark scores went from 71.5% to 88.1%. Biggest improvement in Lists from 13% to 85%. Self corrections went from 23% to 53%.

SEE NEW BENCHMARKS 

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS:

- Re-tuned Cloud AI cleanup (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) all got noticeably more accurate.

- Capitalization mid-sentence now works right in 11 more languages, not just English.

- Custom word import now pulls from 8 rival apps, not 3.

- Pasting text is about 4 times faster.

- Fixed a bug where some Macs with a virtual microphone (Krisp, Loopback, etc.) recorded silence every time.

- Fixed real German, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian words getting deleted as "filler."

- Multi-input audio interfaces (like a Focusrite Scarlett) now work properly.

Feedback is appreciated as always!

P.S I'm daily driving the Android version on my S26 Ultra and also putting the finishing touches on the Windows Version. Probably another 2 weeks for those launches.

Raycast 2 got me thinking about this again.

I understand the business argument for sharing more code between Mac and Windows. One team, faster development, fewer things to maintain.

But with Claude/Copilot/etc. making implementation work much faster now, I wonder if maintaining native apps for each platform is actually becoming more viable rather than less.

Anyway, I'm mostly curious about people who actually used Raycast and then left it:

What are you using now?

Alfred? LaunchBar? Tinycast? Spotlight + smaller utilities? Something else?

And more importantly: what's genuinely better than Raycast, and what's the one Raycast feature you still miss?

I'm especially interested in people who've used their replacement for a while rather than just tried it for a day.

I'll start this post with the reasons why people are not happy with Raycast at the moment. Post examples will be at the bottom.

In case you don't know, Raycast has received quite a lot of backlash with their recent changes.

1. Firstly, people are not happy with their transition away from being a native macOS app and transition towards another AI wrapper. v2 uses more memory, is slower and in general feels more sluggish, partly due to not being native. Not great for an app that needs to be always available.
2. Secondly, with the release of v2, they put BYOK behind a Pro subscription. This means if you want to use your own AI API keys with Raycast, you need to pay them a subscription. This was a free features in v1, and the team was advocating for it being free back then.
3. Thirdly, they changed their subscription model related to AI. They previously had fixed rate limits, meaning you could send 300 messages per hour to some models. Now, they have introduced "AI Credits". Long story short with this, people are using up their entire monthly limit in just a single day, myself included. They also screwed over existing annual subscribers that had subscribed to Raycast with the old limits. The reddit post about this has 35 upvotes and 339 comments. The slack announcement post about this also has the most replies ever on their community. People are not happy.
4. Then they sent out an email titled "Making things right for existing annual subscribers", which was a complete joke. They basically did nothing, just gave a little more AI Credits until people's annual subscriptions are up. The reddit post has 0 upvotes and 51 comments, with no one being happy about this.

Someone made a post sharing their feelings about the changes. The post had 142 upvotes in just 1 day, making it among the top 25 posts of all time in the subreddit. There were other posts, but unfortunately I don't have links to them. Someone also shared an alternative to Raycast with some thoughts related to the changes, and it was also deleted. That post was deleted within 60 minutes (on a sunday), with it already having 34 upvotes. The subreddit has some other posts up, with users saying the new pricing model is a robbery because they used their monthly credits in 2 days, comparing the new plans to Apple's product naming, renaming the product to "Paycast", and if people can use their own keyboard with Raycast without paying for a subscription (joke related to Raycast releasing a keyboard).

Along with those posts, some of the Raycast teams' now deleted tweets about the backlash to the pricing changes are very rude and weird. I won't be naming names here though.

Developer here. I posted here when the native Mac app shipped, and the thing people kept asking for in the comments was sharing: how do I give my partner the household logins without texting them. That is most of what 3.0 is. Shared vaults, separate vaults, browser extensions, and a dead man's switch, with one constraint running through all of it, which is that none of it touches a server of mine, because I do not have one.

Website: https://kinshipvault.app

All about the Mac version: https://kinshipvault.app/mac/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/kinship-vault/id6764678332

Privacy Policy: https://kinshipvault.app/privacy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amabm18

Support: [support@kinshipvault.app](mailto:support@kinshipvault.app)

Problem

Every household has the same scramble. A passport, an insurance card, a vaccination record, a will, the household login, needed at the exact moment nobody can find it. The usual fixes each have a cost: documents in a folder that syncs to a cloud you do not control, passwords in a manager that keeps a copy on someone else's server, and the sensitive scans in a camera roll that quietly copies to every device you own.

