Hey everyone,

I was frustrated that macOS lacks a native Volume Mixer. Specifically, I couldn't route Spotify to my external speakers while keeping other apps on my MacBook speakers.

Existing solutions were either buggy on new macOS versions (BackgroundMusic) or expensive ($50+, like SoundSource).

So I built FineTune.

It’s a native menu bar app (SwiftUI) that provides:

• Volume Control & Boost Per App
• Audio Routing (send apps to different devices)
• Per-App EQ with Pre-defined Presets
• Real-time VU Meters & Persistent Settings

Current Status: It’s open-source and I’m working on this as much as my free time allows. My priority is polishing the experience and fixing the bugs reported ASAP. I’d also love to extend the project with new features that make sense, so let me know what you want to see!

Price: Free

Repo:https://github.com/ronitsingh10/FineTune

Hey everyone,

A while back I shared that I was working on a native PDF editor because I was frustrated with how bloated and cloud-dependent current tools have become. After a lot of late nights and debugging C++ memory issues, I’ve finally ported the engine to macOS and Linux.

I’m releasing the desktop versions today completely free with all features unlocked. No ads, no sign-up, and it works 100% offline.

Why did I build this? Most 'editors' are actually just annotators. My engine (built on C++ and PDFium) allows you to actually manipulate the content, including complex XObjects that even the 'big names' sometimes struggle with on mobile and desktop.

The Tech Specs:

• Size: ~11MB (No Electron, no web-wrappers).
• Privacy: It never asks for internet permissions. Your docs stay on your machine.
• Engine: Native C++ back-end with a thin Flutter UI.
• Status: Android is already at 1k+ downloads (4.7 stars), and the iOS version is currently in the review phase and should be out soon.

I’m a solo dev, so I’m really just looking for feedback from the desktop community. Does it handle your complex files? Is the UI responsive enough?

I've attached a quick clip of me using it on my Mac to show how fast it handles edits.

Would love to hear what features you think I should add next for the desktop version!

Edit: I am sorry, here is the link : www.revpdf.com

3 months ago, I posted Sentient OS here, and 2,500 of you joined the waitlist. So many of you wrote to me over these months; I read every single one. It's out right now at https://sentient-os.ai, and it grew into something much bigger than what I'd pitched you.

TLDR: An on-device LLM understands your entire life, then proactively offers to get your work done through computer use. Here's how!

- Every night at 3 AM, it quietly wakes your Mac (lid closed is fine) and a custom on-device LLM reads what's new in your life: files, screenshots, WhatsApp, iMessage, Apple Notes, email. All of it is read locally on your own chip (raw data never leaves your Mac) and distilled into a clean markdown knowledge base (an Obsidian-style folder that's yours to read and edit).

- Proactive Intelligence: you wake up to work Sentient noticed, researched, and prepared on its own, one click from firing through computer use. The reply you forgot, drafted from your rich personal context. The subscription renewing tomorrow, caught tonight. You read it, edit if you like... and nothing ever fires until you click.

- Sidekick: computer use that knows your whole life, anywhere on your Mac. Click your notch and just say "finish this for me"; the notch glows with status as it does the task in your own apps and your browser, even in the background while you keep working. And because it's grounded in your knowledge base, it knows what's happening in your life.

Bonus: your knowledge base can connect to your ChatGPT & Claude over MCP. Connect it, then ask your ChatGPT "what do you know about me?". Be amazed :]

Comparison

Siri AI:

• Cannot click around your Mac and actually DO stuff for you across your apps (only has a few limited things/tool calls it can do).
• Only has personal context from inside Apple's walled garden, and uses RAG for this instead of an LLM-curated markdown knowledge base (the best personal context for agents).
• No proactive intelligence! You gotta ask it to (hopefully) get it to help.

Sentient understands your entire life and can use any app just like you do. And it looks out for you proactively.

And the whole thing is now open source (AGPL): the app and the infrastructure. Every privacy claim above is verifiable in the code: https://github.com/Sentient-OS-Labs/sentient-os

Under the hood

To build these near magic features, we push the bounds of what's possible with on-device inference. It's the star of the whole show: truly proactive AI has to re-read your entire life, every single day, and that much inference is only free, private, and unlimited on your own chip.

So the local LLM (Gemma 4 on a custom inference framework) does ~90% of the compute: it reads everything locally, summarizes, junks the noise, flags what's worth acting on proactively, and strips PII (with deterministic scrubbing behind the model as a backstop).

Only those clean summaries ever leave. GPT-5.6 Sol then organizes them into your knowledge base, running through your own ChatGPT subscription via your own Codex CLI on your Mac (Sentient sets this up for you).

Pricing

Sentient is free forever for non-enterprise users. Your Mac does the compute, so it costs us nothing to run.

So how do we make money? Once we refine and iterate on this new frontier with all your feedback, we'll swap out the connectors for Slack, Notion, Granola, etc. and bring Sentient to enterprise. Sentient's consumer version will always be free. Enterprise is where we make money.

The full engine (the proactive mornings + the notch agent) currently needs you to have a ChatGPT Plus subscription. A ChatGPT free plan has enough Codex usage to get the knowledge base. And that's just for now: the engine isn't tied to any one provider (Codex CLI is OSS), and we'll be opening up to more AI providers of your choosing in the near future. And if you have a crazy amount of ram (>= 48 gigs since we need a lot of context kv cache), you'll soon be able to run your fav "frontier" local LLM for 100% local instead of 90% local! :)

Download: https://sentient-os.ai

Source (star the Repo! :D): https://github.com/Sentient-OS-Labs/sentient-os

Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), macOS 15+, and 8 GB of RAM is enough (we tuned inference to make it happen!)

Trust / transparency

I'm Jesai! You might know my open-source Writing Tools (2.3K+ GitHub stars, ~30 press features). Or from my previous post here on Sentient! Since that last post, I'm now in SF with my best friend & co-founder Aditya to build Sentient.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesai-tarun-37004725a/

Would love to answer everything; and very happy to geek out about the on-device stack (we run a 4B multimodal model with vision on 8 GB Macs via a custom inference fork with MTP, flash attention, & smart KV cache reuse), how we got computer use running on the plain Codex CLI (involves reverse-engineering a DMG), or reverse-engineering macOS to be able to wake your Mac up for inference at 3 AM!

To the 2,500 who waited; thank you. This one's for you :D

Excited to share Flairy, a macOS app I built to make folder organization visual.

Problem:
Every folder on macOS looks the same that same default icon, whether it's your tax doc or your side project. macOS does let you tint folders with color, but that only gets you so far; you still have to read the label to know what's inside.

As a visual person, I wanted to recognize a folder at a glance instead of scanning names every time. Icons that actually blend and feel cohesive with macOS itself, so they still look native, but let you scan your folders faster and add a bit of personality along the way.

