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.

One of the benefits to being part of the Apple ecosystem is the plethora of apps that work across all of Apple’s devices so that you can access them whether you’re sitting in front of a Mac, out and about with your iPhone or even strapping on a Vision Pro headset. Come on — somebody out there has to be wearing one of those things.

This week’s look at interesting apps features four such multiplatform wonders that let you do everything from type with your voice, post on a social network or jot down random thoughts on at least two different Apple devices. And our lone macOS-only app should prove pretty useful in its own right.

If you’ve come across an app that you find useful no matter what device it works on, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com.

Voice Keyboard Pro

My high school typing teacher would frown upon hearing this, but typing sometimes feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And since I’m the type of person who tends to speak aloud the words as I type them, why am I even bothering with the middleman of a keyboard and not just letting my voice handle all the work?

Voice Keyboard Pro lets me do just that, allowing me to press and hold a key on my MacBook Air keyboard — the Control key, by default, to be exact — and dictate into any app that allows for text entry. I’ve used Voice Keyboard Pro to enter text into BBEdit, the built-in Notes app, and the Gmail web page in Safari, all without any fuss.

Transcription is fairly accurate — Voice Keyboard Pro knew enough to properly capitalize “BBEdit,” for example. But it’s not flawless, as my efforts to dictate a message to Jason Snell kept turning his first name into “JSON.” I imagine that’s something the app would learn to correct over time.

Voice Keyboard Pro isn’t just about dictation, as the app offers a Meeting mode that not only records what’s said in one-on-ones, standup sessions and sprint planning, but also offers a nice summary of what you talk about afterwards.

You can try out Voice Keyboard Pro for free on a limited basis with five transcriptions per day. A $4.99/month Pro subscription unlocks the app and adds custom vocabulary and offline modes.

Play

I cannot tell you how many times this scenario plays out: I will be scrolling through my YouTube feed when I see a video and think “My wife will probably enjoy watching this, I’ll have to remember it for later.” Of course, I will not because my brain is too crowded to remember random YouTube videos upon command.

The simply-named app Play now does the remembering for me. Copy a YouTube link into Play, and it’s kept in a watchlist complete with metadata — you can even watch YouTube videos directly in the app. In addition to YouTube, Play also supports Vimeo, TikTok and Instagram Reels; I’ve also posted Bluesky links with embedded video into Play, though I have to click through to the website to play back the video.

Play has a tagging feature that helps you organize videos. For instance, I can tag videos containing recipes with a Cooking tag for easy reference later on. Other bookmarking and customization features let you organize and annotate your video playlists as much or as little as you like.

You get to try out Play for seven days to get a feel for the app. After that, a $2.99/month subscription unlocks all the features. Though I’ve used Play primarily on my Mac, the app also works on iPhones, iPads, Apple TV and Vision Pro headsets.

Skyscraper

After the social network formerly known as Twitter followed its owner straight into the sewer, I’ve found that I’ve transitioned to Bluesky rather nicely. What I have yet to do is find a satisfying Bluesky client app, though Skyscraper looks like it might change that now that the version 1.6 update has delivered a native macOS version.

Skyscraper lets you scroll through your timeline, remembering where you left off across all your devices. (The app also comes in iOS/iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS versions.) It’s easy enough to switch between my curated feed and the different Discover and Popular with Friends feeds through a drop-down menu. I also find the stats included in the Notifications view showing how many people have replied, reposted or favorited my Bluesky posts to be a nice balm for my ego (or a devastating blow, based on the vagaries of my popularity).

The free download delivers enough features to get by, though some users will want to pay up for a $2.99/month Pro account that adds support for multiple accounts, notification customization and other niceties.

Einfall

My deep dive into the world of apps has revealed that there are a lot of options out there if you want something that helps you quickly jot down your thoughts. Einfall takes things a step further, not just by providing a quick way to jot down ideas as they occur to you, but to take action on them as well.

Once you’ve created an entry in Einfall — it could be anything from a list of to-dos to an idea for a story — you can then use the app to route it elsewhere, whether that’s creating a reminder or calendar entry, or even using AI tools to expand on your thought. Because Einfall works across multiple devices — there are macOS and iOS versions — you can store ideas that occur to you just about anywhere. I especially like the fact that there’s a lock screen widget for the iOS version so that you don’t even have to unlock your phone to get an idea down.

I don’t think the app is for everyone, as the actions interface is taking me some getting used to, but people who will find Einfall useful will likely realize that right away. At any rate, you can download the app for free and jot down ideas in it to your heart’s content. You can try 15 actions before you need to unlock Einfall for good with a one-time $29.99 payment.

Eyes Forward

If you have never longed for an app that turns your Mac into a teleprompter, then you can stop reading this column early today. But for podcasters who have to read tricky ad copy while on camera, actors who record their own auditions or anyone else who needs to stay on script without breaking eye contact, a teleprompter app becomes a very handy tool. And Eyes Forward — a $1.99 one-time download — offers an easy-to-use solution.

You enter in a duration or words per minute into Eyes Forward to set the scrolling speed for your text. You can also move the floating Eyes Forward window to just below your Mac’s camera, with developer Robert Hirsch recommending that you narrow the window to help make your eye contact seem more natural.