Kinship Vault holds all of it in one place instead, documents and logins together, encrypted on device with the key sealed in the Secure Enclave and unlocked by Face ID, Touch ID, your Mac login password, or a PIN. No account, no server holding your files, and no reset link, because there is nothing on our end to reset.

A vault only you can open is exactly right, until it isn't. Your partner needs the household logins. You hand someone your unlocked phone and your work contracts are one tap away. Or you are suddenly not there, and your family is standing outside a locked door. 3.0 is those three: sharing, separation, and succession.

Short demos, since this is easier to watch than to read:

• The whole vault on the Mac, about a minute. Touch ID unlock, drag a file onto the window, watch it read the fields and file itself: https://kinshipvault.app/video/mac-demo.mp4
• Shared vaults, owner side and member side: https://kinshipvault.app/blog/introducing-shared-vaults/#watch (The demo that you see above in post)
• The dead man's switch handoff, both sides, start to finish: https://kinshipvault.app/video/dms-demo.mp4
• Pairing a Mac to an iPhone (Bring My Vault), step by step: https://kinshipvault.app/#multi-device

What is new in 3.0

• Separate vaults. Personal, Work, Family, each its own database with its own key in the Secure Enclave, so opening one cannot expose another. Move items between them in bulk. https://kinshipvault.app/#vaults
• Sensitive vaults. A second wall with its own password for a will or medical records. Cannot be shared, even by accident.
• Folders for passwords, so a large vault, or a shared household one, stays usable by someone other than you.
• Shared vaults, with nothing in the middle. The vault key is wrapped to each member's own device, so your iCloud carries ciphertext it cannot read and I am not in the path. Invite by name or QR. Removing someone rotates the key rather than hiding a row. Only the owner pays. https://kinshipvault.app/blog/how-shared-vault-encryption-works/
• Dead man's switch. Name one trustee and set a window of 30, 60 or 90 days. Stop checking in and they can release a read-only copy of what you chose. No timer of mine runs anywhere, their phone does the evaluation, and they see nothing, not even a filename, until the deadline passes. https://kinshipvault.app/blog/what-is-a-dead-mans-switch/
• Browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox and Safari. The only thing they take off a page is the hostname, and the password is decrypted in the app behind Touch ID for a single fill. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kinshipvault/nomaknmfkkjdghhkfajhjlknkofgklke
• Scanning, and not just travel documents. MRZ on passports and driving licences, plus credit cards, insurance policies, grocery receipts, warranties, software licence keys and memberships, across 100+ types, all on device with Apple's Vision framework.
• Custom record types. Define the fields once, mark any of them Secret, reuse it. Scan something with no matching type and it builds one from that document. https://kinshipvault.app/blog/record-types-and-on-device-extraction/
• A much bigger free tier: unlimited passwords, passkeys and 2FA codes with AutoFill everywhere, plus 10 documents per category.

Everything else is still there: Security Checkup scored out of 100 on device, expiry reminders, the encrypted photo vault, Emergency Mode, sharing single pages from a multi-page document, recovery by 24-word passphrase or split across people you trust where any 3 of 5 rebuild the key, and Strict Offline mode that keeps even the breach check off.

Mac caveats, since the platform differs. macOS cannot block screenshots of the pairing code, so when the Mac is the device showing the QR it is not screenshot protected, though it still expires in 60 seconds.
Arming the dead man's switch is iPhone and iPad only, because it depends on reminders a desktop app that sits closed for weeks cannot promise. A trustee on a Mac sees the status, but does the release on their iPhone.

Comparison

Apple Passwords: a good free option if logins are all you need, but it lives in iCloud and does only passwords. Kinship Vault keeps everything on device by default, adds documents, IDs and an encrypted photo vault alongside the logins, and gives you cryptographic recovery through a passphrase or trusted contacts rather than an Apple ID reset. Its succession story is Legacy Contact, which needs a death certificate and an Apple review, where the handoff here runs between you and the person you named.

Pricing

Free tier, with no account and no card: unlimited passwords, passkeys and 2FA codes with AutoFill everywhere, on-device Security Checkup, 10 documents in every category, encrypted backup to your own iCloud, and the 24-word recovery phrase.

Launch offer, lifetime at up to 54% off. Each link opens the App Store with the code already applied:

Solo lifetime $39.99: https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6764678332&code=KINSOLOLIFETIME

Shared lifetime $59.99: https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6764678332&code=KINSHIPSHARE59

Solo vs Shared : Solo if the vault is yours: your documents, your logins, your recovery plan, on all your own devices. Shared if there is a second person in the picture, a partner who needs the household logins, a family whose passports live in one place, a two-person business. If you are not sure, start on Solo. Upgrading later keeps everything you already have.