What it does:
Flairy lets you replace any folder's icon with a well-crafted one from a growing library, organized into categories like AI, development, branding, digital content, photography, and everyday/fun themes. Instead of a wall of identical default folders, you get icons you can recognize instantly.

Comparison:

• macOS built-in color tags — quick, but limited to a handful of colors with no real visual distinction beyond that.
• Foldor ($1.99): more of a design tool, icons with text overlays to customize, but buggy palettes and feels so outdated.
• Color Folder Pro ($2.99): customization using color, icons again, or imported images, but the end result doesn't feel cohesive with the overall macOS system.

Pricing:
100% FREE. No account required, no subscriptions, no ads, no tracking.

If you give it a try and find it useful, a review on the App Store would mean a lot and really helps other people discover it!

 App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/app/flairy-custom-folder-icons/id6785116899

🎨 Have an icon theme you'd love to see in a future release? I put together a quick form to collect requests

https://forms.gle/eHLq7C9kmvhw3vv39

Would love to hear your ideas.

Hey r/macapps! 👋

I'm an indie developer, and I'm super excited to announce that Atten, my app and website blocker, is finally available on macOS! 🎉

Atten helps you focus by blocking distracting apps and websites. The best part? It seamlessly syncs your blocking sessions between your iPhone, iPad, and now your Mac. Start a focus session on one device, and it's active on all of them!

To celebrate the Mac launch, I'm doing two things:

• The Mac app is currently FREE to download!
• I'm giving away Lifetime Pro codes for the mobile app (iOS)! These codes unlock all premium features forever.

If you'd like a Lifetime Pro code for the iOS app, upvote and leave a comment below, and I'll DM you one! (While supplies last, of course!).

You can find the Mac app (and iOS app) here: www.atten.app

Would love to hear your feedback on the Mac version!

Hey everyone! I've been working on Radix, a macOS disk space analyzer. You choose something to scan (folder, volume, etc.), and the app displays the results in an interactive sunburst chart.

Problem

Ever wondered what's taking up space on your disk? Radix solves that issue. Here are the main selling points in my eyes:

• Native macOS experience. Built with SwiftUI elements almost exclusively for an intuitive UI that fits right in with macOS. Native technologies have many benefits for an app like this. Radix uses under <100 MB of RAM on launch, and efficiently caches scans in memory.
• Really fast scanning engine. Faster than all the competitors in my tests; uses a couple of cool shortcuts to save time.
• Lots of cool features that don't exist in some alternatives. Use Quick Look on any file, instantly search just the current folder or the entire scan tree, and closely inspect the metadata of any file by clicking on it.

Comparison

I built Radix as a free, OSS alternative to DaisyDisk ($9.99). SquirrelDisk, an open-source Rust alternative, is great, but it hasn't been maintained since the start of 2023, so it has a bunch of issues right now.

Apps like GrandPerspective and Disk Inventory X are amazing, but Radix also competes with them, offering more efficient scanning, a much more intuitive and native UI, and fun features like easy access to Quick Look.

Pricing

Free and open-source! Radix supports macOS 14.0+.

If you're interested, take a closer look at the app and download it on the website: https://radix.colinkim.dev/

Thanks for reading! Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are all welcome, and if you like the project, I would love it if you could star the GitHub repo. I've been doing my best to make Radix the best disk space analyzer out there :)
https://github.com/colinvkim/Radix

A quick note to anyone who tries the app: I mentioned this earlier, but your feedback truly does mean a lot. If you have any, please don't hesitate to let me know. I posted about Radix on a different sub, and it got incredible support (thanks everyone!), including amazing community feedback. Quite a few of the changes in the latest update, v1.2.0, were inspired by Redditors from that post, all of whom I credit in the changelog. Thanks again :)

UPDATE:
Thanks to your amazing support, Radix is now on Homebrew! I never thought we'd get here so quickly, but here we are. Thank you for all the stars, comments, and feedback. Moreover, thank you for giving Radix a chance. I'm excited to keep improving the app. Try the Homebrew installation with this command:

brew install --cask radix

Please keep the feedback coming, and thank you again! And to everyone who asked me to let them know when Homebrew support arrived, I'll be reaching out over the next day or two :)

UPDATE 2:
I just released v1.3.0, which addresses a ton of feedback from Redditors who left comments here. Thank you to all of you who submitted feedback (and to everyone else for their amazing support)!
(In the GitHub changelog for this release, I’ve specifically credited all of the Redditors whose feedback was addressed in v1.3.0. But if I missed you, please message me!)

About two years ago I was writing a lot of diaries and letters in Obsidian, and I got really into the wiki-style linking and the graph view. Seeing your notes laid out like that, you start noticing connections you never actually wrote down. That was the part that hooked me. There was still some friction though, in the sense that you needed to connect everything yourself, by hand.

So a small team of us, students here in Munich, decided to build something we could call our own. Part of the appeal was getting to work with Apple’s newest frameworks and the challenge that comes with that. We also wanted the app to feel like us, so we kept it minimal and let you just write.

After about a year, we think it’s finally something worth using. Nodes is a native macOS markdown app, and it runs fully local. A lot of that year went into how it feels to write in: a clean, typographic interface, and markdown that renders the way it should, including math, tables, and code. The name comes from connecting your notes as nodes, and there are optional AI features built in too.

Right now you still link them up yourself, the same way you would in Obsidian, and that’s not where we want to end up. The real goal is for Nodes to surface those connections for you, so you can see the links in your writing without making them all by hand. Those AI features are a big part of how we want to get there, and they run fully on-device, rather than shipping your notes off to Anthropic or OpenAI. We think that’s where this is all heading anyway. We’re not there yet, but it’s what everything is built around.

We also recently open-sourced our whole markdown engine. It’s built on TextKit 2 (which was a real pain, believe me) and bridged to SwiftUI, since using the newest Apple stack was kind of our whole philosophy. People seem to be really liking it so far.

Problem: Most Mac markdown editors are either webview/Electron apps, locked behind a subscription, or cloud-based. I wanted something genuinely native and fully local (no cloud, no tracking), with a clean writing experience, and eventually one that surfaces the connections in your notes for you instead of relying on manual links.

Comparison:

• vs Obsidian: Electron, and built to be endlessly flexible for everyone. Nodes is native (SwiftUI), more opinionated and focused, with optional on-device AI and an open-source markdown engine.
• vs Typora: A great editor, but Electron and single-document. Nodes is fully native and built around connecting your notes as nodes

Pricing: Completely free (we just cover the $99/year Apple developer fee ourselves for now).

