HoudahSpot: Spotlight’s Fastidious Cousin

Even find yourself frustrated with Spotlight and Finder search? HoudahSpot might be the answer.

Spotlight is a great tool for finding files on your Mac. It’s (generally) fast and uncomplicated. If you have some documents in your Documents folder and a bunch (ma)lingering on your desktop, Spotlight is probably the best way to find something. HoudahSpot, however, lets you drill deeper, specify (and restrict) search locations, and apply just about any criteria you can think of.

Spotlight offers a number of search modifiers that aren’t immediately obvious to the casual user.

Filter by file type: You can type a forward slash followed by a file type, such as /PDF or /Images, to show only those specific document formats in your search results.
Search by app or location: Enter an app name like Mail or Notes, or a location like iCloud Drive, and press the Tab key to search exclusively within that app or folder.
Apply keywords and operators: Add kind:, author:, or title: before your search term, or use uppercase AND, OR, and NOT for precise results.

Learning these power moves notably improves your Spotlight experience. And of course, you can always move to Finder to finely tune your searches.

But if you’re doing that a lot, you might prefer HoudahSpot.

Search Templates

HoudahSpot offers a couple of different ways to repeat searches: templates and saved searches. They aren’t quite the same thing, but they’re close enough to each other that I had to think about the difference between the two while learning the app.

Search templates allow you to create a custom search that you can save and reuse. They appear in HoudahSpot’s sidebar, as well as in the search bar. You can use the template as your starting point and refine your search as needed without editing the template. Templates open a new, disposable search window. You can also create keyboard shortcuts to invoke templates. Once you have an open search window with a template applied, you can further refine your search.

HoudahSpot’s templates are saved in your user library, and so they don’t sync between machines. There are ways around this, though, as I’ll explain later.

Saved Searches

Unliked HoudahSpot’s templates, saved searches are documents that you can save anywhere on your Mac. As with templates, you can change the search criteria as you need to, and save the result as a new document or overwrite the original.

Spotlight-ish

I do happen to like the simplicity of Spotlight’s interface, most notably the command-space shortcut to open the search bar. HoudahSpot can’t replace that feature exactly, but you can set up a shortcut to open a search bar. HoudahSpot doesn’t start searching immediately, as Spotlight does, but it’s powerful in that you can specify which of your search templates to use, and restrict your search to file names or text contents.

Extensions and Integrations

You can integrate HoudahSpot with Finder; doing so creates a menu in any Finder’s menu bar. Invoking HoudahSpot from the Finder opens a new HoudahSpot search window focusing on the current Finder directory that you’re in. You can also select templates to apply to your search.

For example, I have a folder on my Desktop called “Collect”; it’s a dumping ground for files that have lingered too long on my desktop, which Hazel cleans up for me. I can open my Collect folder, invoke HoudahSpot and select a template, such as “Excel Files,” to reveal all of the spreadsheets in that folder.

There’s a HoudahSpot extension for Launchbar, too; you can enter text in Launchbar by pressing the apostrophe key, and then use the Launchbar extension to conduct a search. If you’re an Alfred user, there’s a HoudahSpot extension for that, too.

Lastly, there’s a PopClip extension for HoudahSpot. You select text and then click the HoudahSpot icon in the PopClip menu to search for that text on your Mac.

Examples

Here are some of the example searches and templates I’ve created in HoudahSpot:

Markdown files: Any markdown file, regardless of its location, using any of the file extensions recognized as a Markdown file
Outlines: Bike, OPML, OmniOutliner files
Spreadsheets: any Excel (either extension) or Numbers files

Summing It Up

HoudahSpot isn’t a replacement for the default Spotlight interface, and in fact it’s built upon Spotlight’s deep integration with macOS. But it’s a powerful tool to help you find files that Spotlight won’t always reveal easily, and the customizable search templates are a power user’s dream. If you’ve ever taken a quick breath before hitting command-space to search using Spotlight, HoudahSpot is worth a look.

Transformers: Even More Than Meets the Eye

John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers:

It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles.

