u/FlowIll9219

I built ImageBuddy, a macOS utility for cleaning up images: trim dead border space, remove the background, resize the image or canvas, add a watermark, vectorize to SVG. Drop an image, toggle what you need, save. You can edit a single image or set up a batch.

Notarized direct download or Mac App Store for $5: bendansby.com/apps/imagebuddy.html

Also available in a bundle of other apps: bendansby.com/apps/bundles.html

Problem
Editing a real-world CSS file means scrolling through hundreds of rulesets to find the one you need, losing track of which selector touches what, and hunting through the whole project to see where a --custom-property is actually used. Tuning a box-shadow, gradient, or filter chain usually means guessing values, saving, and flipping to the browser to check.

StyleBop turns your existing .css files into a canvas: every ruleset is a draggable node, descendant selectors indent under their parents automatically, and there's a dedicated tokens panel that shows every custom property with live color swatches and a per-token usage count (including an "unused" warning). Box-shadow, border-radius, gradients, animations, and filter chains all get a popover with a live preview that updates as you drag, instead of typing values blind. There's also a full-text code editor for when you just want to type, and edits round-trip between the two views instantly.

Comparison
Closest points of comparison are Pinegrow and just editing in VS Code/Sublime with a CSS extension. Pinegrow is a full visual page builder (Electron, subscription, wants to own your whole HTML/CSS workflow); StyleBop only touches the CSS files you already have on disk, so it drops into any project without changing your build. VS Code/Sublime give you syntax highlighting and autocomplete but no structural view at all, you're still scrolling and grepping to find a ruleset or trace a variable. StyleBop is native SwiftUI/AppKit, so it's a small binary with an instant launch and no background services, versus Electron's overhead.

Pricing
$10, one-time, no subscription. Mac App Store or a free-trial direct download with the same build (Sparkle auto-update). Also available as part of my bundles.

Redact images and PDFs on macOS — auto-detects sensitive fields, burns the redaction into the file

TopSecret is a native Mac app for blacking out sensitive content in images and multi-page PDFs.

• Redaction is destructive by design. When you export, the bars are burned into a re-rendered file — the pixels underneath are gone, not covered by a layer. PDFs are rasterized on export so there's no text layer left underneath. You can choose a black bar, white bar, or noise style (no pixellation).
• Auto-detect finds emails, SSNs, phone numbers, card numbers, IP addresses, and faces, either on the current page or the whole document. Detection runs on-device via Apple's Vision framework — no upload, no network call.
• Find & redact by text lets you black out every occurrence of a specific word/number across a document, with an optional fuzzy-match mode for OCR errors or near-spellings.
• You can also draw bars manually, then move/resize/undo them. Sessions save as an editable .topsecret file if you want to pick the work back up later.
• Handles both single images and multi-page PDFs, with a thumbnail sidebar for tracking redactions per page.
• No accounts, no telemetry, no network access at all — it only touches the file you open.
• Built in SwiftUI, universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), macOS 13+.
• Direct download (notarized, Sparkle auto-update) or Mac App Store. 7-day free trial, then a one-time license — no subscription.

Site: https://bendansby.com/apps/topsecret.html

PicPile takes a folder of screenshots/photos and either arranges them into one styled grid, or lets you frame each one on its own (with its own title/caption) and export separately.

Add titles and captions and quickly adjust padding, corner rounding, shadow/glow, and background color. Use it to show off different options without the hassle of building and exporting an annotated table or grid or prepare store/gallery shots, whatever you want.

Free trial, one-time license after that, no subscription. Direct notarized download or Mac App Store, your call: https://bendansby.com/apps/picpile.html

You can also get it in a bundle that includes 16 other apps: https://bendansby.com/apps/bundles.html

NoteLess is a dead simple notes app that lets you jot down quick thoughts and dismiss the note with a keystroke.

• Press ⌘⇧Space from anywhere and a small card floats up. Type your thought, press ⌘↩ to save and dismiss. You never need to touch the mouse.
• By default, note length is limited to a single card, so your thoughts stay brief. You can change this in Preferences.
• Cards you don't pin quietly expire after 7 days. Pin the ones that matter (⌘⇧K), and the rest just age out. No backlog to clean up, ever. Optionally, you can get notifications on expiring notes or change the grace period.
• Click a small grid icon and it crossfades into a scrollable wall of every card you've kept, at a glance.
• Syncs over iCloud Drive across Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

It's deliberately not trying to be a Notion or even Notes.app replacement. It's for the stuff that's too small to deserve a whole document but too important to lose: a feature idea, a line you want to remember, a reminder to call someone back, a dream.

