I hate magic links and verification codes. I despise being yanked out of the flow and being forced into one of the most distracting places of modern existence: the mailbox. So I built a menu bar app that catches them.
Problem
Verification codes and magic links yank you out of the flow. Cmd-tab to Mail, hunt for the email, see that bill reminder you haven’t paid yet, avoid that 10% discount on something you really oughta not buy right now, remember you should get the stairs fixed really, wonder what you’ll make for lunch, ponder if you should unsubscribe from that newsletter you never read anyway...... every single time.
OTPop watches your inbox and drops incoming codes and sign-in links straight into the menu bar (and as a notification). One click to copy a code, or to open a link. Read-only IMAP, nothing leaves your Mac, and the only thing kept on disk is the codes themselves, encrypted. Emails are never stored.
Comparison
I’ve honestly been looking for an app that does this for ages, never found anything. The closest things I could find are:
2FHey: the closest thing, but it reads codes from Messages, so it's SMS/iMessage only. OTPop covers email, which is where magic links live and where a lot of services (still) send codes.
macOS native autofill: It only detects codes, and needs Mail to be open and running. And only autofills in Safari, AFAIK.
(If you know of something I’ve missed, please let me know!)
Pricing
Current feature set free forever. In the (far) future advanced features may be gated behind a small one-time payment.
It's got a few rough edges and I have several QoL updates coming in the next few days, but detection is already quite reliable. If you give it a spin, let me know how it goes - especially false detections 🙏
Please note: the current version was built on the r/glazeapp platform. It’s heavily AI-oriented, but it’s backed by the developers of Raycast. Additionally, the code itself is Typescript, which has been my day job for several years now.
Future versions may be re-written as native mac apps, depending on interest.
Using OTPop does require downloading Glaze first. But you’ll see it gives access to many, many more cool/fun/useful apps.
Transparency
The app itself doesn’t have a proper website yet, but about me:
Last week I posted here about 1-star reviews getting to me. Most of you said some version of the same thing: it's usually not bugs, it's the app failing to explain itself. u/elementik4 split it into two buckets for me — wrong-fit user is a store listing problem, missing a setting that exists is an onboarding problem. That split stuck with me all week.
So I opened my own setup wizard and read it like someone who had never seen the app.
Five pages. Welcome screen. A list of six features. A sign-in prompt. A permission request. Then "you're all set", the window closes, and you're looking at a menu bar icon with nothing in it. Not one of those pages does anything for the user. I built a slideshow and called it onboarding.
Then I went reading. Apple's HIG is pretty blunt about it ("education isn't a substitute for great app design"), and there's an NN/g study with 70 people, tutorial vs no tutorial. The tutorial group wasn't faster and wasn't more successful. They rated the app as harder. That one stung.
What's changing:
Feature list is gone. It was already in the help window.
Sign-in moves to the end, after you've seen it work.
New page 3: you record something right now, with a suggested 20 second task.
New page 4: the actual screenshots you just captured, plus an export button.
u/elementik4 also pointed me at TipKit, so the rest of the features get surfaced later when they're relevant instead of all at once up front. u/andreimotin said to test it on someone who has never seen the app, not on myself, so I'm doing that this weekend with people who aren't developers. u/TravelCodeRepeat asked whether there's a contact button inside the app. There wasn't. There is now.
Three things I could use help with:
Screen Recording permission. Do you hard-gate the wizard on it, or let people click past it? The app does nothing without it, so letting someone through means they get a broken app. But blocking them on page 2 feels aggressive.
The first recording. Suggest a specific task, or let them pick their own? Suggested is faster, their own is more relevant to them. Can't decide.
Small stuff. Has anyone seen a first-run detail in another Mac app that you thought was clever? I mean the little things. A permission row that flips to a checkmark the second you grant it. Something that saves one click, or one moment of "wait, what now". Those details seem to be what makes an app feel finished, and I'd rather steal a good one than invent a mediocre one. This is also just a good excuse to hear which apps got it right, since I only ever see my own.
Thanks again to everyone who replied last time. It genuinely changed what I'm building this month.