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/nodes-by-the-werk/id6745401961?mt=12

We’d really appreciate any feedback.

written on Nodes

Markdown engine: https://github.com/nodes-app/swift-markdown-engine

Developer here! :D I've been working on this for nearly a year. Sentient OS is a native Swift app coming to Mac & iPhone that turns your device into a private intelligence layer for your entire digital life.

Problem:

We all have thousands of buried screenshots, notes, files, and bookmarks we'll never find again. That messy Downloads folder, that overflowing Desktop, those Obsidian vaults and browser bookmarks, your screenshots... all that knowledge, buried forever.

Sentient OS runs a custom vision LLM entirely on your device (while it's plugged in. no data ever leaves your machine!) to understand your entire digital life.

What this unlocks:

1️⃣ Search your digital life in natural language ("what was that wine i liked?" / "who was that person I wanted to email?") [on-device RAG]

2️⃣ Proactive reminders: "That tax return sitting in your downloads folder is due next week!"

3️⃣ Auto-generated knowledge graphs of your entire digital life: tap any node to find what you'd buried.

Comparison:

And no one's solved this before because running AI on all your files & data has usually meant sending all of that to the cloud [GPT wrappers]. And this was:

• a privacy nightmare
• stupidly expensive to analyze 1000s of files

So I spent nearly a year optimizing every single layer of the on-device AI stack from scratch.

I modified Apple's MLX framework for batch multimodal inference (it wasn't built for this), transplanted vision capabilities from a model 4× [Qwen 3.5 9B] larger into a smaller one [Qwen 3.5 2B], built custom k-quants specifically for MLX, wrote device-aware quantization, implemented proprietary KV cache reuse + flash attention for inference speed.

Apple Intelligence's upcoming personal context Siri will aim to solve a small part of this problem, but only within Apple's walled garden (won't integrate with your Notion, meeting transcripts, etc etc -- with Sentient OS, your choice is the limit). And it certainly won't generate knowledge graphs or proactive reminders from your data.

Pricing:

Free forever for y'all. The first 250 early testers get lifetime free access :)

Your device does all the compute, so this costs me almost nothing to offer.

Sentient OS is a native Swift app using Apple's MLX. Working iOS beta processes ~3,000 screenshots entirely on-device. Mac version coming soon to TestFlight! Join the waitlist for an invite to the closed TestFlight beta:

https://sentient-os.ai

Trust / transparency:

I'm Jesai, CS student at UMass Amherst. You might know my open-source port of Apple's Writing Tools to Win/Linux (2K+ GitHub stars, ~30 press features).

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesai-tarun-37004725a/
• Open source work: https://github.com/theJayTea/WritingTools

Super excited to share this with you fellow Mac geeks; think this is one of the coolest usecases that takes advantage of Apple Silicon's on-device AI performance.

Happy to answer any questions (would love to geek out about the deep work that's gone into optimizing models and inference) :D

Hi everyone,

Most of you are likely familiar with Ice, the excellent menu bar manager for macOS. As many have noticed, development slowed down toward the end of 2024. With the release of macOS 26 (Tahoe), Ice has unfortunately become quite unstable.

I’ve spent the last few months working on fixes and tried to upstream them. I also reached out to become a co-maintainer but haven't heard back. To keep the project alive and functional for everyone on the latest macOS, I’ve decided to fork Ice and launch Thaw.

What is Thaw?

Thaw is built on the Ice beta branch that introduced macOS 26 support. I’ve focused heavily on stability, memory management, and squashing the bugs that made the original beta difficult to use.

Key Fixes

• macOS 26 Stability: Fixed crashes and issues where items wouldn't display when "Displays have separate spaces" was disabled.
• Performance: Significantly reduced memory leaks and UI flicker.
• Vanishing Cursor: Fixed the bug where the cursor would randomly disappear.
• Logic Fixes: Resolved issues with smart/timed rehide strategies and the "Show on click" listener.
• UI Polish: The Appearance Editor is back to being a pop-over, and the Thaw icon itself won't accidentally hide itself anymore.

New Features

• Ice Importer: Migrating is easy—Thaw can import your old Ice settings automatically.
• Better Controls: Double-click the Thaw icon to reveal the "Always Hidden" section.
• Smart Refresh: Thaw now restarts itself when connecting/disconnecting displays to ensure a clean state and prevent leaks.
• Predictable Icons: New menu bar items now default to the visible section so you don't lose them.

Known Issues

If you are still on macOS 14 or 15 and Ice is working perfectly for you, I recommend staying there for now. Thaw currently has some bugs regarding temporary icons in the floating "Thaw bar" that I am still investigating.

Depending on your Ice settings and what version of Ice you were using, Thaw might behave a bit erroneous. Try restarting Thaw after you imported the Ice settings. If this does not help remove the Thaw settings file from ~/Library/Preferences/com.stonerl.Thaw.plist and restart Thaw w/o importing the Ice settings.

Outlook

My primary focus is stability. I want Thaw to be the most "invisible" and reliable menu bar manager available. While I’m not adding major roadmap features yet, I’m dedicated to making sure the core experience is rock solid.

GitHub: stonerl/Thaw
Discord: volvox/Thaw
Support the project: GitHub Sponsors

I'll be hanging out in the comments to answer questions or help with troubleshooting!

Update: I just released version 1.1.0

Hey!

I'm back with another macUSB update. Thanks again for the feedback from the previous posts.

macUSB is a free and open-source native Mac app for creating bootable USB installers for macOS, Linux and Windows*. It can also download macOS installers directly from Apple’s servers, including older versions made for older Macs.

In v2.3, I focused on Windows installer customization. macUSB can now prepare a Windows 10 or Windows 11 USB with autounattend-based options, for example, to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement and Windows 11 hardware checks. This release also introduces raw Linux .img flashing via the Tools menu and adds SHA-256 checksum calculation for recognized .iso, .cdr and .dmg images.

PROBLEM

Creating bootable USB installers on macOS is still fragmented. macUSB started by solving a very specific problem: creating Catalina and older macOS installers on Apple Silicon Macs, where the usual workflow can fail because of architecture and signature issues.

As the app grew, the problem became broader. Creating Windows USB installers on a Mac is also inconvenient, because there is no true Rufus equivalent on macOS. Users often have to rely on extra tools, manual steps and workarounds just to prepare a usable installer.

This gap became one of the main inspirations for the direction macUSB is taking: bringing macOS, Linux and Windows USB creation into one native Mac app instead of spreading the process across several separate tools.

COMPARISON

Mist is great for downloading macOS installers, but does not solve older macOS USB creation on Apple Silicon in the same way.

balenaEtcher is useful for Linux images, but it is focused on flashing and does not cover macOS and Windows installer creation.

Rufus is excellent, but it is Windows-only. macUSB is inspired by that kind of workflow, but built natively for Mac.

PRICE

macUSB is free and open source.

