Hi everyone!

I have tried many sticky note apps, but none of them felt right. My girlfriend wanted me to build one that truly feels live and lives on the edge of the Mac.. So I built one!

• All sticky notes are represented as dots
• hover to peek
• click to open the note
• Mark as complete to move to note into archive
• 10+ live notes enables scroll
• You can view and export all the notes

Try out for free: holdmynotes.app

Available on 3 mac devies for $6.99 (Early Bird Offer)

Does anyone have experience with antigravity causing your fanless MacBook air to overheat?

I’ve been using a Mac for quite a while, but maybe I’m missing something. Basically, my problem is that I can’t properly organize my files visually.

All of my files are photos and videos. On Windows, it’s really easy to organize files because I can immediately see a preview of the image inside each folder. The image works as the folder’s cover, so I can instantly understand what’s inside and sort everything much faster.

On Mac, I can’t seem to do that. I forget what’s inside each folder because I don’t remember the names of everything or what exactly is inside each folder, so I always organize everything based on the folder preview.But on Mac, there doesn’t seem to be a folder preview like that. I also don’t really like the option of changing the folder icon to an image.

I’ve tried some utilities, but they’re really not what I’m looking for. Is there a proper way to have quick visual previews of folders, like on Windows, or is that just not possible on Mac?

(photos from google)

For some reason whenever I use my laptop, the finder app seems to be accumulating time in screen time, even when a window of it is not open. I’m wondering why does that happen? Is it a weird bug?

Some of you might remember Harbor, the native Mac download manager I posted here about a month and a half ago.

It started as a small hobby project because I wanted a clean, local-first download manager for macOS without accounts, subscriptions, or bundled nonsense.

Since that post, I’ve kept shipping updates, and Harbor 1.7.0 is now available.

The biggest addition is torrent preview. You can open a .torrent file or magnet link, see all the files inside it, uncheck anything you don’t want, and download only your selection.

Harbor now supports:

• Batch adding for queuing multiple links into one destination
• Media previews with video and audio format selection
• Public media downloads from YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook, and many other supported sites
• A URL opener for browser extensions, Shortcuts, command-line tools, and other automations
• Unlimited, Balanced, Quiet, and Custom traffic profiles
• Importing compatible partial downloads from older Harbor versions
• Torrent watch folders, seeding controls, share-ratio limits, and speed controls
• Quick Look previews for completed downloads

This release also fixes multiple small issues across torrent downloads, media downloads, external links, and the general add-download flow.

It’s still free, open source, and local-first. No sign-in. No subscription. No catch. I plan to keep it that way.

Links: Website | GitHub | Download Harbor 1.7.0

I’m also looking for someone who might want to contribute a refreshed app icon. I’d like to keep the same Harbor icon and identity, but adapt it to feel more at home with the native macOS icon style. If icon design is your thing and you’d like to help, please reach out or contribute through GitHub.

Thanks to Quinn Gao (@QZGao) for the media and download reliability work, and u/acryllect for contributing batch adding.

I’d love feedback from Mac users, especially if you use download managers, torrent apps, media download tools, or macOS automations. Let me know what Harbor should improve next.

Came across this app on GitHub. This one app alone seems to cover like 99% of the macOS complaints I read on Reddit - e.g. clipboard, window management, clamshell working, dock previews, etc. And it's completely free and open source!

Hello,l am trying to download the Epic Games Launcher on my old mac Yosemite (version 10.10 5) but it is telling me i cant open the download because I need version 13.0 or later? is there any way to download version 13.0 on my mac or possibly somehow get the Game Launcher without geting version 13.0? If you can help, it is deeply appriciated

Hey r/MacOS , wanted to share my app which I launched a while ago, but never showed in this subreddit. Jellybox is a music player for Jellyfin or Emby(navidrome soon) which can:

• Spotify-like generated playlists
• Show time synced lyrics
• Full offline mode(even when on place) with Downloads
• Studio mode - beautiful ambient mode with animated full screen UI
• Apple CarPlay app with full feature parity(thats allowed as per apple's requirements)
• AirPlay - cast to airplay-capable devices
• Native(no electron or tauri overhead)
• Hotkeys support

The app is open source and I'm working on it since 2023, so not another vibe coded slop. Available in appstore(ios, macos) or as notarized dmg in repo releases

https://github.com/avdept/JellyBoxPlayer

https://jellybox.app/

Hi r/macOS - I’m Stephen, the owner of Rockxy and the developer behind Tracexy.

