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AppAddict

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I emphasize honest, practical reviews from my perspective as a power user and productivity enthusiast — not a marketer I have a particular fondness for the indie Mac scene, privacy-respecting software, open-source tools, and workflow...

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  1. McKinley: The SF Symbols Editor Apple Never Built
    Sep 8, 2026 · original
    The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole thing still reads as the same symbol from thin to bold, and doing it all in a way Xcode will accept without silently failing. Most people who've tried this by hand in Illustrator or Sketch will tell you it's tedious, error-prone, and genuinely difficult to keep consistent. McKinley is a dedicated app built to solve exactly that problem. It's a vector drawing tool, but unlike a general-purpose one, it a
  2. Five Free Apps With No Telemetry & No Accounts That Do One Thing Well: TetherShot, Folder Forge, Image Fuel, doktor, and Kompakt
    Aug 30, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Five free, mostly open-source, no-telemetry Mac utilities from this week's testing: docktor (dock widgets + hover previews), Kompakt (drag-and-drop image/video compression), TetherShot (live iPhone screen capture over USB/Wi-Fi), FolderForge (rule-based folder icon styling), and ImageFuel (import-free folder browsing with RAW support). Each gets a free alternative below if you want to compare before committing. Removing Irritation My app testing time this week was spent on free apps, most of them open source and all privacy-respecting. No accounts needed. No telemetry. I've been looking for original, niche apps that do one thing well. docktor docktor calls itself the dock you deserve. It's free, notarized, requires no account, and comes from a solo dev who regularly responds to users with new features and bug fixes. The app fills the unused side space on either end of the Dock wit
  3. Five Free and Low Cost Apps: Holeberry, Dock Party, Neon Vision Editor, MojiBar and Snick
    Aug 23, 2026 · original
    Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one. Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour, or indefinitely, giving you the same toggle as Pi-hole's own web UI, just one click closer. The feature that actually earns the download is per-tab unblocking. Holeberry reads the active tab in Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, or Zen, and when a site is broken because Pi-hole blocked something on the page, it can identify and allowlist that domain without making you dig through the query log your
  4. AppAddict Records 1,000,000th View
    Aug 19, 2026 · original
    When I wrote and published my first software review in 2024, I had no idea I'd still be going strong after 500+ reviews. Thank you to all of my fellow App Addicts and all the developers out there who keep writing high quality Mac software. ✉️ Reply by email
  5. Five Unique Free Apps
    Aug 17, 2026 · original
    Here are five free Mac applications you've most likely never come across. A project template/scaffolding automator, a local music player, resize batch images, a posture app that takes Advantage of the AirPods motion sensors, plus a financial calculator for cash flow simulation. Prefab - Capture a folder structure as a reusable "blueprint," add variable placeholders to names and contents, then deploy it anywhere via the app, menu bar, or Finder right-click. Deployment can chain actions: git init, npm install, opening the project in an editor, arbitrary terminal commands. Built for developers but pitched at anyone with a repeatable folder-setup ritual: lawyers, researchers, creatives. Playhead - Local-first music player for people who keep their own files instead of streaming. The pitch is "waveform-first": it generates and caches waveform data so you can see and scrub a track's structure
  6. Five Free Alternative to Paid Apps
    Aug 16, 2026 · original
    Are you paying for an ad blocker, folder automation, notes & PKM and image editing ? You don't have to. wBlock - a next-generation ad/content blocker for Safari: 750,000 rule capacity across 5 Safari content-blocking extensions (150k each), ~40MB idle RAM by running Safari's native content-blocking API out-of-process, Protocol Buffers + LZ4 filter storage, HTTP conditional-request updates, and iCloud sync of filter selections/custom lists/userscripts/whitelist. It bundles an Element Zapper, "Tube Cleaner & Player Cleaner" userscripts that restore native Picture-in-Picture/background playback on media sites, a full Greasemonkey-API userscript engine, UserCSS support, custom AdGuard-syntax filter-list import, per-site controls, a blocked-request logger, and regional filters. Open source on GitHub Wick - Wick brings timers, stopwatches, and alarms to the Mac with menu bar and Lock Screen ac
  7. Lore: A Free App for YouTubeVideo Downloading, also Builds YouTube Playlists Without Signing In
    Aug 15, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Lore is a free Mac app that follows YouTube channels over plain RSS, no algorithm, no Google account, then archives what you keep as a permanent offline file with transcript search, highlights, and SponsorBlock built in. The site's source-code link 404s, so don't take open source on faith. Alternatives for readers who want a lighter touch: FreeTube (free, open source, no algorithm, no download) and Grayjay Desktop ($9.99 one time, aggregates YouTube with other platforms). Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could When you find a video you want to archive, any app that merely organizes links isn't an archive at all. It's a bookmark service. There's a use for that, but if you need a quality local copy of the information, you need a proven download and catalog app. After evaluating the top contenders, I chose Lore , a native Mac app built by a solo developer, Adrian Ga
  8. The Extension Aided Method of Ignoring thee YouTube Algorithm
    Aug 13, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Control Panel for YouTube, UnTrap, and DeArrow all quiet YouTube down without making you leave the account, the browser, or the ecosystem behind. That's the whole point and the whole limit: you still get Google's ranking, you just stop looking at what it hands you. Control Panel is free and open source on Chrome and Firefox; the native Safari app is $3.99 once, no subscription. UnTrap is $4.99 once for all 250+ controls; an optional $3.99/month or $35.99/year adds cross-device sync and unlimited AI video summaries, which send content to a third party. DeArrow fixes a different problem, clickbait titles and thumbnails, not the algorithm, and is free with an optional $1 license. Saying No to Video Crack Yesterday, in the second installment of this series on building a better YouTube experience, I wrote about three apps that build a subscriptions-only feed by avoiding the recommendat
