Every pick
All apps37
Every app we've picked, in one place. Narrow it down by what you need.
37 apps, A to Z
Amphetamine
Keep your Mac awake on your terms.
“Free, no ads, no upsell, and the triggers mean you set it up once and stop thinking about sleep settings.”
FreeMenu bar
AppCleaner
Delete an app along with the files it leaves behind.
“The Trash only removes the app itself. AppCleaner removes everything the app left behind, and it has quietly done that one job for well over a decade.”
Free
Aside
A web browser with an AI agent that does the clicking.
“The agent browser that feels most like a real browser first, and it asks before it spends your money or sends anything on your behalf.”
Free + Pro
Astropad Workbench
Check on your Mac and its AI agents from anywhere.
“Remote desktop rethought for the agent era: glance at what your Mac mini is doing from your phone, nudge it, and get on with your day.”
Free + Pro
Backtrack
Save the last hour of audio after it happened.
“It quietly records in the background, so the moment you think “I wish I’d recorded that”, you already have.”
Free + ProMenu bar
balenaEtcher
Flash OS images to SD cards and USB drives safely.
“The go-to tool for making a bootable SD card or USB drive. Simple and effective, and it won’t let you wipe your own disk by accident.”
Open source
calibre
Organise, convert and read your whole e-book library.
“Ugly, sprawling and unbeatable. It converts between every e-book format, fixes messy metadata and sends books to your reader, and it costs nothing.”
Open source
Cap
Record your screen and share a link in seconds.
“An open-source Loom alternative whose recordings look polished without an editing pass.”
Open source
Command Reopen
The permission-free Cmd+Tab fix
“A fix for something that should have worked all along, without handing over Accessibility or screen access to do it. It keeps Apple’s own Cmd+Tab, it’s open source, and you forget it is running.”
Pay onceMenu bar
DisplayBuddy
Monitor brightness, volume and inputs from the menu bar.
“External monitors come with the worst buttons ever designed. DisplayBuddy puts every one of them in your menu bar, and presets switch a whole desk setup in one click.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Downie
Download videos from YouTube and 1,000+ other sites.
“Bookmarking a video isn’t the same as keeping it. Downie builds you an offline library of your own, from almost any site, in one click.”
Pay once
Ghostty
A fast terminal that looks and feels like a Mac app.
“Fast like the GPU terminals, native like Terminal.app, and the defaults are good enough that most people never open the config file.”
Open source
Hamdori
A tiny 3D hamster that lives in the corner of your desktop.
“A desktop pet that is genuinely charming, and careful with it: no Accessibility, Screen Recording or Input Monitoring access, no account, and it only counts key presses, never which keys. Paid for once.”
Pay once
Haptiker
Slide along a trackpad edge to set volume, brightness or keyboard light.
“The quickest volume control on your Mac is the trackpad your hand is already on. One finger along the edge, a soft tick at every step, and it even dims your external monitor and lights the keys.”
Pay onceMenu bar
iA Writer
A focused writing app for plain-text Markdown.
“Nothing between you and the sentence. The writing app others copy, and its style check points out the filler you would rather not publish.”
Pay once
Itsytv
Control your Apple TV from the Mac menu bar.
“Typing a search into an Apple TV with a real keyboard is worth the download on its own.”
Open sourceMenu bar
Katalog
A music library manager for big collections you own.
“What iTunes would be if Apple had kept going. It finds fake bitrates and duplicates across tens of thousands of tracks, and it writes the iTunes library file Serato has been missing since Catalina.”
Free + Pro
Keka
Compress and extract almost any archive format.
“The archive utility macOS should ship with. The free download and the paid App Store copy are the same app; buying it just supports the developer.”
Free
Klack
Mechanical keyboard sounds for every keystroke.
“Pure delight for five dollars. It makes a MacBook keyboard feel like a custom board.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Micro Snitch
Know the moment an app turns on your mic or camera.
“From the makers of Little Snitch. Tiny, trustworthy and set-and-forget.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Moises
Split any song into stems and play along.
“Mute the guitar and play it yourself. Moises pulls any song apart into vocals, drums, bass and the rest, and it sounds cleaner than the others we tried.”
Free + Pro
Mole
Clean, uninstall, analyse and monitor your Mac, in one native app.
“CleanMyMac, an uninstaller, DaisyDisk and iStat Menus in one well-made app, from the developer of the free Mole command-line tool with over 70,000 GitHub stars. You review every item before anything is deleted.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Mullvad VPN
An anonymous VPN with one flat monthly price.
“The only VPN we recommend without reservations. No email, no personal details, one honest flat price.”
SubscriptionMenu bar
Obsidian
Linked notes in plain Markdown files you own.
“A spiderweb for your thoughts: notes that link to each other, stored as plain files that stay yours forever, whatever happens to the app.”
Free + Pro
Orb
Scores how good your internet feels, all day long.
“Speed tests measure the wrong thing. Orb tells you why video calls stutter even when the numbers look fine.”
Free + Pro
Panels
A DRM-free comic reader that syncs your library.
“The comic reader that treats your files with respect. Beautiful reading modes, manga support, and a library that follows you from Mac to iPad.”
Free + Pro
Paperman
A soft paper texture over your whole screen.
“Night Shift changes the colour; Paperman changes the surface. A fine grain takes the glare off a bright screen without tinting anything, and it turns off per app when you need true colour.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Penfont
Turn your handwriting into a real font.
“The most personal font you will ever install, made in minutes on your own Mac.”
Pay once
Permute
Drop in any video, audio or image and convert it.
“Drop in almost any video, audio or image and get back the format you need, without learning a single setting.”
Pay once
PXPlay
Play your PlayStation games on your Mac, from anywhere.
“Smoother and far more capable than Sony’s own Remote Play, and one licence covers Mac, Windows and Linux.”
Pay once
Raycast
A keyboard launcher that runs your whole Mac.
“The first thing we install on a new Mac. Clipboard history, snippets and window snapping come built in, so it replaces three or four other utilities on its own.”
Free + ProMenu bar
Scroll Reverser
Natural scrolling on the trackpad, classic on the mouse.
“Fixes the one setting macOS forces you to share between trackpad and mouse. Tiny, free and finished.”
Open sourceMenu bar
Slap Alert
A pixel monkey in your menu bar slaps a sticky note on screen for every Stripe, Paddle, RevenueCat or Shopify sale.
“Silly on purpose, and that is the point: a small burst of joy for every sale instead of refreshing the payment dashboard all day. Read-only keys, no account, and it refuses full secret keys.”
Pay onceMenu bar
SnapState
Puts your Mac windows, apps, browser tabs and Spaces back after sleep, a restart or a monitor reconnect.
“For anyone whose carefully arranged desk falls apart every time the external monitor sleeps. Save the setup once, and one click or a shortcut puts every window back on the right screen and the right Space.”
Pay onceMenu bar
Sticktop
Peel-and-stick vinyl stickers for your desktop.
“The quickest way to give your Mac some personality. Stickers peel, curl and settle like real vinyl, and any photo becomes one in a click.”
Pay onceMenu bar
WhatCable
See what each USB-C cable can actually do.
“Finally, a way to sort the drawer of identical-looking USB-C cables. The free, open-source core covers what most people need.”
Free + ProMenu bar
Windowcase
Wrap your Mac windows in wood, marble or metal.
“You’ll always know which window is active, and it will look like it was framed by hand. Fourteen real-feeling materials, zero intrusive permissions.”
Pay onceMenu bar
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