AppAddict

Quick Tips for App Installation Using Hazel

In this post, I show you how to automate the installation of Mac apps in the two post popular formats ZIP and DMG, so that all you have to do is download a file from a developer's website and with no further action from you, the app will end up in your Applications folder just like if you'd downloaded it from the App Store. Typically, when you download a Mac app from a developer's website, it will come in one of three formats 1. ZIP Archive 2. DMG Disk Image 3. PKG - Package Installer (requires manual installation) You can...

January 17th, 2025 Mac Apps

Facescreen - Useful Add-on for Screencasting and Presentations

I often have to create screen recordings on my job to distribute to the people I support for tutorials. Occasionally I do screen sharing through Microsoft Teams when conducting training. Facescreen, a utility from developer Ram Patra, provides a useful complement to these use cases. It adds a feed from my webcam with a small configurable view of my face to personalize the video. In addition to the image, Facescreen also lets me add text, such as my email or a website related to the subject of the tutorial or training. It's a nice professional touch. Facescreen, like other apps...

January 17th, 2025 Mac Apps

Disk Drill Revisited - Recovering 87K Files from a Drive That Finder Could Not Read

I first wrote about Disk Drill several months ago. The review is below. I recently had a chance to put the paid version of the data recovery tools to work in a real-world situation. I was presented with a 2TB NTFS formatted drive that would mount on my Mac, but displayed the message "Drive not available" and showed no files structure in the Finder. The drive belonged to a relative who lost access to her cloud account when switching jobs and ended up with only one copy of her files from a 20-year career - on a bad drive. Disk...

January 16th, 2025 Mac Apps

Using Google Photos on iOS Makes Leaving Meta Easier

If you've had enough of corporate owned social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram, and are investigating how to preserve your photographic memories, the quickest and easiest way, if you have space available, is to transfer them to Google Photos. You can do it from your iPhone. 1. Click the plus button at the top of the screen 2. Then click "Import from other places" 3. Select Facebook and when you authenticate, you will be offered the opportunity to import from your Instagram account(s) as well. Other Reasons to use Google Photos for iOS1. Cross-platform support - if you use both...

January 15th, 2025 iOS Apps

Recent Additions at MacMenuBar

One of the websites that stay open in my browser at all times is MacMenubar.com. It's a deep resource for new Mac apps in multiple categories. It currently features links and short descriptions to over 1,000 applications. Here's a list of the latest additions and links to all the different types of apps on the site. • Kleanly - Clean your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and display - With just a tap, Kleanly lets you completely disable your keyboard and trackpad, allowing you to clean them without turning your Mac off. • Trace - This menu bar app tracks the active...

January 14th, 2025 Mac Apps

FSNotes - A Free and Open-Source Successor to NValt

FSNotes is a plain text note editor with the two-pane interface of Brett Terpstra's classic Nvalt, which ceased development in 2017. FSNotes has an extensive feature set for run-of-the-mill notes and for developers. If you have an existing folder of plain text or Markdown notes, you can access them from FSNotes by moving or copying the files to the default folder or by changing the path to the folder you are already using. There are built-in keyboard shortcuts for searching your notes database, creating a new note from the clipboard contents and for creating new notes. You can choose a...

January 13th, 2025 Universal Apps

Unsplash Wallpaper App - Free Unlimited Wallpapers at Your Fingertips

Unsplash is one of the largest providers of royalty-free images in the world. Without an account, you can search for, download and use any one of the millions of photographs on the site. For photography fans or anyone who enjoys aesthetically pleasing wallpapers, Unsplash provides a free app to cycle the wallpaper on your displays at regular intervals: hourly, daily, weekly. You can also manually cycle in a new image. When using the manual settings, the app has a built-in viewer so you can see a reasonably sized thumbnail preview of the available images. The selected image is downloaded to...