I was all smiles and nods reading this. I too grew up with Transformers, and while we all liked them, they weren’t as fun as other toys with playing with friends. As Gruber pointed out, they were inferior as action figures to toys like GI Joe and other figures around the 3.75” range. And as vehicles, they didn’t look as cool as Matchboxes or Hot Wheels (or Stompers). And contrary to the spirit of cooperative play, transforming a Transformers could take a few seconds to a few minutes. (In fact, challenging conversions can be a selling point.) But you don’t want to sit around and watch your ten-year-old friends fumble from robot to truck and back again in the middle of a plot.

When we had kids, though, they both got into the Transformers of the day, starting with figures from around 2005 and up. One thing I immediately noticed with their Transformers were the degree of articulation in their robot modes. They were, generally speaking, robot humanoids that moved like action figures.

Sunday Serial: iPhone Duo Apps, WriteRoom 4, nvALT, and the Avoiding the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune with a Portable Jump Starter

I say again: the summer is not actually the best time to drive a convertible. I’ve been treated to a full week of glorious 50+ degree weather, and I’ve been top down for most of it. I think 50 degrees is the bellwether; if it’s 50 or above, and it’s not raining, the top goes down.

It’s spritzes and cheese here at home as the chicken thighs roast in the oven. I’m lucky to be sitting here, feeling pretty blissed out, assembling a list of things that delight me, and sharing them with you.

iPhone Duo Apps

Stephen Robles created a curated site of applications that are ready for the iPhone Duo. If you, like me and Aaron, are on the long wait list for the new iPhone, you can prepare for delivery by checking out if your most trusted apps are ready for the new form factor.

WriteRoom 4 Releases

I had no idea that WriteRoom was going to reemerge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has. WriteRoom was one of the two Markdown-specific apps I started using when Markdown was getting a lot of traction in the nerd space. The other was Byword, which I generally preferred due to the fact that I could post to my Tumblr blog directly from the app (I think it also supported tables first, which I needed when deciding to use Markdown for my report writing at work). But as with TaskPaper, I always appreciated Jesse Grosjean’s attention to detail and style, so I always kept WriteRoom and updated it when the new versions came out.

And hey! WriteRoom 4 is in beta. You can get a steep discount on it during the beta, too, which is exactly what I did. Some observations:

Typewriter noises: WriteRoom sounds like a clicky mechanical keyboard when you type. You can turn it off, too. I found myself browsing keyboards at Best Buy this afternoon after typing on WriteRoom for a spell.
Themes: You can set different themes in WriteRoom, depending upon your preferences. The default is a DEC terminal monitor, with screen bend and everything.
Heading overview mode
Number Headings: I’m not familiar with this feature from other Markdown apps I’ve used, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. In WriteRoom, headings and their children can be numbered automatically, so rather than having “##” as a an H2 heading in our document, you can see “1.2” or whatever level it would be. It looks great and it’s useful.

There’s more I could say about WriteRoom, but Sunday Serial isn’t the place for a big review. I hope you take a look at it if you’re a Mac user who writes in Markdown, however often that might be.

nvALT Resurrected

Speaking of writing in Markdown, Brett Terpstra has updated his fork of Notational Velocity and made it available for download again. This is to tide Markdown purists until the relaunch of nvUltra, which has been in the works for some time now.

WriteRoom, Lettera, and MarkEdit are three document-based Markdown apps that I’ve used over the years; there are more, including BBEdit and TextMate. Ulysses, which is how I write most of my posts for this site, is a database-based Markdown app.

You can use nvALT to search, create, and edit Markdown documents; you point it at one folder on your Mac, and nvALT lists them in a single window. It’s a great way to employ Markdown files instead of a notes app. Your files are portable, and you can send them to other apps as you see fit. I was a big user of Notational Velocity, and later nvALT, for all of my note taking for years.

Portable Jump Starters

I stopped by our local ShopRite this morning for a couple of things, and there was a woman stranded in the parking lot with a dead car battery. I gave her a quick jump from my car and went on with my day, but it got me thinking about our family’s challenges with car batteries, and the simple solution of a portable jump starter.