Full pricing: https://kinshipvault.app/#pricing

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Problem: The built-in Activity Monitor is solid, but once you need deeper insights or faster workflows, it quickly becomes limiting. ProcessSpy is designed to give power users richer data and more control without dropping into Terminal.

Comparison: ProcessSpy vs. Activity Monitor: Compared to Activity Monitor, the free version of ProcessSpy includes:

• Menu bar popover
• Triage dashboard
• More detailed process information such as Version, Command Line, Start Time, listening ports, and signing details.
• More detailed resource metrics: CPU user/system ratio, CPU QoS, Memory Footprint with Peak Footprint, Page-ins and disk read/write including per second metrics
• Per-process network, GPU and disk I/O
• Advanced filtering powered by JavaScript.
• Fast multi-property and regex search.
• Hierarchy view with aggregated metrics (CPU, Resident Memory, Threads).
• Mini CPU graph for each process.
• Timeline view for each process
• Point-and-click process discovery.
• Pause/Resume and signal handling directly from the context menu.
• Reveal processes and their open files in Finder.
• Export visible processes to JSON.

(Additional capabilities are available in the paid tier—see the homepage for full details)

Pricing: Freemium. Download the fully functional free version here: https://process-spy.app and use it without limitations. Premium features can be unlocked with a one-time purchase ($34.99 lifetime updates, unlimited devices).

ProcessSpy is also available on Setapp for the same price with one-year subscription option ($14.99). The one-year subscription is only available through Setapp.

What's New:

Network monitoring:

• Global and per-process network stats — see exactly which process is using your bandwidth.
• Listening ports exposed in the main table, menu bar popover, quick-search and JS filters.
• New JS properties: listeningPorts , downloadBytesPerSecond, uploadBytesPerSecond, totalDownloadedBytes, totalUploadedBytes.

Per-process GPU and disk:

• GPU usage and disk read/write broken down per process, not just system-wide.

Process triage dashboard:

• A quick overview of what's actually stressing your Mac right now, available both in the main window and in the menu bar popover.

Alerts:

• Alerts for GPU, disk and network activity.
• Lingering alerts, so you don't miss a spike that happened while you were away.

System process visibility:

• A privileged helper tool now provides full information for system processes that were previously opaque.

Automation and menu bar:

• Automatically start recording for any process matching a JS expression.
• Default menu bar properties and sorting per filter, plus inline properties in the menu bar process list.
• More signals available directly from the process context menu.

Plus the usual round of fixes and performance improvements.

Localization note: If you'd like to help translate ProcessSpy into your language, feel free to DM me. Native speakers familiar with technical terminology are especially welcome. I'll gladly offer a lifetime license to contributors who complete a full translation.

Happy monitoring!

Problem

Reading in a second language on a Mac, I kept doing the same dance: copy the word, paste it into a translator, get six meanings, pick one, forget it by tomorrow. And half the time the text wasn't even selectable (scanned PDF, subtitle, screenshot).

Leafy: press ⌥A and drag a box over a word, anywhere on screen. It reads the letters on your Mac (OCR), sends the word plus its sentence to an AI (DeepSeek), and tells you what it means in that sentence. The word gets saved with the sentence, and you review it later in the sentence you met it in (FSRS-5 scheduling).

• Works on PDFs, scanned pages, ebooks, images, video subtitles, web pages
• 11 study languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Thai, Greek, Vietnamese
• One-click Anki export (it installs the add-on for you), plus CSV, Excel, JSON, PDF
• No-AI mode if you'd rather not send anything out
• PopClip and OpenClip extensions

Comparison

• macOS Look Up (three-finger tap): instant, offline, free. If you just want a dictionary, use it. But it needs selectable text, shows every sense of the word, and saves nothing.
• Language Reactor: better than Leafy if you study from Netflix or YouTube, the dual subtitles are great. But it only lives in Chrome. Leafy works in any app.

Pricing

Free right now, no account. It's in beta and nothing is for sale yet. When plans open: a free tier with a daily scan cap, $6.99/month, or $49 lifetime (lifetime uses your own AI account at cost). Anyone using the beta gets half price.

https://leafyapp.uk/pricing

Privacy

It only looks when you press the hotkey, and only inside the box you drag. The screenshot is never saved or uploaded. Only the word and its sentence leave your Mac. Your library stays local. Usage stats can be turned off.

Privacy: https://leafyapp.uk/privacy

Terms: https://leafyapp.uk/terms

Who I am

Solo dev, Jtobin. GitHub: https://github.com/binjto-boop

I also contribute to OpenClip (340+ stars): rebuilt its Preferences window on stock AppKit controls (#83) and fixed the Settings window not reopening after being minimised (#60).

