Evidence-first research

I built a free menu bar app that auto-switches natural scrolling when you dock/undock your Mac

Annoyed by having to manually flip "natural scrolling" in System Settings every time I docked my MacBook to my monitor (and flip it back when I undocked), so I built ScrollDock to do it automatically. What it does: \- Detects when an external display connects/disconnects (works with clamshell mode too) \- Switches scroll direction instantly, no logout needed \- Lives quietly in the menu bar, no Dock icon \- Notarized and signed, so no Gatekeeper warnings \- Free, no account, no trial It's a small, single-purpose tool — doesn't try to do per-device (trackpad vs. mouse) switching, just handles the dock-state part. If you're someone who moves between trackpad-only and an external mouse/monitor setup, it might solve the exact annoyance it solved for me. [scrolldock.com](http://scrolldock.com) if you want to try it. Happy to answer questions about how it works under the hood. https://preview.redd.it/2yoecjceutoh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c3e7325e42d5ce5561ae641429e9d4e6e1f2dac [](https://preview.redd.it/i-built-my-first-app-that-i-am-proud-to-use-everyday-v0-gi7pq39dwsoh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=17fcc0ad928397f06dea763cad9d1c330c6e0822)

[OS] FlowPeek: a Mermaid viewer for the diagram that is already on your screen

**Problem** Mermaid renders fine where the platform supports it. GitHub draws it in markdown, docs sites draw it, a markdown preview pane draws it. Everywhere else you are reading a picture as source code. The case I kept hitting: a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex prints a fenced mermaid block into my terminal. There is no file to open, because nothing was ever written to disk. I cannot even select it cleanly, because the terminal has already broken the block across its own line wraps. So I retype or hand-clean it into a browser tab, look at it once, and come back. It is the same story for a diagram in a code comment, in a YAML file, in a chat message, in a .mmd file that Finder previews as plain text, or in the markdown you are in the middle of writing and do not want to open a second pane to check. FlowPeek draws it where it already is: * **Point at it.** Hold Option over a block in most apps. It gets outlined in place, and Space opens it. * **Copy it.** A badge appears under the menu bar naming the key that opens it. * **Print it in a terminal.** Terminal, iTerm2 and Ghostty get a faint frame around every block on screen, with the wrapped rows joined back together before it draws. * **Press space in Finder.** .mmd and .mermaid files preview with Quick Look. * **Find it again.** Everything it has drawn goes on a shelf you raise with a keystroke and search by the words in the diagram. * **Take it with you.** Zoom and pan, copy the diagram as an image, or export PNG

[OS] An app to stop external drives from spinning down (free, open source)

My external hard drive enclosure has a timer in its firmware that put the hard drive to sleep after every \~45 seconds of idle, and it ignores any macOS power management setting. Every touch of a file during the sleep will take 10 seconds to spin the disk back up. I've been using the "Keep Drive Spinning" option in Amphetamine app to workaround this, but I don't really need the other features of this app that keep my whole mac awake. I want my mac to sleep as usually, just don't put the hard disk to sleep when the mac is awake. With recent advancement of AI, I decided to vibe-code a dedicated app just to keep the drive awake: Drive Caffeine. It's now open-sourced on [GitHub](https://github.com/jianfenglin-git/drive-caffeine), and free on mac App Store with no ads. Hope this can help anyone else who has the same issue: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drive-caffeine/id6777139064](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drive-caffeine/id6777139064)

Alfred 6 is coming this Autumn! Sign up!

It’s already in beta, and the best part: it’s a FREE upgrade! Damn, the Alfred team seriously rocks. Years of updates and generous upgrade policies like this are exactly why I’m so happy to be a Legendary Supporter. ❤️ Such an amazing piece of software - easily one of my favorite Mac apps. Announcement: https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/announcements/alfred-6-coming-soon/ Sign up for Alfred 6 updates: https://www.alfredapp.com/v6/

Show HN: Benzi – A Code Intillegence/Harness Beating Claude Code and CodeGraph

AppSift - a free Mac app for searching, comparing and price tracking App Store apps