It’s an inevitable part of owning a car, having a dead battery. It might happen after a chilly night, when you head out for work after the first frost of the season. It might happen completely out of the blue. I’ve had to drive home suddenly to jump Rhonda’s car, when she got stuck at the vet’s office, and I’ve had to ask for a jump from a coworker in the parking lot at work, apropos of no previous issues with my car.

Once, all four of us were in the waiting line to get onto the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and when I tried to start the car to board, the battery was dead. I had charged it the night before we left using a trickle charger, but there we were: stuck, and embarrassed. A patient ferry employee came to our rescue with a portable jump starter, and I resolved to get one for myself.

I ordered one on the ferry ride to Delaware, and we picked it up at an AutoZone or Advance Auto Parts on our way to the hotel. We kept it in the trunk of our 2016 Subaru WRX for the rest of its life, as the car was plagued with some battery issues, the cause of which we never figured out. It has come in handy many, many times. In fact, we’ve gotten by without replacing the battery in our Husqvarna riding lawn mower for the past couple of years, relying on the jump starter to get it running. (I can be weirdly cheap about some things.)

I don’t mind relying on the kindness of strangers if I have to, but it’s my preference to be able to help myself.

Every single time.

Traverse: OPML Outliner for the Mac (and iOS)

Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.

The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.

OmniOutliner is the GOAT of macOS outliners, and it remains one of the best apps I use, full stop. I love Bike, too, and use it all the time. And I’ve tried (but not purchased) Kosshi. Zavala, of course, is another great (and free) option across the Apple ecosystem. Long ago, there was Folding Text… which is back! Another great outliner is MindNode, which reveals the structural similarity between mind maps and outlines.

Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that show parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.

Traverseis another player in the outliner space from Outliner Software, and I’m well impressed. Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.

There’s a lot going on in Traverse’s inspector pane; you can convert nodes to to-dos, mark the node with a color, or add a note (one of my favorite OmniOutliner features).

Traverse offers three distinct views: Outline, Writer, and Column views. Outline view shows each line as a visually distinct node, with a round-rect drawn around the node. Writer view is a simpler mode, with reveal arrows to expand and collapse nodes. Column view is the most interesting, with nodes spilling left to right across the screen. While the first two modes are standard fare for an outliner, column view is a neat twist on the presentation of an outline.

There’s an iOS version of Traverse is there, but the app is a limited or companion version of the Mac’s (it’s also free). You can open and edit OPML files in iCloud, but it uses a folder on iCloud, where the Mac version’s defaults to a location in your home library (you can change the location on the Mac if you want to share Traverse’s Library. On iPadOS, Traverse’s Column view isn’t available on the iPad. I’d say that’s the central feature of this app, and hence a notable omission.

Where OmniOutliner, Bike, and Folding Text are document-based apps, Kosshi, MindNode, and Zavala are database-based apps. Traverse looks and acts like a database app despite using OPML files, which you can reveal in the Finder by right-clicking on the document’s title in the app’s library pane. This allows you to round-trip between other applications, sure; Traverse will prompt you to import external files to the app’s library, though.

An outline can be a project map, a writing structure, a research database, a decision tree, a study plan, a product roadmap, or a way to take apart an idea until you can see what it is made of.

Traverse leans into that. It is not trying to be a full task manager, a notes archive, a mind-mapping canvas, or a document editor. It is focused on helping you build, browse, reshape and export structured information.

Traverse blog

I took a PDF of a chapter of New Jersey’s Administrative Code that I reference a lot for work, and used Microsoft’s Copilot to create an OPML file that contains the full text of the chapter. I pulled that into Traverse to get a sense for how it would handle a large document with many nodes. The color coding for levels is a nice touch.

Traverse uses Apple Intelligence on your local machine, but you can also add other models to employ agent skills.

NetNewsWire Themes

Holy Crap… I j Netnewswire themes make feeds yours 2026 10 22. ust discovered these NetNewsWire Themes. Lots of fun and tasteful choices.

