# Your Mac Is Missing All of These  **Channel:** Snazzy Labs **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npxlJdxSv4A **Date processed:** 2026-04-14 --- ## Summary Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs presents 12 Mac apps, arguing that the AI-driven development boom has produced a wave of high-quality niche Mac software — many free or open source — built by skilled developers who can now justify spending a weekend on something they wouldn't have spent months on before. The apps range from an on-device AI text auto-completer (Cotypist) to mouse/trackpad configuration (LinearMouse), covering productivity, screenshots, speech-to-text, window management, focus tools, and quality-of-life utilities. Most are free or very cheap, and several are open source. The video emphasizes practical demonstration over hype, showing each app's actual workflow integration. --- ## Key Points - Cotypist provides system-wide AI text auto-completion using periodic screenshots and clipboard context, all running locally on-device — free, from the Timing developers - DockDoor (free, open source) replaces Alt-Tab with Liquid Glass-styled window previews in the dock and an augmented Command-Tab, superior to the older Alt-Tab app - TypeWhisper offers free, open-source speech-to-text matching paid alternatives like SuperWhisper, with support for local models (OpenAI Whisper, Apple Speech), cloud via Groq, and post-processing through LLMs - Hyperkey remaps Caps Lock to all four modifier keys simultaneously (Shift+Option+Command+Control), making virtually every "Super+key" shortcut available — Caps Lock still works on quick press - AntiNote ($5) is a scratch pad with embedded math (variables, currency conversion, unit conversion), auto-lists, clipboard paste mode, and timers including Pomodoro - Shottr is a screenshot tool with blur (text-aware), highlighting, counters, magnification, scroll capture, OCR text extraction, backdrop/wallpaper matching, rulers, and drag-and-drop — mostly free - Monocle ($9) dims/blurs background windows with optional mono (black-and-white) mode for everything except the active window, with per-app ignore rules - LinearMouse (free, open source) fixes macOS's treatment of mice and trackpads as identical by offering per-device settings — particularly disabling pointer acceleration, reversing scroll direction for mice only, and adding universal back/forward buttons --- ## Detailed Notes ### AI-Assisted Mac Software Boom [0:00–0:42] The AI development wave has increased both volume and quality of Mac software. Skilled developers now use AI tools to build niche apps in weekends that they wouldn't have justified spending months on. ### Cotypist — System-Wide AI Auto-Complete [0:47–3:44] Free app from the Timing developers. Runs an on-device LLM for text prediction anywhere you type. Takes periodic screenshots and reads clipboard (with permission) to build context over time. Nothing leaves the Mac — verifiable with Little Snitch. Tab accepts one word, tilde accepts the full suggestion. Most useful when typing about something visible on screen (e.g., product descriptions from a webpage you're viewing). Less useful for unpredictable personal text. ### Folder Peek — Menu Bar Folder Access [3:52–5:33] Free. Puts any folder in the menu bar with nested browsing, thumbnails, drag-and-drop, and file actions. Can be configured as an app launcher by whitelisting specific files in the Applications folder. Supports custom icons, sort orders, and selective file display. ### DockDoor — Window Previews and Command-Tab Enhancement [7:30–9:44] Free and open source. Inspired by Alt-Tab but with Liquid Glass styling. Shows window previews on dock hover. Augments Command-Tab to show individual windows within each app, navigable via Command+A. Includes music mini player and calendar view in the dock. ### TypeWhisper — Free Speech-to-Text [9:50–13:03] Free and open source. Comparable quality to SuperWhisper ($250 license). Supports multiple engines: OpenAI Whisper (local), Apple's on-device model (near-instant but less polished grammar), and cloud options via Groq (fractions of a cent). Can chain Apple Speech for speed with LLM post-processing (OpenAI/Claude) for grammar cleanup. Includes snippet expansion (time/date/signatures via voice keywords) and on-device formatting via Apple Intelligence. ### Hyperkey — Universal Modifier Remapping [13:34–15:22] Remaps Caps Lock to press all four modifier keys simultaneously. Quick press still toggles Caps Lock. The LED correctly reflects state (at least on Magic Keyboard). Enables a whole namespace of unoccupied "Super+key" shortcuts across all apps. ### AntiNote — Powered Scratch Pad ($5) [15:27–21:16] Markdown support, embedded math engine with variables and live recalculation, currency/unit conversion, sum/average aggregation (with comment-out syntax), auto-lists with checkboxes, clipboard paste mode (auto-captures successive copies), and timers (custom + Pomodoro). iOS app coming. Extensive settings. Positioned as a scratch pad, not a notes app. ### QLMarkdown — Quick Look for Markdown [21:21–22:23] Free. Adds formatted Markdown rendering to Finder's Quick Look (spacebar preview). Includes table of contents, light/dark mode toggle, raw text view, search, zoom, and export. ### Monocle — Focus/Distraction Dimmer ($9) [22:24–24:54] Activated