Free to try with a direct download with a one-time purchase to keep it with no subscription. Also on the Mac App Store if you'd like Mac + iPhone + iPad in one purchase with syncing.

Site: https://bendansby.com/apps/noteless.html

I made FilePop, a Finder-style file browser that drops down from your menu bar. Hit a global hotkey (or click the menu-bar icon) and you're instantly at your favorites, recents, and home folder, ready to grab a file, drop one in, or jump to a path with a keystroke. It's on the Mac App Store (sandboxed + Apple-reviewed) and also available as a direct download.

Problem

Finder is fine, but reaching for a file usually means opening yet another Finder window that competes with whatever you're working in. You hunt for the file, then close the window. FilePop gives you Finder-style browsing on a keystroke, from the menu bar, with no window to manage. Drag a file out into Mail/Slack/an editor, or drag files in to move or copy them, then it gets out of your way.

Comparison

• vs Finder: the same essentials (icons/list/columns views, QuickLook with Space, thumbnails, sorting, spring-loaded folders, drag in and out), but summoned from the menu bar and dismissed with a click. Keyboard-first, resizable, and you can pin it as a floating window or keep it as a popover. No extra window fighting for space.
• vs Default Folder X: DFX supercharges Open/Save dialogs and adds a recent-files menu. FilePop is a full standalone browser you can summon anytime (not just inside a dialog) to browse anywhere, with a path bar plus autocomplete, Finder-synced favorites, a companion filepop CLI, and one-tap undo for moves.

Native SwiftUI + AppKit, sandboxed, no telemetry, no account, localized in 11 languages.

Pricing

• $10, one-time, no subscription. Free trial on the direct download.
• Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6767933791
• Direct download / details: https://bendansby.com/apps/filepop

TalkProp is a no-fuss teleprompter for macOS. Paste your script, hit play, and read — plain text in, smooth rolling captions out.

• Two windows. A compact controls window drives a full-screen prompter you can place on any display.
• Scroll to set the pace. Spin the scroll wheel or trackpad anywhere in the rolling view to fine-tune the rate live — keep going and it crosses zero straight into reverse.
• Dial it in. Rate slider (15–180 pt/s), font-size slider (18–200 pt), and a vertical scroll or horizontal ticker layout.
• Import in a click. Load any plain-text script from disk with ⌘⇧O.

Native, lightweight, and quiet — no Electron, no clutter. Available for Mac and iOS. $5 with a 7-day trial.

https://bendansby.com/apps/talkprop.html

KeyStruck is a little HUD that shows you the name of the keyboard shortcut you just fired. Great for screencasts, teaching, pair sessions, being sure you actually hit a shortcut, or just learning an app's shortcuts.

Highlights:

• See what you struck. Fire a menu shortcut and KeyStruck flashes its action name in a clean on-screen HUD.

• Lives in the menu bar; toggle it on only when you want it.

• Tune it out. Exclude specific apps or specific shortcuts you don't want shown.

• Also includes a live cheat sheet of the current app's shortcuts.

• Native and light, customizable appearance, localized in 11 languages.

Direct download with a 7 day trial. $5. https://bendansby.com/apps/keystruck.html

My app CrossHair puts four overlays in your menu bar, each a shortcut away. There's a precise crosshair that follows your cursor and gives you coordinates, a loupe that magnifies the pixels around the cursor and lets you sample colors, guides you can drop horizontally and vertically anywhere on screen to align elements across windows, and a measure tool whose dimension lines auto-fit to the UI edges underneath, snapping to color boundaries.

Direct download has a free trial, then a one-time license. Also on the Mac App Store. Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.

https://bendansby.com/apps/crosshair.html

I've been working on a macOS app called ShowRunner.

The idea is simple: instead of recording a demo from scratch every time, you build (or record) a sequence of clicks, typing, scrolling, shortcuts, and app switches. ShowRunner can replay it with a smooth synthetic cursor, or drive your real Mac through the sequence while recording.

Afterward you can edit the recording with zooms, highlights, webcam, transitions, and export a polished MP4. It also supports multi-scene projects, so you can build an entire walkthrough instead of stitching clips together.

It's a native Mac app with a 7-day free trial and a one-time purchase—no subscription.

https://bendansby.com/apps/showrunner.html

Hey folks, MarkWell is a simple bookmark manager I made. $5 gets you a Mac, iPad, and iPhone app with iCloud syncing. Paste in links and have it automatically fill in the title and description and suggest tags, or use the share sheet to save a bookmark from Safari and other apps. Browse by tag and search your full library. One-time purchase, no subscription.

