2026-07-17 21:14:20
Apptorium, the developers best known for SideNotes, is running a sale from July 20–31 on some of the most recommended apps in their category. Get Details .
Apptorium is putting their entire lineup on sale:
2026-07-16 22:42:06
TL;DR - Turn just about any collection of audiobook files (FLAC,WAV,MP3) into a single iPhone compatible M4B complete with metadata and chapters. Mac, $9.99, Solo dev
I've been listening to audiobooks since they were called books on tape. I progressed from there to CDs and then to miscellaneous downloads. These days, the gold standard format, at least for Apple fans, is audiobooks packaged as single M4B files regardless of the book's length, complete with chapters and metadata. That way you can stop and start listening without searching for your place, add bookmarks and get a description and info on the author and narrator. My go-to tool for audiobook conversion is AudioBo, from solo developer Vlad at OrsoLabs, available in the Mac App Store for $9.99. It will turn a folder full of old MP3 files and assorted cruft into something you can listen to on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and yes, even classic iPods. Length is no issue. If you've got a 60-hour doorstop fantasy novel, AudioBo can handle it.
For a long time, Reddit has recommended Audiobook Builder, and it's fine, except for the part where it caps output length and forces you into multiple part files for anything long. That's not a workflow, that's a workaround. For the price of a Big Mac combo, you can get AudioBo which converts MP3, FLAC, WAV, and other common formats into polished audiobooks and simplifies management and playback for good.
The three selling points for AudioBo are:
Metadata Fetch
AudioBo pulls title, author, and cover art from Audible, Apple Books, and Google Books in one click. That's the tedious part of building an audiobook done for you.
Non-Destructive Editing
You can adjust chapters and metadata on an existing M4B without re-encoding. That preserves audio quality and saves real time, since re-encoding a long file is not fast.
No Length Forcing
Long-form audiobooks stay as one file instead of getting split into parts because the app couldn't handle the duration.
While researching AudioBo for this review, I found multiple instances where the developer has responded to feature requests in a thread and then shipped within days. To me, that's a pretty good sign that this app will be maintained going forward. I'm normally wary of App Store reviews because of astroturfing and vague "Good App!" posts, but reading through the reviews left for AudioBo is pretty convincing. The written reviews back it up with specifics rather than vague praise. "Far and away, the best audiobook conversion app I've found," one reviewer wrote. Another called it the "Current Gold Standard of Audiobook Converters on App Store." 9to5Mac gave it a full hands-on writeup, not a roundup mention, and the reviewer's (well-known Mac journalist, Bradley Chambers) verdict after testing it on several massive projects was direct: it delivers, and it's now his go-to.
There are still a few features that the app needs. Currently it doesn't support batch/multi-instance processing. Opening a new window wipes the book you're currently working on, even mid-export. So, don't expect to dump your library in a folder and walk away. The good news is that the feature is coming, according to the dev. The only other hiccup is pretty specific: when re-encoding existing M4B files to go from stereo to mono or to change the bitrate, several people report having issues. That's not something I would ever do, so I haven't experienced it firsthand.
If you're building or maintaining audiobooks on the Mac and you've hit Audiobook Builder's length ceiling, or you just want metadata fetching that doesn't require three separate lookups, AudioBo is the better option. It's Apple/M4B-focused only, so if you need Audible AAX/DRM handling or cross-platform output for Kobo or Kindle, this isn't that tool, and it isn't trying to be.
$9.99 one-time, free demo on the developer's site. No subscription - something we all appreciate.
2026-07-16 07:41:00
We spend roughly one-third of our life asleep as a biological imperative. My relationship with sleep kind of tells my life story, not in dreams but in the pure mechanics of when I went to bed and when I got up. Oddly, sleep has seldom been a neutral element in my life. It's been something that either prevented me from doing something or enabled me.
I had a bedtime enforced by the adults in my life until about a month before I went into the Army. Kids in my house went to bed when they were told. Whether they went to sleep or not was up to them. I argued against it for years but it never did any good. The only time I stayed up past 9:00 on a school night was if I had neglected to do a chore. My old man pulled me out of bed one night about 11:00 because we were out of firewood. We heated the house with a wood stove, and my negligence caused a crisis I had to fix by myself on a frigid January night. Never happened again.
I was a farm kid in high school. Summers and winter work days always meant an early start to the day. Crops in the field and livestock don't respect the wishes of teenage boys. I got up with the sun, even if the night before involved other behavior teenagers are known for.
