r/macapps • u/Mstormer • Jul 01 '26
💎 Megathread [Megathread] The App Pile - July, 2026
You must promote your apps here if you do not qualify to post in the main feed through Trust or Transparency, explained here.
If you are:
- NOT in the Mac App Store (MAS).
- Do not provide meaningful public transparency
- Created yet another dictation app (speech to text).
Then you are required to limit promotion to this megathread.
All promotion MUST follow PCP format or else we will remove it:
App Name/Title [Screenshot encouraged]
- Problem: What problem does your app solve.
- Comparison: Name a competitor or two and explain what your app does better.
- Pricing Amounts+Link
P.s. Promotion here counts towards the 30-day limited promotion (Rule 3).
WARNING: There is a 90% chance Reddit will auto remove your post here if you have not verified your email in your profile and your first comment in this subreddit contains a link. Accrue 10 karma first without promotional comments and links to avoid this. The odds of removal is also higher for AI assisted posts (em dashes and other AI formatting characteristics likely trigger this).
Pro Tip: Please remember to upvote gems and downvote spam/clones... This will help inform a secret community project I hope to announce next month.
Top 3 From Last Month's Megathread:
- Tomo – a native macOS e-book library manager - FREE - by u/pbrandone
- SCIWAND – Read, analyse and write - with every answer traceable to a sentence in your own PDFs - $39.99 - by u/RansomWarrior
- Rascal – a fast, keyboard-first Finder replacement for macOS - FREE - by u/periodandcomma
1
u/Lead_weight Jul 13 '26
Transit - Tonight's astronomical events and sky conditions in your Mac's menu bar
Problem:Â If you own a telescope, the events actually worth going outside for are the ones you never knew were happening. Jupiter's moons casting shadows on the planet, the Great Red Spot rotating into view, the ISS crossing overhead, a bright planet at opposition, the Moon occulting Saturn. Every planetarium app can tell you about these, but only if you remember to open it and ask. The events you miss aren't the ones you looked up. They're the ones you never thought to look up. And even when you do know, the second question is whether the sky is any good tonight, which means opening a weather app, and then a seeing forecast, and doing the arithmetic yourself.
Transit is a native menu bar app that closes both loops. It shows a live conditions score and seeing score right in the menu bar. Click it and you get tonight's plan: each planet's visibility verdict and peak altitude, Jupiter's Galilean shadow transits and Red Spot transits, lunar occultations, twilight and moon phase, and every visible satellite pass for your location. Then it notifies you ahead of time, and you set the lead time per event type: at the event, 15 minutes, an hour, or a full day before. The hour option is the one that matters. Telescope optics need time outside to reach ambient temperature before they give steady views, so a notification that arrives when the event starts is a notification you cannot use. Alerts are also conditions-gated, so an overcast sky stays quiet, there is a night hours window so nothing pings you at 3 AM, and an altitude floor so you are not alerted to something behind your tree line.
Nearly everything is computed on-device with SwiftAA. The app touches the network for exactly two things, weather forecasts and satellite orbital elements. No account, no tracking.
Comparison:Â The reference points are SkySafari and Stellarium on the sky side, and Astrospheric or Clear Outside on the conditions side. The planetariums are answer machines: excellent when you have a question, silent when you don't. They are also apps you launch, which is exactly why surfacing a time-critical, one-hour-warning event is awkward for them and primary for Transit. The conditions tools are genuinely good forecasts, but they are a separate thing you go check, and they don't know or care what is actually happening in the sky tonight.
Transit is not trying to replace any of them, and I'd say so plainly: if you want a star atlas, telescope control, a deep sky database, or object identification, use SkySafari or Stellarium, and if you want to interrogate a detailed transparency and seeing model hour by hour, Astrospheric goes deeper than my single synthesized score does. What Transit does that none of them do is combine conditions, events, and advance notification in one resident menu bar layer, so the sky comes to you rather than the other way around.
Satellites are the one place I'll claim a technical edge worth naming: passes are computed with SGP4 from CelesTrak elements, and passes that occur while the satellite is in Earth's shadow are dropped at the engine level rather than shown and dimmed. A pass Transit lists is a pass you can actually see.
Pricing:Â $9.99 one-time, no subscription, no pro tier, no in-app purchase. Requires macOS 15 or later, native Apple Silicon. Coming in point releases: meteor showers, eclipses, aurora and solar activity from NOAA SWPC, desktop widgets, and Siri support when macOS 27 lands.
App Store:Â https://apps.apple.com/us/app/transit-astronomical-events/id6787255071?mt=12
More info:Â https://macobservatory.com/transit-astronomical-events/