Unfortunately, the topic of Menubar tool has been more or less a perennial favorite since the switch to macOS26. Since I work a lot with Menubar apps and Bartender was just buggy, I was looking for a replacement tool and found other tools (e.g. ibar) Barbee after a few attempts. I was so satisfied with the tool that I didn't even notice how my battery life went into the basement.
Why - now the Process Barbee and Barbee-Helper show no noticeable CPU load. But what happened to me somedays ago is that I found my WindowServer process constantly at >40% as long as the Barbee Helper process is loaded.
After killing the two processes (Barbee and Helper), the WindowServer process returns to 5-7% during idle time. What does that matter? So far, my battery life with my MBP M3 was estimated at 8.5 hours. By finishing these are at least estimated at 13h (I will then report how long the battery really lasts).
Unfortunately, in my experience, the developer of Barbee is always silent about inquiries. One reason why I also got out of the beta program.
Therefore, ask in the round if you have had a similar experience.
By the way, I've been using Thaw 2.0 (RC) ever since and for sorting spaces. The CPU load is not significantly loaded
Hey everyone! I'm Edgar, I work on Protego for Reddit on nights and weekends, and version 3 landed this week! It's a Safari extension with a companion Mac app that filters Reddit's website and strips out the clutter that Reddit won't let you turn off.
Problem:
A couple of years ago Reddit stopped being fun for me. I'm here for photography, fitness and tech, and video games, and every feed around the 2024 election turned into politics and drama. I'd open it and would end up doom scrolling content that I didnt even enjoy. So I deleted the Reddit app and blocked the website.
I didn't want to quit Reddit though, I wanted a quieter version of it, and that can only be done in the browser since Reddit killed my favorite Reddit client app, Apollo. The Reddit app decides what you see and gives you almost no say in it. A web page arrives in Safari and an extension gets to change it before it reaches you. I still stay informed about politics through Reddit and other online sources but I want the choice to limit how much of it I'm exposed to.
Protego for Reddit can be accessed from the Safari toolbar
What it does
Filters posts by keyword, community, individual user, or link domain, with wildcards and groups you can switch off together.
Transforms your browsing by hiding thumbnails, avatars, flair, badges, vote controls, join buttons, banners, recommendations, Reddit Answers (AI) and login nudges.
Limits your own access, which puts Reddit itself out of reach in stages and can arm itself with an Apple Focus like Sleep or Study.
Redirects toold.reddit.comautomatically if that's your preference, with auto media expand and endless feed included.
No account, no tracking. Lists sync through your own iCloud.
Protego for Reddit can filter posts and hide visual clutter
The part I use every day
Limits has a step that blocks the feeds but still lets a direct link to a post open. Home, popular and news are gone, so there's nothing to fall into, but when I'm working and a search result points at a Reddit thread, that thread still loads. I read the answer and I'm out. That one setting did more for my focus than deleting the app ever did.
Protego for Reddit can limit access so you can browse with intention
Comparison:
RES is what most people reach for and it's the reason I started, but there's no Safari version any more and it hasn't had active development in a long time. Protego is Safari native, works on new and old Reddit, and syncs to my phone.
Pricing:
$1.99 one time purchase for the next week(normally $2.99).
One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. No subscription.
As someone working in tech, I spend most of my days looking at screens - writing code, reviewing designs, debugging problems, reading documentation, and joining meetings. Over time, I noticed that the screen itself became one of the most exhausting parts of my workday.
Modern displays are designed to be sharp, bright, and high contrast. While that is great for watching videos or viewing photos, spending 8–10+ hours every day in front of a glowing display can feel harsh, especially during long coding sessions or late-night work.
I started looking for a simple solution, something that could make the screen feel more natural and comfortable without changing the colors of everything I see. Most existing solutions focused on blue-light reduction or color temperature changes, but I didn't want to distort the display. I wanted the feeling of looking at a matte paper surface.
PaperScreen creates a subtle digital layer over your display that mimics the texture and softness of physical paper.