The next chapter, the Army, had rules about sleep that I wish more places would adopt, honestly. Every duty day starts early with PT (physical training). They start trying to make you tired as soon as you get out of your rack. The beautiful part of Army life, the part they figured out, is that it is the solemn duty of every junior enlisted man to sleep wherever and whenever possible. If you tell a platoon of GIs to wait under a tree for a truck that's going to take them somewhere, half of them (me included) will be snoring inside of five minutes. It's even more pronounced when they are in the field or deployed.
I went straight from the military to the state Division of Prisons as a guard. I was assigned, as newbies often are, to third shift. Those hours give you a relationship with sleep that is upside down. For two years, I watched men sleep. This includes the inmates and most of my fellow guards. There were elaborate systems in place to issue warnings when the captain was making rounds and everyone had to be awake. The guys on the gun towers couldn't sleep either. They have a mechanical clock that has to be punched every 15 minutes for the entire shift or they get written up. I was so damn happy the day I transferred to first shift.
I spent eight years in that mad house. I picked up a DUI in my first year there and got sober behind it at 22. I stayed that way through the rest of the job and past the day I quit. Then, a few months after my 30th birthday and about two years after I left the prison, I relapsed. It took until I was 43 before I got sober again. During that time I didn't go to sleep, I passed out. The unconsciousness wasn't restful or appreciated. The bottle was in charge, not me. I've been sober for the past 17 years and have my self respect back now.
In recovery, I suddenly had choices again, and I did what a lot of people do. I got addicted to healthy living, to the extreme. I counted every calorie. I weighed my food on a scale. I set crazy goals in endurance cycling (10,000 miles a year, 80+ rides of 100 miles or more). And I slept like it was the most important thing in the world. I tried, and succeeded, in getting eight hours of sleep almost every night. I kept records. I made graphs. I read books.
When I retired, I got a real curveball thrown to me. I never saw it coming. I picked up a viral infection that almost made an invalid of me. For 18 months, I slept 20 hours a day and there was never a moment when I didn't feel exhausted. I lost a chunk of my life that I'll never get back. I am mostly recovered. I still get tired more easily than I ever thought possible, but it's nothing like it was.
Today I deal with sleep like a lot of older people. It takes a lot of intention to get seven or eight consecutive hours of sleep. The minute I wake up in the night, I have the impulse to get out of bed. If I give in to that, I end up with a broken, patchwork existence, falling asleep involuntarily every few hours while watching TV with Wonder Woman or sitting in the passenger seat of the car. I don't want to live like that. I don't think anyone does. It takes real discipline to resist it, though.
As someone who values autonomy, freedom and self determination for all people as innate human rights, it is ironic that a basic human need we all have has been out of my control for long stretches of my life. Whether it was my parents, Army sergeants, prison bosses, bottles of cheap bourbon, or a mysterious illness, control of that vital one third of my life has been taken or ceded more often than not. These days, it's totally up to me to get the rest required to function, which is great even if it is a struggle. Autonomy, freedom and self determination don't equal easy. If it's worth having, it's worth the struggle.
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2026-07-16 00:53:10
In past lives, my bosses pressed me into using a few complex and complicated apps - mostly Adobe and Microsoft stuff, some AutoCAD. One thing they all have in common is crammed menu bars where what you are actually looking for seldom makes sense and when it does, it's buried three levels deep. Those are the ones that Microsoft likes to use as answers to questions on certification exams.
There's no shortage of specialty apps, like Paletro and automation tools like Raycast, Alfred and BetterTouchTool that try to address menu bar searches. Most of them are good at doing 70% of what it takes but they just never seem to get that final burst of polish it takes to solve the problem. That's where Finbar steps in. For $9.99, you get an app that sees every menu bar option, no matter how deep.
If your keyboard skills are equal to or greater than your clicking skills, take advantage of the free trial and test Finbar. Outline Mode is the feature to try first--it transforms every menu bar into a keyboard-navigable tree, like Finder's sidebar. You can arrow through, expand/collapse, and commit without lifting your hands.
If your workflow isn't keyboard centric and you aren't regularly drilling into menu items, you don't need this. Use Raycast or Alfred. But, if your daily drivers include the apps I mention earlier, this should be an instabuy.
$9.99, one-time purchase. Free trial available. Download at finbarapp.com or via Homebrew (brew install --cask finbar). Requires macOS Big Sur or later. Roey Biran--@finbarapp on X--built this on the Unix principle of doing one thing well. It shows.
