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.
2025-12-29 04:46:34
If you got some cash or gift cards for Christmas and want to try out some new software, you can try a few of these apps. I've installed and tested them all at some point. The links will take you to a short review with download information. If you find a broken link or an app is no longer viable, let me know and I'll make a quick edit. If you're a developer, drop me a DM and I will be glad to check out your work and possibly feature you on AppAddict if it has some unique features the community would appreciate.
Note - In almost all cases, I've listed the purchase and/or subscription price at the time I reviewed the app. Some have undoubtably changed, so make sure you check the current price before purchasing. None of these are affiliate links, they lead to wherever the developer markets his app. This is my hobby, not my part time job.
2025-12-28 01:57:31
One of my passions over the past few months has been growing and curating my collection of ebooks. I've loved reading longer than I've loved computers, but now I love both and this is how I married the two together. As a Mac and iOS user who also has a self-hosted server, I've tried a lot of different apps in an ongoing effort to craft the best workflow.
I was an Amazon customer for a long time, but in February of 2025, the company decided it would no longer allow customers to download their books as user-maintained files and limited them to access with Internet-connected Amazon-approved devices, and implicitly acknowledged that they could and would remove your access to your purchases at their discretion. Before their deadline arrived, I downloaded a thousand+ ebooks and audiobooks I'd purchased over the years. I removed the digital rights management restrictions from my property. Now I can use whatever device I want. I can convert the books to different formats and I can loan them to friends, just like the physical books I purchase at brick-and-mortar stores.
You can let your conscience be your guide. I still purchase books sold without DRM from various sources, but I also use:
Although some UI snobs don't care for its idiosyncratic interface, I use and love Calibre and its many plugins. I can't think of anything I want it to do that it can't handle. Its killer features include:
Apple's own Books app lets you import and read only three formats: pub, PDF, and iBook. It chokes on DRM. It also lacks queries beyond a basic search for authors and titles. It is very much geared towards selling you new books from Apple's bookstore. I only use it for backup.
I use an Intel MacBook as a daily driver for ebook management. When I am at home, I can use its built-in web server to browse my library on my iPhone and iPad. For remote access and to share with friends and family, I use Syncthing to keep a mirrored copy of my database on my self-hosted server. I run Calibre-Web a free third-party app in a Docker container that I connected to the Internet with a free Cloudflare zero-trust tunnel. Calibre-Web has a built-in OPDS service that connects to apps like Readest and MapleRead, so that I can do queries, read metadata, and download books on a device from anywhere with Internet connectivity.
I've been using MapleRead SE($8.99), the edition of the software with the biggest feature set. Other editions don't handle PDFs, and the free edition has a five-book limit. The full-featured edition offers extensive formatting of fonts, themes, and highlights. If you need or want language support, it has good tools for search, lookup, translation, highlighting, notes, and vocabulary lists. You can use text-to-speech to turn any book into a pseudo-audiobook. There are multiple ways to get content into your library, which will sync across platforms.
I am testing a relatively new, free, and open-source ebook app, Readest, an offshoot of the Linux app, Foliate, with a richer set of features and support for more platforms. Readest can do a lot of what MapleRead does, in fact, more in some areas, not so much in others. It supports more formats: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 (Kindle), FB2, CBZ/CBR (comics), TXT, and PDF. The PDF support is new and has some rough edges. At present, I would not use it as my primary PDF reader if you are dependent on those documents for important work. Readest will sync notes and highlights across devices, but it doesn't handle uploading, so you'll have to do that manually if you want that feature to work as intended. One nice feature is the ability to load two books simultaneously, handy if you are working on your language skills and want to see the same book in different languages at the same time.
Goodreads is the OG of Internet book communities and at its inception created a lot of innovative tools. Today it's owned by Amazon, rarely adds new features and is used for data harvesting and to to steer you towards the walled garden of its billionaire owner. There are plenty of other apps and websites out there for book lovers and I encourage you to find one where you fit in.
2025-12-27 00:25:36
If you're running short on cash after Christmas, but you still want to try out some new software, you can try a few of these apps. I've installed and tested them all at some point. The links will take you to a short review with download information. If you find a broken link or an app is no longer free, let me know and I';ll make a quick edit. If you're a developer with a free app, drop me a DM and I will be glad to check out your work and possibly feature you on AppAddict if it has some unique features the community would appreciate.
2025-12-24 01:04:32
For the avid app collector there are a few tools available to help catalog and curate the assortment of programs that accumulate over time. You can use Apple's built in system report to get comprehensive information but it's rather dense and not illustrated. You can use an app like Apparency, but then you are limited to a single app at the time. My Applications, available in the app store for 99 cents, serves as both a database and a launcher for your computer.
One feature I love is a snapshot of my app usage for the past 24 hours. Typically, for me it averages around 85 or so, depending on what I am working on. When I write app reviews, I try to mention alternatives, which leads to me opening a half dozen browsers or terminal emulators at a time to look at their features. I am also not shy about running a lot of startup items, so that's always going to jack up my daily total by 30 or so apps.
The My Applications general interface includes a count of the number of apps you have installed, 653 in my case. It breaks the apps down into publishers, for example I have 98 apps from Apple itself and 16 from the wonderful developer Sindre Sorhus. Apparently, many apps don't provide publisher information because I have a lot that are not listed. It also breaks the apps into categories such as utilities, productivity, developer tools, graphics and design etc. The categories, while helpful, are a little too broad for my taste, for example I have 227 labeled as utilities and it seems that could have been further narrowed into categories like disk utilities, archive utilities, etc.
The app interface lets you choose sorting by name or last launched. It tells you how many apps you currently have running and how may you have launched in the past day. If you click on individual apps, you have the option to launch them or to get more information regarding size on disk, location, language localizations, download date and date of last update. A complete permissions report is included. The package contents are listed as is a complete description, apparently from the App store or developer's web site if provided. There are even screen shots provided.
One feature I love is a snapshot of my app usage for the past 24 hours. Typically, for me it averages around 85 or so, depending on what I am working on. When I write app reviews, I try to mention alternatives, which leads to me opening a half dozen browsers or terminal emulators at a time to look at their features. I am also not shy about running a lot of startup items, so that's always going to jack up my daily total by 30 or so apps.
(This is an update from an earlier post)
