2026-08-03 23:17:44
You have a chance this week (ending August 7th) to pick up five apps at the lowest prices I've seen them listed for. Sale Details.
defaults write tweaks: show hidden Finder files, kill the startup chime, add Dock spacers, change the screenshot format, run maintenance scripts, all without opening Terminal. koingosw.com
VideoPaw ($69.99 - On Sale For $6.50 -%91) - Cisdem's all-in-one media utility: batch convert video and audio across 600+ formats, download clips from supported sites, rip DVD and Blu-ray, compress files, and record screen/webcam with live annotation. Basic editing (trim, crop, merge, watermark, subtitles) is included, so it replaces three or four single-purpose downloads.
PDF Squeezer ($19.99 - On Sale For $3.98 -%80)-- Drag in a bloated PDF and it shrinks by recompressing images and stripping unused fonts and resources, with a side-by-side preview so you can see what quality you're giving up. Batch processing, saved presets, and hooks into Finder, Automator, Shortcuts, and the command line make it a good buy IMHO.
2026-08-02 20:09:58
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" by The Band
Share a song that perfectly captures anticipation. - When I Paint My Masterpiece, written by Bob Dylan, performed by The Band at the 30th Anniversary Celebration
Bob's song writing along with Levon's voice. It doesn't get better. Promise that you'll be there with me, when I paint my masterpiece.
2026-08-02 01:35:58
TL;DR: RAD Weather pulls forecasts from four services and shows you where they disagree instead of averaging the disagreement away. Free, with RAD Ultra at $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, plus a MultiPass tier at $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual. The Mac build is a real Mac app, the subscription is justified by per-forecast data costs, and there is no radar. RAD TV shipped in 7.6.7 and an Apple TV version is announced.
Years of obsessive cycling naturally paired with years of obsessive weather forecast following. Although none of us can do anything about the weather (except to move to a new city), I felt compelled to track temperature, wind speed and rain forecasts several times a day whenever I had a big ride scheduled. I collected weather apps and went into mourning when Dark Sky ceased to exist.
Most weather apps are someone's best guess, presented as a fact. Someone, or some algorithm, took several disagreeing weather services, picked one and discarded the rest. RAD Weather doesn't discard anything, and that's the product.
The engine has a name now, R.A.D. Cortex, and its job is to pull forecasts from the National Weather Service, Open-Meteo, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Apple WeatherKit, then compare them. Where the models converge, you get a high confidence rating. Where they split, the app shows you the spread instead of hiding it behind an average. The developer added lead-time-aware weighting in an earlier release, so regional high-resolution models carry more weight for the next few hours while ECMWF gets priority for the extended outlook. That's a reasonable thing to do, and it's the kind of decision most weather apps make silently, if they make it at all.
RAD Weather is free. RAD Ultra is $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, and Ultra is what unlocks the Atlas globe, the extra saved locations, the Savage and Unhinged tone settings, full detail cards and advanced notifications. There's also RAD MultiPass at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, which extends across the other Rozzi Labs apps and the radweather.cloud web service.
No one likes an unjustified subscription. I've done my best recently to avoid writing about subscription apps altogether. Weather prediction apps are the exception. Every forecast this app pulls costs the developer money, and he's pulling from four services instead of one; widget and Watch complication refreshes multiply that cost across every user, every day, forever. A one-time purchase doesn't fund a bill that arrives monthly for the life of the app. The developer of CARROT Weather has been making the same argument for years, and he's right.
The whole high-end category runs this way. CARROT Weather is free to download with Premium at $4.99 a month or $19.99 a year and Premium Ultra at $9.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Mercury Weather is free with a subscription at $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year. Hello Weather limits you to a single forecaster and no widgets until you subscribe. Against all that, RAD Weather is one of only two apps here that will sell you a permanent copy. RAD Ultra Lifetime is $99.99, which works out to five years of the annual subscription; Mercury's lifetime is $59.99, or four years of its annual. Neither is a bargain on day one. CARROT has no lifetime tier at any price, which is the part I mind.
RAD Weather doesn't currently offer radar maps, so if that's how you make decisions during rough times, you'll need something else. There are other weather apps with a long and proven track record. Its App Store rating is high, but the number of ratings behind it is still small enough that I wouldn't lean on it.
The alternatives, briefly. CARROT Weather, to which I have subscribed for years, is the incumbent in personality weather and has the better radar and map layer story; note that the standalone Mac app is $14.99 and hasn't been updated since May 2023, so on the Mac you want the iPhone and iPad version instead. Mercury Weather, another app I've used in the past, is the choice if you want calm and legible rather than loud. Apple Weather is free, built in, and fine for the basics. DatWeatherDoe is free, open source under Apache 2.0, installs with brew install --cask datweatherdoe, and puts conditions in your menu bar; you supply your own WeatherAPI key.
Unless otherwise noted, the alternate apps mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.
Yes, if you want accuracy and detail from a weather app and you're willing to pay for it. The multiplatform coverage helps too, especially with the recently released full screen RAD TV mode for the Mac and an Apple TV app on the way.