From there, it’s a matter of formatting the script — you can bold words, for example, if you want to remember to emphasize what you’re saying — saving it, and loading it into the virtual teleprompter. The ability to toggle between light and dark modes as you prefer adds an extra level of polish to an app that delivers exactly what it promises.

Artificial Intelligence takes center stage in a few of the apps enjoying this week’s spotlight — and not the kind of AI that’s going to have you rolling your eyes or organizing a protest march against the nearest data center. No, these are actually useful AI features that take some of the busy work of daily life out of your hands so you can concentrate on other things.

AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief outline of the whats, whys, and wherefores.

Now on to this week’s selection…

Sortio

The folders on my Mac are a mess, but who has the time to make sure that everything is filed away in its proper place? AI does, according to the makers of Sortio, a macOS utility that promises to do the hard work of organization on your behalf.

Sortio taps into AI to look at file names and metadata to help it figure out where to put each file. You can also opt to let the utility read the file, sending a 4KB excerpt to your AI provider of choice for even more detailed sorting. (Sortio also offers an offline mode that uses Ollama or LM Studio to keep its activity on your Mac.) You can further refine sorting by telling Sortio to organize things by file type, project, date, and whether the file is for work or personal use..

I took Sortio for a spin, having it go through the folder of articles I’ve written but haven’t bothered to organize for myself. Sortio was smart enough to take my submissions to Awful Announcing and separate them into their own folder. Not every search is that precise — a separate sorting session had Sortio tagging an offer letter from an old employer named Purch as a financial document — but there are edit buttons to correct mislabeled and misfiled material.

You can try out Sortio for free, which gives you enough of an allowance to sort through a few thousand files to get a flavor for how the app performs. After that, you’ll need to buy a license, with the $14.99/month Pro license suitable for most individual users. There are team and enterprise options as well, and paying for an annual license lowers your monthly rate.

AskPlay

AI isn’t just for organizing your folders; it can also generate a playlist for you based on specific artists, songs or moods you’re hoping to hear. At least, that’s the idea behind AskPlay, an app that lives in your menu bar and lets you type or speak plain-English instructions on the type of music you want to listen to.

You’re going to need a few things besides AskPlay and its $1.99/month subscription to make the app work. For starters, AskPlay works exclusively with Apple Music, so you’ll also need to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. In addition, you’ll need to provide an API key from an AI provider, with AskPlay supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter.

Those requirements are likely to limit AskPlay’s appeal to some users, but having tried out the app on my Mac, I am impressed by the results. I told AskPlay I wanted to hear songs written by Stephen Sondheim, and it dutifully produced a playlist not just from cast soundtracks but also numbers by vocalists from their own albums. That said, there were a few misfires — the playlist included a song from Tick, Tick… Boom!, a Jonathan Larson musical that only refers to Sondheim, as well as a rap song that shares a title with something Sondheim wrote. Other requests like “play upbeat songs from the ’80s” proved more successful.

An AskPlay feature I appreciate was the ability to augment playlists. After generating a playlist of Merle Haggard songs, I had the app add Johnny Cash music to the queue. Then I told AskPlay to “add more songs like these,” which brought Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and more to the party.

AskPlay seems built for a very specific kind of user, but if you like thematic playlists and already subscribe to the services that make this app tick, it brings another dimension to your listening experience. In addition to working on the Mac, AskPlay is available for a range of Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.

Pocket Screen

I don’t know about you, but my workflow often requires me to jump from one window to another to perform a task — and that can often break up my workflow. I’m thinking of when I’m writing something and need to refer to notes I’ve taken in another application or a PDF I have loaded up in Preview. Jumping between apps takes me out of the flow of writing, not to mention that accurately transcribing what’s in one app to the other can occasionally be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Pocket Screen addresses some of that dilemma by creating a floating window of one app that you can keep in view when you’re working on something else. Think of Pocket Screen as a picture-in-picture feature, but for productivity. You can capture a PDF, webpage, video, chat or other kind of information and keep it close at hand in a resizable window that you can move around your desktop. The app supports up to two simultaneous views, according to its developer.

You can freely use Pocket Screen for 10-minute sessions, but true productivity mavens will likely want to unlock the app for unlimited use. That’s a one-time payment of $9.99 to remove any restrictions.

Filtre

Filtre is a Safari extension for anyone whose browsing on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad takes you to places and topics they’d just as soon not read about.

Enter keywords into Filtre, and the extension blocks articles, posts and comments that include anything you consider verboten. For instance, I typed in variations of the Washington Nationals name into Filtre to avoid being spoiled on the result of a baseball game. When I visited ESPN in Safari on my Mac, all references to the Nationals and their in-progress game had been removed from view. (A pause button accessible from the Filtre Extension in Safari’s toolbar lets you restore any filtered-out content if you prefer.)

Filtre comes from the maker of Noir, a Dark Mode-enabling extension that Six Colors has profiled before, so we’re clearly talking about someone who knows their way around Safari extensions. You can try out Filtre free for a week before the extension’s $1.49/month subscription kicks in.

LogZero

You’ve got lots of ways to track everything from calories to moods on your iPhone. LogZero offers to do it all in one place. More significantly, though, LogZero promises to keep all that logged data for your eyes only, with data never leaving your device and everything stored within the app encrypted.

LogZero is a one-stop app for keeping tabs on food intake, meditation breaks, exercise, to-dos, and medications. You can also chart your mood and weight. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, you can toggle off the items you’re not interested in logging, and they’ll disappear from the interface.