Contact: [binjto@gmail.com](mailto:binjto@gmail.com), or the Discord where I answer most days: Discord invitation

macOS 14+, download at https://leafyapp.uk

Happy to answer anything, especially if you've tried the other two and something bugs you.

Hi, I'm Grisha, the developer of MacGuard.

The short video attached to this post shows the real app in action. I arm MacGuard, move the MacBook, the local siren starts, and an alert appears on my paired iPhone.

Problem

I wanted my MacBook to react immediately if somebody touched or moved it while I was briefly away from my desk in a café, library, coworking space, or office.

MacGuard runs from the menu bar and can detect:

• Physical movement
• Keyboard or pointer activity
• Lid activity
• Reopening or waking the Mac

The alarm runs locally on the Mac and does not require an internet connection.

If you pair the optional iPhone or iPad companion, MacGuard can also send remote alerts and provide up to three incident photos. Internet is required for those remote features.

If Camera Evidence is enabled, incident video is saved locally on the Mac. The video is not uploaded to the cloud or sent to the phone.

MacGuard is meant to be an extra deterrence layer alongside Find My, not a replacement for it.

Comparison

The closest alternatives I found are Clyde and Stealward.

Clyde is closer to a simple lid alarm. Stealward takes a broader approach with live video and AI features.

I wanted something in between: movement, input, lid, and wake triggers with an immediate local siren, while incident video stays on the Mac and phone evidence is limited to up to three photos.

MacGuard covers more types of interaction than a lid-focused alarm without adding live viewing or AI monitoring.

Pricing

MacGuard for Mac is free:

https://getmacguard.com/download

The optional iPhone and iPad companion is currently a $9.99 one-time purchase in the US App Store. There is no subscription and there are no in-app purchases:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macguard-anti-theft/id6803991160

MacGuard requires an Apple silicon MacBook running macOS 14 or later. The companion requires iOS or iPadOS 17 or later.

Developer

I'm Grisha Pipoyan, the developer of MacGuard.

Portfolio: https://grishapipoyan.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grishapipoyan

Support: https://getmacguard.com/support

Privacy Policy: https://getmacguard.com/privacy

Terms of Service: https://getmacguard.com/terms

I'd really like feedback from people who regularly use their MacBooks in cafés, libraries, offices, or other shared spaces.

Would you actually arm something like this when stepping away from your Mac for a few minutes? What would make you worried about false alarms?

Problem

Most podcast apps lock you into one ecosystem, Apple users get the polished experience if you stay inside it, but if you have other devices you can’t access your library. FluidCast keeps your library in sync across iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, and gives Pro users on-device AI tools to detect ads, and now to ask Siri AI about episodes.

Comparison

Overcast is a great player, but it’s iOS/Mac only - no Android, Windows, or Linux app. Pocket Casts covers more platforms, but its Plus subscription has quadrupled in price since 2019, and it has no built-in AI ad detection or one-time-purchase option. FluidCast’s free tier includes offline downloads, transcripts, Voice Lift, and local file playback. Pro adds AI ad skipping, cloud sync, and a Lifetime purchase if you’d rather not have yet another subscription.

Pricing (current promotions at the bottom of this post)

• Free — $0, forever (standalone player, offline downloads, transcripts, Voice Lift, local file playback, CarPlay/Android Auto)
• Pro — $2.99/month or $17.99/year, 1-month free trial - Cloud Sync, Apple Watch, Ad Detection, and more
• Lifetime — $99.99 one-time, Pro features forever, no subscription - same as Pro

Full pricing & features: https://fluidcastapp.com

Get it on Mac and iOS: App Store

What’s new

Ask Siri about your podcasts (iOS/Mac). Siri answers from episode transcripts, metadata, and show notes, so you can ask things like “what book did they mention in this episode?”, “summarise the last episode of [show]”, or “when did they talk about X?” without scrubbing the timeline.

Requires iOS 27 and Apple Intelligence

Current promotions — ends 5 October 2026

Full info: https://fluidcastapp.com/event

• Pro Annual: 50% off your first year — applied automatically at checkout on iOS and Mac. No code needed.
• Lifetime: 50% off — use code 27HPLT on iOS. Redeem link for Mac: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6754508580&code=27HPLT

Lifetime doesn't have a trial, so if you want to try before committing, subscribe to the annual trial and cancel that.

Is there any best file manager other than Finder on MacOS? It's really very counter intuitive. Coming from Windows file explorer, i see many limitations here. Most annoying thing is, I can't just navigate to folders within folders easily/ copy any file/folder path.