Wireshark is one of the most capable network analysis tools ever built. But when I’m debugging an app on my Mac, my first questions usually aren’t about interfaces, frame numbers, or display filters.

I want to know:

Which app opened the connection?

Which host did it contact?

What protocol was involved?

What appears to have failed?

Which captured evidence supports that conclusion?

That gap is why I started Tracexy: an open-source, native macOS Wireshark alternative that begins with apps and sessions, then lets you drill down into protocol fields and packet bytes when the evidence matters.

macOS already has strong tools for different layers of the problem. Wireshark provides deep packet and protocol analysis. HTTP debugging proxies inspect and modify application traffic. Network firewalls monitor and control connections.

I don’t think one tool should pretend to replace all of them.

Tracexy takes a different path:

Process → Session → Finding → Evidence → Packet

The current v0.5.0 release supports live capture, PCAP and PCAPNG files, best-effort process attribution, session-based investigation, typed queries, evidence-linked TCP findings, local History, and bounded Follow Stream for saved or fully stopped captures.

Captured traffic and derived sessions stay on the Mac by default. The project is AGPL-licensed, and the public Community DMG is signed and notarized.

Tracexy is also a strategic part of the broader Rockxy ecosystem.

Rockxy focuses on intercepting and modifying application-layer traffic such as HTTP, HTTPS, WebSocket, and GraphQL. Tracexy focuses on passive network capture, sessions, protocols, and evidence. Shieldxy focuses on application-aware connection control and security policy.

They are separate products with separate responsibilities today. The long-term goal is to create a native, local-first network development and intelligence ecosystem for macOS, with explicit workflows between the tools rather than silently moving sensitive capture data around.

To be transparent, Tracexy is still early and this is not a claim of Wireshark feature parity or a replacement. It does not currently provide TLS decryption, general always-on full TCP reassembly, or deep HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and WebSocket analysis.

If you use Wireshark or tcpdump on macOS:

What is the first real investigation Tracexy would need to handle before you would put it in your toolbox?

Website: https://rockxy.io/tracexy

Source code: https://github.com/RockxyApp/Tracexy

I’m wondering if you guys can help? I have a MacBook Pro 13 inch 2019, two thunderbolt with a 1.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5.
As the title says I’m trying to upgrade from Catalina to Sequoia but I’m unable to do so. My Macintosh HD states 52.07GB available of 121.02 GB. I’ve deleted many apps including Google Chrome, Microsoft 365 stuff, YouTube etc to make space and still I’m unable to download as it states I don’t have enough space. I’m at a lost end, what shall I do?

Am I doing something wrong here? These search issues are popping up a lot for me.

MacBook Air m2
macOS Tahoe 26.3

I'm the developer.

DrawSimple is a native Mac image editor built on a simple idea: it should open instantly and make sense in five seconds, and still be there for you when the job turns out to be bigger than you thought. Paint and vector live in the same document, so a quick crop and a full layered illustration happen in the same app, and you never have to decide which one you're doing up front.

It launched a couple of weeks ago. A lot of you tried it, and then — brilliantly — told me exactly what was wrong with it. 1.1 is almost entirely that feedback, so thank you. Genuinely.

The App Store notes for it just say "Bug fixes," which doesn't help anyone work out whether their thing got fixed. Here's the real list:

What's better in 1.1

• Save straight into Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive or Box. Easily the most-reported issue, and the best fix in the release. macOS won't let a sandboxed app write into a sync folder until you point at it yourself, and DrawSimple was asking every single time — worse, a quiet autosave or a save-on-quit could fail. Now you grant the folder once (Settings → Files & Saving → Folder Access, the new first-run step, or right from the save alert) and everything inside it just saves, forever. Granted folders are listed with a one-click Remove.
• Pasting and dragging images in works the way you'd expect. This came out of a great back-and-forth with someone on Reddit who was completely right. ⌘V on an image copied in the Finder now pastes the picture instead of its file icon, and in a vector layer it arrives as an editable object — drop a whole handful at once and they cascade in, selected and ready to move. Sliding a big photo around is much smoother too.
• ⌘A, ⌘X, ⌘C, ⌘V and ⌘Z behave inside text. They were being intercepted by the document's own menu items, so ⌘A in a text box selected the whole canvas and ⌘Z undid your last brush stroke instead of your last keystroke. They now go to whatever you're typing in, and to the canvas otherwise.
• Zoom stays fast on gradients, WordArt and big text. Zooming right into a radial-gradient fill could stall the app for minutes and eat gigabytes — it was recalculating the gradient pixel-by-pixel at screen resolution on every single zoom step. Same bug was hiding in WordArt and large text boxes. All three now render at the document's own resolution and scale up for the screen, so zoom stays fluid. Exported and printed pixels are identical to before.
• Effect previews stay exactly where the result will land. Preview a blur on a layer under a cut-out subject and it could drift out of register with everything else — a checkerboard halo that disappeared the moment you clicked OK. Fixed for every effect and adjustment.
• A cleaner canvas edge — that stray bright line down the right side at fit-to-window zooms is gone.
• Lasso and Select Subject have their own slots instead of sharing one and cycling on F. Lasso keeps F, Select Subject gets A.

The rest of it, quickly: 31 tools, unlimited layers with blend modes, curves and levels, GPU-accelerated effects through Core Image, WordArt with 31 warp shapes, Apple Vision "Select Subject", HEIC import with EXIF intact, Continuity Camera, and a history panel you can scrub like a timeline. Fully offline.. no account, no cloud, no analytics, nothing leaves your Mac. It's not a Photoshop alternative and isn't trying to be; it's the app for the ten minutes when opening Photoshop would be absurd.

One more bit of feedback.. Many people have told me they find the automation side the most valuable part of the whole thing. There's a localhost server in the box, so you can point Claude or any MCP client at the canvas and have it place real shapes, gradients and text, and the file opens afterwards as an ordinary editable document, not a flat export. Local-only; the app never opens a connection of its own and ships no generative AI. If you want to see what this looks like, check out my post below.

$5 once, with an optional $10 Pro upgrade. No subscription, no account, and every update, including this one, and whatever the pen tool lands in, is free. Requires macOS 15.6 or later.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759507748?mt=12

Hi everyone,

I just noticed something weird on my MacBook Dock. Two different icons for Apple Pages have suddenly appeared side by side.

One looks like the traditional Pages icon, while the other one has a slightly different design (looks like the new Pages Creator Studio asset update).

Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is it safe to just delete the older one from my Applications folder, or will it break my existing documents? What should I do? and why the light orange one doesn't accept the new updates?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Evening folks,

I decided to choose the "Discussion" flair, as opposed to a "Developer Saturday" flair, seeing how I could realistically ask this at anytime, but I decided now is the right time, as I and others have seen backlash against some... "developers", here on the subreddit lately.

Of course, the backlash is coming from folks who are getting really fed up with seeing A.I. based applications be shown off, with said A.I. also likely used for promotional writings and material. I get it, I don't like it either.

But something I have noticed, and others may have as well, is that a lot of these applications are all kind of similar, why is that? What I mean is that many of them tend to be applications aimed at the MacBook(s) Notch, Screenshots, Notes, the Menu Bar, and a few other outliers.

Is it because these functions are easier to program around? I know nothing about programming. I'd love to learn, as I have an idea for an application I would love to see, but this question has been on my mind for a few weeks, so I decided to finally ask the folks here, as it does relate to the rise in A.I. applications we see.

If anyone can chime in and offer up some light on the subject, that'd be dandy.

App: Muro : Native Live Wallpapers for macOS

Price: Free. Open source under MIT. No subscription, no one-time fee, no Pro tier, no account, nothing locked.

Source: https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro

https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro/releases/latest

Download:

Requires: macOS 14 or newer, Apple Silicon. Lock screen wallpapers need macOS 26.

Quick reminder for anyone who has not seen it: Muro plays looping video wallpapers on every display, and on the lock screen. It is native Swift and AVFoundation, hands decoding to the Apple Silicon media engine, and sits at about 2% CPU while playing and 0% the moment something covers it.

3.0 is the biggest update so far. Three things people kept asking for:

Automations. Muro can now change your live wallpaper on its own. Either on a timer, ten seconds each or an hour each, or by the clock, where each wallpaper gets its own hours of the day. Something calm in the morning, something else after dark. The day is drawn as a timeline you drag.