by shaking the mouse cursor. Dims, blurs, and optionally desaturates (mono mode) all background windows. Configurable blur intensity, tint color, grain, crossfade duration. Can auto-hide dock and menu bar. Per-app ignore rules — e.g., Music can be exempted so switching to it disables the dimming. ### Alcove — Dynamic Island for Mac ($15) [24:58–26:29] Adds a notch to any Mac (even those without one). Hover to see calendar; swipe down for music controls. Passive notifications for volume changes, brightness, AirPods connection with battery percentage. Replaces macOS Tahoe's volume/brightness indicators. Limited feature set but described as flawlessly executed and indispensable. ### Shottr — Advanced Screenshots (Free/$12) [26:34–29:37] Augments macOS screenshots (Shift-Cmd-1/2 instead of 3/4). Editor features: text-aware blur, highlighter, numbered counters, magnifier, backdrop matching (wallpaper/gradient/solid), horizontal/vertical rulers (points or pixels), arrows with customizable style, text bubbles, crop-on-select. Scroll capture for long screenshots. OCR text extraction. Copy-and-dismiss workflow. Drag-and-drop from viewer. Most features free; $12 for full version. ### MiddleDrag — Middle Click for Trackpad (Free, Open Source) [29:43–30:40] Three-finger click = middle mouse button. Three-finger drag = middle-click drag. Useful for browsers, CAD, video editors. Currently broken on macOS 26.4 Tahoe; fix expected since it's in active development. ### LinearMouse — Per-Device Mouse Settings (Free, Open Source) [30:45–33:00] Fixes three annoyances: (1) disables pointer acceleration for mice (keeps it for trackpad), (2) reverses scroll direction for mice only (natural scrolling stays on trackpad), (3) adds universal back/forward button support across all apps (not just Safari). Supports per-device, per-app, and per-display configurations. --- ## Connections *Links to related vault notes will be added here* --- ## My Notes *Space for your own thoughts, reactions, and connections after watching* --- ## Full Transcript <details> <summary>Click to expand transcript</summary> [0:00] The last year of Mac software has been really fun and exciting thanks to LLMs and AI. Because, well, on one hand, there was a huge volume of just slop coming out for the Mac that is no good at all from people like me that don't really know anything about development. But on the other hand, there were a bunch of apps created with the help of AI, not by AI, from skilled developers that would not have spent weeks or months of their time developing something niche, but now might spend a weekend or a couple of weeks building something out with AI tools. And so the quality of Mac software has increased with an enormous increase in volume. And while I've got 12 apps today, some built with the help of AI, some not built with AI, some brand new, just a couple of weeks old, and some super, super old, but they're all pretty fabulous. And I bet you haven't heard of them. [0:47] Our first app is Cotypist, it's something that when I saw it, I thought, wow, no, I do not want that, but I continued to see everybody rave about it, and so I was like, fine, fine, I'll give it a shot, and well, everybody else was right. It's bloody fantastic. It comes from the developers of Timing, and I think it's worth every dollar that it doesn't cost, because it's free. Hear me out, and this is why I was not too excited about it. It is an AI LLM style thing, but listen, it is basically text auto-completion for your Mac, wherever you type. That doesn't sound that cool, and let me demonstrate why that's not that cool, but then I'll demonstrate why it is really cool. So I want to say my name is, there you go, it's automatically suggested Quinn Nelson. That's partially because I fed it that in its initial prompt, but also because, well, it's observed what I've been doing, and that's what makes this app so cool. But functionally, let me show you how it works. If I want to accept this suggestion, every time I hit the tab key, it accepts one word at a time. And every time I hit the tilde key, it accepts the whole phrase. That's it. That's all it does. But you'll find that if in this context, like let's say I want to say I don't know my favorite color is orange and I love the C. My favorite color is okay I can type O orange and I like the see—see what I mean, when you have like something that goes beyond what the standard LLM predicts it's not very good, it's faster to just type it. But let me show you where that changes because boy does it change. [2:14] I am going to open up a Safari tab and I'm going to go to my web store, Copland Supply, and I'm going to open up information about our Platinum Pad desk mat. This thing is brand new, it's fantastic, you should check it out, and there's a bunch of information about it. Okay, this is where Cotypist is so cool. If I come into the context menu, it will use and take periodic screenshots of everything that I'm doing on my Mac. And it not only uses that to provide input at the moment, but it builds context over time. It also, if I give it permission, can look at my clipboard. Now, all of this stuff is local, nothing ever leaves your Mac. You can use Little Snitch or any app you want to verify that that is the case. This thing does not phone home. The model runs on device, all the prediction is done