Some third-party Mac apps I use

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July 22 2025

This morning I received an unsolicited email titled “Blog feature Suggestion”:

I have reviewed your blog and I think [Mac app] could be a perfect fit for it. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share a license key and a unique discount code for your blog, or answer any questions you might have.

Needless to say, the email author has not reviewed my blog, otherwise they would have noticed that I never take blog feature suggestions or solicit advertisers. The only thing I advertise here is myself and my own apps. Nonetheless, the email did inspire me to write a blog post about some third-party Mac apps that I use frequently. This blog post is sincere, unsolicited, and uncompensated. Note that the list below is partial and doesn’t attempt to include every app that I use, hence the “Some” specifier. In alphabetical order:

Alfred

Some people claim that macOS 26 Spotlight has “Sherlocked” apps like Alfred. I think that’s nonsense. In fact, most Sherlocking claims turn out to be nonsense. It may be fun to watch the WWDC keynote and immediately proclaim on social media which apps have been Sherlocked, but this is claim chowder, as they say.

Although I don’t take advantage of Alfred as much as I should, often forgetting about useful features, I still use it many times a day, every day. For example, I’ve set up multiple search engine queries to make up for Safari’s unfortunate lack of search engine customization (which I blame on monopolist Google’s massive annual payments to Apple). I use Alfred to search System Settings, because System Settings itself sucks at search (and sucks at everything else too). I have an Alfred workflow to toggle between light and dark mode appearance by typing “dark.” (I generally prefer light mode but use dark mode right before bed, right after waking up, and sometimes for software testing.)

BBEdit

It doesn’t suck. I use the venerable BBEdit in a number of different ways: to write HTML and JavaScript, to read plist files, to search log files, etc. Increasingly, I’m coming to rely on BBEdit for general plain text editing too, because TextEdit does suck now. (BBEdit can launch as fast as TextEdit if you disable SIP.) Only Apple can unsolve a solved problem such as text editing. TextEdit has become a buggy, unreliable mess as Apple has rewritten TextKit, I suppose to unify the Mac and iOS implementations. Maybe it works fine on iOS, but it’s hopelessly broken on Mac. This is a crying shame. Anyway, BBEdit to the rescue!

I’m still using BBEdit version 14, because I haven’t seen anything in the BBEdit 15 upgrade that I needed.

BetterSnapTool

BetterSnapTool has a number of features (and the developer’s other app BetterTouchTool has even more features), but I use only one them: double-clicking a window title bar to maximize it. macOS has this feature now too, but the problem with the built-in implementation is that the window doesn’t remember that it’s maximized, whereas it does with BetterSnapTool (FB16352998 Finder doesn’t remember window size after Double-click a window‘s title bar to Fill).

BusyCal

I abandoned Apple’s own iCal (now Calendar) app many years ago, way back in Mac OS X Leopard if I recall correctly. BusyCal is the closest to what iCal used to be, before it was ruined.

I’m still using an older version of BusyCal from 2023 and haven’t renewed. BusyCal is not a subscription/rental, and the license never expires, but the purchase provides only 18 months of free updates. Honestly, I preferred older versions of BusyCal before the original developers sold the app in 2017. The newer direction and features are not for me. I’m old school, Mac-only and local-only. On the other hand, I haven’t found a better alternative (I’ve looked), and Apple Calendar certainly hasn’t returned from oblivion, so I’m sticking with BusyCal.

Cocoa Packet Analyzer

Cocoa Packet Analyzer provides a native Mac UI to display packet traces, in contrast to the ugly, confusing, cross-platform UI of Wireshark. I sometimes use Wireshark too, though, for some advanced features.

Find Any File

Find Any File does what Finder used to do in Mac OS X Panther and earlier, before Spotlight: find everything on your Mac, with no exclusions and omissions. I usually display Find Any File search results as a hierarchical file tree, a very convenient way to see what’s on disk. I also frequently search by file content, which is extremely useful for spelunking.

ForkLift

I was a longtime user of Yummy FTP, but its developer Jason Downing died tragically a number of years ago, so now I use ForkLift for SFTP to my websites. I’ve actually become less reliant on ForkLift since I switched to git push from my laptop to my website, but I use ForkLift when I need to perform SFTP manually. I’m still on version 3, because I didn’t need anything in the version 4 upgrade.

Hex Fiend

Hex Fiend is an open source hex editor, originally by “ridiculousfish” AKA Peter Ammon, who also created of the fish shell and used to work on NSMenu at Apple, though now the main developer of Hex Fiend appears to be Kevin Wojniak.

ImageOptim

I use ImageOptim mainly to prepare images for posting on my websites, compressing them and removing unnecessary metadata. The following function is defined in my ~/.zshrc file:

imageoptim() { if [[ -z $@ ]]; then echo "No argument supplied" else /usr/bin/sips --deleteProperty profile $@ /Applications/DragNDrop/ImageOptim.app/Contents/MacOS/ImageOptim $@ fi }

Karabiner-Elements

Karabiner-Elements is the latest addition to my third-party apps, as of yesterday! I decided that I should start using “smart quotes” in my blog posts, but since I’m old school and write my blog posts in pure HTML with the aforementioned BBEdit, I need to be able to use “dumb quotes” too, so enabling the system autocorrect/autocorrupt was not a solution. Unfortunately, the built-in macOS keyboard shortcuts for smart quotes are counterintuitive: option-[ is a single left quote, but option-] is a double left quote instead of a single right quote! This is in contrast to the dumb quote key, which uses the shift key to switch from a single quote to double quotes.

Fortunately, I found a solution with Karabiner-Elements and predefined rules submitted by the community, exactly the rules I was looking for, because I’m not the only one who thinks the built-in shortcuts don’t make sense. Karabiner-Elements is kind of an overkill for this one little feature, requiring a driver extension, two background apps, and an input monitor, but what are you going to do?

Little Snitch

I’ve mentioned Little Snitch, the network monitor and firewall, on this blog many times before. It’s an essential tool and the first app I install on a new Mac, before I connect the Mac to the internet! Without Little Snitch, I’d feel naked and exposed.

Mactracker

Mactracker is a wonderful database of basically every Apple device ever made, from the Apple I to the Magic Keyboard for iPad Air, with extensive technical specifications. Do you want to know the screen size of a device, or which OS versions it supports? Check Mactracker!

Mona for Mastodon

I might be unusual, but I do most of my social media browsing and posting from my Mac, only rarely from my iPhone. My preferred Mastodon client is Mona. And yes, I’ve tried others, including the market leader Ivory. Mona isn’t perfect, with a few bugs that annoy me, and unfortunately it’s a Catalyst app, which brings its own set of problems, but I think Mona is the best “power user” Mastodon client, and the most configurable, customizable. I’m satisfied enough with Mona to prevent me from attempting to write my own AppKit Mastodon client app.

PSWD

PSWD is a random password generator that’s configurable with many different criteria to satisfy all of the crazy, stupid websites with arbitrary password requirements and limitations.

UnicodeChecker

UnicodeChecker is a searchable database for Unicode characters. It shows metadata for every character along with code points in various formats. I keep this app in my Dock next to BBEdit and TextEdit.

WorldWideWeb

WorldWideWeb by The Icon Factory is a local web server including Bonjour support. I use it for testing my own websites before I publish changes to the web, and also for testing my web browser extensions. The GUI of WorldWideWeb is a little easier to use than my previous command-line solution:

alias 'lanserver=/usr/bin/dns-sd -R lanserver _http._tcp. local 8000 & jobs; echo "http://mac.local.:8000"; /usr/bin/python3 -m http.server --bind 0.0.0.0' Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon) Articles index
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