You’d be hard-pressed to find corners of the Apple nerd community where John Siracusa’s name isn’t known. He wrote those mammoth OS X reviews for Ars Technica for many years — some of which you may still be reading now. (They were long.) He cohosts Accidental Tech Podcast and Robot or Not, and authors Hypercritical.
And he also makes Mac apps. And John’s approach to Mac apps has a unifying quality: He wants apps that make his Macs behave the way he wants them to. And he offers them to the rest of us, in case some of us see the same peccadilloes that John sees. The apps are straightforward, intentionally fussy (in terms of how configurable they are), and do precisely what they set out to do.
Front and Center is a $5 Mac App Store app that gives more control over how window layering works. In classic versions of Mac OS, clicking on an application’s window brought all of that app’s windows to the front. On modern macOS, clicking a window brings just that window forward; other windows from the same application stay just where they are.
With Front and Center, you can both choose which behavior you’d prefer to have as the default, and use Shift-click on a window to trigger the opposite behavior.
SwitchGlass is an $8 Mac App Store app for creating a customizable app switcher. In pure Siracusa fashion, it’s exquisitely customizable: You control the look and feel of your app switcher; you decide which display(s) it may appear on; and you set its visibility, position, and orientation. SwitchGlass even lets you get as fiddly as adjusting its rounded corners, or determining whether it shows all apps or only apps with active windows on the current display.
Finally, Hyperspace helps you reclaim storage space on your Mac when your drive contains duplicate files. If you have the same file stored in more than one place, Hyperspace figures it out, treats one copy as the canonical version, and uses space-saving clones to save space.
What I love about John’s apps is that they all clearly were born out of needs he felt personally. Apps built directly from the developer’s own needs and passions are opinionated and definitive, which are great qualities for powerful utilities.