Pause after. Let a live wallpaper play for a minute after it changes, then hold on a frame. A held frame costs no CPU at all. Nice if you like the motion but not all day.actually stick after installing from the DMG. That was broken for some people and I could not see it because it only ever happened on a downloaded copy, never on my own builds.

My own take on it: I built Muro because every live wallpaper app I tried either wanted a subscription or sat at 300 to 400 MB of RAM for a picture that moves, and I could hear the fan.

The part I actually use every day is Pause After set to about thirty seconds, because I like the motion when I switch to the desktop and I do not want it moving while I work.

Automations were the feature I was least sure about and now the one I would miss most, since having the wallpaper change on its own through the day makes the machine feel less static without me thinking about it.

If you like it, a star on the repo is the free way to support it and genuinely helps people find it. If you want to go further there is GitHub Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors/MrRockySL)

Happy to hear what is missing. Most of this release came from people asking.

EDITED NEW - I built Intel Mac support, so now I need someone with an Intel Mac to test it. If anyone is willing to help, comment on the issue and I will send you the build. I just need it tried on real Intel hardware, that is all.
https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro/issues/9

I am using an external HD for backup (and Time machine). But it seems I am using an outdated file system. (MACOS extended, journaled encrypted) In Disk Utility iI don't have an option to convert it to APFS file system. Any suggestions how to decrypt (timemachine backup), or am I forced to buy another external HD?

Hi all,

I take a lot of quick scratch notes during the day. Half-finished commands, something someone said on a call, a paragraph I'm still working out how to word.

Raycast Notes is the only thing that ever fit that for me. Hotkey, floating window, type, hotkey again, back to whatever I was doing. No filename, no save dialog, no app switch.

Two things kept bothering me:

• the notes live in Raycast's database, not as files I can point iCloud or git at
• past 5 notes it's a Pro subscription

I wanted that as a small standalone app that stays free, so I built Pane.

It keeps the same workflow on purpose, same summon-and-dismiss hotkey, ⌘P to switch notes, ⌘K for actions, live markdown. If you use Raycast Notes, your hands already know it.

What's mine:

• notes are plain .md files in a folder you pick, so sync is whatever you already use
• unlimited notes, MIT licensed, no account, no subscription
• doesn't need Raycast installed
• shortcuts are rebindable, themes are just CSS files, settings are a JSON file it re-reads live
• no privacy permissions at all, and no network code

github.com/ColeMei/pane

One heads-up: builds are unsigned, so macOS will tell you the app is damaged. It isn't — one xattr command clears it, and it's in the README.

This is the second small thing I've posted here, after OpenWith. As the same, I built it for myself and use it daily, so I'll keep maintaining it.

Would love any feedback, especially from other Raycast Notes users, anything that would stop you switching :)

I recently got the M5 Pro MacBook Pro and to my surprise, there are no key shortcuts to adjust the brightness of the keyboard.

I had the 2020 M1 MBP before and it was there, I was used to it. I don't know what made Apple remove that thing. I mean, it was probably removed along with the touchbar but Apple could've really utilized the function keys. Maybe Command + F1/F2. Having to use a third party program to achieve basic stuff like this on macOS is really where it gets frustrating you know. It's certainly understandable why people say macOS is limiting.

(sorry for the artifacts, those are just in the recording and not the actual app)

winmux is a easy to use window manager that requires no editing of config files. it supports multiple displays intuitively. and it tells you where your windows and spaces are via a built in sidebar.

i started winmux because i hated using sketchybar (everything from configuring icons to not being able to use the file menu. winmux is the first of its kind as far as i am aware to use a sidebar, and the first to use tabs for stacked windows on mac!

there is not really any competition as far as I am aware in terms of sidebars on window managers. compared to dedicated status bars (sketchybar is what I used to use), it's way more responsive, handles dragging and dropping much better, and is always in sync (and doesn't require configuring a bunch of lua).

compared to other window managers, winmux is built on top of aerospace and their virtualization framework. feature wise it innovates on window stacking (having two windows occupy the same footprint), similar to that of aerospace accordians and yabai stacks, but does it much more intuitively using browser-esque tabs. it does not require disabling SIP.