Sunday Serial: Traverse Outliner for macOS, Sarti Spritz, and Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs

CARROT Weatheris predicting some cool temps for the week ahead. I’m ready for it! It’s been kinda hot lately. I have learned that 50 degrees Fahrenheit is just fine for top-down driving.

Today’s installment of Sunday Serial features 33% software, and 66% epicure. Enjoy!

Traverse Outliner

Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. (Not exclusively. Just extensively.) I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.

The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.

Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that shows parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.

Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.

Sarti Spritz

Rhonda and I love an Aperol Spritz any time of year, a fact about which I’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink. There’s a great riff on the classic that swaps out the Aperol for Sarti. Sarti is a bit more fruity and less herbal than Aperol, but the blood orange flavor is great and keeps the drink from being too sweet. Looking forward to having these in the summer.

This particular mix is made with Autumn Lake’s excellent (if price) Boujee Pet Nat, a sparkling wine that’s perfectly dry and loosely effervescent.

Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs

Rhonda turned me on to Coco Larkin’s quick and easy recipe for soft-boiled eggs. You mash them up in a cup or bowl with a nub of butter. Enjoy with toast if you like, but I can see myself having these at the office san carbs.

Tally, Shortcuts, and Drafts for Logging Calories

I wrote a while back about how I use Tally to track my calories when I’m not ready to enter them into FoodNoms (for example, out at our beloved Bellview Winery). Weighing your food and tracking it with an application like FoodNoms can be a cumbersome process, but one which will help you lose weight if you stick with it. It’s also a great way to learn about how much you’re eating, as we’re all prone to magical thinking about food and drink. And at the very least, tracking carefully in controlled situations helps you estimate portions when you’re out and about.

We once had one of the owners/waitresses at a local restaurant tell us how one guy comes in with a micro scale and weighs his sushi. She was befuddled by this behavior, but I could totally understand it. How many grams in a slice of salmon sashimi? It’s hard to know without a frame of reference.

Anyway, I started using Tally to track my calories when I’m out, and while it’s not as accurate as weighing my food, it’s better than completely guessing. I have a Tally set called “Food Log“ and I refill it with the kinds of food I’m likely to eat and drink when I’m out. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good alternative to trying to log every bite of asiago and sip of wine in FoodNoms.

Most of my Tallies represent portions of favorite foods and drink in grams; in some cases, the entries increment by 1 gram, while others are in higher increments (wine, for example, in 100-gram increments).

Tally has great Shortcuts support, as does Drafts.

Normally, I have to manually reset my Food Log Tally set to zero when I need to use it; the entries from my last usage are still there. I learned that Tally has a reset Shortcut.

I realized at one point that I could export my Tallies to Drafts, which I realized was a good idea: rather than nuke a set I forgot to log, I could export the set and save it in Drafts for later logging to FoodNoms.

I got to thinking: can I automate the process of exporting my Tallies to Drafts? I peeked at Shortcuts and realized that yes, I could.

It’s a pretty simple workflow:
– get the contents of the Tally set “Food Log”
– create a draft in Drafts from the Tally set
– append the current date to the draft
– reset the Food Log Tally set

That was pretty easy to do, and then I thought, can I automate it so that every night, right before midnight, the Shortcut would run? Once again, the answer was yes.

I created a new Shortcut, called Run Reset Tally Set Nightly, which, at 11:59 9pm, fires the Tally to Drafts Shortcut.

The only thing left to do is to figure out how I can export the Tally set data to FoodNoms.

I don’t use Shortcuts much, but when it works, it’s great.

Shortcut to Log Tally Set Data to Drafts

I have the list archived in Drafts each night, and it looks just like it does in Tally.

Tally Data from Yesterday, Archived in Drafts

Sunday Serial, Update Edition: SoundSource 7, Dell S2725QC, and Mellel

Finding new and exciting applications and hardware is fun. But sometimes, you just have to update some infrastructure.

SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba

SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba has been invaluable for me, especially during the pandemic, when I spent a lot of time on Google Meet calls. It allows you to select the sound outputs for different applications, rather than the system-wide setting. It sits in the menu bar, allowing for quick and easy changes to your Mac’s sound output. Version 5 wasn’t updated for macOS Golden Gate, so I updated to version 6 this weekend.