Web site for free Mac trial

App Store for cross-platform purchase

I made QuickCrop because trimming extra space around images is something I do all the time and Pixelmator is simultaneously somehow both overkill and not very good or fast at it.

QuickCrop does it in two clicks. Drop a file in and it auto-detects the transparent and white padding and trims down to the artwork. There's a live dim-outside-crop preview so you can see exactly what's coming off, and a tolerance slider for when "white" isn't actually 100% white. Save over the original (format preserved) or save as a new file. You can do one image at a time or a batch.

It's free, native Mac, no Electron. Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later.

https://bendansby.com/apps/quickcrop.html

ChopShop — a small Mac app for trimming, splicing, and cutting audio and video clips without firing up Final Cut. I made it because modern QuickTime is too sparse, and Final Cut, Premiere, and even iMovie are for me too busy for small projects.

7-day trial + Mac App Store + Setapp: https://bendansby.com/apps/chopshop.html 

Features:

• Two-track timeline (one video, one audio), with clips that can overlap
• Linked-by-default audio/video, with unlink when you want to strip or replace the audio
• Split at playhead, trim by dragging clip edges, with snapping
• Delete a clip and the gap collapses automatically, rearranging a clip automatically moves the others out of the way
• Frame-precise in/out with I and O keys
• Reverse, speed up, slow down, crop any clip
• Opens MP4, MOV, M4V, M4A, MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC natively. Imports MKV, WebM, Ogg, and Opus with a one-pass conversion.
• Lossless passthrough export when the codecs match. Re-encodes only when you've actually changed pixels.
• Native Swift and AppKit. No Electron, no subscription.

Disclosure: I built this. $5 paid app, one-time, no subscription, no analytics.

Problem:

Most notes apps default to keeping everything forever, so over a year your inbox turns into a graveyard of dead thoughts: half-finished grocery lists, codes I copied once, links I never read. The workflow I actually want is: capture a thought in one keystroke, glance at it if I think of it, otherwise let it disappear.

What NoteLess is:

A small Mac, iPhone, and iPad notes app built around two opinions:

1. One note equals one card. Soft length limit per note. If your thought outgrows a card, you make another card. No nesting, no folders, no infinite-scroll inside a single note. You can turn this off if it really cramps your style.
2. Notes expire after 7 days unless you pin them. Pinned ones stay forever. Everything else is gone after a week. The few notes that matter stick around because you said so, the rest don't pile up.

Other details:

• Global shortcut opens an empty card. Type, dismiss, move on.
• iCloud Drive sync across Mac, iPhone, and iPad. No NoteLess account, no NoteLess server.
• Native SwiftUI plus AppKit on Mac, SwiftUI on iOS.

Comparison:

The best comparison maybe isn't with any particular notes app, which are all much more more robust and full-featured, but with stickies, either the real or the built-in macOS kind. This is a different approach to jotting down a thought that comes to you.

Pricing:

• $5 direct download: https://bendansby.com/apps/noteless.html (auto-updates)
• $4.99 on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6769258333

Same app either way, one-time payment, no subscription. The App Store purchase includes both Mac and iOS.

Since Desktop Curtain was getting a little long in the tooth, I built DeskMop as a fresh take with some new additions. DeskMop gets you a clean, screenshot-ready Mac in one click without manually hiding icons, swapping wallpapers, and chasing down menu bar items.

What it does:

• Switch the display to any supported resolution from sized preview thumbnails, including the common capture sizes you shoot for. One click to Restore Original when you're done.
• Pick any open window and snap it to a half or quarter, fill the screen, or resize it to an exact size, centered. Or hide it entirely if it's not the subject of the shot.
• Hide every desktop icon and swap the wallpaper for a solid color or your own image (with separate light and dark variants).
• Hide the whole menu bar, or hide only specific items so the bar still looks real. The remaining items reflow seamlessly.
• Quit DeskMop and everything goes back exactly as it was, automatically. Resolution, wallpaper, icons, menu bar, all restored.

Built in SwiftUI and AppKit. Universal binary, no Electron, sips memory.

A note on builds: I'd recommend the direct download. The Mac App Store version can't ship the "Place the window" feature because Apple's sandbox doesn't allow the Accessibility entitlement that needs; the hide menu bar function isn't as smooth either for the same reason. The direct build has everything. The MAS build is still there if you prefer keeping your software in one place; it has every other feature.

Free trial on the direct build, then a one-time license.

