Rafael Conde’s roster of apps is bursting with personality. I don’t know Rafael personally, but I feel like I kinda know him through his apps.
There’s a delightful pattern in Rafa’s apps. John Siracusa’s apps come from John’s needs for his Mac to behave differently. Rafa’s apps come from his noticing that his life should behave differently — usually while he’s on vacation, or making breakfast, or sitting on the floor with one doing dad-type things. He builds the app, ships it, and improves his life. Nearly every one of these apps has an origin story that takes one sentence to tell.
Hand Mirror
Hand Mirror is the big one, and it is deliciously simple: it lives in your Mac’s menu bar, and when you click it, you see what your camera sees. Which, based on the setup of your Mac, is probably your own face.
Rafa built it in a weekend in 2020. Since then, it’s been featured by the App Store, The Verge, 9to5Mac, and others, which is a lot of press for a weekend project. It’s free, with a Hand Mirror Plus upgrade for people who want more, and it remains in active development six years on.
Rafa says he hopes it would make his 16-year-old self proud. Oh, to have that 16-year-old’s youth again, though.
Thwip
Thwip is a soundboard for iPhone and Apple Watch. It started as a watchOS toy and then turned into something better when Rafa started using it during playtime with his son. Tap button, play sound. Good stuff.
Night Knight
Night Knight is a night light, a white noise machine, and a wake aid that changes color at a set time so a small child knows whether it’s okay to come find you yet. I used multiple pieces of hardware to pull this off when my kids were little. Had Night Knight existed then, I would have absolutely used it. Now I have one kid in college and another applying and my youngest — youngest! — is fifteen. I’m getting emotional. Let’s move on.
Rafa built it because he was on vacation with his family and had forgotten to pack his kids’ night clock. If you have ever been in a rental house at 5:15 a.m. with a toddler who is fairly confident it’s morning, you understand the motivation. It’s free.
The rest
Docktor is a free Mac app that lets you drag and drop an icon to preview it in the Dock — a tool Rafa built for himself while designing macOS app icons.
HiDock is also free, and it gives your Dock different settings on different displays: visible on the big external monitor, hidden and smaller on the laptop. Rafa couldn’t believe macOS didn’t do this, but I appreciate that he could make it do what he wanted. It’s frankly Siracusian.
Booby Track tracks breastfeeds on iPhone and Apple Watch. It exists because a couple of weeks after their son was born, Rafa’s partner asked him to build something that remembered which side she fed the baby on last, and when. He built it, and the app kept her abreast of various details while nursing. I see what I did there.
Check out Rafa’s apps.