Dell S2725QC 4k Display

Dell Dell - S2725QC 27" IPS LED 4K UHD 120Hz 8ms FreeSync Premium Monitor with HDR (HDMI, DisplayPort, USB) - Ash White — Dell Dell – S2725QC 27″ IPS LED 4K UHD 120Hz 8ms FreeSync Premium Monitor with HDR (HDMI, DisplayPort, USB) – Ash White

I’m going to write up something more fulsome about this display, but this has replaced the Samsung 27” G7 curved display that I’ve been using at the office. The Samsung runs at 2560 × 1440, which isn’t a resolution macOS treats kindly, and the 109 PPI makes macOS look a bit fuzzy and blown up.

The Dell S2725QC display is a 4k display, which runs at 3840 × 2160 and offers 163 PPI. It looks super sharp when plugged into my MacBook Air M4. The oldish M1 iMac on my desk at work still boasts a tighter display, but only at 24”.

I’ve been so happy with my Samsung 32” 4k display at home that I had a hard time imagining that a 27” display would be a good fit for me. At home, my Samsung U32J59x runs at 3840 × 2160, but the 138 PPI makes the OS chrome look a bit more blown up compared to the Dell. I’ve always looked at the 32” Samsung at home as a treat after a day at the office staring at the 27”, but the Dell is putting the Samsung to shame.

Mellel

I have tried, where I can, to avoid using Microsoft Word. That’s partly because it’s been a crappy Mac app in the past. I don’t think that’s the case now, but I also don’t really care for it that much (Excel is a different story). I used Nisus Writer Pro for years, back when I was writing psychological reports for a living. I liked it a lot, and it felt like a Mac app. It seems dead, though, which is a shame.

In the meantime, Mellel has been offering a Nisus Writer to Mellel crossgrade. I tried Mellel back in the Intel Mac days, and while I liked it plenty, I settled on Nisus Writer Pro. I’m glad to see that Mellel is still in business, and taking advantage of the gap in the market by offering this crossgrade.

It opens the rtfd files that I’ve created over the years in Nisus Writer Pro, and seems capable of handling Word files, depending upon the complexity of the formatting in the file.

Sunday Serial: Snouts and Stouts Brewing, Mochi Type, and Colori

I just got back inside after washing the cars. I learned a trick from Aaron to avoid swirl marks on the paint when he washed his Mini Cooper after trialing the foam cannon this past summer: I noticed he was drying the surface after hand washing in a straight up and down motion, rather than in a circular motion. I’ve tried it a few times since, and I can’t argue with the results. I hand wash that way now, too.

It’s a very satisfying thing, to learn something from your kids.

Snouts and Stouts Brewing in Hammonton, NJ

We had a family dinner at the excellent Rocco’s in Hammonton last night to celebrate Rhonda’s birthday, which is tomorrow. We left home early so that we could stop at Bagliani’s for some of their salami and cheese, as well as a few other things. We had some time to kill before our 6pm reservation, so we drove over to Snouts and Stouts Brewingto have a a beer. Rhonda had an Newfie IPA, which is a hazy brew made with Citra, Mosaic, and Nelson hops. I’m not familiar with Nelson hops, but we’re both big fans of Citra. Glasstown Brewery in Millville makes a unique brew called Mosaic Man, which is hopped exclusively using Mosaic hops and has endeared me to Mosaic. I had a hard time choosing which beer to try, as they had a kolsch, a German pilsner, and an Oktoberfest on tap. I ended up trying a Marzen, which had a great malt-to-hops balance. We can’t wait to go back.

Mochi Type

When I was in high school many years ago, the recommended sequence of courses for college-bound students was to take four years of a foreign language–in my case, French. Owing to the small size of my high school, taking four years of French was incompatible with taking a typing elective.

My mom, thoughtful person that she is, signed me up for eight weeks of typing lessons with a teacher from our local public high school after school. I drove to her house during the fall of my senior year, where she taught me the QWERTY keyboard layout and how to type on an electric typewriter. Due to this experience, I am able to touch type at a reasonable speed.