on device, everything is stored on device, the snapshots are on device, it's all on your computer. But this is what I can do now. I can say the Copland Supply Platinum Pad is a desk mat—see what I mean, this is where it gets so cool—that is both beautiful and functional. Let's say I want to talk about it comes in two layouts, there you go, chronology edition, and see this is where it gets so exciting because it's just observing everything that you're doing on your screen and so when you're typing an email it automatically knows their name, it automatically knows the context of the conversation, it provides all of this so quickly. And when you—it takes a little bit of practice because you have to know when to listen to the model and when to just type what you want to type, but it's so good at not only initiating the charge, but allowing you to type so much more quickly. It is so freaking cool. Give it a shot. It's free. There's literally nothing to lose. And boy, will you love it. It is fabulous. [3:52] Our next app is called Folder Peek. It's hardly gorgeous, but when it's free and functional, can you really complain? In short, it allows you to put any folder you want on your Mac inside your menu bar. And you might be thinking, well, I can just pin something to Finder. And that's true, you can, but it's not always immediately accessible. When you're already doing something in Finder, it's way nicer to be able to just go here and let me show you how great it is by just demonstrating. So I have two different servers here and I have two iCloud Drive folders here, but they're all folders I use every single day and they are just boom, they're there in my menu bar now all the time. I can come in here and if I find a project folder I want to open, well, I just tap it and it instantly opens inside of the Finder revealing all of my files. But I don't even have to do that. I never have to interface with the Finder at all if I don't want to. I can come back over to the same thing, go to exports, and then boom, there's an MP4 file that not only does it show me a thumbnail of, but I can move it to the trash, I can copy it, I can share it, or I can just hold it and drag it wherever I want to. This is what I mean. It works in conjunction with the Finder, not as a Finder replacement. [4:54] Now, you can get really, really, really powerful with it. I haven't chosen to, but some people do some pretty nutty things. So inside here, you can not only choose the sort order of the folders that you choose to place in your menu bar, but you can even edit their appearance. If they have different icons or symbols, you can change their size, the order in which they display things, and you can choose whether or not they're nested. Mine are all nested, but you don't have to nest it. And if you don't nest it, you can use pretty neat stuff like selective file display. So you don't have to show every single file that's inside of a folder, you can choose what you want to show. And so I have seen people that will do like the applications folder. They put the applications folder up there, but then they only whitelist a few apps available in that folder there. And then suddenly, well, you have an app launcher from your menu bar. [7:30] So there's this app that's been around for a while, it's called Alt-Tab, and it emulates one of the few things that Windows does well. Look, Windows sucks and I hate it, but I will admit that the Alt-Tab functionality where you can see all of your active open windows is pretty cool. The Mac does have Command-Tab which allows you to toggle through open applications and while many people don't know this, inside of an application with multiple windows you can actually tap Command-Tilde to toggle between those two windows. But if they're nested or in different spaces you can't see them all at one time, you just have to like randomly hit Tilde until you get to the window that you want inside of your browser or whatever app—it's not a great system. And so Alt-Tab has been around for the Mac to basically emulate the behavior on Windows, but holy crap, it's ugly. [8:13] And so there's a better app, it's called DockDoor. DockDoor is fully free and open source, and you can tell that it took heavy inspiration from Alt-Tab because even visually, it still sings like—not just the traffic buttons here, but this little purple quit button that quits an application entirely, that is just ripped straight from Alt-Tab. But here's the thing about DockDoor that it integrates and innovates upon that I don't think Alt-Tab has ever or will ever be likely to do. One, visually it matches Liquid Glass, which I think is very nice. And also inside of the dock, it shows you window previews. So inside of the dock, I can go to Safari and it shows me both of the windows that I have open. I can tap it, I can go from here to say, okay, go full screen with this. It's really, really nice to be able to do that. And there's even things like a mini player for music and a calendar view for your calendar. It's really, really awesome. [9:03] And well, it goes even further because if I open up the DockDoor settings here, I can come into Command-Tab. I have to enable the enhancements, which requests that I quit the app. But then once I do that, and I open up DockDoor again, check this out. I can do Command-Tab, and it augments