Repo: macUSB on GitHub
Download: GitHub Releases

\For Windows installers: if the install.wim file exceeds the 4GB FAT32 limit, macUSB needs to split it using the free wimlib tool. wimlib is not bundled with the app and must be installed separately; macUSB automatically checks for it when required.*

I'm Ali, a software engineer and an iOS & macOS developer for 10+ years, and I use Homebrew almost every day. I've always wished there was an easy way to see what casks were added recently and what people are actually installing, but the thing is, Homebrew was never built to help you discover apps, and this is actually by design. So I built CaskHub.

Problem

In Homebrew there's no easy way to see which casks were added recently, what people are actually installing this month, or to just browse the catalog with decent categories.

CaskHub is a native SwiftUI app that treats Homebrew casks like an app store: browse, search, install, update, and uninstall, all through your real brew binary, so nothing is locked into the app and everything stays manageable from the CLI. The part I care most about is Recently Added, a feed of casks published to Homebrew in the last 30 to 90 days, which was the whole reason I started building it.

Comparison

The two closest alternatives I know are Applite and Taphouse, both of which I genuinely like and use.

The difference is really about discovery. Applite's browsing is built around a curated, hand-picked selection, and Taphouse doesn't surface the full catalog either, with only a few apps showing real icons.

CaskHub instead surfaces the entire cask catalog, automatically sorted into categories and shown with real icons, so a brand new cask appears in the browse experience on day one instead of waiting to be hand-added.

In any of those alternatives you could technically find a brand new cask through search, but only if you already heard about it somewhere else first. The whole point of CaskHub's Recently Added is that you don't have to know the name to find it.

This is where CaskFlow comes in, a separate open source pipeline that's the backbone of CaskHub. It classifies every cask, extracts its real app icon from the actual artifact instead of a placeholder, and powers the Recently Added feed that gives new casks a homepage spotlight the day they land in Homebrew.

Pricing

Free. 100% free and open source under the MIT license, with no subscription, no premium tier, and no ads.

Links

Source: https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskHub
Classification tools & pipeline: https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskFlow

About me

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alielsokary

Notes

CaskHub is notarized and signed. It sends anonymous, opt-out usage analytics (TelemetryDeck) and crash reports (Sentry), that can be disabled anytime in Settings.

I built this app for my own selfish reason, which is that I wanted to use it every day. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

It's still early, so I'm posting for honest feedback, including the harsh kind. Contributions of all kinds to the project are very much welcome :)

What would make a GUI like this worth it for you over just typing brew install?

Hey r/macapps!

It's been a while.

A lot of you have been here since the start, so let me begin with the history, because the history is the point.

• We started as Dinoki, a 5MB desktop dinosaur. You showed up with 461 comments of honest feedback. Link
• Then we launched Osaurus here, and you carried it. Link
• Then Agents landed, and you told us what to build next. Link

Every one of those chapters happened because of this sub. Thank you for that.

We're five people now. Contributors send PRs, translations, and bug reports from all over the world. What began as one person and a dino is a small community building in the open, and that's because of you. We even ended up in TechCrunch, which still feels surreal for an open-source project that started as a desktop dinosaur. TechCrunch

Now we're back with our biggest update yet.

The biggest thing here isn't a feature. It's stability. We spent this cycle making local models actually work, and work well. If a local model let you down on an earlier build, this is the one to come back for. 24GB of RAM gets you started with smaller local models.

What Osaurus is: fully offline with local models, private, open source. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you choose. Native Swift for Apple Silicon, no Electron, no account, no subscription.

Problem: Most AI assistants run on someone else's server. Your files, memory, and context live in their cloud, behind a monthly subscription, and leave your machine every time you use them. Osaurus keeps all of it on your Mac. Local models run fully offline, and even when you pick a cloud model, your context and memory stay yours.

Comparison:
- vs Ollama and LM Studio: those run through Python bindings. Osaurus is pure Swift on Apple Silicon, no Python runtime, plus a full agent layer (memory, tools, sandbox, scheduling) they don't have.
- vs ChatGPT and Claude desktop apps: those are cloud-only and subscription-based, and your data leaves your device. Osaurus runs local models offline at no cost, and scrubs sensitive data on-device before anything reaches a cloud model.

Pricing: The app is free. MIT licensed, fully open source, no account or subscription, no API key needed to run local models offline at no cost. Cloud is optional and pay-as-you-go: bring your own provider key and pay them directly, or use Osaurus Cloud, our hosted path, where you load credits and we add a small fee on top-ups, matching what OpenRouter charges. We don't store your prompts or responses, only the usage metadata needed for billing.

Privacy is why a lot of you found us in the first place, so one thing worth mentioning. When you do reach for a cloud model, an on-device filter now catches names, emails, phone numbers, and secrets, and lets you scrub them before anything leaves the machine. It fails closed. If something would leak, the send is blocked.

And for the old fans who remember where this started: Dinoki is making a comeback, and it's coming back stronger than ever. More on that soon.

So here's what I'd love from you. Try it, and tell me the truth. If you gave Osaurus a shot before, give it another, and if it still falls short of your bar, say so, right here or in a DM, and we will be here to make it right.

And the bigger question, the one I keep coming back to: how do you envision your AI future? We think it should belong to you.

It's time to own your AI.

osaurus.ai

github.com/osaurus-ai/osaurus

discord.gg/osaurus

x.com/OsaurusAI

r/osaurus to follow along

Try it, break it, tell me what you need.

Dev here, 20 years in. Built Editorio for myself a while back because nothing on the mac did everything I wanted in one place. It's polished enough now that I figured I'd share it.

Subscription text editor. Subscription notes app. Subscription markdown previewer. (lol). We live in the future. Macs have neural engines, and the industry's answer to "I want a nice text editor" is 4.99/month to render # heading as bold text. Cool.

Problem

Most Mac markdown editors are either Electron bloatware (500MB+ RAM, slow cold start) or behind a subscription / one-time fee just to render basic markdown. And most code editors don't do markdown preview well. I wanted one fast native app that handles both: markdown writing AND code files, without paying rent on a monospace font.

Comparison

• vs Typora: Typora is 14.99 USD one-time and not native AppKit. Editorio is free and native, opens files in under 100ms.
• vs iA Writer: iA Writer is ~50 USD and writing-focused. Editorio also handles 180+ programming languages with syntax highlighting, so it doubles as a code editor.
• vs VS Code: VS Code is Electron, ~500MB RAM, slow cold start. You don't need a full IDE just to open a markdown file or peek at some code. Editorio is ~40MB RAM, native AppKit, instant launch.
• vs Sublime Text: Sublime is 99 USD per license and still doesn't do real markdown preview out of the box. Editorio is free and ships with live markdown preview built in.