Learning how to type has come in decidedly more useful than French in the intervening years.

I found Mochi Type on the latest Bundlehunt sale, and it’s a gorgeous typing tutor. There are a plethora of color schemes, including the default Dracula-based theme. Mochi will teach you the basics, if you don’t know them already, but if you do, you can jump right in and practice. Error rate and words per minute are calculated after each one-minute practice session, and it shows your progress over time.

Colori

I’m not a designer, but I do like to view color palettes for setting up styles in applications like Ulysses and OmniOutliner. Colori offers 800 five-color palettes to inspire your design. It’s a satisfying digital version of the paint chips you’d find at a hardware store.

Field Notes Hometown Series: Portland

Having exhausted my supply of the Chicago-design Field Notes, I ordered a new set of Field Notes from the Portland series. These look great. I got some super-gooey gel pens with 1.0mm tips just for fun.

Sunday Serial: Staying Sharp, Hold My Notes, Unread RSS v5

It’s a hot mid-September weekend here in the Garden State. We notionally equate September as heralding the start of the fall, with the season’s attendant chilly nights, crisp days, and changing foliage. But September to me has always been a hot month. I went to a small Catholic school as a child, and back then, in the 80s, there was no air conditioning, and the boys’ uniforms mandated navy blue pants, which were thick and most unwelcome in hot weather. My high school experience was only marginally better: gray pants, but pants nonetheless, and no air conditioning. And like most schools, both were surrounded by parking lots and no shade.

So yeah: I’m a Gen Xer slowly gaining an appreciation for our generational toughness. Maybe it’s due to thermal conditioning.

Whatever Sundays are for, they are always a day to prep for the week ahead. For me, that means pre-packing my lunches and breakfasts, ironing shirts, and other quotidian tasks.

Staying Sharp

One not-so-quotidian task includes occasionally sharpening our kitchen knives. We have two German steel knives that we’ve had for over two decades: a Henckels chef’s knife, a Santoku knife, and a paring knife.

German steel knives are (in)famous for their soft steel, which means they are easy to sharpen, but also easily dulled. I’ve sharpened them using a few different methods over the years: an electric sharpener with two stages, a Lansky set of hones, and an oil stone I purchased at a local hardware store.

The electric sharpener does a nice job on the chef’s knife and my cheap cleaver, but not so much on the Santoku and paring knives. Unfortunately, the electric sharpener is wearing away the chef’s knife’s blade, but not the bolster, so I’m slowly creating a knife that’s not useful across its entire length.

I’ve watched a bunch of videos about sharpening knives using whetstones, and I’ve planned, for a long time, to eventually get a set of Japanese water stones and learn how to use them.

Curiosity got the better of me once again, and I found myself this weekend trying out the old oil stone I got at Ace Hardware years ago. I’ve rehabbed some beat up old pocket knives with it, much to my delight, but I haven’t used it on the kitchen set in a very long time.

I made a cheap 25-degree spacer out of an index card to check the angle of the knife on the stone, and got to work. I tested the results on one of Rhonda’s amazing garden tomatoes, and the results were great.

Hold My Notes

The software universe is rife with notes apps, and the Apple ecosystem boasts some fine choices for all tastes. I’m currently an Apple Notes user, largely because I love taking handwritten notes, and Notes’ Smart Script blows me away. If Apple made Smart Script available in, say, Notability, I’d probably migrate over to it, but I’m generally happy with Notes (more on that later in a different post that I’ve been working on).

There is a place, however, for other Notes on the Mac. I’ve enjoyed Tot, for example, with its very opinionated focus on a specific number of notes. I’ve used other menu bar-centric apps in the past to keep Mac-specific info at my fingertips, such as MailMate’s search modifiers; one great example is FiveNotes.

Apps like Bartender highlight the complication that comes with adding items to your Mac’s Menu Bar: too many icons in the menu bar likely results in not seeing anything there at all, or expending some cycles trying to figure out what you’re looking for up there. And keyboard commands? Useful for sure, but contrary to the visual advantages of having a graphical user interface.

