PowerPhotos 3.0 is Here

Screenshot of PowerPhotos 3.0 showing batch metadata editing features for a photo titled "Burt’s" with keywords “Albuquerque” and “Vacation.”

PowerPhotos 3.0 has officially landed, and it’s a big one.

For the uninitiated, PowerPhotos is a utility that fills in the gaps in Apple’s Photos app. It’s long been the Photos utility of choice for many Mac power users, offering features like multiple library management, duplicate detection, and the ability to copy albums between libraries while preserving edits and metadata.

Version 3.0 brings a host of smart new features, including:

Batch metadata editing — You can now edit photo titles, keywords, and captions right inside PowerPhotos, with batch editing tools that support templating, auto-numbering, and more.
Advanced search — A new indexing engine lets you search by criteria not supported in Photos, like file size, dimensions, video duration, and more. You can also save your smart searches, which support nested logic.
Improved photo browser and viewer — The app now updates live with changes to your library, includes a built-in photo viewer, and allows you to move or delete photos and albums, all with full undo support.
Library management improvements — You can now move (not just copy) content between libraries, and select multiple libraries for batch operations.

To top it all off, this marks the 10th anniversary of PowerPhotos (and the 20th of its predecessor, iPhoto Library Manager!). To celebrate, the app is 10% off through May 16.

You can download it for free, with advanced features available by purchasing a $39.95 license. Existing users can upgrade at a 50% discount.

If you work with large or multiple Photos libraries, this is one utility that deserves a spot in your Applications folder.

Whither Apple Calendar?

I have noted that Apple continues to make progress on its productivity application suite. Apple Notes is no longer a joke; it is a powerful tool that many people are using effectively. Reminders is also on an upswing. While certainly not a tier-one task manager, it has most of the features that people are looking for and continues to make yearly improvements.

Apple’s Calendar app is the exception, however. There’s been a lot of evolution in how we manage calendars, and Calendar has yet to keep up with any of it. While the application is acceptable for keeping track of dental and other appointments, even its touted Reminders integration (introduced in macOS Sequoia) is half-baked. A powerful calendar app can make a huge difference in our productivity if harnessed correctly. The problem with Calendar is that it doesn’t have any of the tools necessary to do so. Moreover, from the outside, it looks like Apple has no intention of ever adding those features.

Unread for Mac

I’ve always considered Unread one of the most attractive RSS reader apps. However, there has never been a Mac version. Today marks the release of Unread for Mac. It’s an RSS reader made with taste. It has great typography, themes, search, and compatibility with the usual suspects. I love having this app on my Mac.

Tinderbox 10 Is Here

It seems to be software updates season. Tinderbox version 10 is now available with a new Gaudí view designed to use the screen more efficiently and make brainstorming easier. If you’re unaware, Tinderbox is one of the best thinking and planning apps available for the Mac. I am pleased to see this application continue to get further development and new features.

The New Overcast

Congratulations to Marco Arment on shipping the new Overcast. The new version is a complete rewrite and redesign that runs faster and uses Apple’s latest technologies.

By far, my favorite applications are the ones developed by solo or small teams that are obsessive about design and performance. Marco fits that mold with Overcast. Looking through the new app, you can see that he was intentional about every button and screen.

When the Antivirus Software Is the Virus

Last week’s CrowdStrike outage is pretty concerning. It’s shocking how a mistake by one software company can shut down so many global industries.

While I understand that antivirus software is necessary, its existence always represents a vulnerability. It has to embed itself deep in the system to do its work. Any mistake in that software, whether the result of negligence or malice, can cause the exact damage the software is engineered to avoid. Fortunately, Apple uses an Endpoint Security framework and therefore avoided the CrowdStrike fiasco.

Brett Terpstra’s Conductor

I’m a little late with this one, but I wanted to congratulate my friend Brett Terpstra on the release of Conductor. This new command line utility is an add-on for Brett’s successful Marked app. As the name implies, this utility acts as a train conductor for Marked 2, allowing you to set up and run custom processors to make Marked 2 even more powerful and automation-friendly.

Brett goes deeper into Conductor in this post. He even added some functionality a few days ago.

MacWhisper 8 Improvements

MacWhisper has been updated to version 8 with some new features, including a video player. Multiple apps use the Whisper model to perform transcription. I bought a license for MacWhisper early, and I’ve been using it a lot ever since.

MacWhisper application icon featuring a close-up of a white microphone in vertical orientation, on a stand, against a blue gradient background in the shape of a round square.

One example: We use a Notion database to manage all the MacSparky content (this blog, the MacSparky Labs and Field Guides, etc.). With the addition of Notion AI, we’ve found value in keeping text transcripts of released content in the database. This allows us to ask questions like, “When is the last time I covered MacWhisper?”

MacWhisper 8 adds new features:

Video Player

A new inline video player has been added that allows transcribing video files. The video player can be popped out into its own window. Subtitles display directly on the video, and translations appear as separate subtitles, too. This will make the above Notion workflow even easier

WhisperKit Support

You can now choose different Whisper engines like WhisperKit for your transcriptions. WhisperKit offers distilled models for faster transcription speed, and transcriptions stream in real-time. WhisperKit can be enabled in Settings → Advanced.

There are a bunch of other improvements keeping MacWhisper at the top of my list for transcribing audio on my Mac.

I will be curious to see if Apple incorporates the Whisper technology into the Mac operating system at WWDC. It seems like it should be built into the operating system. Moreover, if they incorporated it onto the chip, it could really scream. But it’s too early to tell exactly what Apple’s vision is for incorporating AI into macOS, and this may be a bridge too far. In the meantime, I’m very happy to have MacWhisper around.

BBEdit 15 is Here

The folks at Bare Bones Software just announced a big upgrade to their ubiquitous text editor, BBEdit. It’s got too many features to mention, but here are a few that jumped at me:

A new AI-driven document type called ChatGPT Worksheets, which lets you interact with ChatGPT as you put your words on the page.
Minimap, a palette gives you a nice overview of the document you’re working on, making it easy to see its structure.
Expandable Cheat Sheets to reference bits of text that you use often or don’t remember how to type.
A new UI for Text Factories, a long-standing and unique feature of BBEdit.

You can read more about the new features and get upgrade pricing if you have an older version of the app.

I’ve seen BBEdit grow for the last few decades and it’s nice to see it’s still going strong in 2024.

The Vision Pro Software Question

One of the bigger questions around the looming release of the Vision Pro is software. Specifically, will there be any, and will it be any good? We don’t know yet. We’ve seen some offerings from Apple and some limited offerings from third parties, but now that we have a shipping date on the hardware, announcements are starting to roll out. The Omni Group announced OmniPlan will be on the new hardware. I suspect they’ll be announcing more. This is where the companies that adopted SwiftUI will get their payoff.

But it’s too early to tell whether a healthy software stack will be available to us on Day One. The device could be focused on enterprise-style software, given its cost. But I could equally see a lot of the better developers getting apps on it despite its small initial adoption so that they can have their flag planted. We’ll see.