my existing Command-Tab. So it shows me, hey, here's not just your app switcher, but the windows within that individual app. And I can click them with my mouse, or I can, while holding down the Command key, as I'm doing, I can just press A, and that will toggle through my specific windows. Oh my gosh, it's fabulous because it integrates Command-Tab, which I love, and Command-Tilde, but visually all in one thing that's better than Alt-Tab and better than Windows, and it's free, and it's open source. Wow! [9:50] Speech-to-text apps are a dime a dozen for the Mac nowadays, but they all vary in cost, quality, and speed. As you can tell, that was super crazy fast and accurate. That was done by SuperWhisper, an application that is fabulous, but had to send my voice to the cloud for processing, wasn't done on device, and, well, let's just say it's not very affordable. Had I known when I bought this about a year ago that TypeWhisper would be available free and open source with nearly as good a performance, boy I would have waited. But watch this: Speech-to-text apps are a dime a dozen for the Mac nowadays, but they all vary in cost, quality, and speed. Takes a little bit more time to process, but that is exactly the same output, identical, and it was all done on device for free using an open source model and an open source application. That's what's so cool about TypeWhisper. [10:41] But the other thing that's cool is it is crazy powerful, even more so than many paid applications. So I can choose my default engine that I wish to use. That was using OpenAI Whisper, which I think is a pretty good trade-off between performance and speed. Apple's on-device model for Tahoe 26, which is not the same as the dictation button. It's completely separate. Apple's developed it. They haven't brought it as like the main input, and I don't know why they really need to figure it out. They use it when you're talking to Siri, but that's it. Check this out. "Speech to text apps are a dime a dozen for the Mac nowadays, but they all vary in cost, quality, and speed." It's like instant. The thing is, the grammar is not quite as good, it does often misinterpret words here and there. Not gravely poorly, but like it's not proofread. [11:25] That's what's great about this app though, is I can use Apple Speech as my default engine, but then I can send the finished text to another service for post-processing. So I could send it to OpenAI or Claude to make it look and sound more like me with the grammar that I use because those models are trained on that. Super, super cool. I can even come down into integrations. And if I don't want to run a local model or I want to run a more powerful local model, I can do that. I can also choose to run stuff via the cloud. And so I could use, for example, Groq—not Twitter Grok, it's a different Groq—that would allow me to run a cloud model, say the same exact model that SuperWhisper is using, V3 Turbo from Whisper. I could run that on Groq. I think they cost like four cents per 1,000 minutes pay as you go or something like that. So I don't remember what it is, but point in case, I did the math and for the $250 SuperWhisper license that I paid for years ago, I would have to record 6,250 hours of audio pay as you go in order to pass that cloud transcription fee that I paid. So yeah, you could say that this is a more affordable way to do it, but again, fully free on device without ever leaving the device. [12:36] But it's got a bunch of other cool things too that I haven't seen in many other apps. So for example, I can say "it is current time" and it pastes the real current time on my computer, 4:41 PM. And that's because it has the ability to do snippet expansion with not just time and date, but other things as well. And you can do keywords or phrases or signatures all controlled by your voice keywords. Pretty darn neat, but it doesn't stop there either. So on-device models like Apple Intelligence are really good at basic formatting. So I could create a list, let's say, eggs, salami, steamed ham, Diet Pepsi, and a big old hug from Peeps. That is just an ugly grody list. However, when I select it and then choose to do on-device processing, I can say "format that as a list" and check it out. Boom, it's done all on-device via Apple Intelligence. [13:34] Every single time without fail, I do one of these videos, somebody goes into the comments and they're like, "Quinn, this is all great stuff, but how do you remember all the keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys, there's too many of them." And the answer is, I don't. I cheat using an app called Hyperkey. This is indispensable. Okay, so I am here inside of my SuperWhisper settings, that speech-to-text app I just showed you, and you'll see that my toggle recording hotkey is Option, Command, Control, Shift, Space. That is insane. I have never once pressed that on my keyboard because if I did—like, I did it with one hand, but only barely. You see, Hyperkey is the app that you want because it allows you to remap a physical key on your keyboard, and it should be the Caps Lock, and I'll tell you why, to be every single modifier key pressed down. So Shift, Option, Command, and Control. Okay, I had to look down 'cause why would you ever push all of those at the same time? Well, this key can. And so you'll find that most