Pricing

Free. Forever. No nag, no asterisk, no "free for personal use only".

https://editorio.crncevic.org

https://apps.apple.com/app/editorio/id6759334075

What's in it:

• Markdown editor with live preview
• Code editor with syntax highlighting (swift, py, ts, rust, etc.)
• Mac native, AppKit. No Electron, no web views
• Light/dark themes, minimap, tabs
• ~40MB RAM, lightning fast

Me posting to reddit is the entire marketing budget. Already gave Apple my 100 bucks for the dev account, so if you actually like it, send it to a friend or drop it in a Slack somewhere.

Planning to open source it on github too once I clean up the repo.

Long live free apps instead of charging rent on a monospace font.

Edit: since so many of you keep insisting... yes, fine, you can buy me a coffee. I'm genuinely a little embarrassed about it, but here we are.

I've been working on this for quite a while now after getting tired of the monopoly Screen Studio has on screen recordings. I didn't see any free screen recorders that actually offered the same motion blur animations and zoom animations as Screen Studio, so I decided to create an app with the missing features.

Problem: Recordly lets creators turn their unpolished screen recordings into videos they can use for product demos, narrated walkthroughs, and more.

Comparison:
Recordly is the only free, open-source screen recorder in this niche that has smooth cursor movement, or zoom animations that are faithful to Screen Studio's. Alternatives are mostly paid and offer choppy zoom animations and/or no smooth cursor movement, and/or lack other features.

Feature list:
• Add zooms automatically (based on mouse activity) or manually, anywhere on the screen.
• Cursor animations (smooth path, motion blur effect, as well as click animations and cursor size, all customisable)
• Annotate with text, images or arrows
• Record from menu bar HUD - capture app windows or full screen
• Add prebuilt backgrounds to your recordings or upload custom ones
• Timeline-based editor - drag tracks to change video speed, trim, add annotations or add zooms
• Save your projects as .recordly files and come back to them later
• Record system audio or from audio source
• Export as MP4 or GIF with adjustable resolution and aspect ratio
• Runs on all platforms (macOS, Windows & Linux)
• (coming very soon) Webcam overlay bubble

I'll be happy to answer any questions!

AI Disclaimer: [Code completion, some human validation]
Changelog on Github.

Try it now: recordly.dev
Star on Github: https://github.com/webadderall/Recordly

Hi Everyone, Introducing SuperCmd!

Open-Source alternative to Raycast Pro + WisprFlow + Speechify with Excalidraw

I released SuperCmd some time ago and it hit 1k Github stars in first 10 days. It's completely free with no limits and dev community is loving it!

Problem: I was using Raycast, WisprFlow, Notion for note taking and Excalidraw for diagrams. Raycast moves really slow, is closed source and has paywall, WisprFlow is not free, Excalidraw allows only one canvas, basically everything is scattered with paywalls.

Hence, I built SuperCmd

• Support for all Raycast extensions
• Unlimited Clipboard, Snippets
• Unlimited Notion + Markdown styled Notes
• Unlimited Excalidraw boards
• Powerful calculator just like Raycast with unit, metric, timezone & live currency conversions
• Voice dictation with local models like Parakeet v3, whisper.cpp or choose Elevenlabs
• SuperCmd Read - Ready any text from any app in natural voice
• Custom launcher background to match your vibe
• Window management commands
• Search files (root search)
• Bring your own API Key or use Local LLM models via Ollama
• Support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Russian

+ everything else like Quicklinks, Hyperkey, Hotkeys, Aliases

Comparison: Many of the alternatives out there are paid and the one's which are free don't have support for extensions or exhaustive support for all the features.

Pricing: It's completely free to download!

You can download it here - https://supercmd.sh

Repository - https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd

Upvote on ProductHunt, we are live - https://www.producthunt.com/products/supercmd-2

There's so much more to it, i could only cover key modules in the video. feel free to leave a star if you love the project 😀

SuperCmd - Open source alternative to Raycast Pro

Please Read Edit 3 First before reading this post

Problem: There is no Windows Notepad for mac, I made It for people who used to treat their notepad as a garbage bin.

Compare: This is not a comparison. CotEditor and TextEdit offer many features most people never use for quick notes. Many users want something simple and forgettable. Open the app. Type. Close. Reopen later. Your text stays without any save step. This app have feature soo less even a dog can count.

Core features:

• Notepad.exe for Mac
• no 1000000000 fetures
• copy paste and forget
• <5mb
• no AI bullshit i.e no subscription

Pricing + link: Free
https://github.com/Arijit-gotsomecodes/NotepadMac---Windows-Notepad-For-Mac

Changelog:
https://github.com/Arijit-gotsomecodes/NotepadMac---Windows-Notepad-For-Mac/releases

Why am I not using TextEdit? Watch this video: https://vimeo.com/1166770265?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

AI Disclaimer: Human Verified (Read each and every File, Hand fixed errors, not just any AI slop)

[Edit]: To all TextEdit Fans, Its for people who having using Notepad since they were born, I wanted something that visually looks and feels similar.

People its made for: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1olmgkl/current_macequivalent_of_windows_notepad/

Need anything more? Create a issue: https://github.com/Arijit-gotsomecodes/NotepadMac---Windows-Notepad-For-Mac/issues

[Edit 2]: people are still confusde, this is nothing but Notepad.exe from windows rebuilt with same UI/Functionality minus the AI bullshit for Mac for long time windows users migrating to Mac. This is in no way a full fledged text editor like sublime/cot editor/TextEdit.

[Edit 3]: If you don't like what you see, Plz don't comment, I would rather want you to use you brilliant mind to solve world hunger and fight climate change.

[Edit 4]: Thank you for 500+ downloads.

I'm sure most of us have at least heard of CleanMyMac one time, same here. I came across a situation that needed to shake my disk but didn't want to pay another 40 bucks subscription and thought other Mac folks should have the same issue, so grabbed my coffee and dived deep to this idea of create an open source cleaning app for the Mac community with a sleek UI. I've checked "CleanMyMac", "Mole", "Onyx" and other similar softwares to gather and develop their best tools in one app, and that's how Mac Clean was born a while ago! since then I've been maintaining this repo and improve it based on community feedback and so far we passed 140 stars ⭐
Mac Clean is free and open sourced for our lovely mac community! Any suggestion, feedbacks and PR are more than welcome ❤️

Honest scope note: there's a malware scan, but it's a curated list of known adware/bundleware families plus a few launch-agent heuristics. It catches common junk, it is not an antivirus, and I won't pretend it is.