January 12th, 2025 Mac Apps

Background Music - Per App Volume Control and More

When I am at work, I like to leave my system volume setting in the midrange. I want to be able to hear incoming mail alerts and calls on Microsoft Teams. What I expressly do not want is have anything from YouTube, or any other website suddenly playing through my iMac speakers. At home, I like to have music playing and I appreciate the convenience of having it stop and restart automatically if I decide to watch a video. The free app, Background Music can handle both of these tasks. You can set the volume for any app to a...

January 11th, 2025 Mac Apps

Cheatsheet - Mac, iOS, WatchOS

I have hundreds of contacts and I know almost no phone numbers. My job requires me to gain entrance to numerous rooms secured with keypad combinations. Remembering hotel room numbers is always a challenge. Don't put a gun to my head and ask me the license plated of my wife's car. My solution for quickly referencing these little pieces of information regardless of whether my phone or computer is in reach or not is Cheatsheet, a synchronized notes app I that allows me to enter information on my computer or phone that I can easily get to from any device,...

January 10th, 2025 Universal Apps

Datacever - Simple Data Control When You Have to Tether Your Mac

I don't know about you, but whenever I have to tether my laptop to my iPhone, I get nervous about the possibility of some unknown process running in the background and chewing up my data. Even though my mobile provider calls my plan unlimited, I know that there are always gotchas. I tried TripMode a while back, but it was overly complex for my needs, with more settings and options than I wanted to mess with. I recently found a much simpler menu bar app that I prefer for its simplicity and ease of use. Datacever by developer sameh sayed...

January 9th, 2025 Mac Apps

Lossless Cut - Save Time When Editing Videos

The command like application, FFmpeg is remarkably powerful but it is also overly complicated for people who don't use the terminal much or who don't have the headspace to memorize a bunch of esoteric commands. Thankfully, there are some good front ends. Lossless Cut is one whose main feature is specifically lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera. It is extremely fast, allowing you to trim the video without having a loss of quality caused by having to do (slow) any...

January 8th, 2025 Mac Apps

Open Source Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means When It Comes To Safety

“What about open-source software?" I hear you say. "I'll just review the source code and determine whether it's malicious".” "I would make several points in response to this. The first is: "LOL". Any nontrivial program consists of hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code, and reviewing any fraction of that in a reasonable period of time is simply impractical. The way you can tell this is that people are constantly finding vulnerabilities in programs, and if it were straightforward to find those vulnerabilities, then we would have found them all" From - Why it's hard to trust software,...

January 7th, 2025

Radarr - Movie collection manager for Legal Usenet and BitTorrent users

When I was a younger man, I'll admit to living the pirate life for music and movies. I was around for the original Napster and the birth of BitTorrent. That all came to a screeching halt one weekend when I sat down at my computer and couldn't connect to the internet. I called tech support, and the stern-sounding lady on the phone told me to go to my computer and read what was on the screen. It basically said, "If I ever download something illegally again, my Internet will be turned off forever." There was one checkbox, and it just...

January 7th, 2025 Mac Apps

Resilio Sync - Secure, Private Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

The easiest way to share files between computers or with other users is through a commercial cloud service like iCloud, Dropbox or Google Drive. The problem with using those services is that your data passes through someone else's computer. If you are sharing apple pie recipes with your Aunt Sue, that's not a problem, but if your data is ultra-private documents like financial records, proprietary business information or the like, you should consider a product like Resilio Sync, formerly a commercial product, now free for personal use. Resilio Sync allows you to sync data between computers and to selectively share...

January 6th, 2025 Universal Apps

Making App Wishlists

Because I like checking out new to me software and writing about it, I usually install something new just about every day. Reading r/MacApps and lots of other software discovery sites is how I find new apps. I've experimented with several different ways to keep lists of apps I want to check out and here are a few of my favorites. • Listy - A Private List Manager - this is good for both iOS apps and macOS apps. It tracks whether you've downloaded the app or not and gives you info on the app rating, category and developer as...

January 5th, 2025 Universal Apps