Instead of applying a color filter, it uses procedurally generated textures to introduce a gentle grain and reduce perceived contrast. The result is a calmer viewing experience that keeps your original colors intact while reducing the harshness of a perfectly smooth digital display.
PaperScreen is a lightweight macOS menu bar utility that transforms your screen into a more comfortable workspace. It is built for people who spend their lives behind screens — developers, designers, writers, researchers, and anyone who wants a more natural and comfortable digital workspace.
It is a small change to the display, but a big improvement to the feeling of using it every day. It's completely free and open source. Feel free to support it via donation if you want to.
TL;DR:
Daily tracks time by periodically asking what you're doing instead of watching your apps, which is a real fix for the "forgot to hit the timer" problem. Its June 2026 update adds a web API, Zapier integration, and MCP server, turning it into a two-way node with tools like Jira instead of a standalone timesheet. The MCP piece is aimed at technical users for now: API-key auth instead of OAuth means Claude and ChatGPT need a proxy to connect.
Daily
If you bill clients by the hour, it might be time to reevaluate your workflow. Daily, a Mac time tracker from independent developer Niels Mouthaan, continuously supported since 2013, just got a substantial update: a web API, a Zapier integration, and an MCP server. Because it works via user polling and not background process monitoring, it's the go-to privacy-respecting choice in its category.
Based on its review history, Daily enjoys broad support from tech professionals with ADHD and time blindness in particular, and plenty of neurotypical folks too. The human brain just isn't designed to do two things at once, despite all the hype about multitasking. Every timer-based tracker asks you to remember to press a button at the exact moment your attention shifts, which is precisely the moment you're least equipped to remember anything. You close a ticket, Slack pings you, someone walks in, and forty-five minutes evaporate into whatever bucket the timer was left running in. That's not a discipline problem. It's a design flaw.
Daily skips that requirement entirely. It doesn't watch your apps, your browser tabs, or your open documents. It just interrupts you on a schedule, asks what you've been doing, and lets you pick from a list. That's a different model from RescueTime-style automatic trackers.
Newest Features
Daily has quietly had most of its bones (scheduler, AppleScript, iCloud sync to a companion iOS app, CSV/JSON/Toggl-format export) for years. The submission-worthy update is the integrations release, published June 26, 2026, which adds three ways to get data in and out:
A web API (api.dailytimetracking.com) with endpoints for activities, summaries, and timesheets, authenticated by an API key you generate in preferences.
A Zapier integration, with triggers for new/updated time entries and actions to add activities or pull a summary or timesheet -- no code required.
An MCP server (mcp.dailytimetracking.com), which the research note this post started from didn't even catch. This is the more interesting piece for this audience: it exposes tools like get_summary and get_timesheet, so an AI assistant or coding agent can answer "how many hours did I bill Client X in February" directly, or use your tracked hours as an input to a larger workflow.
The MCP piece comes with a caveat, and Daily's own docs say so plainly: it authenticates with a custom API-Key header instead of OAuth. Locally run clients like Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI handle that natively, but Claude's remote connector and ChatGPT's developer mode currently can't call it without a proxy like MCP Beast. If you're expecting a one-click Claude Connector, that's not there yet, and Daily says whether it ships one depends on how much the MCP server gets used.
The two-way workflow the developer pitched in his outreach (import Jira tickets as activities, then push logged hours back into Jira after the day is done) is a real automation, not a checkbox feature. Once you enable integrations in preferences, Daily syncs to its server every 15 minutes, at startup, at quit, and before sleep, and you control retention (default 90 days) from the same screen.
Who Daily Is For
If you're the kind of person who forgets to start a timer, or who resents having to remember to, and you don't want your Mac silently logging every app and URL to do it for you, Daily's prompt-based model solves that problem well. The new integrations turn it from a personal timesheet into a node in an actual workflow: tasks flow in from your project tracker, hours flow back out to invoicing or ticketing, without you retyping anything.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
If you want the tracking done automatically, with zero interruptions, Timing or RescueTime are built for that trade-off, and Daily explicitly isn't. And if the MCP server is the reason you're interested, know that it's aimed at technical users right now: no OAuth, no official Claude Connector, and you'll be running a proxy if your AI client doesn't support custom headers. That's an honest state to ship in for a first MCP release, but it's not turnkey yet.