It’s worth downloading the free iOS app to see if it fits your tracking needs, though a paid subscription gives you access to more analytics features plus personalization controls. A monthly subscription costs $5, while the annual rate is $35.

We’ve got a pair of apps that help you get a little reading done, albeit with two different approaches. Still, whether you prefer having someone else read the articles to you or if you just prefer a cleaner feed of articles, there’s something for everyone in this week’s App Report.

If there’s something you think belongs in our weekly look at promising macOS and iOS apps, just drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of the app in question. We can’t reply to every email we get, but we’ll certainly take a look at any and all apps for a future column.

Listen Later

Six Colors readers may be familiar with Listen Later, which has provided a way to turn articles you’ve been meaning to read into podcasts that you can listen to at your convenience. Recently, there’s been an expansion in the ways you can access the service, with both an iOS app and a Safari extension giving you new ways to send URLs and PDFs to Listen Later so that they can be converted into a podcast.

In the iOS version of Listen Later, a Submit tab offers a field for pasting text, HTML or links; there’s also an optional button for uploading PDFs to the service. I’m able to link Listen Later to my podcatcher of choice — in this case, it’s Overcast — and a new episode featuring the content I’ve submitted shows up in my feed after it’s been converted to audio form.

The Safari extension for macOS works much the same way, only there’s a button next to the search/URL field that I tap when I want to submit something to Listen Later.

Both the Listen Later iOS app and Safari extension for macOS are free downloads, with $2 in credits for new users. If you like what you hear, you’ll need to purchase additional credits through Listen Later to cover the cost of AI processing and audio generation.

PageFeed

Reading articles on your iPhone can be a delight, but scrolling from the start of the article to the end can take some of the pleasure out of the process. If that’s a problem for you, PageFeed comes to the rescue by adopting a more book-like format for a news reader. Instead of scrolling, you tap to turn the page to make your way through an article.

The idea, PageFeed developer Brad Moss says in the description for the iOS app, is to add some degree of calm to reading through your news feed. You can select the sources and topics you want to read about. A share sheet can also send articles you find elsewhere to PageFeed for a scrolling-free experience.

You can download the app to your iPhone or iPad for free and use it for 14 days to get a feel for PageFeed’s approach. After that, a one-time $10 fee unlocks the app for good.

Tansei

It would be unfair to describe Tansei as kind of a universal clipboard for your Mac, even if that’s what this utility does, at least in a broad sense. But Tansei is really a storage space for anything. Besides text and URLs, it can hold images, screenshots and even colors, keeping them in a shelf on the side of your display for you to access whenever you need.

In my testing, Tansei has already proven its worth for a weekly newsletter I put together every week. I include a lot of links in that newsletter, and previously, that meant keeping an open text document where I could copy down URLs to articles of interest for use when it came time to put a new issue together. With Tansei running on my Mac, all I have to do is copy the URL, and it shows up in Tansei’s shelf automatically. I can also drag-and-drop items into Tansei, and hide the app off to the side when I want an uncluttered screen.

I wish there was a way to exert a little more control over what gets copied. For example, while moving the newsletter text into the publishing site I use, every block of text I copy over appears in Tansei. At least the app offers a bulk management feature that I can use to delete unnecessary items in one fell swoop.

You can buy Tansei for a one-time payment of $7, though a three-day trial lets you use the app for free without restrictions.

WidgetScreen

The release of macOS Sonoma three years ago brought desktop widgets to the Mac. WidgetScreen now pulls off the same trick for your Mac’s lock screen, letting you add weather forecasts, calendars and other bits of information that remain visible even before you’ve unlocked your computer.

Specifically, WidgetScreen includes widgets for weather, clock, stopwatch, reminders and battery. You can also add a Now Playing widget that controls music playback or a Pomodoro widget for when you want to focus or take breaks. A $10 Premium purchase unlocks additional widgets, such as Live Lyrics and News, while giving you greater customization powers over your lock screen.

Not everyone is going to want to bring the widget experience to their Mac’s lock screen, but if you’ve ever wanted to replicate the iPhone’s widget capabilities, WidgetScreen feels like a simple way to do that.

MailTwin

I’m not fully sold on the value of AI-powered writing tools at this point in time, though that could be the professional writer in me talking. For people who don’t mash sentences together for a living, every little bit of writing assistance helps, especially when it comes to dashing off emails.

So in that sense, I can see the use case for MailTwin, which promises to help you draft emails using a voice drawn from the messages you’ve previously sent. Even more helpfully, MailTwin can differentiate between different email accounts if you keep your personal and business correspondence separate, so that the messages it generates aimed to be tonally appropriate depending on context. Replies are generated in a separate window, and you can paste the results into a draft in macOS’s Mail app if you’re satisfied.

MailTwin can tie into eight different AI providers, including the Apple Intelligence that’s already on your Mac. The data only passes between your Mac and the AI service, with nothing ever winding up on a MailTwin server.

You can try out the app for free. After 30 days, you’ll need to pay $20 to unlock the app, though that’s a one-time fee.

Clearly, creating Mac apps that make the most of your voice continues to be a focus of developers — at least based on the offerings coming across my radar lately. Following last week’s profile of two different takes on on-device transcription software, we’ve got yet another voice-powered app to take a look at, with this macOS download supporting dictation that you can then paste into other apps.