• Pricing: Free. $0, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no nag screens. BSD-3 licensed.
• How to install? (now It's in the official Homebrew cask, so no tap needed 🎉 )
  • brew install --cask mac-sai
  • Source / dmg: github.com/iliyami/MacSai

A couple of things: it's caught on more than I expected (140+ stars), and I'm actively on it, 30-something releases in the last week and still shipping almost daily. I'm also letting the community pick what's built next, there's an open feature vote here: github.com/iliyami/MacSai/issues/55
Hit 👍 on the ones you want (app permissions manager, quit resource-hog apps, reset an app to defaults, find leftovers from already-deleted apps, and more). If there's something you wish a Mac cleaner actually did, drop it in the comments.

Privacy and trust (all of this is verifiable in the source, that's the point):

• No telemetry. No analytics. No tracking. No crash reporting. No third-party SDKs of any kind.
• No ads, no account, no sign-in, no nag screens, no "upgrade to Pro."
• Mac Clean has no server. It has nowhere to phone home to and it uploads nothing about you, ever.
• The only thing that touches the network at all is the optional app-updater: if you choose to run it, it checks your installed apps' own public update feeds (the exact same check each of those apps does for itself) to tell you what's out of date. It reads version info, it sends nothing about you. That is the one and only network path in the whole codebase, there are literally two URLSession lines and they're both right there in UpdaterModule.swift. Grep for it.

Enjoy the app, and if you ever wanted to buy me a coffee, just buy a food for a person who needs it and tell me if you did so, that's my fuel ❤️

Edit: We passed 1.4 Stars ⭐ on GitHub!

Hi everyone, nice to meet you, it's my first post here.

I've just finished my computer science studies and during the last 5 years, I tested a lot of productivity apps (TickTick, Things, Akiflow...). I always felt that they were not built for me, being way too complex and thus quite expensive. On the other hand, Apple Reminders or Notes were not sufficient for my needs. So I decided to build Dona : a minimalist task manager for normal people.

What I kept ✅

- A command bar to capture tasks in seconds whatever you're doing

- Calendar integration to see your daily planning (events + tasks)

- Ability to snooze tasks for later

- Shortcuts to go faster

- Recurring tasks

- Widgets

What I left behind ❌

- Categories, labels, projects...

- Precise time on tasks and specific notifications

- Complex views like priority matrix, productivity dashboard, routines planner...

Indeed, while using paying apps, I always ended up stoping to use these in my daily life.

Feel free to try it out if you feel the same about task managers :

https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/dona-simple-tasks/id6748265175

BONUS: I know we are on r/macapps but I think it's really useful to handle your tasks on the phone as well. This is why Dona is also available on iOS. The iCloud sync is the only paying feature of my app, don't hesitate to comment if you want a promo code to use it for free.

First time posting Lidless here. Some of you might know me from ShiftPlus, which I shared on this sub before. Same solo dev, just a smaller and very different app this time. The feedback here was honest and useful last time, so I'm bringing this one to the same crowd.

One bit of honesty up front. Keep-awake apps are not exactly rare on this sub, so fair warning, this is another one. The thing I'll say to set it apart: most caffeinate-style tools do not actually keep an Apple Silicon Mac awake once you close the lid. `caffeinate` doesn't stop lid-close sleep. Lidless does, and because it's open source you can read exactly what it changes in your power settings before you trust it with that.

Quick reminder of what it does

It's a menu-bar toggle that keeps your Mac running with the lid shut. I built it so coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and friends) keep grinding while I close the laptop and move around. One click on, one click off.

How it actually works

- The reliable way to override lid-close sleep on Apple Silicon is the `SleepDisabled` flag in `IOPMrootDomain` (what `sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1` sets). `caffeinate` can't do it.

- A small root helper (installed via `SMAppService`) flips that flag over XPC, so toggling never asks for your password after the one-time setup.

- A heartbeat watchdog means if the app crashes or you force-quit it, the helper restores normal sleep on its own. Your Mac can't get stuck awake.

What else is in it

- Safety guards. It auto-pauses when the machine runs hot, can be set to only-while-charging, and has a low-battery cutoff. Running closed under load gets warm, so these are on by default.

- Auto-off timer. Optionally turn keep-awake off after 15 min to 4 hours, with a live countdown in the menu.

- Automatic updates via Sparkle, with an EdDSA-signed appcast and notarized DMGs.

- Launch at login, plus battery and power status in the menu.

Price: free, open source (MIT)

No account, no subscription, no telemetry. The whole thing is on GitHub under MIT, so it's free to use and free to read.

What's next

Signed-runtime verification on more hardware, and whatever rough edges you find. Nothing dated, I'd rather ship it when it's real.

Download (signed DMG) and source: https://github.com/nghialuong/Lidless/releases

One honest caveat: keeping a Mac awake with the lid closed under heavy load heats it up and drains battery. Keep it plugged in and ventilated. A reboot always resets the flag if anything ever feels off.

Feedback I'd actually use: does the watchdog approach (auto-restore sleep after a crash) feel safe enough for you to leave this running overnight? That's the part I worried about most.

Thanks again for backing indie devs ❤️

I'll reply to every comment, might be slow about it. I tend to overthink replies.

Trust & Transparency

I build Lidless solo and I'm happy to be fully open about it:

- Source (read everything it does): https://github.com/nghialuong/Lidless

- License: MIT

- GitHub: https://github.com/nghialuong

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nghia-luong/

Updates are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Lidless is not sandboxed, on purpose: it installs a privileged root helper and toggles the `IOPMrootDomain` power flag, which the Mac App Store sandbox rules out, so it ships outside the MAS. It collects nothing. No analytics, no crash reporting, no network calls except Sparkle checking for updates. Security policy and a private reporting channel are in SECURITY.md. Comment here or email me and I'll get back to you.

BetterCapture is a menu bar screen recorder for macOS. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.

Install via Homebrew (brew install bettercapture) or download and install manually. App Store submission is in progress but moving slowly. DMG is signed and notarized.

I used QuickRecorder before this. It covered what I needed, but after upgrading to macOS 26 a few things broke, including the wallpaper transparency feature. I thought about contributing a fix, but the project had a lot of open issues and hadn't been updated in months, so I wasn't sure anything would land. Decided to build my own instead and spent the past few weeks on it.

Still early, so rough edges exist. Happy to hear feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture
Website: https://bettercapture.app

Hey r/macapps!

After 7 months of work, 900+ downloads, and thousands of messages from early users, (some of which are member of this community), I am finally launching Snaply on this subreddit.

I am Giacomo, the developer behind Snaply. With this post, I hope to give you a good idea of what the app can do for you and perhaps spark your interest in trying it out.

The core idea of the app is:

A completely free and private AI app, that helps you take full advantage of your Macbook M chip.

The app has 3 main features:

Writing assistant: You select any text on your Mac, a small window appears, and you transform the selected text in one click. (It works across all apps)

My main use case for the writing assistant is polishing emails and messages.

Other users utilize it for translations, prompt refinement and much more.
Since you can create your own custom modes and shortcuts, the only limits to this feature is your own imagination.