Consider Apple’s longstanding Stickies app: it’s a Mac app. It’s only a Mac app. It hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s a full GUI affair, with rich text support. It migrated from the Mac’s Classic OS to OS X/macOS, and continues to come pre-installed on every Mac to this day. I still use it.

Outside of the Menu Bar, the edges of the Mac’s screen are a common place to add UI elements. Yojimbo, a great digital junk drawer, has long allowed users to drag all kinds of content to a shelf on the edges of the screen. And Yoink, one of my must-have infrastructural apps, lives on the left side of my screen.

Hold My Notes is a new app that takes advantage of the Mac’s edge-of-the-screen UI. In a landscape of plain-text notes apps, it’s a full-on GUI affair, with fetching tabs and pop-out card views. You can turn note contents into checklists, and change the background color of the note. You can pin a note to the screen to keep it in view, and archive notes that you don’t need to see. And the hover animation is absolutely delightful.

Despite the app’s visual richness, though, it doesn’t support rich text: dragging links to a note produces a plain-text link, which I don’t like at all. It is, in a sense, a Markdown note editor with a thoughtful GUI. To my mind, pulling a URL out of Safari and dropping it into Hold My Notes should behave the same way as Stickies: create a rich text note link, not a plain-text one. I want to drag a link or a screenshot to a note and have it appear just as it does in the system.

Hold My Notes supports iCloud syncing, and license costs less than a sawbuck for up to three Macs.

Unread RSS v5

Unread is one of my favorite RSS readers; it’s unique (to me) in that it’s fabulous on the iPhone and Mac, but not so great on my 13” iPad. On the Mac, it supports amazing themes and FeedBin, while on the iPhone, it presents your feeds in a most device-forward (and thoughtful) way. It is singular in its design on the iPhone.

Unread’s version 5 isn’t a redesign, but features welcome and meaningful improvements.

Sunday Serial for Labor Day 2026: Bellview Winery’s Saperavi, Cotypist iCloud Sync, and Newsairy RSS Reader

It’s a Sunday that feels like a Saturday!

I managed to replace the faucet in the upstairs kitchen; it was leaking a bit at the handle, and my previous attempt to remove the handle only made the leak worse. I put the repair off long enough to replace my basin wrench, which had gone missing.

I got the wrench and summoned the gumption to replace the faucet yesterday after coffee. I did not, in turns out, need the basin wrench; the design of the faucet is such that it includes the hot and cold water lines in the unit. It’s the second faucet I’ve replaced that came from the factory this way, but I forgot that it was a thing. So while removing the old faucet was a bit of a pain, once removed, the new installation was a breeze.

It’s a feeling of accomplishment to get something like that done. I always worry a bit with plumbing stuff that a supply pipe will break when I’m working on a faucet or another fixture, but happily, this was a quick and easy job. Special thanks to vice grip pliers and a can of Liquid Wrench for making it happen.

Bellview Winery’s New Red Wine: Saperavi

I stopped by Bellview Winery in Landisville, NJ, on Friday to pick up a couple of bottles of wine, and they had their new Saperavi on tap, which often precedes bottling at the winery, but is sometimes their way to test a new wine before going whole hog.

It’s a dark and luscious red, with notes of blackberry and black pepper. There’s a ton of berry up front before the tannins weight in. It’s a tart wine for sure.

I have a Picanha in the sous vide tank that’s going to pair nicely with this wine.

A new dry red grape coming soon to Bellview Winery. This red has notes of blackberry and black pepper. Fans of Syrah or Malbec should stop in and give this wine a taste.

Cotypist Sync

Cotypist version 2026.4 adds a feature that I was hoping for: iCloud Sync across your Macs. I have an M1 Studio at home, and a MacBook Air for work, and I use both enough that a shared base of autocomplete behavior would be very much appreciated in Cotypist.

One of the privacy-forward virtues Cotypist has always extolled is its on-device storage model: all of the processing happens on your Mac. In addition to not switching context to a chatbot, you use the app you need while Cotypist scaffolds your writing.

And now, we have encrypted sync across devices via iCloud.

Newsairy RSS Readers for iOS + iPadOS

Developer Enrico Bonaldo recently released his take on an RSS reader for iOS. Having too many RSS readers to choose from is a good problem to have; I serially switch between Unread, Reeder Classic, NetNewsWire, Current, and Fiery Feeds; I love each of them for the unique features that define their character.

Newsairy has a crisp look and feel. There are a number of settings to tweak to customize your reading experience. And Newsairy supports Feedbin, among other aggregators.

SummerFest 2026

Bloody hell: The SummerFest software site is go! Cotypist and Hookmark are easy endorsements for just about anyone, and Scrivener is a must-have for writers. I’ve got my eye on Mellel: the unresolved grief over Nisus Writer’s demise, and a lingering reluctance to even open Microsoft Word, has found me kicking Mellel’s tires once again. CleanShot 2026-09-03 at 6.58.30 PM@2x.

Designed in California: System 7 to OS X

Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that seven (seven!) episodes of Designed in California, the podcast on Relay FM from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley, dropped today… but most notably, that the arc of this segment highlights the evolution of macOS from System 7 to OS X. This was probably peak Apple for me, at least at the latter end of the throughline. I’d been using a Mac since System 7, when I came home from my senior trip to find a Mac Color Classic waiting for me to take to college. I wrote my salutatorian speech on it (with Wordprefect, no less), and played a lot of Prince of Persia. I went from a person who didn’t care about computers to a nerd overnight. It’s great to listen to Jason and John Siracusa recount the details, while Myke asks questions and adds commentary. Glad I backed this Kickstarter.

Designed in california podcast screenshot 2026 09 02.

Sunday Serial: TMOG, Escape from Duckov, and ExtraBar Launcher Mode

The beginning of the 2026-27 school year is upon us! Summer is always a busy time at work, which most people don’t realize. There’s a lot of prep work that goes into the start of the school year. I will miss the shorter work days and longer weekends of summer, but it’s good to return to the routine as well.

Earlier today I washed the cars; I hit the Miata, WRX, and Joe’s Impreza with the foam cannon, and then gave the Miata a quick hand wash because of the hard water spots. Everything is looking good now!

There’s that hint of fall in the late afternoon air. I noticed it coming back in from the pool just now.

Task Manager TMOG

Leo Laporte mentioned TMOG on MacBreak Weekly last week, so I decided to give it a try. TMOG unifies some disparate utilities on your Mac (or Windows or Linux box) into a single app. You can see CPU and memory usage, GPU and disk activity, and even what your Mac’s Neural Engine is up to. There’s plenty more, including your status apps, running processes, and running services. TMOG doesn’t rest on its feature set, though; it has a customizable color palette and some unique visual tweaks to make it all your own.

It looks like there’s a pro mode in the works, too, but you can’t currently buy it.

TMOG

Escape from Duckov

This quirky extraction shooter harkens the name of another shooter, Escape from Tarkov, but you play as a duck who must marshal resources in order to escape from his egg-shaped planet. I was not initially interested in the game when I first saw it on the App Store, but something about it kept me coming back. I watched a few YouTube reviews and thought, despite the cutesy graphics, that it might be worth checking out.

There’s a crafting element and some resource management to keep the gaming interesting, and the combat is surprisingly deep.

Escape from Duckov

ExtraBar Launcher Mode

App launchers are a solid genre of Mac utility apps, and there are many great choices, including LaunchBar (my favorite), Alfred, Quicksilver, and Raycast. I was surprised by an email from the ExtraBar team on Saturday announcing a launcher mode. I expected another take on an app launcher, but that’s not what it is. Instead, ExtraBar’s launcher mode is a way to invoke your active presets from a launcher menu, and you can type the name of the preset you want to run. It looks great and is a neat twist on this highly customizable utility.

If one of the limitation of ExtraBar is that your preset items can start to grow in number and hence occupy more screen real estate, the launcher mode is way to keep your config out of sight until you need it. I’m thinking this will be a great way to get more usage out of ExtraBar while keeping UI clutter to a minimum. Very cool.

ExtraBar