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.

Your voice may be your passport, as a certain Robert Redford picture once asserted, but two macOS apps in our spotlight this week view your voice as a way to get more things done on your Mac. We’re talking transcription apps with two apps that take very different approaches to what you can do with vocal recognition and AI.

But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.

Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.

Vox Dictum

I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.

Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.

I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.

As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.

Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.

Bonfiyah

Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.

Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.

Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.

Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.

Letterboxx

Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.

With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.

You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.

Echo Photo Album

I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.

You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.

You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.

Chess Peace

All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.

The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.

The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.

For the most part, I’m going to focus on Mac apps with these columns, because that’s where the action seems to be these days. But iOS remains a vibrant platform, too, and every now and again, we’ll look at some of the interesting apps being created for iPhones and iPads. This is one of those now and agains.

Want to see your app included in a future round-up? Get in touch at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and you just might make the cut.

Kickabout

The World Cup is just a memory now, but if you’re missing the daily infusion of soccer (or football, depending on what part of the globe you’re reading this from), Kickabout brings the action back to your iOS device in a very condensed form.

Kickabout will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever gathered around a foosball table in a rec room, with a look that will bring a smile to the face of Subbuteo tabletop football aficionados. You take charge of an 8-player team, with players only free to move about certain areas of the pitch. (No length-of-the-field Maradona-esque wonder golazos for your squad.) You use your finger to drag your players around, swiping any which way to boot the ball toward the goal as you look to rack up the most goals in each 2-minute match.

Goals and shots off the post earn you points, which translates to tickets that you cash in to collect various national teams, from the U.S. all the way to newly minted world champion Spain. You can also buy gear, including stands for your virtual stadium. It’s a fun element that adds to Kickabout’s replayability as you try to assemble your own World Cup field.

Kickabout has both single-player and dual-player modes, though I found the latter to be a little cramped for my iPhone 17 screen. I imagine head-to-head matches are much more enjoyable on the iPad. Still, Kickabout offers plenty of fun even for single players, as you try to master the game’s different difficulty levels.

Kickabout is free to download, and a $3 in-app purchase gets rid of any ads.

Undolly

The Photos app has a built-in tool to weed out duplicate images, but if you find yourself taking a lot of photos, Undolly brings a whole suite of tools that promise to bring order to your iOS device’s photo library. Besides getting rid of duplicates, the mobile app also lists large videos taking up space in your library, rounds up any screenshots you may have stashed somewhere and keeps tabs on other potential space-takers like RAW, timelapse and animated images.

The value of Undolly will depend heavily on how you use your photo library. For instance, I take a lot of screenshots for articles that I don’t always remember to delete, and the app helped me track down some that were three to five years old. I also appreciate Undolly’s swipable comparisons of similar shots, so you can see for yourself whether the images differ enough to keep. Undolly’s algorithm also rates images by their framing, quality and expressiveness of subject to better help you determine the shots that deserve a place in your library.

While it’s free to download initially, you will have to subscribe to Undolly to use its features, with a free three-day trial letting you get the lay of the land. After that, a monthly subscription costs $4, while annual and lifetime payments go for $15 and $40, respectively.

VWLSS

Nearly five years after Wordle first appeared, we’re still living in a golden age for daily word puzzles. Add VWLSS and its daily serving of mobile word play to the pile, though there are some unique iPhone elements that could help this free offering earn a place in your regular rotation of gameplay.

You have eight words to guess, each tied to a specific category and with all the vowels stripped out. It’s up to you to figure out the actual word, which you can do either by typing in the answer or using a handy speech feature. I prefer talking to typing, though I’m still sore that my guess of “Bob Barker” in the game show hosts category was misheard as “Bob Parker.” Revenge will be mine tomorrow, I guess.

Annotate

Between Notes and the still-new-to-iOS Preview app, you’ve got more than a few built-in tools for marking up documents and images on your iPhone or iPad. The Annotate app looks to expand on that with 17 tools that allow you to crop, blur and add notes to your heart’s content. If you find yourself making a lot of the same annotations, the app lets you create and save templates and there are shortcuts for watermarking and auto-redacting faces and phone numbers.

You can download Annotate for free and export up to five annotated photos and documents. After that, you’ll need to make a one-time $10 payment to use the app. Annotate works well enough on my iPhone, though I suspect iPad users will get more out of using this app’s many features on their larger-screen devices.

Just ahead of WWDC 2026, Jason Snell noted that he gets a lot of pitches about Mac apps, attributing the sudden boom in macOS offerings to vibe coding aided by artificial intelligence. Regardless of how apps are getting built — be it with AI tools or the more conventional developer kits that Apple offers — it’s certainly true that a lot more macOS apps seem to be popping up, extending the capabilities of your hardware. And some of those apps deserve a little extra attention.

And that’s what I’m hoping to do with these app spotlights for Six Colors. We’ll profile some interesting new apps for the Mac (and maybe the odd iOS offering every now and again), and explain why you might want to give it a download.

Do you have an app you’d like to bring to my attention? Simply drop me a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and we’ll take it from there.

With that housekeeping out of the way, here’s what I’ve been downloading lately.

