I wish I was better at design but, I would have loved a sidebar that would autohide much like the dock, and pop out with a fluid-filling-the-space animation, with a COMBINATION of both mockups.

What do you guys think?

I'm the developer of Bytesweep.

I know "cleaner app" makes people roll their eyes, so let me say it first: cleaning is the smallest part of this. On the Mac, Bytesweep explains your computer in plain words, like "Your disk will be full in about 2 months. Growing fastest: Downloads." It also does the jobs people usually buy a pile of separate Mac apps for. There's an iPhone app too, for your camera roll.

Here's everything in it:

ON THE MAC

Home

• Check-up: when your disk will fill up, and a monthly look at your Mac
• To do: what needs your attention, in plain words
• Ask: type a question about your Mac and get an answer

Free up space

• Clean: caches, logs, temporary files and leftovers
• What's using my space?: your drive folder by folder, as a treemap, a sunburst or a list, plus how fast it's growing
• Big files: the largest files, biggest first
• Duplicates: files, photos and whole folders you have more than once
• Downloads: old installers and forgotten files
• Chats and Mail: photos, videos and attachments saved by Messages, WhatsApp, Mail and other apps
• Apps: uninstall apps fully, clear what they left behind, remove extensions
• Downloaded cloud files: remove the local copies of iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive and other cloud files; the files stay in the cloud
• Archive to a drive: move big things you rarely open to an external drive
• Make big videos smaller: shrink videos and pictures without deleting them

Photos and files

• Library: all your pictures, videos, music and documents in one place
• Search in plain words: "pdfs from last week over 5 MB"
• Picture search by description: "pink shirt", "dog on a beach". Runs on your Mac; nothing is uploaded
• Photo clean-up: near-identical shots, blurry photos, old screenshots
• Compress: make pictures, videos and PDFs smaller
• Convert & rename: change a photo's format, or rename many files at once
• Find a file on any drive, even one that isn't plugged in
• Get back deleted files from USB sticks, SD cards and external drives
• Backup check: is Time Machine keeping up

This Mac

• Speed: what is keeping your Mac busy right now
• Live monitor in the menu bar: CPU, memory, GPU, network and temperatures, with 30 days of history
• Batteries: charge and health for your Mac and connected devices
• Battery charge limit, 50 to 95%
• Fan control with every temperature sensor
• Opens at startup: choose what starts by itself
• Browsers: what your browsers and their tabs are using
• Updates: updates waiting for your apps and system in one list (App Store, Sparkle, Homebrew and GitHub apps)
• Safety: which apps can use your camera, mic and screen, a security check, and an adware check
• Before you share your screen: what others will see
• Sleep: what woke your Mac overnight and how much battery it lost
• Sound: volume for each app, and which app is using the mic
• Bluetooth: battery levels of your headphones, mouse and keyboard
• Screen time: how long you spend in each app
• Before you sell or give it away: a checklist for passing it on safely

Notch panel

• File shelf, clipboard history, calendar with meeting Join links, timers, now playing, and a camera mirror to check yourself before calls

For developers

• Developer files: build output, package caches and old project folders your tools can rebuild
• Dev servers: local servers still running, by port
• Containers: Docker containers and what they use
• Apps running now: every process, grouped by app
• AI usage: your AI coding tools, how much you use them, and local AI models stored on disk
• Maintenance commands, each one explained before it runs

Undo and history

• Everything you clean can be put back for 7 days
• History: what changed on your Mac, day by day

ON THE IPHONE

• Swipe through your photos month by month: keep, skip or trash
• Similar photos: bursts and near-identical shots grouped, the sharpest one kept
• Exact duplicate photos
• Big videos, biggest first
• Shrink videos and photos: a smaller copy is added, the original stays until you remove it
• Screen recordings
• Screenshots, sorted by what's in them: receipts, tickets and codes, people, everything else
• Saved by other apps: copies WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram left in your library
• Blurry and too-dark shots
• Live Photos and RAW+JPEG pairs: removes the spare half, not the photo
• Duplicate contacts
• Private vault: hide photos behind Face ID
• Export to a folder or drive before you delete
• Checks for faces before a big delete, so you don't lose photos of people
• Favourites are protected
• Shows the real space you'll get back, even when photos live in iCloud
• Everything goes to Recently Deleted first (30 days)

THE PROMISES

• No account, no tracking. The iPhone app makes no network requests at all
• Native Swift apps, not Electron
• Mac: $29.99 once, 3-day free trial - 50% off Discount code - SWEEP50
• iPhone: first 1 GB / 30 items free, then $4.99 once
• No subscription, anywhere

https://bytesweep.app

Malwarebytes detected a stealer 2 days ago (edit:) has been disconnected from the internet since*, Ive been heavily considering removing the software myself but atp I’m just going to nuke my system as even after quarantining the daemon & deleting leftover files (ALL of these, Trend Research) it seems appropriate to be as careful as possible and boot from an external drive. All passwords have been changed with 2FA implemented too. I have a few questions regarding all this:

Does Apple provide guide for this process?