Hi everyone! Today I'm introducing **AppSift** , a free Mac app for searching, comparing and price tracking App Store apps. **The problem** I build Mac and iOS apps, so I am always looking things up in the App Store: what a competitor charges, whether an app is still maintained, what a subscription actually costs. The store app is built for buying, not for deciding. You cannot filter out subscriptions, you cannot put two apps side by side, and a 4.5 average tells you nothing without the rating count behind it. There is no wishlist either, so if something is too expensive today you just have to remember to check back. So I built the AppSift Mac app * Filters the store does not have: no subscriptions, a minimum number of ratings, release date and last update as separate filters * Compare apps side by side, with every in-app purchase listed and subscriptions worked out as a cost per year * A watchlist with price drop alerts, plus a daily deals feed * Top charts with rank history, collections, saved searches, and a My Apps library that flags updates and badges apps you already own **Comparison** *The Mac App Store.* AppSift is not a companion to it, it is a different front end onto the same catalogue. Apple's app has no wishlist, no price alerts, no side by side view, no way to exclude subscriptions, and no answer to "has this ever been cheaper". What it does better, and it matters: it can actually install things. AppSift hands you back to the store to buy. *AppShopper.* The wish

Show HN: Nightshift – Your code gets better while you sleep

[Update] Pinery 2.0: the macOS self-publishing app I posted here a year ago, now with an AI editor you approve line by line

I am the solo developer. I posted v1 of Pinery here about a year ago ([that post](https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1mwbkjo/i_built_a_native_macos_app_for_selfpublishing/)), and this is my biggest update since. **Problem** Publishing a book yourself properly is expensive, and almost none of the cost is the writing. Reedsy prices a standard 80,000 word book off more than 230,000 freelancer quotes on its marketplace: $2,940 to $5,660 a title, editing $2,160 to $5,040 of it, typesetting $800. Tools are on top, $260 to $310 for the usual Mac stack of Scrivener plus Vellum, depending on whether you need paperbacks. Meanwhile Written Word Media surveyed 1,346 indie authors last year and 44% of them earn under $100 a month. The professional path costs more than most authors make in a year, so what actually happens is a manuscript in Word and an export nobody is confident about. Pinery goes at both ends of that. Write in Markdown, design the real book (typography, spacing, Kindle e-ink preview), export ePub 3, PDF or a website. Prose, the AI editor, then runs the editorial passes over what you have written, proofread, line edit, developmental edit, beta reader report, each one a Markdown file you can open, change or write your own version of. It will not design you a cover, and an AI pass is not a human editor. It is the one most authors can actually afford. AppKit and SwiftUI, not a web view in a wrapper, and your document is a folder of plain Markdown files on disk, **no ac

Show HN: Benzi – A Code Intillegence/Harness Beating Claude Code and CodeGraph

AppSift - a free Mac app for searching, comparing and price tracking App Store apps

Hi everyone! Today I'm introducing **AppSift** , a free Mac app for searching, comparing and price tracking App Store apps. **The problem** I build Mac and iOS apps, so I am always looking things up in the App Store: what a competitor charges, whether an app is still maintained, what a subscription actually costs. The store app is built for buying, not for deciding. You cannot filter out subscriptions, you cannot put two apps side by side, and a 4.5 average tells you nothing without the rating count behind it. There is no wishlist either, so if something is too expensive today you just have to remember to check back. So I built the AppSift Mac app * Filters the store does not have: no subscriptions, a minimum number of ratings, release date and last update as separate filters * Compare apps side by side, with every in-app purchase listed and subscriptions worked out as a cost per year * A watchlist with price drop alerts, plus a daily deals feed * Top charts with rank history, collections, saved searches, and a My Apps library that flags updates and badges apps you already own **Comparison** *The Mac App Store.* AppSift is not a companion to it, it is a different front end onto the same catalogue. Apple's app has no wishlist, no price alerts, no side by side view, no way to exclude subscriptions, and no answer to "has this ever been cheaper". What it does better, and it matters: it can actually install things. AppSift hands you back to the store to buy. *AppShopper.* The wish

Show HN: Nightshift – Your code gets better while you sleep

[Update] Pinery 2.0: the macOS self-publishing app I posted here a year ago, now with an AI editor you approve line by line