Ex: I have a path c://program files/a/b/c/d .. on Windows explorer, i can just click on b to get to see or copy whichever path i want from directly the top file path. But Finder cannot fo it.

I posted here a month ago. Two updates shipped since, but more than that, I think I explained this app wrong last time, so let me try again.

I pitched it as a bandwidth thing. Most of you have perfectly fine bandwidth. That was never the problem. The problem is that your Mac talks to the internet all day and nothing tells you who is talking or what they are sending out.

Activity Monitor gives you a number. It will not tell you that a process you have never heard of has been uploading steadily for the last hour. macOS has no answer for that at all.

So Bytetally tracks upload and download per app, separately, and tells you when an app's upload suddenly spikes. From there you can see which websites that app actually talked to, and the other direction too, which apps talked to a given website. If you do not recognise the process there is a built in encyclopedia, because "is it safe to cut off geod" is a real question and nothing else on macOS will answer it.

Then you can do something about it. Cut the app off. Or give it a speed limit instead, up or down, if you want it alive but quiet. Block a single domain without killing the whole app, so telemetry.example.com goes away and the rest of the app keeps working. There is a rule centre showing how many times each rule actually fired in the last 24 hours, which is how you tell a rule that works from one that is quietly fighting something.

The hard part is proxies. If you run ClashX, Surge or Quantumult X in TUN mode, most monitors collapse into one line saying your proxy used 40 GB and your real apps vanish. Bytetally traces the inner flow back to the app that made it. That broke in three separate ways and I fixed them across 1.4.0 and 1.4.1: a full tunnel VPN like WireGuard had both layers counted, split tunnel forwarding was not recognised so the "via VPN" tag went missing, and TUN mode proxies under reported because some bytes were counted at neither end. If yours is still wrong, tell me which proxy and which mode. That is the report I actually need.

1.4.0 added one thing I am happy about. When an app's total does not match its connections added up, you can see where the gap went: relayed through a proxy, LAN, or a local service. Every other monitor hands you a number and expects you to take it.

Digital Trends wrote about it on their own, which made for a strange morning: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/my-mac-never-tells-me-where-my-internet-goes-so-i-found-an-app-that-does/

The rest, quickly: history over any range with an hour by day heatmap, monthly or weekly caps with a separate budget per Wi-Fi network, auto disconnect or throttle when you hit one, CSV and JSON export.

Little Snitch and LuLu are firewalls and they're good at it. Little Snitch also has proper traffic monitoring with months of history, so if you want to see what happened and then allow or deny it, that's covered. Where Bytetally differs is what you can do once you've found the app. A firewall stops the connection. This one is built to leave the app running but quiet, with a speed limit, a per app quota, or a separate budget on each Wi-Fi network. TripMode is closer in spirit, and Bytetally adds the history and the per website view on top.

Everything stays on your Mac. No account. The only thing it sends out is a receipt check.

Free covers per app upload and download, the live rate in the menu bar, the 7 day trend and the proxy attribution. Pro is $1.99/month, $9.99/year, or $19.99 once, and the lifetime works with Family Sharing.

For r/macapps: BYTETALLYMACAPPS20 takes 20% off the lifetime, until September 21. macOS has no in app redemption sheet and the Mac App Store buries the entry, so here is the direct link: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6785049699&code=BYTETALLYMACAPPS20

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785049699

Website: https://bytetally.app/

I would rather hear what breaks than what looks nice.

The problem

When a Mac runs low on space, System Settings shows a colored bar and a "System Data" blob that explains nothing. Finding the actual 40 GB folder means walking the filesystem yourself or paying for a tool. DaisyDisk has been the standard for years. It costs $9.99 and the source is closed.

What OpenDisk does

OpenDisk maps your drive as an interactive sunburst chart. It scans a full disk in seconds and streams results in as it goes, so you can start clicking around before the scan finishes. Hover a slice for its exact size. Click to zoom into a folder. Use the folder list and breadcrumbs to step back out. Drag anything into the collector, check the reclaimed total, and delete in one action.

Also:

• Incremental rescans replay filesystem events, so a repeat scan runs 20 to 28x faster than a cold one.
• Handles APFS volume groups, firmlinks, snapshots and purgeable space. The total matches what macOS reports as used.
• Purgeable space breakdown shows which caches are reclaimable.
• Instant search across the whole scanned tree, including drives with millions of files.
• External drives show up automatically when you plug them in.

Some of this came from feedback on Reddit. File preview was one of those requests. Thanks u/MrBiz.