Park Shelf

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for most of us, our Mac screens are an unholy mess. Open windows clutter up the view, adding another layer of complication to multitasking. An app called ParkShelf from Digital X Design looks to bring some order to the chaos with a handy place for storing open windows instead of placing them in the dock or relying on your Mac’s App Switcher to jump between windows.

Instead, ParkShelf features a floating bar you can position anywhere on your screen (though there is an option to pin it to a specific area if you prefer). That way you need to call up a particular window, it’s just a matter of heading over to where you’ve stashed it in ParkShelf and summoning what you need. The rest of the time, you’ve got a clean, uncluttered workspace so that you can focus on the task at hand.

I’ve been trying out the free version of ParkShelf, where you can store up to three different windows at any one time. For unlimited storage, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Pro version. In addition to the unlimited storage, the Pro version also gives you the ability to customize a hot key that sends an open window into ParkShelf’s waiting arms. (In the free version, option-P serves as the default hot key.)

For my purposes, ParkShelf works best when I’m focusing on a specific project. If I’m on a writing assignment, I can use the app to stash a window of notes, a browser page I’m using to research the topic, and data sheets in PDF form while I type away in my text editor. When I need anyone of those windows, I can turn to ParkShelf to look something up, but otherwise, those windows are out of sight and out of mind.

I’d like it better if I could store multiple web pages or notes, but ParkShelf seems to treat each app as its own window. For instance, even when I have web pages open in Safari for multiple windows instead of tabs, ParkShelf stores the whole kit and caboodle. Still, the free version of Park Shelf is certainly worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to better manage all the open windows on your screen.

Other apps

• ScrollPods lets you control scrolling on a Mac by tilting your head. The free utility works with 3rd-gen AirPods as well as any AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro models. Install the app, turn on a switch, and a tilt of your head lets you scroll through emails, web pages and other windows. Mastering just the right tilt takes a little bit of practice, but this is a pretty clever accessibility tool that takes advantage of an accessory you probably already have on hand.

• Sleepr is a $5 app that serves as a sleep timer that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and lets you time shutdowns after 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute intervals; you can also have your Mac go to sleep at a very specific time. The 3.0 release adds Liquid Glass support, recurring bedtimes that automatically start themselves, a floating alert that can even appear over full-screen apps, and a live menu bar countdown.

• Senqu Image Converter is a $5 image utility that lets you convert among JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and PDF files. The recent 1.2 update added the ability to drop images onto a preset in the full window for instant conversions, while dropping a file now immediately starts the conversion process using current settings.

My Apple TV has started yelling at me. Or at the very least, the Disney+ app on the Apple TV is now clamoring for my attention.

It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest Avatar picture or something from Pixar or even a Hulu original that now lives in Disney’s app — one moment of hesitation, and a preview plays until I move on to the next thumbnail and the cycle begins anew. New season of The Bear? Preview. An Indiana Jones picture? Preview. X-Men ’97? A particularly angering preview that doesn’t even feature Gambit, for crying out loud.

Disney’s Apple TV app is not alone in blasting previews whether I want them or not. In the land of streaming services, you are dealing with an attention economy, and the purveyors of streaming apps have decided the only way to command that attention is to shout as loud as possible. Hence, nearly every app from every streaming service of note turns on auto-playing previews by default, no matter how you feel about them.

And make no mistake — I feel that auto-playing just about anything is an assault on my senses. When I am trying to decide what to watch, I want to pause on a thumbnail and maybe glance at the information a bit without having to hastily scroll away once audio and video playback begin. Maybe I want to have a conversation with a family member about whether this is a program we both might enjoy without having to shout over some Na’Vi chittering at me about some sort of trouble brewing on Pandora.

The good news is that Apple TV apps have a setting for turning off autoplay previews so that you can go back to browsing through a streaming catalog in blessed silence. But there’s bad news, too — each app seemingly puts that setting in a completely different place, and it’s up to you to hunt down where that might be.

Should Apple impose some order on tvOS apps and require some degree of standardization when it comes to autoplay settings? Or should it go one step further and tell developers not to turn on that feature by default so as to spare the eardrums of paying customers? It’s not for me to say, even though the answer is emphatically yes to both questions.

But I fear my wisdom will fall upon deaf ears — and not just because they’ve already been deafened by all those autoplaying previews. So instead, I can do the next best thing, which is share the hard-won knowledge I have on how to turn off autoplay features in all the big streaming apps that might be living on your Apple TV.

Please don’t thank me. The silence is reward enough.

Apple TV

Apple’s TV app will start to preview content from the Apple TV streaming service if you let it. That’s certainly Apple’s right, but maybe I don’t want to hear about Your Friends and Neighbors each time I launch Apple’s app.

To make Apple TV shut up about the new season of Ted Lasso, go to the Settings app and select Accessibility, followed by Motion. Toggling off Auto-Play Video previews should, in Apple’s words, control whether you allow “video content to auto-play in apps like TV.” In my experience, though, the only app this setting seems to control is TV itself. For third-party apps, you’ll need to dive into settings on your own.

Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+

Tubi has among the easiest autoplay settings to disable, which is good because it also has the most annoying autoplay behavior. Tubi not only starts to play a preview if you momentarily pause while browsing through its vast library, but if you let that preview reach its conclusion, the movie or show will immediately start playing. For heaven’s sake, Tubi, your entire raison d’etre is to let me comb through the back alleys of your content to let me find something obscure to watch — stop ruining this for me!