I am the solo developer. I posted v1 of Pinery here about a year ago ([that post](https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1mwbkjo/i_built_a_native_macos_app_for_selfpublishing/)), and this is my biggest update since. **Problem** Publishing a book yourself properly is expensive, and almost none of the cost is the writing. Reedsy prices a standard 80,000 word book off more than 230,000 freelancer quotes on its marketplace: $2,940 to $5,660 a title, editing $2,160 to $5,040 of it, typesetting $800. Tools are on top, $260 to $310 for the usual Mac stack of Scrivener plus Vellum, depending on whether you need paperbacks. Meanwhile Written Word Media surveyed 1,346 indie authors last year and 44% of them earn under $100 a month. The professional path costs more than most authors make in a year, so what actually happens is a manuscript in Word and an export nobody is confident about. Pinery goes at both ends of that. Write in Markdown, design the real book (typography, spacing, Kindle e-ink preview), export ePub 3, PDF or a website. Prose, the AI editor, then runs the editorial passes over what you have written, proofread, line edit, developmental edit, beta reader report, each one a Markdown file you can open, change or write your own version of. It will not design you a cover, and an AI pass is not a human editor. It is the one most authors can actually afford. AppKit and SwiftUI, not a web view in a wrapper, and your document is a folder of plain Markdown files on disk, **no ac

Show HN: Raiders at the Gate – tower defense web game

Show HN: I created a translation service prompt

I am in the process of learning European Portuguese because I moved to Portugal. I was having significant friction with Google Translate, so I started giving more and more instructions to Gemini Flash to create a powerful, low-friction experience when getting translations between English and EU Portuguese. This became a generally-powerful prompt that can serve any language combination, so I posted it to github. I haven't tried it with any other model providers yet. Let me know what you think!

Show HN: Open-source simulation testing infra for voice agents

Hey HN, we’re Nischal & Naman. We’re brothers, and together we’re building an open-source platform for simulation based testing of voice agents (try it out in 5 mins - https://docs.egma.ai/docs/get-started/quickstart , 2 min demo video - https://youtu.be/wgDWEe5UAUY ) Platforms that help you do simulation testing already exist. But they all charge a heavy premium on top of inference costs. We believe if the industry truly wants to scale simulation testing of voice agents, we need to stop charging a premium on inference and start providing infrastructure to scale simulations. The project is built in a way that allows you to bring your own STT, LLM, and TTS provider keys while also providing a way for us to provide inference directly within the platform at a 0% markup so you don’t have to wrestle with multiple keys/ rate limits. A bit on why’re we’re building this - We started working on voice agents in early 2024 and since then, have worked on numerous voice ai systems - like screenless voice-powered hardware for kids[1], AI receptionist deployed in healthcare practices like med spas & therapy clinics and personal accountability coaches. Some of these were full-fledged startups others were just side projects. But we kept on encountering similar issues all throughout. One of the most frustrating parts was calling the agent again and again, reciting the same script to test its behavior. We also kept on encountering new issues all the

Show HN: I built an AI Agent that sell itself

Quick bit of context: SendRoq is a LinkedIn automation tool. Before the AI era (pre-2021), I ran a marketing agency. Back then, client acquisition on LinkedIn was all manual. Once AI agents started becoming a thing, I built one for my agency's internal use, never intended to sell it. It worked really well for us. A few colleagues and partners kept pushing me to turn it into a SaaS. I said no, we were already profitable running the agency, why complicate things. Then a few weeks later, I was on an onboarding call with a new client, and he asked, "How did you guys know I was looking for marketing help?" I told him straight up: we have an AI agent that analyzes LinkedIn profiles and picks up on signals. If someone comments, engages, or posts anything hinting they're looking for marketing, it flags it and reaches out. He got interested immediately and wanted to buy the agent for his own sales team, was ready to pay well for it. I told him it wasn't public, not for sale. He pushed back: "So make it a SaaS." That conversation is basically what got the ball rolling. A few months later we actually started building it out. The hardest part, unsurprisingly, was getting our first users. Our GTM was pretty meta: we used our own tool to book meetings with potential customers and sell them directly.