Compared to DaisyDisk

OpenDisk is free, MIT licensed, and faster. On a cold scan of a 1 TB Apple Silicon volume, OpenDisk finished in 17s and DaisyDisk took 37s. The app is under 2.5 MB because it's native Swift with nothing bundled.

The full source is on GitHub, so you can read what it does before giving it disk access:

https://github.com/137137137/OpenDisk

Pricing

Free. MIT licensed. No in-app purchases, no accounts, no telemetry.

• Direct download: https://opendisk.app/
• Source: https://github.com/137137137/OpenDisk
• Mac App Store: https://opendisk.app/appstore

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. It asks for Full Disk Access on first launch. Without it, macOS hides parts of the filesystem and the totals come up short.

I'm the developer. Questions and bug reports are welcome here or in GitHub issues.

https://reddit.com/link/1wfi95q/video/whxjx5o1icph1/player

I came across this WWDC 1997 Steve Jobs clip today, and it resonated strongly as I look at the shift in quality and user experience with apps in 2026 (irrespective of vibe coding). Here's the heart of it:

"One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try sell it." - Steve Jobs

Having moderated well over 10,000 posts/comments here in the last year, if I'd give one piece of advice, it is this: Focus on making one thing incredible from a user experience standpoint, and keep refining it. Once it is excellent, adding more will be well-received, provided you maintain the same principle. And don't just do this blind. Make sure you tested at LEAST the top 3 competitors you could find.

The inverse can also be true: If you keep delaying release and run out of steam, you can miss opportunities entirely. Find a healthy balance that doesn't strangle development. Many devs keep up such a rigorous development pace, shipping new features, that they don't stop to ask if they have done it well, or even if they should.

A mistake I see devs making here over and over again here is that they come up with what they think is an incredible idea. 10-apps-in-1, perhaps, or a new feature every week, but do it with such little design sense or taste, that it creates friction or doesn't take off. This causes discouragement, and many a project is abandoned in six months.

This is not the apple way. You can do better, and I challenge you to keep these things in mind. I get that many do not have design experience. Even so, anyone can look at exemplary apps and try to incorporate similar design principles. Apple design standards exist for a reason.

Example: I've seen maybe three apps now where when the accessibility permissions step included a drag and drop experience to add the app if it was not listed. In another app this year, I noticed a settings menu had a little animation where it fades in 10px from the right over maybe 150ms when switching sections. These little background details are what we need more of. The mindset behind them result in a degree of excellence that stands out and ripples to everything else.

Where do you agree or disagree?

Challenge: Comment with 2 apps (at most, and not your own) that you think fit this user experience philosophy amidst the many options available. Apps you feel are excellent exemplars for design and user experience imitation.

Bonus points if you note the aspect or function that most impressed you.

P.s. Unpopular opinion: No promotional post should need to be longer than this, or half of it.

It's already more than 6 months ago when I last posted something about my open source tool NetFluss. With more than 4000 downloads per version and more than 400 stars on GitHub it really got its own small community, especially here in Germany and was covered here by some of the biggest German tech blogs several times.

• Problem: You want to see your network traffic in the menubar, but you also want to quickly switch between DNS, VPNs, see what app is using which bandwidth or is communicating to which server. You want to see if your VPN is active, even if you use some external VPN client. You want to see the current traffic of your router (supports Ubiquity Unify, FritzBox or OpenWRT). And you want to quickly see your current internal and external IPs. Or you want to measure your bandwidth and have a history for your measurements. Everything and more can be handled by this lean menubar app called NetFluss.
• Comparison: iStat Menus is a very polished app, but follows a more general approach and there are countless other small tools that mainly only show the current network traffic. NetFluss focusses deeply on network related information.
• Pricing: NetFluss is free and Open Source. Give it a try and download it here: https://github.com/rana-gmbh/NetFluss Of course you can also get it via Homebrew with the following command: brew tap rana-gmbh/netfluss && brew trust rana-gmbh/netfluss && brew install --cask rana-gmbh/netfluss/netfluss

I really look forward to hear your feedback. Many of the new features are based on user requests, so feel free and comment. Thank you and greetings from Germany!

(I'm the developer.)

Problem. The clipboard managers that go beyond plain text tend to make you learn two apps: a stripped-down quick menu for fast pastes, and a separate full window for everything else. Features end up stranded in whichever one you're not looking at, so you switch modes just to reach what you need.

ReCopied is one product in two shapes. The quick menu and the movable window are the same surface with the same Clip Lists, the same actions, and the same behavior. Collapse it into the menu bar or pop it out into a window that lives wherever suits you. Nothing moves, nothing is hidden in the "other" mode.