Anyhow, with Tubi, all you have to do is head to the app’s settings where you select Video. There, you can disable autoplay to your heart’s content. See? Simple.

The story is similar for HBO Max and Paramount+—sort of. On HBO Max, choose Settings and then under the Playback tab, you can turn off a whole variety of autoplay features. In Paramount+, the Settings icon is hidden at the far bottom left of the screen, but if you just keep moving down through the side menu, you will end up selecting the Settings icon and can get where you need to go. All the Autoplay settings are under the Video tab.

Unfortunately, while Paramount+ will let you turn off “autoplay video,” that setting does not stop previews from autoplaying. Instead of letting you do that, Paramount+ gives you the option of holding down the center button on any preview to enter an “immersive preview mode” where they made the whole plane out of the preview. Frankly, yet another reason to give anything with Paramount’s imprimatur on it a wide berth.

Netflix

If Tubi is the easiest app for managing autoplay annoyances, then Netflix may be the worst. That’s because you can’t do it from the app on your Apple TV.

Instead, you need to head to Netflix in your web browser of choice, where you select your profile icon, followed by Account. From there, you select Edit Settings followed by Playback Settings followed once more by Autoplay Controls. There’s a box called Autoplay Preview While Browsing on All Devices — uncheck that and make sure to save your preference. Autoplay should be just a filthy memory the next time you access Netflix on your Apple TV.

Peacock and Disney Plus

I’m lumping these two services together because they put their autoplay controls in the exact same place. That’s not to say that the setting is easy to find, though, as both Peacock and Disney do a bang-up job hiding the control where you would least expect to find it.

In either app, go to the screen with your account profiles and click on the edit icon for the one you want to adjust. On Peacock, under Autoplay Preferences, you’ll see a toggle for Autoplay Trailers. For Disney, the Playback and Language Settings section has Background Video and Background Audio toggles; turning off the former takes care of both, while adjusting just the latter means that video previews will play silently.

Does the fact that this setting lives in the user profiles for both Peacock and Disney Plus mean that you’ll have adjust playback controls for each profile in your account? Indeed, it does!

Amazon Prime Video

Near as I can tell, Amazon Prime Video is the rare streaming app that doesn’t autoplay previews as you’re rummaging through its library of shows and movies. At the very least, nothing autoplays when I’m in the app, and whether that’s because of the overall Apple TV settings I’ve adjusted or something with Amazon itself, I’m satisfied with the result.

So well done, Amazon — I take back some, but only some, of the horrible things I’ve said about you.

When Amazon Prime Day gets underway this Tuesday (June 23), it will be the first time in nearly a decade that I’m not involved in some tech site’s effort to go all out with coverage around the online retailer’s multiday sales event. In recent years, my home base on the West Coast has meant late-night shifts posting about deals, updating constantly shifting sales prices and otherwise pointing out discounted doodads to readers. But none of that’s happening this year, after I was unceremoniously laid off a few months ago.

Being unemployed stinks for a number of reasons. Missing out on Amazon Prime Day coverage isn’t one of them.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good deal, and certainly helping your readers save some money on something they’re looking for falls well within the remit of a consumer technology writer. But few of the offers you’ll see on Amazon Prime Day qualify as good deals. And whatever bargains that are to be found are generally lost in the firehose of inconsequential price cuts on second-rate merch. Amazon Prime Day has become the living embodiment of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, to the point where if Oscar Wilde were alive, he’d be pointing at his computer monitor like he was in the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.

And yet, you wouldn’t know this by perusing the majority of tech websites this week, which will spend the next few days turning themselves into an extended, unpaid advertisement for Amazon’s sales event. As I write this sentence a few days ahead of Prime Day’s actual kickoff, some sites are already touting the deals you can snap up right now. And I guarantee you that once Prime Day wraps up on June 26, you will see stories about the Prime Day deals you can still get. Why, it’s almost as if Prime Day is a made-up construct and prices on goods routinely fluctuate!

Look, I don’t begrudge websites getting in on this Prime Day racket, particularly any websites that might want to employ me at any point in the future. The fact of the matter is, websites gotta make money somehow, and if one of those ways turns out to be affiliate revenue—i.e. the percentage of money a site can collect when you click through a link to an online retailer—more power to them. But the downside to that is a lot of deal alerts on items that aren’t really bargains at all, so much as they’re Amazon trying to offload merchandise to make way for the next product cycle.

Why you should sit out Prime Day

With all the noise surrounding Amazon Prime Day, it’s going to be tempting to head over to that site and load up your virtual cart with all manner of marked-down gizmos. While I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, my humble suggestion would be to… maybe not do that? I don’t know the particulars of your current life situation well enough to be handing out blanket advice. Maybe you really need a new robot vacuum cleaner, in which case, hey, this is your time to shine.

But for most of us, Amazon Prime Day is probably something best viewed at a distance with our eyes shielded to prevent permanent damage. Here’s why:

• Amazon has sales all the damned time: To the extent that Prime Day has ever been something to get hyped up for, it’s been diluted by the fact that Amazon is just going to turn around and have an identical sale a few months from now. For the last few years, Amazon has held Prime Deal Days in October, and that’s followed up shortly by the usual round of price cuts for Black Friday and holiday shopping. The price cuts you’re seeing now will likely return in short order.

