2026-01-15 00:15:20
I've tried a variety of notch apps, and I haven't been truly happy with any of them. I'm not sure whether the novelty of the interface is the problem, or if it's the design of the apps I've used that bothers me. I recently installed Droppy, a free and open-source app built entirely with Swift for speed and stability, and I like it more than the other notch apps I've used.
It isn't overloaded with superfluous features, and the features it does have can be toggled on and off easily. It also seems very stable--I haven't encountered any bugs so far.
Depending on which features you enable, Droppy can replace several categories of single-purpose apps:
Droppy's architecture allows you to add or remove features through extensions. This keeps the bloat down. You won't be faced with menu options for Spotify or Alfred if, like me, you don't use either of those products. The currently available extensions include:
I tried Notchnook shortly after it came out, and it felt more like a minimally viable product than a finished app--despite its $25 price tag. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
My second choice in this category is Dynamic Lake Pro, which sells for $15.90 on Gumroad. It has a couple of features Droppy doesn't, such as a weather and calendar HUD and notification support. It's updated frequently, and the developer is very responsive to bug reports and user questions.
2026-01-11 22:19:34
Apps gain new capabilities through updates. Our preferences change, task requirements shift, and workflows evolve right along with them. It pays to periodically reevaluate the tools and methods we rely on. As a writer and blogger, I go through a surprising number of images every day. My goal is simple: images should be optimized for file size, renamed intelligently, and land exactly where I need them for current projects. After 24 hours, they should be archived--still accessible, but no longer cluttering my active workspace.
Clotski is a menu bar utility for browsing, tagging, renaming, and editing metadata for images in user-specified folders--most often Downloads, Screenshots, and project folders. Its superpower is the ability to automatically save images from your clipboard to a location you define in the app's settings. In my setup, copied images are saved as JPGs directly into the Downloads folder.
NameQuick is a powerful automation tool that has improved significantly since I first started using it. Beyond AI-assisted renaming, it can move, tag, add comments to, archive, or trash images based on rules you define.
In my setup, NameQuick evaluates images in Downloads. Screenshots are renamed based on their content and the app that created them, with "Screenshot" appended to the filename. Once renamed, the files are moved into the folder where my current project files live. I use CleanShot X for screenshots for many reasons, but especially for how well it integrates with Raycast, ExtraBar, and CirMenu.
Other images follow a similar path: they're given short, descriptive filenames and moved into the same project folder.
There's no reason to work with image files that take up more disk space than necessary. For that reason, I use Clop to automatically optimize every image I work with, unless there's a rare and specific reason not to. Clop watches the project folder and, when a new image appears, runs a process to reduce its file size. Its interface also makes it easy to upload files to cloud services, send images to an editor, compare diffs against existing images, and handle a handful of other related tasks.
Most images in this setup exist for an immediate purpose: a blog post or a document I'm actively working on. By the next day, I usually don't need them anymore. To handle that, I use a Hazel rule that moves any file older than 24 hours into an archive folder. From there, another Hazel rule permanently deletes those files after 90 days.
2026-01-07 03:11:50
You don't need wads of disposable income to enjoy new software on a regular basis, and you don't have to rely exclusively on freeware to get useful work done on your Mac. You're the only one who knows what your budget can support. I've been buying independently developed software since before people called them apps--back when you dialed into a local BBS to download shareware from the computer eccentric you met at the last user group meeting. My hometown even had a store in the '90s where you could rent commercial software. This was before Little Snitch mattered, because most home users didn't even have Internet access.
Here’s an example using Hazel as the starting point–I got 19 alternative suggestions in seconds.
If you do subscribe, yearly plans are almost always cheaper than monthly ones. Be especially wary of weekly pricing. I recently tried a translation app that cost 49 cents for seven days–after that, it jumped to $10.99 per week.
Don't download cracked or pirated software. It's easy to find sites with massive catalogs of apps, usually delivered at glacial speeds unless you pay for "premium" access (Bitcoin preferred). Even when the apps are recognizable titles, they're often modified in ways that break Gatekeeper, Apple's built-in malware protection.
To compensate, these sites usually provide a mysterious Terminal script you're told to run. None of this is smart. Even if nothing immediately bad happens, you're often left with an app you can't update without breaking it.I don't lose sleep over Adobe's or Microsoft's profits, but stealing a $4.99 app from an independent developer who built something genuinely useful is just low-class.
I also have mixed feelings about asking developers for freebies or discounts. Some--like Sindre Sorhus--openly encourage students and users in low-income countries to reach out, which makes sense. I'm privileged enough not to need that. On the flip side, I regularly get emails from people who assume I'm the developer of an app I reviewed. Most are polite; some are pushy. Decide where you land, and act accordingly.
2026-01-05 04:07:24
Complex, multi-purpose apps with a zillion functions can be fun to learn, even if you never quite feel like you've mastered them. Every time I tinker with my Raycast setup or my collection of Keyboard Maestro macros, I get the nagging feeling that I'm not making the best use of those apps. To remedy that feeling, it's refreshing to discover a few simple apps that do one thing well--and that's all. Here are a few I've been tinkering with lately.
