By Jason Snell

August 21, 2026 8:30 AM PT

Schlage Sense Pro UWB smart lock review: What price beauty?

Back in March I took possession of an Aqara UWB Smart Lock, which allowed me to live out my Star Trek dreams by using Ultra Wideband technology to sense my arrival and unlock the door without any interaction from me. Now a second UWB lock has arrived on the scene, Schlage’s Sense Pro UWB smart lock. I’ve spent the last month locking and unlocking my front door with it, and it’s got some definite strengths over the Aqara lock—as well as some definite weaknesses.

Let’s start with the prices. The Aqara is $269, and the Schlage lock is $400. While it can be hard to justify a smart lock at any price, it’s extremely difficult to recommend one lock with much the same feature set over another when there’s this kind of price disparity.

And yes, these locks are very much playing by the same playbook: Both use UWB and Apple’s HomeKey technology to detect when your iPhone (11 or newer) or Apple Watch (Series 6 or newer) approaches your door, unlocking without having to wait or tap your device against the keypad. You can read my previous review for more about how this works, but it’s a huge improvement on both NFC tap-to-unlock and Bluetooth proximity detection, because it can wirelessly detect if you’re inside or outside the door—and only unlocks when you’re approaching from the outside.

The Schlage Sense Pro trades versatility for compactness and attractiveness. The Aqara lock is a big black slab, compared to a relatively squat keypad that comes in either black or satin nickel (a perfect match for my front door hardware). Schlage’s lock is undeniably better looking. It also has a light-up keypad so you can unlock it with a code, and you can program additional codes via the Schlage app or directly via the Apple Home app. And it supports NFC unlock, so if someone in your house doesn’t have a UWB device, they still have an avenue to electronically unlock the door via a tap.

Past Schlage smart locks—I used one for several years before buying the Aqara UWB model—offered a little 9-volt battery nubbin at the bottom of the outside to provide emergency power if the device’s batteries died and you needed to get into the house. This model has a USB-C port to do the same thing, and I don’t know about you, but I’m far more likely to source a USB-C cable (and an iPhone to provide power) than I am to find a 9-volt battery laying around outside my house.

Unlike the Aqara lock, the Schlage Sense Pro doesn’t have a thumbprint scanner or a physical key. The Aqara’s thumbprint scanner works but always seemed a bit pointless to me; the key, on the other hand, might have value if you like the idea of using a hide-a-key or giving a physical spare key to a friend. Alternately, it might seem unnecessary or even a security flaw. Trade-offs.

The Schlage Sense Pro is powered by four AA batteries that slide into the lock in a plastic sled; I found that if I was too forceful sliding the sled in, a battery occasionally popped out. I strongly prefer Aqara’s battery solution—a power-bank-style rechargeable battery pack that offers long life and a relatively easy USB charging path—to swapping AA batteries every so often.

My front door is not quite perfectly aligned, so automatic locks sometimes fail to lock it properly. The Schlage’s lock motor is forceful enough to do the job, but a lot less forceful than the Aqara’s, which would often have enough oomph to get the door closed even if it had to push really hard. In truth, though, both locks were equal in their ability to lock my weird door, though Aqara is much more aggressive in making a noise when it fails to lock the door, which I appreciated more than Schlage’s somewhat muted alert.

I also appreciated Aqara’s gesture to lock the door when leaving the house—you basically tap the pad anywhere—to be a lot easier to use than the Schlage lock, which requires you tap the top portion of the touch pad twice. I got used to the double-tap, but Aqara’s was faster and less fussy.

When testing the Schlage Sense Pro, I also ran into a very odd quirk where the lock became completely unresponsive until I pulled the battery sled out and put it back in—essentially, power cycling the lock. According to Schlage, this was likely due to a faulty lock and the company supplied me with a replacement that hasn’t shown any signs of the same issue.

Both locks do a great job of unlocking automatically. This is what the whole show is really about: If I walk up to a door with my watch on my wrist or my phone in my pocket, does the door unlock by the time I put my hand on the latch? Yes, almost all the time. Very occasionally there would be a slight pause when I reached the door, but almost never. It really is a magical feeling to have your door know that it’s you and unlock as you approach, and if you connect it to other HomeKit automations, you can have that unlock trigger other devices, like turning on your entryway lights.

In the end, the Schlage Sense Pro is a very nice lock, with a restrained look that I prefer to the Aqara’s industrial black block. Aqara’s extra locking methods (fingerprint, traditional key) are not really ones I feel are necessary. Yes, Aqara’s battery approach is better than Schlage’s, but I’ve been using AA-powered locks for ages, and it was fine, if a little annoying.

All in all, these locks are pretty close to even, with Schlage having the advantage in aesthetics. The problem is that the Schlage lock costs $130 more than the Aqara. If you don’t mind the extra charge for a more attractive lock, I won’t fault you, but for most people a smart lock is a bit of a splurge purchase as it is. It’s not the kind of product that can be snuck by household members who are less enthusiastic about technology, and sometimes the price tag is all it takes for the household to decide that it’s not worth doing.

The Schlage Sense Pro is a great product that brings that Star Trek feeling to my front door—but at a price than makes me wince. The first UWB lock that arrived on the scene, Aqara’s U400, is equally capable—and a lot cheaper.

By Jason Snell

August 20, 2026 4:17 PM PT

Open and move windows between displays automatically

When I was visiting my pal Myke Hurley in London last year, I noticed that he had a second display to the right of his main one. It was large and mounted vertically, and when he recorded a podcast, he kept all his recording information over there. I liked the idea of monitoring my recordings while they were going on, just for extra peace of mind, and a second display seemed like the right way to do it.