No, if you want radar, or your needs are minimal. For design nerds, the faux terminal presentation may be off-putting. Not being a design nerd, I'm fine with it.
2026-07-31 21:11:43
TL;DR: Orbit runs each of your Google accounts in its own isolated WebKit session inside one native Mac window, for $89 one time instead of the $50 to $200 a year the alternatives want. It exists because you can de-Google yourself but you can't de-Google your father. The catch is that it only works as long as Google keeps letting Mac apps sign in, and passkey-only and Advanced Protection accounts already can't.
My opinion of big tech companies has hardened over the years. Their business models turned into anti-privacy juggernauts, so I started pulling away from them. In January 2025, after using Gmail for twenty years, I downloaded my entire archive, deleted every message off their servers and moved to Fastmail. Drive went to Koofr. Search went to Kagi. Gemini got replaced by ChatGPT. I left the empty account open since it linked me to a lot of legacy logins and contacts.
Then, nine months later, I became responsible for managing the affairs of my elderly father, something that commonly happens to people in my age group. Dad's life ran through multiple Gmail accounts, personal and professional: his doctors, his investments and the guy who cuts his grass all reached him through Google, the company I had worked so hard to get away from. I couldn't ask an 80-year-old man to move house on the internet. I had to log back in.
That's the part nobody warns you about. You can de-Google yourself in a weekend if you're stubborn. You can't de-Google somebody else, and the account that drags you back in was never yours to begin with.
Browsers do this badly on purpose. Google's account switcher runs every account you sign into through a single browser session, so a security re-check on one can sign you out of all of them at once, and the account you're currently "in" is a state you have to remember rather than see. Everybody who lives this way eventually has the moment where they send, or nearly send, a message from the wrong account. Sometimes that's an embarrassment. Sometimes it's worse.
The fix is an app, and the one I recommend is Orbit from Andrew Kwak at Dearnode. It's a one-time purchase of $89. That's a steep number to look at once, and cheaper than every competitor that charges $50 a year and up.
Each account gets its own sealed WebKit session, with its own cookies and its own sign-in, so signing into one never signs you out of another. ⌘1 through ⌘9 switch between them, all preloaded, with unread badges per account. Inside each one is the real Gmail, not a rebuild through the API, so your labels, filters and keyboard shortcuts are the ones you already have. Calendar, Drive and Meet open in the right account too. I have three accounts in mine.
Orbit is designed around privacy. It doesn't route your mail through a server it owns. There is no Orbit account to maintain. Analytics are turned off by default. It doesn't phone home, and if Dearnode vanished tomorrow, Orbit would keep working until Google changes something on their end.
Because Dearnode has no servers to maintain, the one-time price is sustainable. Kiwi, the app I used for years with Gmail, committed what I consider an unpardonable sin earlier this year when it stopped honoring lifetime licenses it had already sold and moved every customer to $60 a year. It's not the only casualty in this category: Sidekick was absorbed by Perplexity and shut down in 2025, and Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021.
Orbit is written in Swift and runs on WebKit. It weighs 9.9 MB on my system, a far cry from the Electron build behind Shift.
To his credit, Orbit's developer publishes the warnings himself rather than waiting for a reviewer to find them:
And one risk that isn't Kwak's fault and isn't in his power to fix. Orbit works because Google lets a Mac app sign in and render Gmail. Google can withdraw that. It has before: Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021 when Google started blocking embedded browsers at the sign-in page, and Mailplane was the same idea as Orbit, Gmail's web interface in a Mac shell. The accounts Orbit can't sign in today, the passkey-only and Advanced Protection ones, are that same door already partly closed.
Kwak has built the parts he controls to fail quietly. If Google reshuffles Gmail's page, an unread badge goes stale instead of your mail breaking, because the mail was never his code. That's the right way to build this. It just doesn't help with the failure that matters, which is Google deciding one morning that apps like this don't get in anymore.
Every alternative here costs you something. Some want a subscription, some run on a browser engine you didn't ask for, and the free ones make you give up the switching and the badges.
I haven't personally tested Mimestream or Shift and this information comes from their websites.
Writing about a Google adjacent app doesn't mean I've reconsidered anything. Fastmail, Koofr and Kagi are still where I manage my own life. But I couldn't de-Google on my father's behalf. Pretending otherwise would have cost him his pharmacy, his insurance and his bank. His accounts aren't a preference, they're an obligation, and the software worth paying for is the software that makes an obligation easiest to manage.
If you're carrying three or more Google accounts you didn't choose, you switch between them all day, and you've had the wrong-sender scare, $89 once is a fair price for never having that thought again. There's a 14-day trial that doesn't ask for a card and a 30-day refund window, so trying it costs you an afternoon.
If you have two accounts, Safari profiles are free. If you want a real native mail client and a merged inbox, Mimestream is the app and the subscription is the tax. And if you run Advanced Protection, Orbit can't sign you in at all, which puts it out of reach for exactly the people its architecture was built to appeal to.