2026-01-04 01:15:00
Did you have a moment when the Internet seemed like a magical creation? Was there ever a time when you sat at a keyboard or held a phone and discovered you could use it to do something you’d once only read about as science fiction?
In the old days, back in the 1900s, BTI (Before the Internet), keeping up with the weather was not simple. There were only a few ways to get a forecast. Radio stations made jingles about the times when they would clue you in on the temperature or the chance of rain, so you could get that information at one minute past the hour. Some places actually had a phone number you could call to find out the current temperature. Your other option was to wait for the local news to air in the evening for a detailed explanation, complete with maps and jargon about cold fronts and barometric pressure.
When the walled gardens—Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL—entered their heyday, before access to the World Wide Web was widespread, the content you got in Miami was the same content people got in Seattle. It wasn’t localized. Over time, that began to change, in an actual example of companies improving their products to better compete with their rivals. One day I logged into AOL to see if the “You’ve got mail” guy had anything to say to me when I noticed a new button labeled “Weather.” I clicked it. Hard. I don’t remember whether I typed in my city and state or my ZIP code, but whatever it was, the result was an on-demand weather report—the first of my life. I was 28 years old, and all of a sudden, I was living in the future.
Let’s fast forward to 2026. Today, magic is pretty scarce. We’ve largely become immune to amazement because we’ve been inundated with bullshit from tech companies for so long—and it’s obvious. One of the most egregious ongoing examples is the question too many apps ask you on an iPhone. You go to the App Store to install the app from your favorite sub sandwich place because, well, you’re hungry and you want that footlong Italian. Before you can start placing your order, you get hit with a request from the sandwich app to track what you do in other apps and across the Internet. Why? Seriously—what possible benefit could you get from such an arrangement? Jersey Mike’s wants to add to its bottom line by acting as a data broker? That’s not the relationship you were seeking, was it?
These requests are always presented as though they will benefit you in some way. You would think everyone would see straight through that, but you would be wrong. Many otherwise intelligent people get instantly confused any time something unexpected appears on a screen. They get flustered and blindly click buttons until the message they didn’t read goes away. (Source: my 30 years in IT support.) The whole experience is the furthest thing from magic.
Some people give Apple kudos for giving us the choice to opt out of exploitation. I have to reject that. Yes, it’s better than what Google does with Android, but the option shouldn’t even exist. No one installs a sub sandwich app so their unrelated behavior can be harvested for profit. And if you accidentally click the wrong button and agree to be surveilled, you didn’t choose that—you were ambushed. It happens to all of us. Undoing that choice isn’t obvious, and the burden shouldn’t be on the user to hunt down the consequences of a momentary misclick.
As a certified Old, I remember the magic, and I miss it. I know how cool technology can be. I know there are still real possibilities. But kids today think the enshittified Internet is the only Internet there ever was. It isn’t—and it didn’t have to turn out this way.
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2026-01-03 21:30:22
Rather than trying to consolidate all the image tools I use into one giant app with hundreds of features, I prefer to use smaller, specialized apps that are single-purpose or that have a small feature set. They are easier to learn, faster to launch, and often maintained by a very experienced developer with years of experience. Here's a collection of such apps that you might find useful.
Dating back to the 90s, Toyviewer (free) can open just about any image format you throw at it, including ones that Preview won't touch. You can view images one at a time or use its slide show mode. For simple, one-off edits, ToyViewer can adjust the brightness, contrast, and color tone of images, and perform enhancements, embossing, etc. It does file conversions, and you can also print from it.
ImageOptim (free), a powerful compression app, can be accessed by dropping images on its icon in the dock, through integration with macOS services, or by opening the GUI and dropping a single file or a batch of files into the interface. It is essentially a wrapper for a powerful set of compression tools. It's capable of reducing file sizes by up to 90% with no discernible quality loss. It does its work quickly, even on older Macs. If you are a Qspace user, you can add ImageOptim to the right-click menu. You can recover the original files without losing access to the converted ones.
If you come across a folder of RAW photos, a collection of giant TIFF files, or maybe some PSD files that never got finished in Photoshop, you can use XnConvert (free) to turn them into something manageable and useful all at once. Not only can you batch convert them into a new format, but you can also do resizing, renaming, adjusting colors, applying filters and effects, and editing metadata all in one go.
I keep one canonical collection of photos for myself and my wife in the file system of my daily driver that gets synced to other computers, a couple of backup drives, and two cloud services. I still use iCloud for the photos I take with my phone, but just for the sake of convenience in viewing and sharing; I don't try to make it the comprehensive, go-to source for my entire photo library. Digikam (free) is a huge app with more features than Adobe Lightroom. I use it for facial recognition, tagging, filtering, and file management, but it can do a whole lot more. I installed the Linux version on two old 24-inch iMacs just to use them as extra-large digital photo frames.
I use Immich (donationware) in a Docker container that reads the file structure I maintain in Digikam. Using the companion iOS app, I can remotely access my entire photo collection on my phone using its powerful search features, albums, and tags. I can also use its built-in web server with a domain I own to get to my photos from any Internet computer. The Immich developers give you access to the entire feature set right off the bat, but they do ask that you help support the app financially if you continue to use it.
