u/LessPermission2503

Round three. The 95-app post got me completely roasted. The Top 20 follow-up was better, but I was still padding. So I cut hard. These are the 10 I'd reinstall first on a new MacBook. I'm on my Mac 12 hours a day as a creator/business owner, and every one of these earned its spot.

1. Raycast - The brain of my Mac. Replaced Spotlight, my calculator, my emoji picker, and my clipboard manager. The clipboard history alone is the killer feature. If you only try one thing from this list, make it this.

2. Cotypist - Probably my favorite app on here. AI autocomplete that works anywhere you type on macOS - Slack, iMessage, Notion, browser, all of it. Runs locally, fully private. Genuinely changed how I write.

3. Spokenly - Voice-to-text done right. Runs the distilled Whisper V3 Turbo English model locally - free, private, accurate. Bring your own API key for cloud models if you want. Custom shortcuts, custom AI prompts, and it'll transcribe video/audio files you drop in. That last feature alone is usually a separate paid app.

4. eqMac - System-wide audio EQ. Two reasons: full control over how music sounds, and it boosts your Mac's volume past the native cap. You know when max volume still isn't loud enough? Fixed. Free and open source.

5. BetterDisplay - Required if you use external monitors. macOS scaling options are either too big or too small, and BetterDisplay fixes all of it. The HiDPI scaling makes external displays look noticeably sharper.

6. BrightXDR - Pushes your display past its normal brightness cap, free. Yes, BetterDisplay Pro can do this — but only in the paid tier. If you already pay for Pro, skip this. If not, BrightXDR does the one thing perfectly. The GitHub repo was outdated so I patched it and re-uploaded a working build — happy to share if anyone wants it.

7. LibreOffice - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but free. Pages and Numbers are fine until someone sends you a .docx or .xlsx. Open source, handles every Office format, no subscription.

8. Ollama - Run AI models locally. Llama, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, Gemma — all free, all private, no API keys. I mostly run Qwen 3 32B on an M5 Max with 128GB and it flies. If you have Apple Silicon, you should be running local models. Ollama is the easiest entry point.

9. Thaw - Required if you have a lot of menu bar apps. macOS hides extras behind the notch, and Thaw lets you reorganize and properly hide them. Replaces Hidden Bar (abandoned) and Ice (discontinued). Open source, updated almost daily, free.

10. The Clock - Replaces the native macOS menu bar clock with one that's actually clickable. Calendar dropdown, multiple time zones, date scrubber. I click it 30+ times a day. The kind of app you don't realize you need until you have it.

What am I missing?

CODEX JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CHATGPT MOBILE APP AND I BUILT AN iOS APP WITH 2 PROMPTS USING IT: https://youtu.be/VQNOoXPWwbE

A lot of my smaller clients send video files via Drive instead of Frame.io because they're already in Workspace and don't want another subscription. Drive's comment system has zero concept of timestamps — every note is just plain text, so I'd be typing "at 1:23, the audio cuts out" by hand on every line. Got annoyed enough that I built a Chrome extension to fix it.

What it does:

• Pause anywhere → click Comment → the box pre-fills with [1:23] automatically
• Existing timestamped comments show up as clickable colored circles on the seek bar (one per comment, golden-ratio hue spread so they don't blend)
• Click any [m:ss] inside a comment to seek; click any circle on the bar to jump + flash the matching comment
• #tags in comments (#fix #color #audio #approve) override the marker color, plus a tag filter that filters both the comments list and the timeline
• Sort by timecode / oldest / newest / commenter / completed
• Loop between two markers for repeated review
• Search across comments
• Drawing/annotation overlay on paused frames (saved locally, re-displays when you scrub back)
• Side-by-side compare page for v1 vs v2 review

Export formats — this is the part that matters for editors:

• FCPXML — Final Cut and Premiere both import as a project with markers at every timecode
• EDL (CMX 3600) — DaVinci Resolve, Avid, anything that takes EDL
• SRT / WebVTT — burn comments in as captions
• TXT, Markdown, CSV, JSON, printable HTML for handoff / spreadsheet / PDF

What it's not:

• Not real-time multi-user — it enhances Drive's existing comment system, those still sync as Drive normally does
• No HH:MM:SS:FF frame-accurate timestamps because Drive doesn't expose framerate
• Drawing tool is solo-only; annotations are stored in chrome.storage.local, not shared with other reviewers

Under the hood: it's a content script that reads time from Drive's seek slider DOM (<input aria-label="Seek slider">), inserts text into Drive's contenteditable comment editor, and overlays clickable markers on the seek bar. No server, no telemetry, no account, MIT license.

Free and open source. I'm mostly looking for feedback from people who actually do client video review — particularly: are FCPXML and EDL the right two NLE formats, or should I prioritize something else (XMEML? OTIO? AAF)? And is anyone here using Drive for review who'd actually use this?

Feel free to share it with anyone who might find it useful! If you find any bugs or have suggestions, let me know!

Links in the first comment.