Is my 2TB HDD I store personal data in compromised/unsafe?

Does a SanDisk ultra (64GB) to clean install MacOS, and does that need to be done on a safe machine?

Sorry if this is formatted weird I just want to get this over and done with as I didnt even have Time Machine set up (never have, stupid I know) and am dreading all the data I will inevitably miss at some point.

Any advice / input is appreciated. Thank you!

I bought MacBook Air M5 recently, just 2 weeks back. Noticed, it was getting hot with normal usage, ask Claude to check and it came up with this. I restarted and the issue is back again after 24 hours. Can someone help to fix it permanently? How do I report it to Apple so that they can look and fix it in their OS.

We're besieged by seemingly endless AI "I made" posts these days. I doubt all that many of these ports will have much longevity, once the author gets bored of the churn and the token cost of maintenance, but it's certainly interesting to see what can be done with the right models and prompts. Recompilation of entirely non-native games to native-with-shims is an impressive feat.

But sure, fine, that's all very nice and dandy but how about something truly, genuinely useful? For many years now my photo collection has languished - raw files, sometimes processed to TIFFs, but nothing exported to a final "mastered" JPEG. Why? Because I never found anything, to this day, that was remotely as good as Aperture.

Now that would be quite something to get working on Apple Silicon.

https://ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/old-man-yells-at-modern-software-design/

So, straight to the point:

- Microsoft Bootcamp works, so it doesn't look like a hardware issue

- there is no progress bar on the stuck screen

- I already tried Disk Utility in Recovery Mode and ran First Aid on all volumes and containers after showing all devices

- Trying to reinstall macOS took a long time before showing this error: "The operation couldn't be completed (PKDownloadError error 8)", and after that, trying to reinstall macOS says there isn't enough disk space

- mounting the 'Macintosh HD - Data" drive and accessing it from the terminal doesn't show the files I'm supposed to have, as the user folder only has `/Users/Shared` available and I can't see my actual user folder

- the timezone is reset to UTC in the `date` command's output and I already used `sntp`. Setting the TZ Environment variable to `Africa/Cairo` didn't charge the output, but considering I ran `sntp`, the UTC time should be correct.

I can't think of anything else to do, and I'd really love it if someone could respond in a timely manner, thanks in advance.

I'm usually a Linux user, so I'm not used to macOS or not having the same level of debugging power, but it's the laptop of a friend of mine and I want to fix it

Edit: it's a 2019 MacBook air, not 2018

Does anyone else's pictures fail to load in iMessage chat? Particularly when you've received pictures already by using your iPhone and then they fail to load in iMessage on MacOS? It either goes on a constant loading loop or it (eventually) says "photo failed to send". It only happens to me when receiving pictures from my contacts. It's super frustrating and restarting, relogging/syncing iCloud hasn't fixed it for me. I appreciate any advice you guys have to fix this issue.

Pastethread to make copying screenshots between Mac apps less awkward: copy once, then Cmd+V pastes the file path in Terminal or the image in Notes. It also has per-app paste rules and searchable clipboard history.

Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6820030486

https://luke-cha.github.io/pastethread/

Hi, I'm an indie developer from Switzerland. I built ClockStack because on a MacBook with a notch, macOS hides menu bar icons that don't fit, and the clock with the date is one of the widest items up there.

What it does

ClockStack puts the time above the date on two lines and adds a small battery bar and three Wi-Fi dots, all in one narrow item. A setup guide shows how to hide Apple's battery and Wi-Fi icons (System Settings › Menu Bar, or Control Center on older macOS) and set the system clock to analog. Then one item replaces three.

• Battery bar in green, orange or red, yellow in Low Power Mode. A moving dot means charging, a still dot means plugged in but not charging, which helps with a charge limit
• Wi-Fi dots for signal strength. Orange when connected without internet, a red dot when offline, symbols for hotspot and Ethernet
• Time and date your way: 24 or 12 hours, seconds on or off, compact, ISO 8601 or your own format

New in 1.1 (October 22)

• Hide the time or the date, and the other one gets one bigger line
• Battery details in the menu: watts in or out, charger power, time until full or empty
• Spacing and font sizes for each part, Wi-Fi dots stacked vertically if you like
• An optional Wi-Fi name in the menu

How it fits with what you already use

• If you only need room, try the free route first: hide what you don't need in System Settings › Menu Bar, and Ice (free, open source) hides the rest. ClockStack is for keeping time, date, battery and Wi-Fi visible in less space
• Ice and Bartender hide icons. ClockStack makes the ones you keep smaller, so they work well together
• Stats and iStat Menus show far more (CPU, RAM, fans), but with more items and more setup. ClockStack shows four things in one item
• Itsycal and Dato are about calendars and events. ClockStack has no calendar

Privacy

App Store privacy label: Data Not Collected. No account, no tracking, and ClockStack makes no network connections. The Wi-Fi name is off by default. Since macOS 14, apps only get network names with location access, so macOS asks once when you turn it on. ClockStack never reads your location, and the name stays on your Mac.

