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.
2026-01-03 01:30:00
I recently went on vacation to Costa Rica. It was an experience that was not without technical difficulties. The very first time I attempted to take a picture with my iPhone, I received a message that my storage was completely used up and that I needed to delete something in order to save photographs. It happened at an inopportune moment. My wife and I were in the jungle surrounded by white-faced monkeys. One had climbed on her shoulders, and she was imploring me to take photographs. The message on my phone came as quite a shock because I'm very careful about keeping track of my available storage, and as far as I knew, I had over 100 gigabytes free. My first thought was that I had inadvertently filmed a 4K video of the inside of my pocket lasting for hours. But that proved not to be true.
I didn't have time to investigate the issue, being in the middle of a rainforest and all, so I did the first thing that I could think of, which was to delete a couple of the largest apps on my phone. They were both AI models that I had downloaded, and it would be no problem to download them again in the future. With the immediate problem solved, the emergency was over, but I had six more days of adventure planned. I wanted my visits to the beautiful places I wanted to see captured with photographs and videos, and I was concerned about the storage issue. When we returned to our hotel, I began to look into where all my space had gone.
It turned out that Apple's mysterious System Data had swollen to 75 gigabytes. Normally, it's somewhere in the range of 20. A web search revealed that System Data "includes caches, logs, temporary files, failed downloads, Spotlight indexes, Siri voices, iMessage attachments, data, and sometimes straight-up orphaned files that iOS forgot how to delete. When something goes sideways (updates, app crashes, big syncs, travel, poor connectivity), it can balloon fast."
After restarting my phone, which should always, without exception, be the first step in troubleshooting just about any device, I freed up more space by
These steps just involved removing data to free up space, and what I was most interested in was shrinking the size of my System Data to what it should be. The Internet suggested that I:
After attempting all these steps, one after another, and seeing little or no changes, I kept seeing the same thing mentioned again and again in my research. The surefire and bulletproof method to freeing up space is the nuclear option. I was to ensure that my phone was backed up to iCloud. Then I was to erase all content and settings, download the backup, and restore it. Being in a foreign country, there was no way in hell I was going to do anything that might brick my phone, even temporarily, because I needed it to be my lifeline back to my life in the States. It held my boarding passes, all of my contact information, and my medical history. So wiping it was out of the question. I managed to capture the photographs that I wanted, although I abstained from making any video files. I checked on my storage daily, but it never budged more than a gigabyte or two in either direction, holding steady at around 75 gigabytes of System Data day after day.
When I returned home, I went ahead and used the nuclear option, and just as everyone had promised, more than 50 gigabytes of System Data disappeared, and my storage was back in the range I was used to seeing it.
For people without a technical background, my near disaster would have been an actual disaster. The steps I took seem common sense, but little in the average person's background prepares them to do almost any of the things I tried. Power users forget that we are the outliers.
Travel causes a surge in System Data for lots of reasons because iOS is designed to start caching and logging like crazy when you begin to go in and out of airplane mode, switch cellular networks, and encounter frequent areas of poor connectivity. It stores authentication tokens, carrier codings, DNS results, captive-portal junk, and diagnostic data.
Apple Maps and every single app that you have using Apple's location services stores offline maps, routing data, and geofencing information for places you've recently been. All of that information is in System Data. All the new apps you download for a trip, the extra messages, photos, and videos you take, coupled with spotty connectivity, result in the retention of more local copies of data. Even things you delete have space-eating residue that lives, you guessed it, in System Data.
You may have never noticed this issue on your past travels when you were using older versions of iOS. Some of the data retention behavior was just introduced in recent editions. Given enough time, the data retention policies and internal maintenance cycles will eventually shrink System Data, but Apple doesn't give you any knobs to turn to make that happen.
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2025-12-31 19:17:47
ExtraBar is a new app from the developers at AppItStudio. That's the same team behind ExtraDock and DockFlow, two useful additions to my toolbox in 2025. ExtraBar is one of those apps that solves a problem I didn't realize I had. My Mac's menu bar is cluttered with icons from (don't hate) 40 different apps. Traditionally, the way to tame that was by using Bartender, Ice, or some other menu bar manager. Apple, in an attempt to Sherlock those apps, introduced a few menu bar management tools in macOS 26. In doing so, it changed the back end for utility developers, and it's been a scramble for months for a lot of folks to find something that works the way they want it to.
Enter ExtraBar. It doesn't try to mimic the old menu bar management paradigm. It provides users a way to perform a huge number of actions by allowing them to associate their favorite use cases with menu bar items that can be hidden until needed or left permanently on display. The entire interface is accessible through keyboard shortcuts. Everything I describe below can be done without using a mouse.
Keyboard Maestro In my first day of use, I was able to eliminate the native Keyboard Maestro menu item, which I use multiple times a day, by creating a custom Keyboard Maestro action list with ExtraBar.
Apple Shortcuts There are several apps and a native way to activate Apple Shortcuts from the menu bar, but now I can do that from ExtraBar. This means I can build my own launcher for individual apps. I can batch open groups of apps, documents, and websites easily too.
Messages and Mail I was able to quickly build a menu bar action list that opens Apple Messages to a specific contact, with the cursor in the message box ready for me to type. The same concept applies to my email client.
Raycast I have installed more Raycast extensions than I can keep up with, and I often get frustrated because I can't remember the correct alias or keyboard shortcut for the function I want. Those days are gone. Now I can make a menu to choose from, ordered in any way I want and containing up to 35 items. Some of the apps I was able to eliminate from my menu bar as a result include Drafts, Fantastical, CleanShot X, and Things 3.
One nice touch about the app is that you can export and import action lists. This has been a useful feature in other automation apps, like Hazel and BetterTouchTool, and I think it will be helpful here too.
There are still a lot of possibilities to explore. I can search Obsidian with an ExtraBar action. I can search my Raindrop bookmarks. I can start and record AI Q&A sessions. I've already submitted a feature request to the developers to allow users to create their own action lists (using shortcuts and deep links) that are associated with workflows and not with single apps. They have a history of responsiveness and frequent updates with their other products, and I expect we will see more of the same with ExtraBar.
Learn more about ExtraBar and by all means, buy a copy (€9.99) at the developer's website.