• A lot of the discounted items are clearance sales by another name: Prices on some Apple gear will drop this week — in fact, some things like AirPods and Apple Watches may already be available at a notable discount. But that’s because Apple likely will be rolling out new versions of those devices in the fall, and Amazon doesn’t want a lot of outdated inventory on hand. Hey, if you want a pair of AirPods Pro 3 for less than what you’d normally pay and don’t mind missing out on the new features Apple is rumored to be adding to the next-gen model, go ahead and click that Buy button with my best wishes. Just be aware as to why the price might be that low.

• Do you really feel like giving Amazon more of your money?: Jeff Bezos may not be involved in the day-to-day operations at Amazon, but he’s still the executive chairman of the company; more to the point, he profits handsomely from Amazon’s ongoing success. And whether it’s throwing a hey-look-at-me wedding last year or running a major American newspaper into the ground or bankrolling documentaries lauding the First Lady, he’s not really putting that wealth to good use. You may disagree, in which case, load up on those discounted Ring doorbells and Echo Dots to your heart’s content, but I try to send as little money to the real-life version of LuthorCorp as possible.

Oh, you’re ignoring me? Well, at least do this

As good as these reasons are to give Prime Day a pass, I know that some people reading this are already making a beeline toward Amazon. Fair enough — just follow a couple of good practices to get through this shopping event with a minimum of fuss and/or muss.

• DO use a price comparison tool: Make sure that whatever deal you’re seeing on Amazon is actually a good deal by turning to the price-comparison tool of your choice. For me, that’s CamelCamelCamel, where you can enter an Amazon product number¹ into the site’s search field, and you can see how a product’s price has been trending — including whether it’s hit an all-time low.

• DO look for coverage that treats Prime Day skeptically: When it comes to Prime Day, less is more. I tend to find the most helpful articles are the ones that are more selective in their approach to Amazon’s sale, as they acknowledge that most of the deals on offer are pretty crummy and really only highlight worthwhile picks. I tend to find that the Wirecutter site of The New York Times handles this sort of thing pretty well. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed several articles to Wirecutter as a freelance writer, though I’ve never been a part of any Prime Day coverage with that site.)

• DON’T go on a shopping spree. You see something you want that happens to be on sale at a good price? Great, pick it up. Maybe add a second item to your cart if it also fills a need. Anything more than that? No sir — down that path lies madness. Amazon is counting on you to get deal crazy and take a lot of smart speakers off its hands. Don’t give it the satisfaction.

I’m never going to see Prime Day pop up on my calendar without getting a sad, faraway look in my eye. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. Like many things in life, Prime Day is best dealt with in small doses, if at all. Together, we can get through this thing.

Siri’s long-awaited overhaul made its public debut today during Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote, as Apple outlined its vision for a more capable version of its virtual assistant that’s powered by a new generation of Apple Intelligence.

From now on, Apple’s foundation models are being blended with Google Gemini to create the new heart of Apple Intelligence. The result, Apple executives say, will be AI features that are aware of your context, including what’s on your screen, with a personal assistant in the form of the rebranded Siri AI that’s more responsive to your needs.

Developers will get the first crack at seeing what’s new with Siri and Apple Intelligence, as Apple releases developer betas of this year’s software updates — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27 — starting today. Public betas will follow in July, with the full releases arriving in the fall as they usually do.

Of course, not every iPhone and iPad owner is going to have access to Siri AI right away. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, announced during the keynote that the updated digital assistant won’t ship to EU countries with the rest of iPadOS 27 and iOS 27 in the fall, as EU regulators want other virtual assistants to have the same access to users’ private data that Siri gets. That’s a hard no for Apple, which insists that user data remain private. There’s no timeline on when Siri AI might hit the EU.

But that’s for Apple and the regulators to hash out. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced during the WWDC keynote and what it means for your iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

Apple says it rebuilt the architecture for its AI features using those new foundation models, with Apple Intelligence able to understand speech as well as text and images. It can draw on the personal context stored on your device, recognize what’s on your screen and pull from external information available on the web. As before, Apple Intelligence operates on your devices as well as servers via Private Cloud Compute, and all your AI interactions are kept private, even from Apple.

One note about on-device actions, though: only recent hardware will be powerful enough to run what Apple describes as its most advanced on-device model. That means the iPhones released last fall, any M4-powered iPad or M3-powered Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory and the M5-based Apple Vision Pro.

Siri is accessible from anywhere on your device, and you can summon the assistant with the usual “Hey Siri” vocal command. iPhone users will be able to activate Siri with the side button on the phone or with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island; another swipe can expand Siri’s answer to get a more detailed response. iPad and Mac users can interact with Siri AI from the Spotlight tool as well as systemwide context menus.

Siri AI will be available on the Apple Watch, too, letting users start a conversation with an assistant or continue one started on another Apple device via a new Smart Stack suggestion. In addition, the changes coming to Siri and Apple Intelligence will extend to CarPlay and AirPods.

A new Siri app will debut on Apple devices this fall, giving you a place to access past conversations with Siri; you can also start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your Mac.

Some of the examples Apple showed off during its WWDC keynote featured Apple executive Mike Rockwell asking Siri about an upcoming concert, with the assistant pulling the dates from the web. Follow-up questions let Rockwell ask Siri about the ticketing process, set a reminder to buy tickets at the appropriate time and play music from the artist. All of this was done in a conversational style, without the hassle of having to repeat the artist’s name.

