2026-03-02 19:48:01
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.
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.
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:
If it shows up in your macOS print dialog, it’s fair game.
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.
If you:
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.
2026-03-02 18:15:17
"The Foggy Dew" by Sinéad O’Connor & The Chieftains,
A song that reminds you of one of your favorite places.
Oh, Ireland. This performance of maybe the greatest of all Irish rebel songs always gives me chills. It's the story of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.
2026-03-01 16:27:27
"The End" by The Doors
What song makes you feel like you're in a dream?
If Jim Morrison hadn't been so damn pretty, he'd be better remembered for the true poet that he was than just another 60s rock star. This is truly one of the sings of my life and one I've loved for more than 40 years.
2026-02-28 18:38:43
When you're faced with text that you can't select in the conventional
way on your Mac (meaning with the cursor), there are several options.
They all work in slightly different ways, and I use the one most
appropriate for the task.
The operating system has a feature called Live Text Recognition , an on-device computer vision feature that detects and extracts text from images and video so you can interact with it like normal text.
It uses Apple’s Neural Engine to perform optical character recognition; OCR, directly on your Mac. That means you can:
The key idea is this: pixels become selectable characters without sending your data to the cloud. It quietly turns static images into searchable, actionable information.
My go to choice is Cleanshot X, mainly because it's always running on my Mac anyway. Live Text Recognition requires you to open an image in an app like Preview first. Cleanshot X let's you select any region and get text immediately. The downside is that Cleanshot X is a paid app.
There is a Raycast extension called Easy OCR that combines the features of Live Text Recognition and Cleanshot X. After you invoke it, Easy OCR can be used on an image you've already captured, the clipboard or an area you select on screen. Just search for it in the Raycast Store.
(Free)
Even if you have the tools previously mentioned, there should still be room in your toolbox for TextSniper, an OCR app for YouTube videos, PDFs, images, online courses, screencasts, presentations, webpages, video tutorials, photos, etc. Like Cleanshot X, you don't have to make screen captures and open them in Preview to grab text. In my experience it works better than alternatives like PDF Pen, Adobe products, Google Docs etc. As long as you can draw a rectangle around the text, it doesn't matter if it's rotating, angled or shadowed.
Unique Features
Text Sniper is currently on sale for $2. That should be a no brainer. It is also available as part of SetApp.
OCRmyPDF is an open-source command-line tool that adds a text layer to scanned PDFs while keeping the image intact. It creates searchable PDF/A output. You can use it via this Apple Shortcut..
2026-02-28 17:49:12
"Leaving On a Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul & Mary
A song that reminds you of your last vacation or holiday.
2026-02-28 01:00:00
I have tried a variety of notch apps, and I haven't been truly happy with any of them. I am 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, an app built entirely with Swift for speed and stability, and I like it more than the other notch apps I've used. I don't say this lightly, but it could be the best $7 you ever spend on software.
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.
The developer of Droppy was recently subjected to a concerted campaign of disparagement by a competitor that involved brigading and a lot of Reddit style drama. That's unfortunate but he handled it with grace and class. If you have questions, here is a good explainer.