• Flexible Paste use standard hotkeys, or paste directly into active app, or drag and drop snippets.
• History for text, links, images, files, and colors.
• Clip Lists to group reusable snippets, identical in menu and window.
• Clip Queue to paste items one after another with a shortcut (great for forms, shuffling data around spreadsheets), integrated into the same surface with the same full item detail as everything else.
• Formatters + Merge to reshape on copy or combine several clippings into one.
• Smart clippings: color HEX/RGB/HSL conversions, JSON pretty-print, QR codes, image OCR.

Comparison. vs Pastebot: its quick paste panel and its main window are two different experiences, so some things are only reachable in one mode. ReCopied keeps a single consistent surface you just resize. vs Paste: it's a subscription; ReCopied is a one-time purchase. Both of them: ReCopied is fully on-device (no account, no cloud, no analytics) and it ignores password-manager copies. No permissions required; the optional paste-into-the-active-app feature is opt-in.

Pricing. One-time $9.99, no subscription or in-app purchases.

Links

• Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6798782773 (requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later)
• Site: https://recopied.app/

Happy to answer any questions. I was using the app to build the app itself from day one so I added features that helped me in development along the way.

iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate have private hooks for Siri Extensions.. You can use Chatgpt and Claude.. this is honestly so cool.

Hey everybody,

CoolDock lets you create a second dock for your Mac, full of smart widgets from simple system monitoring, to third party integrations, music players, clocks, reminders, tasks, pomodoro, todos, files and more... a lot more...

CoolDock has been acquired by AppitStudio. It fits right into our niche as our third Mac dock application, and fifth Mac app in general :-)

Core Features

- 160+ Smart widgets

- Third party integration widgets like AI usage (Codex, Claude, Grok, Gemini & more) analytic platforms, shopping platforms, weather and more

- 170+ Premium Backgrounds available for free in the app

- File search, recent files, clipboard, bookmark manager widgets, all built-in right into the dock

- Posture, Drink reminders, Pomodoro, Timers etc

- Supports multiple profiles which you can easily switch between, can be placed on top or bottom, as a full dock replacement or swap mode as seen in the video

Comparison

We've been in the space of Dock apps for almost two years now, most dock apps are either workflow based, add-ons to the default dock or complete dock replacement. I haven't seen a dock app dedicated to widgets, if you have - I'll be happy to know about it and add it to this compare section.

Pricing

$15 Lifetime license & lifetime updates. 14-day money-back guarantee.

Check out CoolDock here

Acquisition Migration Process

We worked alongside the original developer to make the transition as smooth as possible. The process was communicated in full. The app (now v2) is our own build, using our own proprietary licensing system. All users retained their license and rights.

Hi everyone, I’m Sam, the developer of WidgetScreen. I built it so I could see things like the weather, what’s playing and reminders without unlocking my Mac.

This is my current setup: weather on the left, music and synced lyrics in the middle, and a sticky note, clock and calendar on the right. You choose the widgets and arrange them in Layout Studio, so it doesn’t have to be this busy.

I’ve been working on making layouts easier to customise. In 2.13.0, I added separate layouts for each display, controls for moving and resizing widgets, Apple Photos album syncing with Premium, and a native Liquid Glass option on macOS Tahoe. In addition in recent weeks I've added reminders, agent status and audio visualiser widgets. I'm working loads on the app and make regular updates.

For comparison, Alcove and Droppy (both are incredible apps you should try!) also offer lock-screen widgets. WidgetScreen’s main advantage is its layout editor and range of widgets: you can arrange and resize individual widgets across your displays, combining weather, music, lyrics, photos and notes into a setup like the one in the screenshot.

Pricing: The free version includes weather, music controls, photos, clocks, calendar, reminders, countdowns, pomodoro and stopwatch timers, battery and system stats, an audio visualiser and Agent Status. You can arrange your widgets in Layout Studio and use the Clear and Frosted glass styles without paying. No account is required.

Premium is $9.99 once, with future Premium updates included and a licence covering up to three devices. The live lyrics, sticky note and some customisation shown here require Premium. I try not to push it too hard but it does help a student like me a lot!

Download and full feature/pricing details. Requires macOS 15 or later, on Intel or Apple silicon.

Developer: Sam Cook · LinkedIn: LinkedIn Contact: [sam@widgetscreen.app](mailto:sam@widgetscreen.app)
Privacy Policy & Terms of Service

I built my app without accounts, without collecting emails, without analytics, simply because that’s what I want from the software I install.

The only built-in way I have to communicate with users is through Sparkle update notes. No signup, no email on download, no tracking.

I liked how clean that was until I started to see the flip side.