good like standard shortcuts and hotkeys that are already taken by the system or other apps—nobody is making pre-mapped shortcuts and hotkeys that use every single modifier key. They're all available. And so you can do Super, which is what I call it, Super-A, Super-D, Super-S, Super-B, Super-Space. They're all available. And literally all you do, watch this, is Caps, Space. And it does all five. It's fantastic. It works really, really well. [14:56] Now here's why you should do it to the Caps Lock key. First of all, the Caps Lock key is stupid and you should never really ever need to use it. But the second reason is because this app allows you to still use the Caps Lock key. If I press it quickly, it toggles Caps on and off. But if I hold it down, then it doesn't. And what's really neat is that even though I have this Bluetooth keyboard, the system actually reflects state. So I always thought the Caps Lock key was like a standard, like on off, like you press it and turn. No, no, no, like it's communicating with macOS. If I hold the Caps Lock key down and use it as a Super key, the LED doesn't turn on. It's great. That might only be with the Magic Keyboard, I will admit. [15:27] The next app is, well, I guess our first paid app of the day, but it's worth every single one of the mere $5 reduced that it costs. I've been a user of it for years. It is indispensable to me. I love it. And I summon it with Super-N. See, Hyperkey is really, really great. Okay, this is called AntiNote, and it is basically a notepad where you can just ramble on a bunch of disorganized thoughts you want to put them and you can swipe through them to see them chronologically in order. These are not my real notes because if you saw the real ones I'd be committed somewhere. This is just a notepad where you just put random crap. I've created some fake notes to show you all the features of AntiNote because it is crazy super powerful for just being a dumb little notepad. [16:05] So you can see that it supports Markdown. I could do subheadings. Okay, there you go. And if I swipe back, this is where stuff really gets cool. I can do math inside of my notes. So I type "math" and then colon and then the whole rest of the sheet does math for me. So I can type out $14.99 for polysorbate, $6.49 for TSPP, and $8.50 for amber bottles, and it tabulates it to $29.98. See that? It does it again here with multiplication. I can even do currency conversions. So I can say like, I don't know, $1,470—oh, I did conversion. USD to, yeah, Great British Pounds. Sure. Ooh, 1,100 Great British Pounds. I can go down with my keyboard and I can do weight. So like 14.7 ounces to grams. And there we go. 416 grams and 74. [16:55] Okay. You're like, big whoop. Spotlight can do that. Yes, that's true that it can, but Spotlight cannot do this. So you'll see that I still have "math" at the top. If you don't have math, nothing happens. So you got to put math. Then once you put math, it's like, okay, we're going to do math. I can set and establish variables, which is pretty cool. So cost per kit, every time I type that out, it's going to be $18.37. So if I want to find out what the margin of disk utility will be I can do my retail price—mine, well, that's actually set a new variable because then we can do cool stuff later on. So let's do my margin: retail price minus my cost per kit minus shipping cost. See that, the app even auto completes it for you, which is pretty awesome. There you go, twenty-three dollars and four cents. But that's not quite enough money. I want a little bit more. Why don't I do a new margin and I'm going to put in a new price. So let's say, I don't know, $54.74, okay? Minus my cost per kit, minus shipping, and boom. Yeah, $28.78. That's more than 23. Even a dum-dum like me knows that's good. So I'm gonna say, let's do my margin, subtract my new margin, and yeah, $5.74 more. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. So thanks for paying me more money. [18:07] Okay, so there you go. And conversely, I can change any random variables. So if I go, okay, my retail price is actually going to go down to $46. It changes all the math real time. Really, really cool. But it doesn't just do math. It does other things. I am here inside of my little Copland Supply order summary. These are how many orders I did each day. I lied. I am going to do more math. Check this out. I can type "sum" and boom, it adds up all the numbers, except for you'll notice the ones that are marked out with backslashes, like because they're commented out just like HTML. Pretty neat. So it ignores the things that are bracketed up, but it does tabulate everything else. But it's not just sum. I could do my average with AVG. And it adds it to the bottom. 