macOS software crafted with care

CopyLens

v1.0.2 · 2 June 2026

Hit a hotkey, draw a rectangle anywhere on screen, get its contents on your clipboard. Text inside becomes text; if there isn't any, you get the cropped image.

Vision OCR macOS 14+

WindowPin

v2.0.6 · 2 June 2026

Pin any window as a floating always-on-top overlay with live capture. Toggle with a hot-key. Overlay auto-hides when the source app comes to front.

Picture-in-Picture macOS 14+

SpaceMan

v2.0.6 · 2 June 2026

User-driven workspace snapshots. Capture a named window layout on any Mission Control space and restore it later — including launching missing apps and spawning extra windows.

Mission Control macOS 14+

See all our apps, utilities & screensavers.

• Sat 30 May

  The Details Are the Software

  Tugboat is an internal-only tool, used by exactly one person, and almost nobody will ever see its menu-bar icon. I reworked that icon anyway, so it shows — in real time — which edge of the screen the Dock is actually living on. This is a post about the smallest of details: why they matter, why they're the line between hand-crafted code and AI slop, and the other invisible little things scattered across the Jorvik suite.

• Sat 23 May

  The OS Upgrade Tax

  Two apps, three Tahoe regressions, one afternoon — the price of shipping a macOS suite through an OS upgrade.

• Sat 16 May

  The Column I Couldn't Copy

  Last week I needed to copy a single column out of an HTML table in an email, and discovered that the boring solution — copy the whole table, paste it somewhere, trim it back — is a fifteen-second tax on a one-second intention. So I built CopyLens. Draw a rectangle anywhere on screen; if there's text inside, it lands on the clipboard as text. If not, the cropped image does. Same gesture, two outcomes. Plus a full-disclosure note about how the OCR engine actually got built, which wasn't by me.

• Tue 12 May

  Rainy Day Isn't a Screensaver

  Rainy Day shipped this past weekend. The product page calls it a screensaver. The bundle on disk is a regular .app — no .saver in sight. This is the story of why. A run-down of the macOS frictions that ended my attempt to build it the orthodox way: WebContent suspended within seconds of activation, an Apple SPI that no longer works in macOS 26, a CARenderer that returns blank frames, ScreenCaptureKit edge cases when the saver occludes the screen it's trying to read, multi-instance lifecycle thrash from System Settings previews, and the way ad-hoc signing burns TCC grants on every rebuild. And then the architecture I ended up with — LSUIElement app, SMAppService login item, idle-driven fullscreen NSWindow at screenSaver level — which side-stepped every one of those frictions in an afternoon.

• Thu 7 May

  Putting The House In Order

  Two weeks of housekeeping on the Jorvik estate. It started with Spotlight launching the wrong version of an app, ended with a 1,100-line refactor of Release Manager, and surfaced about ten gigabytes of accumulated nonsense in between. This is the diary of the fortnight: what the audit found, what ps told me about my own apps, and why a clean filesystem is a clean countertop.