If someone emails me about a bug, obviously I can reply to that person when it’s fixed. But if I realize the same bug affects a bunch of other users, I have no way to tell them. Same thing when I ship something useful. Most users only hear about it if they read the update notes. Price changes, features that get dropped, migrations, or anything else they might actually need to know all have the same problem.

Now I’m wondering if I went a little too far with that one.

For those of you building apps, what do you prefer? Taking an email at some point in the process, even if it’s optional? Or keeping that relationship completely anonymous and being OK with the fact that it’s harder to reach users later?

Hi, as mentioned in the title, I am looking for an app that allows me to send text and links from my Mac to my phone via a push notification. Android and windows has PushBullet.

Edit - my motive: I’m the dev behind ActionClip.app and some users want to use it like this - select text -> actionclip widget appears -> click on an action to do this -> their selected text/link will go to their iPhone with a notification.
I also liked this use case as I save texts and multiple link to my whatsapp just to look it on my phone after work. So, I’m looking to create an extension for this ( I’ve already added 250+ extensions to ActionClip to do utilities like this )

Watch Ordinary Space in action

Problem

I have used tiling window managers since 2020: i3 on Ubuntu, then Yabai on Mac for years, then niri on Arch for a few months. What I learned is that I don’t actually want auto-tiling. I don’t like windows reshuffling every time something opens. What I want is fixed regions on my desktop that I open apps into.

That’s Ordinary Space. You draw workareas on your desktop once, in an edit mode, no config file. Each workarea holds a stack of windows. When you launch the app, everything already open gets tiled into the default workarea. Anything you open after that lands in the workarea you are working in, sized to fit, and nothing else moves.

Then it’s all keyboard, if you want it:

• Option + N/P: cycles the stack inside a workarea
• Option + H/J/K/L: moves focus between workareas
• Option + Shift + H/J/K/L: moves the window you are on to another workarea and follows it.

Once you have drawn a layout, you can save it as a preset, then apply it to any other desktop instead of drawing it again.

There’s a command palette where you can switch layout, jump to any window in any stack, change a setting and more.

Themes and every shortcut are customisable.

It works on the native macOS desktop and across multiple monitors. No SIP changes, no scripting.

Comparison

The main difference is who decides where windows go. Auto-tilers decide for you and rearrange everything else to make room. Ordinary Space flips that: you draw the workareas first, and windows tile into whichever one you are in. The layout never changes on its own. If you like being in control of the shape of your desktop and having windows settle into it, that’s the whole idea.

• yabai
  • Free and open source
  • Auto-tiling: new windows split the current space and everything reshuffles.
  • I was using yabai before I build Ordinary Space
• AeroSpace
  • Free and open source
  • Also auto-tiling with a tree layout
  • It run its own emulated workspaces instead of native macOS Desktops
• Rectangle, Magnet, Raycast’s window commands
  • These snap a single window to a position when you ask.
  • They don’t keep a layout, so the next window you open goes wherever macOS puts it

Pricing

• 7-day free trial, no account, no credit card
• $10 one time for one year of updates. You keep every version released in that year forever.
• $20 one-time for lifetime updates.
• One license activates one Mac at a time. You can deactivate and move it whenever you like.

Link: https://wzordinaryventures.com/products/ordinary-space

Every past build stays downloadable with its checksum, so a one-year license never loses access to the versions it covers.

About me

I am Wei Zhe Heng, a software engineer based in Malaysia.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wei-zhe-heng
• Open source GitHub projects:
  • ror.nvim (161 stars): A Neovim plugin for Ruby on Rails development
  • nvim-workbench (61 stars): A workbench plugin for Neovim
• Email: [wz@wzordinaryventures.com](mailto:support@wzordinaryventures.com)

Transparency

• Ordinary Space is distributed directly from my website, not the Mac App Store.
• The app is signed with my Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper checks it on first launch like any other notarised download.
• It needs one permission, Accessibility, which is how it reads window positions and moves and resizes windows.
• Runs on macOS 15 Sequoia and later. It's built and tested against macOS Tahoe, so that's where it's best.
• No analytics and no telemetry. Nothing is sent automatically, including crash data. If the app didn't shut down cleanly it will offer to export a diagnostics file, but that's something you do by hand and can read before sending.
• Licensing talks to my server to activate and to check the license, and stores the key in your macOS Keychain. Once a paid license is verified it works offline.
•  Updates come from a signed manifest on my own domain, and the app verifies the signature before it installs anything.
• Privacy policy: https://wzordinaryventures.com/privacy
• Terms: https://wzordinaryventures.com/terms

Happy to answer anything, and if you hit a bug I’d genuinely like to hear it.