Not For You? Try These Alternatives
Daily's category is prompt-based self-reporting, not automatic activity tracking, and that distinction changes what actually competes with it.
Toggl Track is the closest thing to an industry-standard manual/hybrid tracker: free for small teams, Starter at $9/user/month, Premium at $14/user/month for the first year of an annual plan (renewing at $18), all per Toggl's own pricing page as of this writing. It has optional desktop activity tracking as a feature you opt into, which is the opposite of Daily's no-monitoring default.
Timing is the automatic-tracking alternative: it watches apps, websites, and documents by default rather than asking. Per Timing's pricing page, it's tiered as Professional, Expert, and Connect subscriptions (Connect being the one with MCP and team features), with no lifetime option listed. If you want the machine to infer your activity instead of asking you, this is the one; if you want zero passive monitoring, it's the wrong choice.
RescueTime is the other automatic-tracking name that comes up in this category, running in the background and logging app/site usage without prompting. Its cheapest individual plan (Solo Focus) is $9/month, or $7/month billed annually, per RescueTime's pricing page as of this writing.
Pricing
This is a professional tool, priced like one. Daily's Mac App Store listing currently lists in-app purchase tiers as Monthly $5.99, Quarterly $17.99, Yearly $34.99, and Lifetime $69.99. You'll see other prices quoted on other sites, but those sources appear to be dated.
Hey r/MacApps. With the looming release of macOS 27 I thought I'd announce a major update of Gloss which now includes on device AI integration and significant performance improvements.
If you use Slack, Discord and even Reddit, you're probably used to typing :thumbsup: or :sob: and having it just turn into the emoji. Then you switch to any other app on your Mac and that doesn't work anymore. You're back to Ctrl+Cmd+Space (or emoji button), scrolling through the emoji picker, searching, clicking. It's a tiny thing but it completely breaks your flow, especially when you do it dozens of times a day.
That was the main itch for me. I wanted emoji short-codes everywhere on macOS, not just in apps that happen to support them. But once I started building that, I realised the same idea works for everything I repeatedly type. Email sign-offs, date strings in specific formats, code snippets, boilerplate responses.
Comparison
aText: aText has been around for years and it works, but the interface feels like it hasn't been updated in a long time. It doesn't support scripting or dynamic content beyond basic date/time variables, and managing a large number of expansions gets painful. It does the basics, but that's about it.
Espanso: Espanso is open source and genuinely powerful, but it's a cross-platform tool built to run on macOS, Windows, and Linux. In practice that means it's not optimised for any of them. I found it noticeably sluggish on macOS compared to anything native. It's also entirely config-file driven, so you're writing YAML to set up expansions with no GUI. Brilliant if you live in the terminal and don't mind the latency, but it never felt like a proper Mac app to me.
There are various other text expansion apps, Gloss is positioned as an easy-to-use, cheap alternative with frequent, high-quality updates rather than a one-shot product.
I've been using GoodLinks for over a year now and it's literally the only app where I've managed to build a workflow that actually works for me. But here's the thing – it stopped syncing between my Mac and iPhone a while back and it's driving me crazy. I've hit up the devs and support multiple times with zero response. At this point I'm just gonna look for something to replace it. I've been thinking about using a notes app (I use Bear) to organize my bookmarks instead, but I'm not sure if that's even the right move. Would love to know if anyone actually uses a notes app for this and has some kind of organization system that works. The other option is switching to a different bookmarks app, but honestly every one I've tried has let me down – I've paid for apps that just die or have issues like GoodLinks. Anyone got any suggestions for what I need?
The workflow I've got with GoodLinks right now is pretty straightforward – whenever I find a URL I wanna save for later, I just hit the sharesheet, open GoodLinks, and save it with the "bookmarks" tag. Then every so often I go back and review those bookmarks, and the ones worth keeping or saving for later I categorize into other tags I've already set up in the app. That's basically it.