2026-07-30 19:28:31
TL;DR: Blankie is a free, open-source ambient sound mixer for Mac, iPhone, iPad and CarPlay; no ads, IAPs, or subscriptions. 24 mixable sounds, saved presets, custom audio import, menu bar control. Stacked against Noizio, Dark Noise, myNoise, and Endel, all of which charge something for depth or convenience Blankie gives away for free.
I'm not usually one to complain about app pricing, but I make an exception when it feels like someone is misrepresenting the complexity of something simple to justify a monetization strategy. Ambient sound apps, at their core, are well-organized loop players, and nothing about them justifies subscriptions, tiered unlocks, and $50 lifetime passes. You get rain, waves, white noise and a coffee shop hum with variations. That's the whole package.
Enter Blankie, a free and open-source ambient sound mixer from developer Cody Bromley that gives you everything you need without insulting your intelligence or your wallet. It also respects your privacy by not collecting any data. It's inspired by Blanket, a Linux app in the same category. Blankie avoids ads, IAPs, subscription tiers and paywalls. It's just free, forever. Better yet, it works on your Mac, your phone, your iPad and your car.
With Blankie, it's easy to construct custom loops and recall them at will. You get 24 sound elements to experiment with, including several added in the most recent updates: rain, storms, wind, ocean waves, a running stream, birds, forest, crickets, a train, boat, airplane, city hum, coffee shop, fireplace, fan, laundry room, plus a few music-adjacent layers (piano, lo-fi beats, guitar, ambient synth) and the full noise family (white, pink, green, brown).
One of the under-publicized features available in macOS Accessibility settings is a control for background sounds. You can get a flat layer of white noise without installing anything. If that does the trick to drown out your office mate's Zoom calls, then you're golden. If you want actual combinations you can control, layering rain with a fireplace, mixing to your own balance, saving distinct presets, and importing your own recordings, Apple's built-in version doesn't do any of that.
I've tried Noizio and Endel. They work, but they cost more than they're worth.
Unless otherwise noted, the alternate apps mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.
Use Blankie if you want a free, privacy-respecting sound mixer that doesn't hold features hostage behind a subscription, and you're fine with a smaller sound library (24) than the subscription apps offer in exchange for owning the whole thing outright. If you own something else already or you just really need hundreds of soundscapes and don't mind paying, go with myNoise.
2026-07-30 02:24:32
Mac users tend to be nostalgic about the hardware and software they used in their earliest exposure to tech. That doesn't mean anyone wants to try to get real work done on a late-90s PowerPC Mac clone, or go back to 14-inch monitors. People just enjoy being reminded how far we've come, and pretend there was once a time when everything "just worked." (It didn't. I was there.)
German developer Maik Klotz created a free app, RetroMac, that turns your current Mac into a version of the Wayback Machine. It doesn't touch your system. It paints. A Metal shader sits on top of whatever's already rendering: CRT curvature, scanlines, VHS tracking noise. It can also swap your dock, wallpaper, boot screen, and cursor set for a specific era's look: Windows 98, Windows XP, System 6, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X Aqua, Snow Leopard, BeOS, NeXTSTEP. If all that lickable tech scares you, you go back to boring just by quitting RetroMac.
Sometimes an app is just fun, and this falls into that category, but there are a few semi-practical uses too:
Depends what you're actually nostalgic for.
Glaze ($9.99 one-time) is the closest direct competitor: a live GPU-shader overlay for your whole Mac with 50+ looks, including CRT, VHS, Game Boy, comic-book, and oil-painting filters. It skips the classic-OS theme replication entirely and focuses on the shader layer, so if you just want the tube-TV look on a normal desktop without the Windows 98 cosplay, it's narrower and cheaper.
retroStrip is the odd one out: not a shader app at all, but a modern recreation of the classic Mac OS Control Strip, the little floating bar of one-click controls from System 7.1 onward. The base app is free (retroStrip LE); additional icon theme packs are $2 each or $5 for all three. If what you actually miss is the Control Strip specifically, this is a tighter, single-purpose tool than RetroMac's dock feature.
RetroVisor is free and open source, a ScreenCaptureKit-and-Metal shader overlay clearly modeled on Windows' ShaderGlass. It runs in a floating window rather than full screen and has none of RetroMac's theme, dock, or Retro TV features. Good pick if all you want is the CRT glass effect and you don't want to pay anything.
Two flags on that. First, these three comparisons are based on research, not testing; I haven't installed any of them myself. Second, that actually cuts in RetroMac's favor: you'd have to install and configure all three to come close to what one app does by itself.
Apple released its last CRT-equipped computer in 2003 and discontinued it three years later.. Targeted at the education market, the eMac came in one color: white. It lacked the iMac's convenient carrying handle and weighed in at over 50 pounds, looking for all the world like the front end of the space shuttle viewed from behind. Most of them wouldn't run any version of OS X beyond Tiger. My employer, a rural school district in North Carolina, bought them by the thousands. I was the "Mac guy," so I spent months of my life unboxing eMacs for computer labs and placing them in every K-5 classroom in the district. It gave me PTSD, and to this day I can't look at a 17-inch CRT (or Tiger) without flinching.