57.82 orders on average every single day. Pretty darn neat. [18:53] Again, you're like, okay, this is so much math, nerd. Do something else. Okay, well, watch this. If I type "list" and then type colon, it's going to automatically create a list with every single one of these things. And I can check them off manually. Or I can go backslash X to type things off. And it's super fast, works really, really well. And while there is not an iOS app currently, it is coming. And so having the ability to run like easy lists like this, rather than have to use a to-do list, is going to absolutely be something that I will do every single time. [19:23] But that's not it either. I can start pasting. This is freaking nuts. So watch this. I'm going to type "paste." And now it is auto pasting my clipboard. So I'm going to go to Copland Supply and I'm just going to start copying crap. Okay, so I'm going to go to these keycaps here. I'm going to copy this line. I'm going to copy this line. I'm going to copy this line. And if I hide the window, you'll see that it has copied every single line item individually. It just keeps copying everything I copy like a copy and pasteboard. So neat. And then to stop, all I do is type stop. Just kidding. You don't do that. You have to hit the button that's being hidden by this little autocomplete thing. Stop, Andy. No, leave me alone. Too many things are happening. That's fine. We can leave autocomplete on. I don't care. [20:06] It can do timers as well. So I can type "timer 5" and check this out, a five minute timer has begun. I could do "timer pomo" if I want to do a Pomodoro timer, so 25 on, five minute break. And what happens when the timer goes off is really satisfying. So let me show you this. Oh, you can also do like timer pause with "timer P" or timer stop with "timer S." It's great, but let's do "timer five seconds." Okay, so it's gonna go five, four, three, two, one and it goes full screen. It makes a beautiful noise and it says "timer complete." Wild. Wildlife fact file: pikas collect and dry flowers to store for winter. It gives you a nice little warning, a nice little informational thing every single time you do that. [20:49] Of course you can disable that, and AntiNote has a ton of awesome settings where you can go super into detail about like what do you want to work here? What hotkeys? What commands? What behaviors? What standard timers? What's your standard settings? Do you want to do a Pomodoro timer? Custom? Like, holy crap, you can get really out into the weeds on the settings on here. This isn't like a notes app, okay? You don't want to leave stuff in here forever, but it's great for like, jot something down, and I'll come back to it later, and quick little tabulation. It's a scratch pad, and it's a really, really good scratch pad. It is AntiNote. It is $5, and I think you should get it. [21:21] In a new world of agentic AI, Markdown files are becoming increasingly common. I write most stuff in Markdown anyway, but the thing about Markdown inside of Quick Look is that, well, it looks like butt. But it doesn't need to. I am actually going to install this utility real-time to show you how… Come on. Okay. I'm sorry, Xcode. Please, I'll bow down to you. Okay, now I'll run this again. There we go. Okay, we're going to install this app. And this is so neat because it allows you to view formatted Markdown inside of a Quick Look right from the Finder. It works really, really well once it installs. Da-da-da-da! It's done. And now check this out. I can go in, I tap the spacebar, and boom! It's formatted Markdown. And it looks fantastic. Not only do I have a table of contents, which is really, really handy, but I can change from light mode to dark mode. I can come in here and view the original text if I so wish. And there is, if you choose to enable them—I don't generally—there is the ability to navigate through this Markdown really easily. Searching and zooming and viewing and exporting and everything all from Quick Look. [22:24] Our next app is not free. It's $9 and it only does one thing, which makes that nine bucks seem a bit expensive. But while there are free and open source alternatives, they are not as functional and they are certainly not as beautiful, which I think makes this app worth the money. It's called Monocle. Have you ever been distracted by all the crap on your desktop? Too many active windows, too much stuff going on, you need to just focus on one thing? Well, with Monocle, you just shake your mouse cursor and suddenly your screen has this beautiful gradient that fades in from bottom to top with a nice film grain, a nice accent tint, and nice blurring to the background, allowing you to focus on your work. When you want to get rid of it, you just shake your mouse cursor again and it goes away. [23:01] But that's not all Monocle does. It's a lot more powerful than that. You can come into the settings here and change the way that it's displayed. You can go from this ambient mode, which I prefer, to a deep mode that has this nice film grain and tint applied everywhere. You can change how much blurring there is. I like to leave it quite minimal, but you can go to the point where you can basically only see the active window. There is a tint option. You can choose to have a ton of color, which I think looks hideous, or not at all. I like a nice subtle tint. And then you can also change the tint color. These are the system colors, and so you can change that. There is not a color picker, unfortunately, so you are stuck to these colors that they've selected. I think blue tends to look the best with the most majority of content, and you can choose your grain quantity so that you can make it look really crunchy or not grainy at all. I like a medium grain here. [23:48] But this is where stuff gets really cool. You can choose to auto hide your dock and your menu bar when you enter this mode. So I don't have my dock enabled, but you can see my