Other demos of Siri AI showed how the assistant can now help you plan things, pulling a schedule of World Cup matches, formulating a menu of possible meals for a watch party centered around a specific match that also included recipes shared via Messages, and generating and sending out an invitation to the party. It’s worth noting that at each step, Siri has you confirm actions, and you can leap in and edit things should Siri get them wrong.

Siri AI also features improvements to the expressiveness of its voice — imagine the assistant emphasizing certain words or striking a more excited tone to reflect the message it’s reading to you. You have the ability to adjust that expressiveness as well as the pace of Siri’s voice.

Siri AI will be limited to English initially, but Apple plans to add support for other languages in short order.

Siri features in apps

There’s more to Siri AI than just a new app, though, as many features are being integrated and enhanced in other apps. Visual Intelligence is integrated directly into the Camera app, for example, with a Siri mode to show the assistant exactly what you’re seeing. Point your iPhone’s camera at a plate of food, and you can pull up nutritional information or capture an image of a bill to split it with friends, all while paying your share via Apple Pay. Those Visual Intelligence tools will be available on the Mac and iPad as well as the iPhone.

Writing tools are getting a boost with this Apple Intelligence revamp, as you can ask Siri to draft documents for you. Apple suggests that this is just a starting point for a draft that you would then elaborate on, and as a writer who balks at the idea that any AI feature can handle writing on my behalf, I should certainly hope so. I’m far more intrigued by a promised feature in which you can ask Siri to give you feedback on writing.

Additional writing tools coming to anywhere you can type include automatic proofreading — hope it proves more reliable than autocorrect — and the ability to recognize who you’re sending messages and texts to and adapt the tone to correspond to the recipient.

Photos gets a number of AI-powered image-editing tools, such as an enhanced Clean Up feature that promises better fill-ins when you remove distracting objects or people. An extend tool expands the background on shots, while a spatial reframing feature lets you change the perspective of the photo after you’ve taken it.

Safari now taps into Apple Intelligence to organize all those open tabs by topic, while a Notify Me feature uses your natural-language instructions to monitor changes in web pages — say an item going on sale — and alert you when it happens. Passwords can change passwords on your behalf, while Shortcuts taps into the vibe coding fad by letting you describe a shortcut to auto-generate it.

Apps like Messages, Calendar, Mail and Phone better understand context to offer up more useful one-tap suggestions. For instance, if you’re in a Message conversation where someone asks you for a specific photo, the Siri assistant should be smart enough to generate a suggestion that finds and sends the photo on your behalf.

You can also expect an update to Image Playground that will add support for more styles as well as new ways to modify and tweak anything created by Apple’s image generation tool. A welcome change will be the ability to create images in more formats, such as landscape. And the app figures to be better integrated with contact posters and wallpapers for your iPhone. Note that image generation will be among the Apple Intelligence features that come with a daily limit, as those capabilities are being offloaded to servers; you will be able to bolster your access through iCloud Plus subscription plans.

Platform improvements

Apple Intelligence dominated the WWDC keynote, but it’s not the only change Apple has planned for its software. Apple is promising a number of system improvements across its various operating systems. “Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re taking the features you’re already relying on and making them better,” Federighi said.

That includes system optimizations that speed up things like app launches, content loading and AirDrop transfers. Older iPhones can count on a new CPU scheduler to make sure tasks run more efficiently; as a result, iOS 27 will run on the same devices that support iOS 26.

The most anticipated changes, though, are likely to be promised enhancements for Liquid Glass, the new interface Apple rolled out across its platforms last year. Not everyone was a fan of the new look for the various OSes, and Apple took some of that feedback to heart. Liquid Glass changes promise more readable menus thanks to better diffusion for complex content, and there will now be a slider in Settings to adjust the look between fully clear and fully tinted.

Apple is also promising more uniform toolbars, with color returning to the icons in sidebars so that it’s easier to see which menu item is active. Icons are getting new layers that should make them look sharper and more defined.

Refined parental controls

Capturing the zeitgeist of society’s growing unease about how much access kids have to technology, Apple spent a chunk of the WWDC keynote reviewing trust and safety issues with its software, including new child safety tools formulated with feedback from experts.

To that end, Apple is expanding upon the Ask to Buy feature that lets parents approve App Store downloads with a new Ask to Browse tool. That lets parents view a website a child is trying to access and determine if it’s age-appropriate. A similar feature lets parents approve who their kids can connect with in Messages and other communication apps. The Communication Safety feature that already detects and blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime will do the same when it detects gore or violent images.

Apple highlighted Time Allowances that manage when kids can access certain apps and for how long. Screen Time is getting a redesign to better highlight how kids are using their devices and what apps they’re accessing the most.

More to come

Part of the fun of WWDC keynotes is seeing what new features weren’t highlighted during Apple’s presentation. More of those details should come out in the coming days as people get their hands on the developer betas and have more of a chance to go over Apple’s supporting documents.

Both Jason Snell and Dan Moren are on the ground in Cupertino getting up-close looks at Apple’s planned software updates and Apple Intelligence changes. Expect more reports from them today and throughout WWDC, as we make sense of what Apple has in store for our devices the rest of this year.