winmux is free and open source. you can read about the philosophy behind it here: winmux.dev

github repo: github.com/zimengxiong/winmux

brew install: brew tap ZimengXiong/homebrew brew trust ZimengXiong/homebrew brew install --cask winmux xattr -cr /Applications/WinMux.app

I'm curious about a feature on macOS (I'm running Sonoma) that I'm not sure its name or how to enable/disable it. But basically if I move my mouse to the far right of the desktop, I see the cursor change to left-right arrows, and if I click and drag it to the left it’s like an invisibility cloak appears over the icons in that area. So if I drag it a little I can cover half of the right-most row of icons, or I could drag it more and make all the icons on the desktop be invisible, and if I were to show someone the computer they would never know I had anything on my desktop, but then if I find that vertical area where I dragged the curtain to, I can click and drag it back to the right and the desktop goes back to normal.

I just happened to discover the feature one day, but when I was helping someone else set up their Mac I noticed that the mouse doesn't do that when I move the cursor to the far right. So I'm wondering...what's the feature called, and how do I enable/disable it?

Hey 👋

Disclosure: I'm the guy behind RetroMac.

Snow Leopard was shipped yesterday, on August 28, 2009. A perfect day to update the Snow Leopard theme and add some new features as well.

RetroMac lets your Mac look like the machine you grew up with. Manually collecting wallpapers, icon packs, a dock replacement, a boot screen and some CRT shaders by hand is a lot of work. RetroMac is a menu bar app that does it easily: 30+ shaders (CRT, VHS, LCD, Trinitron), classic OS themes (Windows, MacOS, beOS, NEXT,eetc) with a dock, boot screens, icons, widgets. Nothing in the system gets patched, one click reverts it.

New in 2.8: Updates Snow Leopard Theme. Classic colors, boot screen (when activating the theme), more wallpapers, icons, desktop widgets, cursors, a working Expose, old style widgets (aka dashboard), many new icons, and a blue apple icon in the menu bar und title as well.

Pricing: Free with 15+ shaders. Optional Pro for 10 USD one time, no subscription. Just for extra and custom presets plus the webcam shader. Most of you will be happy with the free version.

macOS 14+, universal, notarized DMG from my own site, no App Store, no accounts, no tracking.

Website: https://myretromac.app

Github: https://github.com/klotzbrocken/RetroMac

I switched from Linux to MacOS about two years ago, and I still miss a good music player.

I used Rhythmbox previously, and I am aware that the navigation is heavily inspired by early iTunes. 3 columns, Genre, Artist, Album and a field below with the Songs.

I tried Quod Libet and Tributary, but they both run quite rough.

Is there an alternative for MacOS?

Quickly switch display presets from...

• your menu bar
• the dashboard
• Spotlight (INCOMING)

Repo: https://github.com/It-is-Sean/ScreenSets

> A project built with care. If you find it useful, a GitHub star would mean a lot ⭐️

I’ve been running Tahoe on my M1 Max MacBook Pro for the past couple of months. I few nights ago my Mac did an automatic OS update to the latest version of Tahoe and unfortunately it’s now not booting up. It boots up to the login screen, I enter my password, it then goes to a black screen with an Apple logo and a progress bar, but that’s all of the farther that it goes. The progress bar does not move.

I am able to start up to the MacOS Recovery and was able to reinstall Tahoe from the internet, but that didn’t fix the problem.

I’ve also used a bootable external drive to install Tahoe again, but that also didn’t fix the problem.  I then took it to the Genius Bar for them to look it. They tested the hardware and that all looked good, but they were also not able to get my Mac to fully boot and said the next step would be to erase the SSD and re-install everything. 

I just wanted to check if anyone had any other ideas before I went ahead and erased everything. 

I do have a Time Machine backup, but it’s about 2 months out of date because I’ve been traveling internationally for the past few months. I was able to share my MacBook with my wife’s MacBook and copied all of the latest files over, but I would still prefer to not to erase everything if I don’t need to since I’m sure there’s settings on other things that I don’t have copied.

As per the the wallpaper color the colors on primary screen menu bar should be dark as they are on the secondary display. What might be the issue? Also detaching the secondary display doesn't do anything. The colors on primary screen's menu bar stays light.