menu bar has disappeared and when I disable Monocle it comes back. If you want to focus on your content and get stuff out of the way, that's a really, really neat feature. But there's more. Mono is probably the best feature in my opinion where it turns everything else black and white, allowing you to focus on your content. So you can see there's a lot of color back here but when I turn this on, everything grays out except for the active window. The color stays there but it disappears everywhere else, allowing you to focus what is there, and you still have a nice subtle tint which is pretty cool. There are more settings as well so you can choose to have the functionality changed inside the menu bar. You can choose to have it focused on just a specific window or an entire app. You can change the crossfade duration. And my favorite feature is that you can choose to ignore certain applications just by entering the menu. So if I say like, here I am in Music and I say ignore, well, every time Music is the active app, it's not engaged. But then when I move back to another app, it has that beautiful crossfade and goes back into the same mode. I can go to Safari and it changes the mode. I go back to Music, turns everything off. [24:58] Now for the most controversial pick of the whole video. The keen eye amongst you might have noticed that despite using a Mac mini and clearly an external monitor, I have got a notch at the top of my screen. What's that all about? Well, it's from an app called Alcove that costs $15 and it is one of many apps that exist that are designed to augment the notch on Apple's laptops like Apple does on the iPhone with the Dynamic Island that for some reason they choose not to do on the Mac. There are a ton of them, many of them are open source, some of them are crazy powerful. Alcove is not only one of the most expensive but it's also one of the most limited. And yet, it has become indispensable to me because it works flawlessly. It feels like Apple designed it. [25:35] All I have to do is take my mouse cursor, drag it up to the top window, and I immediately get a display of my calendar. When calendar events are about to come up, it shows me a Dynamic Island-style notification that it's time for a meeting or for an event, and I also have music controls by swiping down. I can play, I can skip, I can next track. When I am playing, it shows me a nice little visualizer up top. That's about it. That's the only time you interact with the notch. Everything else is passive. So for example, when I change the volume, rather than using macOS Tahoe's horrible new volume indicator, it does it very seamlessly in this very visible notch at the top. When I change my display brightness, same thing. When I connect my AirPods, same thing. It shows me a visualization with the battery percentage. It is like the Dynamic Island, feature for feature, but on a Mac. And it works so well, and it's so seamless that yeah, I've added it to Macs that technically don't even have a notch because it's so much a part of now how I use macOS. [26:34] So you know how WinRAR is not free software but no Windows user has ever paid for WinRAR? Well there is a macOS equivalent called Shottr. Technically it's $12 but you can use it basically indefinitely with almost every feature for free. And it's really great because it augments something that Apple has already done really well in the system: screenshots, where Shift-Command-3 gives you a full screen screenshot and Shift-Command-4 allows you to make a selection. Shottr works exactly the same way. Shift-Command-1 is a full screen screenshot and Shift-Command-2 is a selection and it works quite literally identically to Apple's tool. The only difference comes into play once you're inside the editor, which is really powerful and the best way I can prove that is to just show you. [27:08] If you push B, you can blur specific stuff with a blur, but you can also choose to blur just the text or erase just the text and leave the images intact. Pretty cool, right? I can push H to use the highlighter, which allows me to quickly make a highlighted selection nice and smooth. I can use C to create a counter so that I can mark things that I'm referencing in documentation. I can press M to magnify a selection and then choose where to place my magnification and how large. I can do K to add a backdrop. I can match my desktop wallpaper. I can do a gradient. I can do a solid color. I can do one or two for horizontal and vertical rulers. So I've got 95 points there and vertically 131 points. It's the best measuring tool in mother friggin macOS. And by the way, I can do points or pixels as well. I can do A to add an arrow really quickly and easily. I can change the color of said arrow. I can change the shape and the fill of said arrow. I can do T to add text. Hello. I can change the style. I can give it a little dingleberry here so that I can use it as a text bubble. I can do V to make a selection. And then once I push Enter, it crops the image. It's so, so powerful and works crazy really well. [28:27] Honestly, I mean, that wasn't even the cool stuff. So like, let's see, I can do—let me make another selection here. I can do Command-C to copy and immediately dismiss that preview window once I've made the edits that I want to make, and then I can just paste it wherever I want. I