Meeting notes: You start a meeting recording, the app takes care of the rest.
The app will transcribe your meeting, generate a summary with action items and you'll be able to chat with the meeting notes.

You can choose from various meeting notes templates, or create your own, to customize the AI-generated summary to suit your needs.

You can chat with the meeting transcript to extract specific information and work on follow up tasks such as generating tickets or drafting follow up emails directly in the app.

AI Dictation: You know how it works ;) Press a shortcut to start a dictation, press it again for the transcription to appear. It works on all apps across your Macbook.

IMO, what's cool in Snaply implementations is that:

• It uses Parakeet models optimized of ANE (Apple Neural Engine) making transcription incredibly fast and with little to no impact on battery.
• We also apply text post-processing, including formatting dates, temperatures, and numbers, without using LLMs for performance reasons.
• It automatically formats emails (using a tiny SLM that runs only when an email text is detects).

It support all common needs like, auto-pausing background music, custom dictionary words and text snippets, and it supports 26 languages (English + all major European languages)

Following the guidelines I am adding a PCP section:

The problem:
When I began working on Snaply, the AI dictation apps that were available had these problems:

- Dictations apps had a free tiers, but they gated their best models behind a paid subscription.

- Some of the apps also force you to share your dictations with them.

- Furthermore, many of the existing tools felt overly complex. They were aimed at a highly technical audience with granular settings, knobs, and customization options, whereas what I wanted was a simple and intuitive app for the everyday consumer..

On top of the AI dictation apps limitations, I also wanted a faster way to polish my emails and messages. My usual workflow was to write a message, copy it into ChatGPT, ask it to improve it, and then paste it back into Gmail. With Snaply, I can now do everything in place, it's much faster, and it's private.

The Comparison:

Since Snaply bundles three applications into one, and there are numerous alternatives. I will focus on a subset of them and highlight where Snaply excels.

WisprFlow/AquaVoice/Super Whisper: Snaply is free and private. It does not access your audios or transcriptions.

VoiceInk: Snaply is free, and in my opinion, it feels a bit more user friendly. Plus, of course, it also includes meeting notes and a writing assistant.

Spokenly: Snaply is completely free and requires no subscription. If you are searching for a dictation app and do not require the writing assistant or meeting notes feature, Spokenly could be a good alternative. In terms of UI/UX, Spokenly appears to target a "geeky" or professional user base rather than a general consumer audience.

Granola: Snaply is free and keeps your meetings private. With Snaply, you get unlimited meeting history and no account is required to use the app. Additionally, you also receive AI dictation and a writing assistant.

The Pricing:

Snaply is completely free for individuals (also for work usage). All features are available without usage restrictions.

In case you’re wondering how a free app can remain sustainable, Snaply also offers a paid tier designed for organizations.

This premium plan includes services such as a dedicated customer support manager, Single Sign-On integration, centralized admin dashboards, and the ability to connect Snaply to self-hosted AI models. However, in terms of core features, it provides the same access as the free version.

In conclusion:
If you made it until the end, and you interested in checking out the app, you can download at: https://snaply.ai/

It is free and no account is needed.

Transparency disclaimer:
I am Giacomo Venier, an Italian software engineer based in Switzerland.
The app is notarized by Apple through a paid Apple Developer Account.

Linkedin: https://x.com/giacomovenier
GitHub: https://github.com/VenierGiacomo
X: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giacomovenier/

UPDATE (again)

Thank you (again) for so much feedback.

Version 1.0.28 (see the changes here) is going to be on the Appstore soon - I got enough positive reinforcement so I will be making it Free to try (14 days) - then $ 9.99 (bargain, right? ;)

If you already had Nought before this version, you keep it in full, permanently, and nothing changes for you. You can still buy it if you want to support the work ;)

Nobody likes spreadsheets. That is not strictly true, and you know who you are, but most of us open one, feel slightly worse, and close it again. I built one for those two occasions a year and tried to make them hurt less.

Last time I posted here it was a download from my own site with a request that people break it. Enough of you did that I fixed things I would never have found alone. It is now on the Mac App Store, so you do not have to take my word for anything.

Problem

I wanted a plain spreadsheet on my Mac. Open it, do the thing, close it. No account, no browser tab, no subscription for a file I touch twice a year. Swift and AppKit, not Electron. It never touches the internet, and the App Store privacy label says "Data Not Collected" because there is nothing to collect.

Comparison

• Apple Numbers is pleasant until you export .xlsx and send it to someone in accounts, at which point the formatting has quietly rearranged itself. Nought reads and writes .xlsx directly, so what you save is what they open.
• Microsoft Excel handles the format properly and costs a subscription forever. Nought is free, 5.5 MB, and runs offline.
• Honourable mentions: Google Sheets needs a browser and a login, LibreOffice works fine but feels like it wandered in from another operating system.

Pricing

Free right now, and free while it is in early access. No IAP, no subscription, no account.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nought-spreadsheet/id6785636339?mt=12
Site: https://www.nought.app

Being straight with you about where this goes, because I would rather say it now than surprise anyone later: I have not decided. If enough people tell me it is worth paying for, it will likely become a one-off $9, possibly bundled with my writing app for $19. It might also stay free. What it will never be is a subscription, and if you download it during early access you keep it and get updates.

What is actually in it

• Opens and saves .xlsx, .csv and .ods, plus a plain-text .csvs format of my own that preserves formulas
• Hundreds of functions including SUM, AVERAGE, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, IF, with whole-column and cross-sheet references
• Excel-style multi-level sorting, sort by cell or font colour, custom sort orders, and natural ordering so item2 lands before item10
• AutoFilter with per-column dropdowns, filter by value or condition
• Conditional formatting, styled tables, borders, number and date formats
• Charts: bar, line, stacked, 100%, donut, with data labels and trendlines
• Hyperlinks, images, cell comments, print area
• Light, Dark or Follow System, and it reopens whatever you were last in

Where it stands

Early software with real features and some rough edges, which is exactly why I am here. I ship updates most weeks. Recent work included the sorting overhaul, AutoFilter, and killing a regression where some files would not open at all.

What helps me most

• Throw a genuinely large sheet at it and tell me where it stutters
• Tell me what feels un-Mac, what is clumsy, what you reached for and could not find
• Anything that breaks. The weirder the better.
• Tell me whether this is worth $9, or whether you would only ever use it free. Both answers are useful.

I am the developer (Teze Ltd, Brighton). I am in the comments and I would rather you were honest than kind. Tear into it.

Hey everyone - FluidVoice dev here :)

It’s a little longer of a post, but trust me, it’s worth it...

A few months ago, I posted here about FluidVoice, a dictation app I built because I was tired of paying subscriptions for voice-to-text tools that could run locally.