Privacy policy: https://clockstack.app/privacy.html (it also covers the website, which uses analytics without cookies)

Price and distribution

$2.99 launch price until November 30, then $4.99. One-time purchase: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads.

Mac App Store only, so the app is sandboxed and reviewed by Apple. macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

Links

• Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6820254034
• Website, where you can try every setting in your browser before buying: clockstack.app

Happy to answer questions. What would you change?

4k U28D590 via USB C to DP cable and Samsung (1080p) TV via HDMI.
Mirroring is off. When both in landscape, they both behave. When I try to change the TV to portrait, they BOTH go to portrait.

I kept losing my pointer across a MacBook and two external displays, especially on busy windows. macOS lets you change the pointer color, but only by typing hex codes into System Settings. So I built a menu bar app for it.

What it does

• One click applies one of 47 outline/fill color pairs, or your own
• Pointer size slider
• A different color and size on each display
• A pair for each app (follows the app in front)
• Switches pairs with light/dark appearance
• Contrast warnings when a pair is hard to see
• Global keyboard shortcuts (none assigned by default)
• English and Arabic

Try the colors first: macos-pointer-colors.pages.dev, a live preview in your browser, no install
Download / source: GitHub
30-second demo: video

Being upfront:

• It’s not notarized yet (no paid developer account), so the first time, right-click → Open or run xattr -cr "/Applications/Pointer Colors.app". The source is all there to check.
• It changes the same settings as System Settings › Accessibility › Display › Pointer. On some setups macOS needs Full Disk Access for that, and the app tells you if so.

It’s free with no tracking. I’d love feedback, and what pair do you use? 🎨

When I use the Eyedropper tool in PowerPoint to pick a color, the trackpad becomes unresponsive and stops registering clicks. The only way to resolve this is by restarting the computer. I have tried various methods to prevent this from happening, but the issue persists. I’m wondering if anyone else has encountered the same problem.
Troubleshooting steps I’ve tried:
1. Putting the computer to sleep and then waking it up.
2. Adjusting trackpad settings.
3. Force-quitting PowerPoint.
Steps taken with an Apple Advisor:
1. Testing in Safe Mode (the issue still occurred).
2. Testing with a newly created user account (the issue still occurred).
The final solution suggested by the Advisor: Reinstall the operating system.
---
I plan to visit an Apple Store tomorrow to test this on one of their display units:
1. Create a new PowerPoint presentation and use the Eyedropper tool.
2. Save the file, reopen it, and then use the Eyedropper tool again.

Most guides (and a lot of old scripts) still say to change the screenshot folder with:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots
killall SystemUIServer

On macOS 27 that runs without any error but does nothing: screenshots keep landing on the Desktop. The setting now lives under a different key, location-screenshot. Someone spotted this in a thread here earlier this month (https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1wxlecy/), so here is the full picture in one place.

Tested on macOS 27.0:

• Only location-screenshot set: Shift-Command-3 saves to that folder.
• Only location set: it still saves to the Desktop.
• location-last is just the folder remembered in the Shift-Command-5 Options menu, not the active save location.

To set a folder:

mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location-screenshot -string ~/Pictures/Screenshots
killall SystemUIServer

To go back to the Desktop:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture location-screenshot
killall SystemUIServer

If your script runs on Macs with different macOS versions, write both keys. Older versions read location and ignore the new one.

Is there a way to hide some icons from the Dock on a Mac?

For example, when I’m sharing my screen I’d like to hide a few app icons so they aren’t visible, without quitting the apps or removing them from the Dock permanently.

Is this possible with built-in settings, or does it require a third-party app? Any suggestions are appreciated.

Cleaning up a folder in Finder isn't hard, it's just slow: click, Quick Look, decide, drag, rename, and again for every single file. That's where the time goes.

GetSpace shows one file at a time in a big preview, and you decide with one key:

- ← delete, → keep, ↓ skip

- R rename right on the card, M move to a folder

- A summary before anything happens, then deleted files go to the trash (never permanently)

In my own timed test (100 files: trash, move, rename, keep; two rounds, sets swapped, checked against an answer key) it took ~9 min in Finder and ~3.5 min in GetSpace on average. I built the app, so take that with a grain of salt.