can drag and drop it from this same viewer. So here you go. I can take this and boom, it's dragged and dropped into a specific file or web browser or window wherever else. Oh, scroll shot. Scroll shot's amazing. I don't know if I have it enabled to a hotkey, but check this out. Okay, ready? So I'm going to go here into Safari and I'm just going to go boom and it starts scrolling. I can push the Escape key and it creates a beautiful, seamless, long screenshot that I can then edit thereafter. It is so amazing. I can do text extraction. This I definitely do all the time. So check this out. If I come in here and go Super-T, I can go boom right there. Let's say this text is not selectable. It actually is now, but boom, I can paste it. And there you go. It's not 100% because that's a weird at symbol, but it works really, really well. TextSniper is a paid app and this basically does the same thing for free. It is so, so neat. Almost all of these features are free, but honestly, pay 12 bucks for it. It is a lifesaver and one of the best apps available on the Mac, period. [29:43] I've been doing this for 18 years and every single time we push the record button on the camera, something that was working before stops working. And that today is an application called MiddleDrag, which I've been using for a few weeks now and really like, but was broken this morning. Why? Well, it's because macOS 26.4 Tahoe installed overnight and well, guess what? It's broken inside of macOS 26.4 Tahoe. Luckily, it's a new app. It's in active development. And so I presume a fix will come soon. And I sure hope it does because it's great. Everybody knows that on the Magic Trackpad, you click with one finger, that's a left click. You click with two fingers, that's a right click. Well now you can click with three fingers and that adds a middle mouse click to the Magic Trackpad. Additionally, you can three-finger drag to manipulate objects using a middle click. This is fantastic because middle clicks on mice are nice. They're used not just in CAD apps, but in browsers, in video editors. And now using the power of free open source software, you can bring a middle click to your Mac, unless, well, it is what it is right now and it's kind of mining the zoom and yeah, please fix this. [30:45] All right, this last one's boring, but wait, don't go anywhere. Boring doesn't mean bad. You need this app. It's called LinearMouse. It's free. It's open source. It's fabulous. If you're one of many people that is now using a MacBook as your primary computer, or sometimes you plug it into a display, you've got a keyboard and mouse that are Bluetooth or whatever, you need this app because macOS treats input devices as basically the same. But the reality is, the trackpad on your laptop and a mouse, they're not the same. They shouldn't have the same default behaviors and settings, it makes no sense. And yet, well, that's how it is. Not so with LinearMouse, the app that fixes everything. [31:18] So I can come in here and set per-device settings, and I can get way more complex than that. I can set specific settings in given apps with certain displays, like it gets nuts. But there are three things that I do change for every mouse I add to the Mac. The first one is I turn off pointer acceleration which pisses me off on macOS and has for the decade that it's been implemented. It makes sense on a trackpad that you want the content to continue scrolling when you flick it because that makes sense, that's how it works on a phone. But on a mouse, I don't want the cursor to keep moving after I stop moving the mouse. That makes no freaking sense. Turn that off. Windows doesn't do it, macOS started it, it's dumb, it's bad, turn it off. And it makes the mousing experience so much better and so much more accurate. [31:59] Next, scrolling. I like natural scrolling on macOS, but I do not like reverse scrolling on my freaking mouse. Up going down and down going up makes no bloody sense. But if I disabled the setting in macOS, it disables not just for the mouse, but also for the trackpad. I don't want that. I like natural scrolling on the trackpad, but now using this setting, I can scroll down to go down and up to go up. Ho, ho, what a novel idea. [32:24] Last, buttons. Universal back buttons are basically not supported anywhere in macOS, even the Magic Trackpad doesn't support them. So for example, I can hit this back button and inside a Finder, nothing happens. It works in Safari, but not elsewhere. This allows you to have a universal backwards and forwards experience no matter your input device. And so if a window or an app supports going backwards and forwards, it will work all the time. So now I push the back button, I go back, back, forward, forward, back, forward, back. Ha ha, and I can do the same thing on the Magic Trackpad by swiping inside of the Finder to move in between pages. It's fantastic, it's crazy powerful. These are just the three things I changed, but you can do like freaking everything. It's a great app, it is boring, but you want it. [33:05] And well, I hope this video wasn't boring. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like. If you didn't, that other button works okay too. Let me know down in the comments below some of your favorite recent Mac apps, but most importantly, and as always, stay snazzy. </details>