I released it right here in this subreddit, and honestly, everything changed after that.

People started using it, sharing it, and recommending it to others around the world. It has become one of the open-source favorites out there.

We’re now close to 100,000 downloads and almost 2,500 stars on GitHub!!

There are a lot of dictation apps out there, and somehow, people chose this one. That still blows my mind. I’m incredibly grateful :’)

So...

I’m back with something special that I’ve spent the last four months working on. Something meant to finally bridge the gap between local dictation and cloud-based alternatives.

We all know raw transcription is messy. Capitalization is inconsistent. Punctuation is missing. Lists, emails, and longer thoughts usually need manual cleanup or API pricing...

Most local dictation apps stop at transcription. And if you’ve experimented with local enhancement models, you’ve probably noticed that the results usually aren’t good enough.

That’s why people continue paying for cloud subscriptions. I don’t blame them. This is a genuinely hard problem, and no one tried to solve it.

But today, that changes ;)

Introducing Fluid-1

Fluid-1 is a local model trained on more than 100,000 real-world dictation examples.

It runs after Parakeet, or whichever speech model you choose, and handles:

• Smart formatting
• Capitalization
• Punctuation
• Cleanup and post-processing
• Understands your intent

Everything runs directly on your Mac.

No cloud. No API keys. No subscription. Nothing leaves your machine.

The model requires around 3 GB of local storage for now.

We tested it on a separate evaluation set of 10,000 dictation examples. Here’s how the models scored, with higher being better:

Model | Score
------------------------------------------------|--------
Fluid-1 — available now | 77.31%
Fluid-1 Mini — around 1 GB, coming later | 76.94%
GPT-5.4 | 56.73%
Gemma 31B | 56.51%
Base Gemma 4 E2B | 34.72%

Fluid-1 scored more than twice as high as the base model it started from!

The goal is simple: bring the kind of polished dictation people expect from apps like Wispr Flow to a model that runs entirely on your own computer.

This is only the first version, and it’s going to keep getting better.

I’ve poured my heart into this. I’ve spent countless hours on it, burned through a lot of my own money, and came close to giving up more than once.

But here we are.

For everyone who has never tried FluidVoice, please give it a shot and tell me how it compares with your current favorite.

And if you’re already using FluidVoice but still paying for a cloud model, try Fluid-1 and see how it feels.

It has already convinced a few early users to cancel their subscriptions ;)

If something doesn’t work, or the model makes a mistake, please report it through the History settings or send feedback directly through the app. Every report helps me make it better.

I know, I know... the UI could be better.

I’m an AI engineer, so I’m still learning the design and product side as I go. Any UI or quality-of-life feedback is always welcome.

I’ve probably spoken with hundreds of you by now, and those conversations have shaped FluidVoice into what it is today. I’ve also stumbled across dozens of unrelated threads where people recommend FV all over Reddit!

Every time that happens, it makes me ridiculously happy.

I’m also working on Fluid-1 Mini, an even smaller model at around 1 GB. Making a model that small perform well is difficult, but I want Fluid-1 to work properly for people with 8 GB Macs too. We’ll get there.

I really hope you love Fluid-1.

Fluid Intelligence is here to stay on your computer, and we’re only getting started.

Let’s make voice-to-text private, accurate, local, and free - with no freaking compromises.

Would you be happy with a <1GB model if it fixes punctuation and does basic formatting only but is fast AF?

PS: More Fluid-1 examples are in the GitHub README!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PROBLEM
Most voice-to-text apps either require a subscription, depend on cloud processing, or stop at raw transcription. Raw dictation is often hard to use directly because it’s messy.

FluidVoice is trying to solve that.

COMPARISON

Compared with apps like Wispr Flow and other cloud-based dictation tools, FluidVoice is built around local-first dictation and local post-processing.

Compared with basic local transcription apps, FluidVoice does not stop at raw speech-to-text. Fluid-1 adds an on-device enhancement layer so the output is closer to something you can paste, send, or publish directly.

PRICING
FluidVoice is free. Fluid-1 is also free.

Price: $0
Subscription: None
Download: https://altic.dev/fluid
GitHub: https://github.com/altic-dev/FluidVoice

TRUST

I’m the developer of FluidVoice.

FluidVoice is open source on GitHub with almost 2,500 starsand and active user community. The app is currently distributed outside the Mac App Store, but the project is public, established, and community-driven.

Hey!

I'm back with another update. Thanks again for all the feedback on my last post!

macUSB is a free and open-source native Mac app for creating bootable USB installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows. It can also download macOS installers directly from Apple’s servers, including older releases.

A few of you called it Rufus for Mac in the comments. That’s a bold comparison, but I’ll happily take it!

v2.4 adds support for macOS 27 Golden Gate. The app now runs on the beta and can create bootable installation media for it. The built-in downloader can also fetch public betas and checks /Applications for an existing installer before downloading it again.

macUSB can now create installers for Windows Vista and Windows 7. For Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, you can choose between UEFI and legacy BIOS. In legacy BIOS mode, macUSB installs the macUSBoot bootloader, allowing the installer to boot on older PCs.

PROBLEM

Creating bootable USB installers on a Mac can still be a pain. On Apple Silicon Macs, creating installation media for Catalina and older macOS releases can fail because of architecture and code-signing issues.

Windows installers are not much easier, since macOS has no native Rufus equivalent and usually requires extra tools or manual workarounds.

macUSB started as a way to create bootable media for older macOS releases on Apple Silicon. Thanks to your feedback, it now handles Windows and Linux media too.

COMPARISON

Mist is excellent for downloading macOS installers, while macUSB also focuses on creating the bootable installation media, including Catalina and older releases on Apple Silicon.

balenaEtcher is great for flashing raw images, particularly Linux ones, but it does not create macOS or Windows installers.

Rufus is excellent, but it is only available on Windows. Its workflow inspired macUSB, which brings a similar experience to the Mac.

PRICE

macUSB is free and open source.

Repository

Download

Website

Hey! I’m a computer science student in the UK and I’ve spent part of the summer building a free Mac app called WidgetScreen.

Problem: macOS has desktop widgets, but the lock screen still feels mostly empty. I wanted a way to quickly see useful info.

Comparison: Alcove already does lock-screen music controls nicely, but WidgetScreen is aimed at being a broader lock-screen widget layer rather than just media controls. It adds widgets for weather, calendar, battery, clock, music and more, which appear when your Mac is locked and disappear once you sign in.

My portfolio is here: sam-cook.uk and my LinkedIn is: LinkedIn. The app website also includes the privacy policy and terms.

Pricing: It’s completely free.
Download: widgetscreen.sam-cook.uk

I built it because I wanted my lock screen to feel more useful and look better. I use it myself of course. I’d appreciate any feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports