As the song goes, we all need a little help from our friends. And that applies to apps for our Macs and iPhones as well.

Fortunately, the apps in the spotlight this week all aim to lend a helping hand, whether it’s tracking down files to free up space on your devices, expanding text or storing clippings to save time or even doing things with the photos and screenshots you’ve accrued over the years.

Do you know of any helpful macOS and iOS offerings? Drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. We won’t be able to respond to every email we receive, but we will give any and all suggestions a helpful once-over.

Crumb

I’m not as diligent about keeping my Mac free of detritus and cruft as I should be, to the point where gigabytes are often in short supply on my laptop’s drive. Crumb promises to do the hard work of freeing up space on your Mac, with some more sophisticated tools to help you track down the files that have outlived their usefulness.

At its most basic, Crumb clears out your caches, which can remove a surprising amount of filler if you’ve not used a cleaner app in a while. Running the app for the first time, I wound up with 2.4GB of cache and logs that could be safely jettisoned — I imagine that number won’t be as garish with more frequent cleanings, but anything that helps me keep my drive free of cruft is welcome.

Crumb has some other modes, like a Visualize tool that shows you what’s in different folders and how much space that folder takes up. An analysis tool can spot whether the content in the folder contains things you’ve created and, therefore, should be reviewed manually before deleting. You can also tap a shortcut button to head straight to a folder to review its contents.

I find Crumb’s Duplicate tool particularly useful, since I’m in the habit of downloading images, tweaking their sizes for stories and then keeping copies in multiple places. Duplicate tracks down the extras for purging, while an Uninstall feature helps you remove apps and any files they leave behind.

The free tier of Crumb entitles you to one full cleanup — a trial of the app, in essence. A one-time $9 payment unlocks unlimited cleanups as well as the Uninstall, Duplicates and Organize tools. (The latter feature sorts things into folders such as Images, Videos, Documents and more.) A Crumb license works on up to two Macs.

Klackey

Klackey is a multipurpose text expander that works on both Windows machines and Macs, though it’s only the macOS version we’re concerned with here. And while some may find the extensive toolset to be overkill — Klackey brings a lot to the table — the text expansion features certainly impress.

I get a lot of email submissions, as you might imagine, and I’ve been struggling with a way to send out a reply that doesn’t make responding to emails my full-time job. In Klackey, I can write a general reply and give it a simple code preceded by a semicolon — say ;reply — so that when I type that code into a Mac app that accepts text input like a mail client, my form letter shows up automatically. I can do that for any other frequently used text snippets I want to store in Klackey as well.

Klackey offers other features like a clipboard history for keeping everything you copy close at hand, a notes tool for organizing your thoughts and even an encrypted secure folder for storing items like passwords. I found the text expansion to be the real selling point, but you can decide for yourself with a free 14-day trial when you download Klackey. After that, a payment unlocks all the current features with a year of updates, with a cross-platform license covering up to two computers.

As I write this, Klackey is available for $35, a discount from the regular price of $49.

MemoryString

You’re not hurting for options when it comes to assembling your photos and videos into a movie that you can view or share with others. MemoryString is betting you’ll give this macOS offering a try for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s free.

That’s not “free” as in you get to assemble a video or two before you’re required to unlock the full app. MemoryString won’t cost you a dime to download — neither initially nor through any in-app purchases. Just grab the app, import some photos or videos and fiddle around with the transitions, titles and audio. (There’s a royalty-free library included with the app, or you can add your own music.) A MemoryString watermark does appear at the end of the finished video.

MemoryString looks to be an alternative to iMovie by getting you to the finished product faster, while also offering more control over your project than the Memory Movie feature included in Photos.

I found that the app works best when you import an image or folder, as MemoryString crashed when I tried dragging things directly from the Photos app on my Mac. However, MemoryString’s developer responded promptly to my bug report.

In other words, it’s a promising alternative if you’re looking for a tool that helps you turn the photos on your Mac and iPhone into moving pictures, and the free status means there’s no barrier to giving MemoryString a try.

Pixph

Just as there are lots of ways to assemble your photos into a video or slideshow, you also have many options for managing all the things you save to your clipboard. So why turn to the $10 Pixph as a place to stash text, URLs or anything else you care to copy? Besides the convenience of having a storage space on the side of your display — or wherever you choose to position the Pixph window — there’s also the matter of organizing all those clips.

It’s easy to copy something over to Pixph: just highlight and tap your shift button twice to capture it in the app. But Pixph also lets you organize clippings into projects, so that if you’re researching something, all the related text strings, links and images you’ve saved are all in one place, ready to move back into the window that you’re working in. Pixph lives in the menu bar of your Mac, and it’s easy to pivot between projects when you find a relevant clip to save.

I found Pixph’s commitment to the Liquid Glass interface a little bit distracting, though it was easy enough to open up settings and switch to dark mode so that the app behind the Pixph window wasn’t as visible. Pixph also treats your clippings as a checklist, with buttons for marking off items when you have no further use for them. Some may appreciate that approach, but it really didn’t fit into my workflow.

Nevertheless, the ability to organize items and even add your own thoughts via a note feature makes Pixph a useful tool for people to add a little structure to their projects.

DumpPixels

If you find yourself filling up your iPhone’s Photos app with screenshots — and then forgetting to delete those screenshots later on — DumpPixels can clean up your photo library without sacrificing the information you were looking to capture in the first place.

Anytime you capture a screenshot, it appears in DumpPixels, which also copies any text that appears within that screenshot. Say you capture an article in the News app because you spot an interesting snippet of text. Within DumpPixels, you can save a note containing that text to the app’s Notes tab. You can then delete the screenshot, freeing up space in your Photos library while retaining whatever information you wanted from the screenshot.

Or at least, DumpPixels will delete the screenshot after you’ve unlocked the app. The free download only lets you save copied text from screens, while a $20 in-app purchase unlocks the deletion feature.

If there’s a limitation to DumpPixels, it’s that it only works on screenshots. If you were to take a photo of a flyer with date and address info, that wouldn’t get copied into DumpPixels — unless you were to take a screenshot of the photo itself, of course. Still, if you find yourself snapping a lot of screenshots to collect data for later use, DumpPixels could be an effective way to better manage all the info and imagery you’ve collected.

It’s a real grab bag of apps in this week’s report, but that seems wholly appropriate somehow. After all, most of us turn to our Macs for a variety of reasons, so why not a selection of apps that speed up image processing, give you new controls over your tunes or help you keep a cleaner, better organized desktop? Oh, and there’s an iOS app in there, too, for the next time the travel bug bites you.

So why not reach in and see if any of the apps below grab you? And if there’s something we haven’t covered, drop us a line with the details at apps@sixcolors.com. We can’t respond individually, but rest assured that we take a look at every suggestion we get.

Freshly Squeezed

Each week I produce a weekly newsletter where I write about whatever’s on my mind — you should subscribe! — and one of the big production tasks is to take the images I’ve shot and convert them into 16:9 JPEGs cropped down to 2000 x 1125. It’s a job that would definitely benefit from batch processing, which is where an app like Freshly Squeezed comes into play.

Freshly Squeezed handles the jobs you’d expect from a batch image processor: It can resize, crop, compress and convert images to different files, all while retaining your originals. I’ve set up the app so that I can drop photos into it and get the right cropping and conversion, with Freshly Squeezed giving me the option to individually tweak crops if I want.

The app’s showcase feature is called Drop Folder, which you set up when you need to perform the same image processing over and over again. Once you’ve set up the parameters, just drop images into the folder, and Freshly Squeezed handles the rest.

You can download Freshly Squeezed onto your Mac for $7. A 7-day trial lets you try things out for free.

NepTunes

For another way to control music playback on your Mac, turn to NepTunes 4, which works with both Apple Music and Spotify. In fact, the Pro version of the app even lets you toggle between the two music services.

At its most basic, NepTunes lives in your menu bar, where it shows you whatever song is currently playing along with playback controls. You can also customize NepTunes to display additional info — I’ve got the app showing recently played songs, and if you link it to your Last.fm profile, you can see stats affiliated with that account. From the NepTunes interface, you can look up similar artists, while Pro users can find similar tracks to what’s playing. And all NepTunes users can set up hotkeys to control different playback features.

I keep mentioning the Pro version, which is a $10/year subscription. Besides the aforementioned features, Pro users can display their top albums in a grid. They can also download desktop widgets in various styles, such as one that displays the album you’re listening to like it’s a CD in a jewel case. You can peruse the 15 available widgets to get a flavor for NepTunes’ visual flair.

The Pro version comes with a 14-day free trial. Otherwise, NepTunes is a free download.

Tidy

It’s an occupational hazard that I have a lot of screenshots piled up around my Mac with names like Screenshot 2024-07-09 at 10.05.32 AM that tell me nothing about what’s actually contained in the screenshot. I imagine you might have the same problem with IMG files or PDFs or any file with an inscrutable collection of letters and numbers as its only means of identification.

Tidy is the answer to our organizational prayers. This $9 macOS download takes the screenshots, scans and other oddly named files from your Downloads folder, takes a look at them using its own built-in OCR feature and proposes readable names to help you better identify what the file actually contains. You approve the names, so nothing’s forced upon you, and Tidy only generates names using what it sees, so there are no hallucinations.

Even so, Tidy occasionally misses the mark. For example, a screenshot of the NepTunes app from up above got renamed “dutton-toster” because the font for singer Sutton Foster’s name proved too tricky to decipher. I was able to reject that suggestion, though, so no harm, no foul.

More often, Tidy proved to be on the money, as a photo of the ferris wheel looming over Disney’s California Adventure was retitled “blue-sky-land-amusement-park” — a much more decipherable moniker than IMG_435.HEIC.

Appricio

Appricio looks to be an indispensable travel companion by taking advantage of your iPhone’s location awareness. Fire up Appricio in a city included in one of the iOS app’s guides, and it can tell you what to do based on where you are, what the weather is and preferences shared in the settings.

You won’t just get a list of places to visit with Appricio, though. It’s a curated guide that makes specific suggestions, with a bias toward taking you off the beaten path (at least when you’re amenable to that). For example, Appricio detected that I’m near San Francisco and that the weather’s nice right now, so it steered me away from Pier 39 — which it dismissed as a tourist trap — and guided me to a day in Golden Gate Park instead.

Appricio would be a fine app if it just helped you in the moment, but it helps you plan trips, too. That feature is somewhat limited by the fact that the app only covers 50 cities at the moment, though I was able to do web searches for an upcoming visit to San Diego (currently not among the included cities) without the benefit of Appricio’s curation.

The app is free, though a $30/year subscription gives you a dozen more cities, a multi-day planning feature in which Appricio helps build your trip and an events calendar, among other bonuses.

Droppy

If you’ve looked at the notched display on your MacBook and thought, “I wish this worked more like the Dynamic Island on my iPhone,” Droppy is here to answer the call. At its most basic, this app lets you drag documents and files up toward the notch, where they can be stored for easy access until you find a more permanent home for them. But Droppy’s feature set doesn’t end there.

Droppy provides access to other features, like music playback controls, a clipboard that keeps the history of things you copy and paste and a five-hour weather forecast. Additional widgets — or Droplets, as the app dubs them — can be added to handle things like editing screenshots, file conversion, transcription and more.

While the app complements notch-equipped machines, it brings those Dynamic Island capabilities to other Macs as well. Droppy is free to try for three days; afterwards, a $10 payment unlocks the app for up to two Macs.

Sometimes, putting these columns about intriguing macOS and iOS apps together feels a little like improvisational jazz — I’m not always sure where this is going or how it’s going to wind up, but hopefully there’s a note or two that someone gets some enjoyment out of. Well, this week, we’re going to look at an app that deals with actual jazz. How’s that for a tie-in?

Before we get to that offering, though, there’s a pair of Mac productivity boosters that caught my eye, particularly for research projects. And just so iPhone users don’t feel left out, we’ve got a couple of iOS entries, too, aimed at helping improve your sleep and your brain power, respectively.

Do you know of an app that makes your heart sing? Let us know by emailing apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. Due to the large volume of tips we get, we’re not able to respond to each email, but rest assured if you send us a note about an app, we’re going to read it.

And now on to our first number…

Eno PDF

I’m of the mind that AI is best suited to perform repetitive tasks that might otherwise derail me from getting my main work done, and Eno PDF seems to be of the same mind. Billed by its developer as “AI for people who hate AI,” the app taps into artificial intelligence to dive into documents to find the information you might otherwise invest a lot of time to track down on your own.

Eno PDF doesn’t just expect you to take its word for it, though, as it summons up the exact part of the text that shows what you’re looking for, so that you can verify the result.

When testing Eno PDF, I loaded up four years of Apple SEC filings into the app and asked it to track down exactly how much revenue Apple made from iPhone sales last year. Eno PDF produced the right answer and even highlighted the part of the fiscal 2024 report that showed the number. (And yes, the 2024 fiscal year was the last full year of data I had Eno PDF search through.) More impressively, as it was searching, Eno PDF listed what documents it was poring over, further reinforcing the idea that its results aren’t being pulled out of thin air.

The searches take place natively on your Mac, so they’re relatively speedy depending on the size of the documents you’re having Eno PDF sort through. Nothing’s stored on external servers, though snippets of documents are sent out for AI analysis.

You can download Eno PDF for free, with 1,000 free credits available for you to test out the app. After that, it will cost you $15 to add 5,000 credits for future searches.

Not everyone’s going to need a tool like Eno PDF on their Mac, with the developers touting the app for professionals like lawyers and academics. But if you work on any project that requires research, Eno PDF can take a lot of the grunt work out of your hands while giving you the confidence that the results coming back to you aren’t some AI hallucination.

Caddy

Speaking of research projects, I’m a sucker for any app that can keep all my related ideas in one place. And Caddy, which adds a project tab to the side of your Mac’s screen, fits that description to perfection.

Caddy can hold whatever you need to have on hand for a particular assignment — notes, files, documents, images or what have you. I’ve set up a Caddy tab to contain research for a story I’m working on so that I can slide out the tab when I need to reference my notes without distracting from the app I have open. You can set up multiple Caddy tabs, using different colors to distinguish them.

The app is a free macOS download with a subscription-based Caddy Club ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) adding the ability to further customize tabs, collaborate with other people or send a copy of your Caddy to someone else so they can see what you’re working on.

Sessionography

I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I contend that the more specific your music tastes, the less you might feel well-served by streaming music apps built with general audiences in mind. Sessionography looks to bridge that gap, at least when it comes to appreciating jazz music.

Type an artist, album or song into the Sessionography app, and you can easily fall down a jazz wormhole. (Jazz Wormhole, incidentally, is the name of my poorly received second album.) Typing “Bill Evans,” for example, brings up a list of all the pianist’s albums, which you can then sort through by whether the artist was the leader or sideman. Speaking of sidemen, you can get a list of everyone who played on a particular album, delving into their catalog, too. Create a smart playlist with the tap of a button — assuming you’ve got an Apple Music subscription to also enjoy playing back your selections, that is.

The free version of Sessionography limits you to 10 taps per day for exploring artists and music along with three smart playlists, but a subscription (99 cents/week or $19.99/year) unlocks unlimited activity. It’s an ideal app for jazz enthusiasts to find new combinations and for the jazz-curious to find out what kind of tunes they like.

Wavelength

Like a lot of people reading this, I struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and while there are probably many factors at play, perhaps one I can take more control of is the quality and duration of the ambient light around me. That’s the notion behind Wavelength, an iOS app that taps into your iPhone’s camera to measure the light around you to see if it might be throwing off your body clock.

The first time you fire up Wavelength, you’ll enter in the time you woke up that morning along with your preferred wake-up time. Wavelength then charts out the times of day you should be out in daylight or at least bright light to boost your body clock and when you might want to steer clear of brighter lights, lest you throw off your body clock. Not only does this help with sleep, but it can help you stave off jet lag, too, the app’s developers claim.

If this sounds like hooey to you, Wavelength’s release notes point to the research all this is based on. So there’s some circadian science behind all the app’s recommendations on heading to the light.

Normally a $29.99 download for the full app, all of Wavelength’s features are currently free to all users through September 2027, according to the Wavelength App Store listing.

Geo Text

Part of my daily puzzle habit is to play the latest edition of MapTap online, where I have to drop a pin on a globe as accurately as possible to whatever city is part of that day’s game. Geo Text takes a similarly geographical approach to gaming, bringing a guessing game to the Messages app on your iPhone.

After downloading Geo Text to your iPhone, you access it in Messages, where you’re given a 360-degree photo of a place to scroll around looking for clues. You then tap the part of the globe where you think that photo was taken — the closer your pin to the right result, the more points you accrue.

Here’s where the Messages component comes in. Sharing your Geo Text result to a chat or group message lets everyone you’re chatting with play along — provided that they download Geo Text, too, of course. It’s a way to add a little friendly competition to your chats, as you battle friends for geographic supremacy.

There’s just one Geo Text game per day in the free version of the app, but $1.99 in-app purchases unlock separate games for the 50 U.S. states as well as soccer stadiums around the world.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life, as this week’s crop of intriguing apps proves. None of our entries promise anything revolutionary — just control over one aspect or another of your Mac that should stand to make your user experience just a tad bit better.

Oh and we throw in a game, too. All work, no play and all that.

So let’s work our way down the list of possible additions to your Mac or iPhone. And if you have something you’d like to see featured in this space, let us know about it via email at apps@sixcolors.com.

Mainspring

Your Mac is more powerful than you know, with a lot of controls hidden well out of view (at least if you don’t want to dig around in the Terminal). Mainspring imagines a world where you can control some of those features via toggles in a utility panel.

Want to speed things up by removing the delay before your auto-hidden Dock pops up or making the hide and show animation go faster? Turn those features on. You can also tweak the built-in screenshot tools to remove drop shadows or save your files as JPGs instead of PNGs. Or you can explore dozens of other optimizations covering various aspects of your Mac, tailored to whether you’re using a laptop or desktop.

Best of all, undoing those changes is as simple as sliding the toggle off. Mainspring really lets you tweak and fine-tune your Mac without running the risk of damaging something important in the process.

What I really appreciate about Mainspring is the setup feature that proposes different scenarios for getting started. I selected the Writer settings, which gave me access to the different screenshot tools that I could turn on and turn off. The app really makes it easier for amateurs like me to use.

You’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $29 for an unlocked copy of Mainspring, but the app comes with a free trial that lets you use it for one day so you can see if Mainspring’s various settings are just the tweaks your Mac needs.

Docktor

Sometimes, when I’m jumping between different apps for the same project, I forget what I’ve got open where. Did I start writing that document in BBEdit or in Google Docs in Safari? The free Docktor utility resolves any lingering doubts by adding live previews of each open app’s window when you hover over its icon in the Dock.

You will have to turn on some permissions to let Docktor do its thing, such as allowing screen recording to capture live thumbnails using ScreenCaptureKit. Optional permissions allow Docktor to know your location and look at your calendar to populate relevant widgets that can be added to either side of your Dock.

That’s another bonus feature for Docktor apart from the live thumbnail previews, though by default, the widgets appeared a little faint on my display. I took care of that by going into Docktor’s settings and fiddling with the Liquid Glass to make things easier on my eyes. That may be a step too far for some users, but the app is free to download and use so you can give it a try to see if it delivers what you’re looking for in a productivity-boosting utility.

Pop Out Timer

Apple devices have their own built-in Clock apps, though the one that comes with the Mac is a bit pedestrian for my tastes. Pop Out Timer offers a different spin on things, with a floating window that you can place just about anywhere on your screen.

That can come in handy when using the stopwatch mode if you want to keep an eye on your time while running through a presentation. As for me, I’ve used Pop Out Timer’s stopwatch as an impromptu time tracker for logging how much time I’m spending on projects where I bill by the hour. The app also features timer, clock and pomodoro modes.

Customization features in Pop Out Timer’s settings let you adjust the aspect ratio of the floating timer as well as the background and text colors. The app, which also runs on iPhones and iPads, is free to try, with timers restricted to 5 minutes. If you like what you see, unlock the premium version, either with a subscription (49 cents/month or $4/year) or a one-time $12 purchase.

TrillMark

When you’re heads down on a project, those notification pings your Mac sends out can fade into the background — which really defeats the purpose of notifications if you ask me. The $8 TrillMark lets you assign different sounds to notifications coming from different apps, so that an alert coming in from Slack will make a different noise compared to a News notification.

To differentiate notifications even further, TrillMark lets you set colors for individual apps, so that you’re sure to see the alerts that are critical to you and to know which apps they’re coming from at a glance.

TrillMark requires some tweaking. For instance, when I’m shuffling through songs in the Music app, I have a notification appear on screen with the song title and artist, but I don’t necessarily want a noise from TrillMark pinging over the music. Fortunately, if you go into the settings, you can ensure that such notifications appear silently.

Echo

Let’s wrap up this week’s look at apps with an iOS puzzle game that lets you clear your mind while passing a few spare moments.

Echo requires you to navigate your way through a maze with just a limited number of moves, but fortunately, there’s an Echo button where your past moves reappear to help you unlock doors and overcome obstacles. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but all becomes clear the moment you start playing.

Different game modes — a campaign mode along with endless play and daily puzzles — add to Echo’s replayability, while soothing music creates a very calming experience.

Best of all, Echo is a free download with no ads marring the experience, though there is a button where you can send a tip the developer’s way.