Easy macOS and iOS Tips and Fixes
About macOS and Applications for Apple Mac computers.
Apple is expanding its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) technology beyond its own data centers by collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud Platform. This move extends Apple’s strong privacy and security commitments for AI inference from Apple devices to third-party cloud environments, enabling more complex AI tasks to be handled while maintaining user privacy.
Mouseless is a cross-platform app that enables fast, precise mouse control entirely via the keyboard, supporting comprehensive mouse actions like clicking, dragging, and scrolling without needing a physical mouse. Designed to boost productivity and reduce ergonomic strain, it provides a modern alternative to traditional mouse keys and offers accessibility benefits for users unable to use a mouse. The app runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux and aims to keep users in their workflow by minimizing the time needed to perform mouse actions.
LosslessCut is a free, open-source tool for fast, lossless editing of video and audio files, enabling users to trim, cut, merge, and remux without re-encoding or quality loss. Designed for efficiency, it provides features such as track selection, snapshot capture, and metadata adjustment, making it ideal for tasks like removing commercials, extracting tracks, or fixing video orientation. The app is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with official versions available via app stores for easy installation and updates.
The author reminisces about the macOS 10.5 Leopard feature called Spaces, which allowed virtual desktops arranged in a customizable grid, enabling efficient spatial navigation that was lost when macOS Lion replaced it with a single-row Mission Control interface. To restore this functionality, the author developed GridLion, an app that recreates grid-based virtual desktop navigation on modern macOS versions despite API limitations and complex permission hurdles, emphasizing the ongoing value of well-crafted software.
https://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/macos-needs-its-grid-back/
BBEdit 16 introduces expanded macOS Shortcuts support, improved HTML5 syntax checking via the W3C checker, and the ability to search text within images using OCR. It also offers enhanced project-specific color schemes, vi keyboard emulation, an improved Language Server Protocol integration for syntax coloring, faster SFTP operations, and streamed AI worksheet responses. These updates enhance both coding and text-processing workflows, maintaining BBEdit’s reputation as a robust, versatile macOS text editor.
Kept is a local-first tool that archives AI chat conversations from multiple LLM providers as plain markdown files stored on your filesystem, enabling full-text search, semantic recall, and integration with tools like Obsidian. It supports manual and automatic capture, offers a knowledge graph and topic clustering, and includes a MCP server for integration with other clients, while maintaining user data privacy by default without any cloud dependency.