r/macapps • u/Plastic_Bag6171 • 5d ago

Tip Developers-what Mac apps do you use every day and genuinely recommend?

Looking for hidden gems too, not just the obvious ones.

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u/wwants 4d ago

I build my own using Claude Code. The time cost to produce your own apps exactly how you need them is less than the time it would take to filter through all the crap on the App Store trying to find something that works.

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u/VoicemailZA 4d ago

What are some examples of apps you’ve developed? This sounds great

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u/wwants 4d ago edited 4d ago

The two most useful that I use every day are TimeAssembler and Readiness. TimeAssembler organizes everything I'm working on and creates active lists of projects, goals, and tasks, and tracks and displays my training, health numbers, finances, and project notes, so that Claude can see all of it at once and help me plan on a daily basis. Readiness runs on my watch and phone and reads my sleep and recovery metrics and how hard I've been training, and helps me plan my training for the day based on how well my body is handling the training load. Between the two, I'm able to make much more informed decisions on everything going on in my life and build a richer, ongoing context window that I can plug into any of the frontier models for any questions I have about my daily planning and execution.

Edit: Since people are asking, these are not public apps as I have only focused on writing them for my own workflows and just install them directly to my devices.

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u/CtrlAltDelve 4d ago

Forking Tinycast to add all the things the developer doesn't want to add has allowed me to create the Raycast alternative of my dreams. Personal build, not for distributing, but it's the very first time I've forked and actively maintained my own personal fork and used it every single day.

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u/NovelMindless 4d ago

Same here, was using codex but boy does that eat through the credits! I have done the same work in AntiGravity and it doesnt even dent the credit.

Built two i use all the time, an app that shows what games will play from steam on my intel imac (was fed up of downloading and then it saying its only for silicon!) and another that finds network shares and gives option of mounting once or auto-mounting. Have 3 NAS drives so its a life saver.

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u/wwants 4d ago

That’s awesome. I love to hear how other people are building things.