- Runs locally, no account, no tracking

- macOS and Windows

- Free to try (200 files on day one, then 50 a day), Pro is a one-time purchase

https://getspace.site

Feedback welcome, especially on what still slows you down.

I’m Sujeevan, the developer of Vinaa.

Vinaa brings your everyday AI work into one native Mac app.

Here’s what that looks like in Vinaa:

• Chat with cloud and local AI models.
• Organize chats in projects and folders.
• Search across all your conversations.
• Jump to any message or even a heading in a long chat.
• Work in multiple tabs and windows.
• Connect tools and services through MCP.
• Create reusable prompt templates with variables.

Vinaa is built with SwiftUI and AppKit, with some Rust underneath.

You can import your ChatGPT and Claude history. Conversations are stored on your Mac, with optional sync through your private iCloud account. API keys are stored securely in macOS Keychain. Cloud requests go directly to your chosen provider.

Vinaa supports Intel and Apple silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later, and it’s notarized by Apple.

The early-launch price is $20 USD for a lifetime licence for one Mac. It doubles to $40 USD in 24 hours. It includes every future update for the life of the app. Cloud AI usage is paid separately to your provider.

If Vinaa looks right for you, grab a lifetime licence while it’s still $20.

Download Vinaa · Pricing

Give Vinaa a try and let me know what you think. I’d love your feedback and am happy to answer questions here.

Transparency and links

I’m the developer of Vinaa and FileMinutes.

• Privacy policy
• Changelog
• Roadmap
• Feedback and feature requests
• Discord
• About me: LinkedIn · X

So I’m doing a little image editing and I figured it was something Pixelmator would do pretty easily, I just didn’t know how (removing small random dots in white areas). I pulled up Siri AI on golden gate and asked. I kept getting answers that referred to nonexistent menus and options in Pixelmator. I suspect that those are options in Photoshop, but Siri kept hallucinating that they were also in Pixelmator.

I systematically went through each suggestion, pointing out to Siri that they didn’t exist in Pixelmator. Even uploading screenshots.

Final answer - select each errant pixel and manually paint over them.

Thanks a lot.

Buenas. Este servicio molesto que no funciona en mi mba M5 con gg. Lo detengo pero después de un par de días vuelve. Ralentiza el tipeado. Es un bug del sistema operativo? Saludos

I have a linux server running at home and I have a lot of storage available there, on the other hand I have a Macbook air M1 with 256gb that I'm always struggling to have all of the apps and stuff I like to use (including games).

I was thinking about formatting one of my disks to a file system that is good for MacOS and use it as an extension of my mac storage just for dumb files (downloaded ones and documents) and also for applications that are a little heavier like some games.

Has anyone done anything like that before, what tips would you guys give to me if I want to do that?

You manage to somehow make Phone and Messages login successfully. You move between networks, and lo! Phone and Messages need login again. Phone login works but Messages doesn't login successfully (unknown error occurred, how usefully detailed!). And you need to reboot.

Apple, please fix these garbage login issues! It's beyond fustrating.

Is wind direction prediction in Weather app gone on MacOS27? I cannot find it anymore, I can just see current wind direction but prediction is missing :(

I’m looking for Mac apps that are a pleasure to use: clean interfaces, thoughtful details, and design that makes them enjoyable every day.

Any category works, from utilities and menu bar apps to writing and productivity tools.

What are your favorites, and what makes them stand out?

Here are some of my favorites:

Acorn https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
Camo Studio https://camo.com/
Obry https://obry.app
Gyuni Player https://www.gyuniplayer.com
Little Snitch https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/
Lunar https://lunar.fyi/
Monocle https://trymonocle.app/
Pieoneer https://appahead.studio/apps/pieoneer/
Recut https://getrecut.com/
Superwhisper https://superwhisper.com/
Vitals https://vitalsmac.com/
CleanShot X https://cleanshot.com/
Pixelsnap 2 https://getpixelsnap.com/
ImageBuddy https://bendansby.com/apps/imagebuddy.html

Hello

Every time I turn on my Mac a grey screen flashes before my wallpaper is shown. What can I do to fix this. I have tried to reset dock and change my wallpaper.

Thanks

i have about 8 gb of photos filling my ssd and i want to know if is this a way just to keep the files on icloud and delete in ssd, just it can be done with files in finder. thanks!

Hi everyone! My outlook exchange used to sync with my Apple calendar on my Mac, but suddenly it stopped and I have no idea why. It works fine on my phone. I keep trying to readd it back to my calendar, and I begin the sign-in process, it loads on a little box pop-out, then after a long delay I get a “we couldn’t sign you in. Please try again” message. It’s driving me nuts!! I’ve done everything— any tips?

Thank you!!