2026-07-13 15:36:28
"Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets
What song makes you feel nostalgic for a time you never lived through? - Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets
The first few seasons of Happy Days, a must watch TV show about a family in the 1950s, this tune was the theme song (until the producers got tired of paying for it and wrote their own.) I'm pretty sure it was also used in American Graffiti.
2026-07-12 03:52:46
Apple, in its infinite wisdom, buries a great many popular system controls three layers deep in Settings, or worse, leaves them accessible only via the command line. Luckily, we have a community of indie developers who are pretty good at surfacing that stuff, building an app around it, and selling it for $5. An app for brightness. An app for the notch. An app to keep the Mac awake. An app to mute the mic. Then one day your menu bar has 40 icons in it and your login items are out of control.
There's a relatively new, free and open-source app that takes the opposite approach. Currently sporting over 500 GitHub stars, Mac Tools folds more than 40 of those functions into a single menu bar icon. It's built natively in SwiftUI and AppKit; the functions run on native Mac architecture, not scripts. Brightness goes through CoreDisplay, audio through CoreAudio, and disk cleanup runs path verification before it deletes anything. That last one matters: a cleanup tool that checks its work before emptying folders is rarer than it should be.
Check out the Mac Tools website. Mac Tools is available through Homebrew:
brew tap ggbond268/mactools
brew install --cask mactools
The features break down into five groups. You enable the plugins for what you want and leave the rest turned off.
Display Control -- resolution switching per monitor, DDC/CI brightness for external displays, True Tone, dark mode, Night Shift, display sleep, prevent sleep, notch hiding, and menu bar icon hiding. This group alone covers what most people buy three or four separate utilities to do.
System Operations -- Stage Manager toggle, system and microphone mute, disk cleanup, Xcode cleanup, eject all disks, empty trash, clear clipboard, lock screen, batch quit apps, and a fix for the "app is damaged and can't be opened" error, which is really just quarantine flag removal with a file picker instead of an xattr command.
Efficiency Tools -- three-finger middle click on the trackpad, a cleaning mode that blacks out the screen and locks input so you can wipe the keyboard, IP lookup, translation, global app hotkeys, a full-screen Launchpad replacement, Finder right-click enhancements, and a zsh config editor.
Monitoring Panel -- CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network, and battery with one-hour history curves; keyboard, mouse, and app usage statistics; battery levels for the Mac plus Bluetooth peripherals and AirPods; fan control; and a charge limiter that defaults to 80 percent.
Personalization -- custom menu bar icons including GIF and MP4 animations, Launchpad appearance controls, 11 languages, and a plugin marketplace.
The plugin architecture is what keeps this from becoming bloatware. Everything can be enabled, hidden, or reordered, so the panel only shows what you actually use.
The point of Mac Tools is consolidation, not feature-for-feature parity with every indie tool it overlaps. Lunar is still the king of independent monitor control, but if you just need brightness adjustment, Mac Tools handles it. If Amphetamine is only in your Dock to stop the Mac from sleeping, Mac Tools does that too. Across a whole set of single-purpose categories, it's a credible replacement for:
This is a relatively new app. After it appeared on GitHubDaily and in a Medium article, its popularity spiked fast. The developer's true identity is unknown; "ggbond268" is a pseudonym, and the project came out of the Chinese Mac community. The README is in Chinese, though the app itself is localized into English and ten other languages. That's not disqualifying on its own -- I run Chinese-built apps like Qspace regularly -- but it's the kind of context you want before you grant an app broad system access, not after.
And several of these features do ask for broad access. Fan control installs a helper with admin rights. Disk cleanup deletes files. The middle-click feature uses an event tap. Quarantine removal is the kind of thing you want done carefully, not casually. The code being open and the app being native counts for a lot -- that's the whole argument for shipping as a public repo instead of a black box. What it doesn't have yet is a public security audit. Worth knowing before you install, not a reason to skip it outright.
If you're comfortable installing from a Homebrew tap, you like open source, and your menu bar currently hosts a small orchestra of single-purpose utilities, Mac Tools is an easy experiment. It's free, it's light, and the plugin design means you can turn on three features and ignore the rest.
If you'd rather pay for a mature tool with a support address and years of releases behind it, or handing admin rights to a young, pseudonymous project makes you itch, stick with the battle-tested standalones for now and check back in six months. Promising and early -- both are true at once.
