Airfoil takes audio from any application on your Mac and streams it to AirPlay speakers, Apple TVs, Macs, iOS devices, or Chromecast — including apps that don’t support AirPlay natively. It’s the missing piece when you want Spotify or a browser tab playing through a different room’s speaker without fussing with system audio routing.

Boop is a scratchpad for text transformations — paste something in, run a script, get the result. It ships with scripts for encoding/decoding, formatting JSON/XML/HTML, hashing, case conversion, regex, sorting, diffing and dozens more. You can also write custom scripts in JavaScript. No subscription, no fuss, just a quick ⌘⇧B and a search.

Drafts opens to a blank note instantly — the idea is that text lands here first, then gets routed somewhere else via actions. I use it as a frictionless capture layer: quick notes, URLs to process, things to look up later. Actions let you send the content of a draft anywhere — to Obsidian, email, reminders, a shell script, whatever. The action directory has hundreds of community-built options. Drafts on Mac syncs seamlessly with iOS, so anything captured on iPhone shows up immediately.

dupeGuru scans folders for duplicate files using exact matching or fuzzy logic — useful for music libraries where files may have slightly different tags or filenames but identical content. Three scan modes: standard (hash-based), music (tag-aware), and picture (image similarity). Open source, no cost.

EasyFind searches file names and contents directly without relying on Spotlight’s index — which means it works even when indexing is off (like your setup) and finds things Spotlight would miss. Supports wildcards, regular expressions, and full-text search inside files. Free from DEVONtechnologies.

Feishin is a native desktop client for Navidrome (and Jellyfin) — it connects to your self-hosted music server and provides a full-featured listening experience: library browsing, playlists, scrobbling to Last.fm, and media key support. A cleaner alternative to the Navidrome web UI for daily listening from your Mac Studio.

Hazel watches folders and automatically moves, renames, tags, or deletes files based on rules you define. It runs silently in the background as a System Preferences pane — no app window, no fussing. I use it to keep Downloads from becoming a graveyard, auto-sort receipts and invoices into dated folders, and trigger follow-on Automator or shell scripts when specific files land in watched locations. Once the rules are set, you forget it’s there.

Moom adds a popup to the macOS green maximize button that lets you snap windows to halves, thirds, quarters, or custom-defined layouts with a single click or keyboard shortcut. It can save and restore full window arrangements, making it easy to return to a known multi-window setup with one keystroke. Simpler than Rectangle Pro for layout snapshots.

Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files in a local vault — no proprietary format, no lock-in, just folders and files you own. The killer feature is bidirectional linking: notes reference each other and the graph view shows how ideas connect. I use it for the bee-hub vault itself, long-form notes, and anything I want to keep permanently searchable. The plugin ecosystem is enormous, covering everything from kanban boards to Dataview queries that turn your notes into a database. Syncs across devices via Obsidian Sync or a folder-based solution like Resilio.

Peek extends macOS Quick Look to support file types it doesn’t handle natively — including Markdown, plain text with syntax highlighting, archives (zip/tar), strings files, .env files, and more. Install it and Quick Look just works for those types. No interface to learn.

Quitter automatically hides or quits apps you haven’t used for a set amount of time. Useful for keeping Slack, Mail, or other notification-heavy apps from sitting in the background demanding attention. Configure per-app rules: some apps hide after 5 minutes, others quit entirely after 30. Runs silently in the menu bar.

Radial is a gesture-triggered circular menu that launches apps, runs shortcuts, or fires system actions. Summoned with a mouse gesture or hotkey, it presents options in a ring around the cursor — faster to target than a linear menu because every option is equidistant. Pairs well with a drawing tablet or trackball.

Recordia puts audio recording one click away in the menu bar. Click the icon, it records; click again, it stops and saves. Supports multiple formats (M4A, MP3, FLAC, WAV), configurable input source, and can transcribe via Whisper. Good for quick voice memos, meeting audio, or capturing a thought without opening GarageBand or QuickTime.

TinkerTool exposes macOS preferences that Apple doesn’t surface in System Settings — animation speeds, Finder behaviors, Dock settings, font smoothing, screenshot options, and more. All changes are reversible, and it includes a ‘Reset’ function to return any category to defaults. Free, no installer, just run and tweak.

TypingMind is a polished interface for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and other AI APIs — you bring your own API keys. It adds features the official apps lack: conversation folders, custom system prompts, personas, plugins, web search, document upload, and chat export. Good for maintaining organized long-term AI conversations without a subscription to each provider’s native app.

Yoink solves the awkward problem of dragging files between windows or spaces — instead of juggling both source and destination visible at once, you drop files onto Yoink’s shelf, navigate wherever you need to go, then drag them out. It also works as a quick clipboard for files, staging multiple items before pasting them elsewhere. Small app, very specific job, does it perfectly.