Web: https://bendansby.com/apps/deskmop.html

Direct download (recommended): https://bendansby.com/apps/deskmop/DeskMop.dmg Mac

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/deskmop-tidy-desktop-menubar/id6774802601

Apple removed the "hide mouse pointer" toggle from the Cmd-Shift-5 recorder, so I made a tiny menu-bar app: hit ⌃⌥⌘C and your pointer becomes a highlight ring you can see on screen, but that never shows up in recordings, so you can add your own or just have a clean screen. No Dock icon, pick your ring color, auto-updates, free. https://bendansby.com/apps/ghostcursor.html — feedback welcome.

InSpec is a web browser for Mac I made specifically for visual edits. Rather than being crammed into a panel of a panel, CSS rulesets and properties are given pride of place in a roomy sidebar. Common viewport widths are always accessible without entering an extra mode.

A page or an element’s “variants” (dark mode, print stylesheet, reduced motion, etc.) can be viewed directly on the page. Edits can be targeted to a specific variant or viewport. Edits also persist between page loads and even app launches until cleared.

Text edits can be made right in the side panel without digging through the DOM. Notes and annotations can be made on elements, good for live demos or vibe coding sessions, and can be exported along with all your text and visual edits as images at various viewport widths.

All your CSS edits are collected and can be copied by ruleset with diffs, or, if you’re working locally, saved directly to disk. This won’t be a tool for everyone, but a certain kind of design-focused web dev may find it useful compared to the baseline.

Native Mac. One-time purchase with free trial. No telemetry or subscription.

Site • Direct Download • Mac App Store

Native macOS motion design app, built specifically for the kind of motion that ships in product demos, promos, App Store videos, and social clips. Not a general-purpose After Effects or Apple Motion replacement, but with plenty of flexibility and power. Digital native, no broadcast legacy. Lightweight but powerful.

Some of the features:

• Spans, effects, and behaviors, not just keyframes. Every layer lives on a time range with its own intro and outro. Stack effects on either edge (fade, pop, bounce, slide, type-on, draw-on) and MoveMatic takes of the rest. Also has procedural Oscillate / Shake / Wiggle bars on any property, plus layer-level Follow Layer and Follow Path.
• Pulses for one-shot beats. Scale, glow, and radiate gestures you drop on a layer's track. Fire at playback without touching the layer's baseline keyframes. The way a UI animation emphasizes a button press or a notification.
• Responsive timeline. Move a keyframe and the rest follows. Cycle modes (off, before, after, both) and everything on the timeline participates. Aggregate tracks roll children up so you can retime an entire group in one drag.
• Camera zoom layers. Drop a zoom over any region and the playhead lenses into it, full-screen or as a picture-in-picture. Product detail shots without re-staging the composition.
• Multi-scene documents. A single .mvm holds a sequence of scenes with their own layers and timelines. Drop a Fade / Slide / Push / Zoom transition between any two, and lay a document-wide audio bed underneath.
• Particles emitted from any layer. Point a particle at a text glyph, an icon, a freeform line. Lines feed their actual curvature so the cloud hugs the path. Sparks, dust trails, snow inside a shape.
• Multi-clip video tracks. Multiple cuts of one source on a single video layer. Each gets its own trim, speed, end behavior, and freeze-frame mode.
• Mix and Match. Select a row of layers and one click redistributes Fill, Stroke, Size, Font, or Text Content across the selection. Lands as a single undo step.

Native SwiftUI plus AppKit. Free trial, then a one-time license, or one-time App Store purchase. macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6771238493

Direct download / free trial: https://bendansby.com/apps/movematic.html

DateDrop is a menu-bar utility that drops formatted dates and times wherever your cursor is. Hit a shortcut, pick what you want, it gets inserted (or copied).

A few things it handles:

• Date, time, or a start-to-end range.
• Multiple time zones at once, so you can paste "9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UK" without doing the math.
• Common formats out of the box (short / medium / long / full, ISO 8601, RFC 2822, Unix timestamp), plus a custom format field with a live preview.
• Menu bar popover or a floating window, whichever you'd rather have on screen.
• Native SwiftUI + AppKit, no background services.

Web site • Free trial • Mac App Store

If you've got a date / time format or a use case you'd want it to handle that's not in there, I'm interested to hear.

This one's for all my Mac devs. BeautyShot takes some of the tedium out of preparing promo screenshots of your Mac apps. Pick a running window and BeautyShot drops it centered on a custom desktop, takes light + dark snaps in all your languages, and numbers and names everything in a folder of your choice in the resolutions you need. You can even have a clean menu bar with full battery and time of your choice if you want. Native SwiftUI + AppKit.

https://bendansby.com/apps/beautyshot.html • Direct download • Mac App Store

Let me know if this seems helpful to you or what would be.