  9. How to Experience YouTube With No Algorithm
    Aug 13, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data API instead, which should make it sturdier, but needs macOS 15. Play, Yattee and Unwatched Won't Fix YouTube's Algorithm. They Just Won't Ask It. I wrote last time about paying for YouTube Premium after years of running my own ad-blocking stack. Premium immediately silences ads. That's the extent of its problem-solving. It didn't buy me a say in what shows up next. The recommendation engine is still running, still decidin
  10. YouTube Premium kills the ads but doesn't solve the real problem. Here's the stack I use to do that.
    Aug 11, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren't. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming. Google did not design YouTube to entertain you or to inform you. Every major design choice points toward one purpose: to make you watch more YouTube. Watching more leads to one of two outcomes: your attachment to the platform gets stronger, or you get shown more advertising. For a lot of people, it's both. For a long time, bragging about how you managed to watch YouTube without being subjected to ads was a particular kind of geek flexing, and an annoying one. The problem few people admit to is that avoiding advertising isn't a fix, it's a moving target. Anyone who tells you they've permanently solved it i
  11. Caption Snap: Meeting Transcriptions With No Bot, No Model to Download, No Data Transferred and No Drain on Your CPU - Free Trial, One Time, $9.99
    Aug 10, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: CaptionSnap is a $9.99 one-time menu bar app that saves your Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet transcripts by reading the live captions the meeting app already displays. No audio recording, no bot in the call, no cloud, no model download, and Accessibility is the only permission it asks for. Speaker names come from the platform, so attribution is a lookup instead of a guess. You have to enable captions yourself, transcripts are only as good as the platform's captioning, and it requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. CaptionSnap Reads the Captions Your Meeting App Already Shows You Here is a list of the many things I don't like about transcription apps. Using one in a meeting often means a bot joins the call and you have to explain it to everyone. Local models require a huge download. Remote models send my conversations to somebody else's server. They require numerous privacy and security e
  12. Autoshelf Has an MCP Server You Probably Don't Need and The Rule Engine Is Weak - A Review
    Aug 9, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: AutoShelf ($19.99 one-time) ships an embedded MCP server that works, but do you actually need that? An AI model can write a launchd LaunchAgent and a shell script once and it runs forever, no app, no daemon, no purchase. The MCP's real value only shows up once you're managing enough rules to want conversational audit and editing instead of hand-maintained scripts, and even there, my hands-on testing found the rule engine underneath thin: no dynamic subfolder sorting, limited management by file size, and an action list a fraction of Hazel's. AutoShelf delivers less using AI than its marketing promises and loses the file-organizer argument outright. AutoShelf I've had a Hazel rule watching my Downloads folder since before I can accurately date it. It reads PDF invoices and files them by vendor, decompresses ZIPs and moves the app inside to Applications, converts HEICs to JPG, and ha
  13. The Apps I Use So Apple Can't Take Everything
    Aug 7, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every quarter. Disaster Avoidance Apps Yesterday I laid out what happens when Apple closes your account : your identity if it's an @icloud.com address, your photos and messages, your purchases, your hardware in every practical sense, and a 2023 federal ruling that says suspicion is the only standard Apple has to meet. That post was the bad news. This is the other half. These are the apps and services that move your data out from under a single Apple Account, what each one actually protects, and where each o
  14. All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Apple Disaster Scenario
    Aug 6, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Mac power users vet apps carefully and then hand their entire digital life to Apple without a second thought. Apple can close your account on suspicion alone, keep your unspent balance, and never tell you why; a federal judge confirmed all of that in 2023 and threw the case out. An Apple Account is simultaneously an authentication system, cloud-storage account, software license repository, device-activation credential, communications identity, and payment account. A full lockout can therefore affect data, purchases, services, and hardware management at once.This post covers how accounts get closed, what you lose when it happens, why getting back in is so hard, and eleven things to do about it now. All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Disaster Scenario When the conversation turns to abandoning third party apps in favor of using Apple's default stack, I keep waiting for someone to menti
  15. When You Need a Mac, But All You Have is a Phone - The Verdict on Four Free Alternatives to Leaving Work Undone
    Aug 3, 2026 · original
    TL;DR: Four free iPhone apps that handle jobs you would normally do on your Mac: API Bot for testing endpoints, View Source Vibe for inspecting a suspicious link, Fiper for algorithm-free RSS, and Owl VIP for sender-level email notifications. Two earn a place on your phone. Fiper loses to NetNewsWire for anyone reading this blog, and Owl VIP charges a subscription for something iOS Focus Modes mostly do free. None has a native Mac app. Every so often, something breaks and you are nowhere near your computer. An endpoint starts returning 500 errors while you are sitting in a parking lot. Someone texts you a link and you want to see what trackers it loads before you trust it. You are waiting on one critical email, but your phone keeps buzzing about newsletters. These are Mac jobs. Your Mac is at home. The obvious move is to reach for your phone. The obvious problem is that most "mobile vers

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