If only I had a second display! But I do, of course, because my main Mac is now a MacBook Pro. So I’ve taken to recording podcasts using the “Hurley Method,” with my Audio Hijack windows positioned on the laptop display, off to my left.

It’s nice, but if you know me, I quickly became frustrated by the number of clicks and drags I needed to perform every single time I record a podcast: Open up my laptop, open Audio Hijack, open the list of recording sessions, double-click on the one I’m using right now, then drag the window over to the laptop display.

So today I automated it.

None of my automations work if I haven’t opened the laptop, and while it sits next to my Mac in a nice stand from Twelve South, it’s closed most of the time. So my first step before moving windows to the laptop display is to make sure that the display is available! Fortunately, there’s a command-line command for that:

system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType

If you want, you can simplify the output by piping it through a grep command like system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep -B1 "Resolution", but all I really want to do is search for the text string “Built-in”, which indicates that the laptop is open and its built-in display is running.

I automate most of my recording stuff using Keyboard Maestro macros triggered by an Elgato Stream Deck. So I built my automation into an existing macro in Keyboard Maestro, just adding a new if/then statement: If the calculation `SCREENCOUNT() > 1 returns true.

Then the macro runs the shell script, saves that to a local variable called LocalScreens, and it’s time for one more if/then statement, to ensure that this part of the macro only runs when more than one screen is attached and when the internal MacBook Pro display is active.

Unfortunately, the next step requires automating Audio Hijack, and while that app is very scriptable via JavaScript, and controllable via Shortcuts (or a plain text file?!), there’s no direct method of automating it from within Keyboard Maestro. So I created a basic Shortcut containing the JavaScript required to tell Audio Hijack to open a specific session by name, with the name passed to the Shortcut as input:

Then it’s a one-step item in Keyboard Maestro to run that shortcut with the name of my Audio Hijack session as the input:

(I wish this was cleaner and I didn’t need to run a shortcut. The alternative is to literally write out a text file containing the JavaScript and run it via a shell script. Is that cleaner? Doesn’t feel like it, but it’s more self-contained and doesn’t rely on the good graces of Shortcuts.)

Now that I know that my MacBook Pro display is open and my Audio Hijack session window is open, it’s a one-step command in Keyboard Maestro to make the move:

This one’s a little tricky. I have to use the Move and Resize Window command, but instead of standard numerical values, I need to use custom “smart” values that Keyboard Maestro supports. In this case, horizontally it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidX)-600 —essentially, 600 pixels to the left of the midpoint of the internal display—and vertically it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidY)-250—250 pixels up from the midpoint of the display. You can play around with the dimensions until the window ends up in the right spot, and of course, at the right size.

And that was it. Now, when I press my recording button on my Stream Deck, if my laptop display is open, the session window will automatically pop open on my laptop display. I sure do like it when things happen on my computer automatically.

By Glenn Fleishman

August 18, 2026 3:28 PM PT

Add your own stuff to Apple Wallet

Wallet on iPhone is a bulging catch-all. Apple stores all your payment card information there, and it's an interface for adding and removing cards, as well as viewing associated details. It's the place where you interact with your Apple Card (like scheduling payments or viewing transaction reports), the Apple Card savings account, and Apple Cash. But it also handles related but miscellaneous categories of other things: tickets for events, reward cards, membership cards, your library card… really, anything with a number, a scannable code, or a connection to payment winds up there.

Despite all that, Wallet has been deficient: you couldn't easily add items to Wallet that the party issuing them hadn't formatted and made available with an "Add to Apple Wallet" button, whether from a website or within its app. Starting in iOS 27—coming in September but available in a public beta now—you can use a new pass-creation tool to make your virtual billfold even larger. Third-party tools still fill the gap for iOS 26 and earlier users, or for those who want customization that Apple isn't providing in Create a Pass.

Make your own Wallet entry

In iOS 27, open the Wallet app and tap the Add button in the upper-right corner. You'll notice that among the options you're familiar with, Create a Pass appears. Tap that.

If you have a device that supports Visual Intelligence and the pass has a barcode or QR code, tap Continue, and Wallet opens a camera sheet.¹ When you tap the shutter button, Visual Intelligence analyzes the image and tries to extract elements, like your name, the organization name, or the code. If it can't, it will offer a Try Again and Create Pass Manually dialog.

If it's successful, Wallet next displays a preview screen. You can tap Add to accept the pass as it appears, or tap Edit Pass to modify the fields shown and the contents of those fields.

Continue reading “Add your own stuff to Apple Wallet”…

By Dan Moren

August 17, 2026 7:10 AM PT

LLMs aren’t writing

I’m not an AI hater: I’ve used it for my fair share of projects that involve coding or for troubleshooting various technology problems. In my work testing Apple’s Apple Intelligence releases, I’ve generated some images, all truly bizarre and many of them good for nothing beyond a joke.

But I have been fascinated by the response to Anthropic’s AI watermarking scheme, especially after I read my friend John Gruber’s full-throated rebuttal. I have great respect for John as a writer. He truly cares about details: he’s meticulous about the words he picks, the way he constructs sentences and arguments.

This is why I find his defense so puzzling. Because a large language model could not be further away from those ideals. In the title of his piece, John describes the watermarking system as “a perversion of writing.” That might be the case if AIs were writing. But they are not; they are simply generating text. Those two things are not the same. As per the premise of John’s piece, writing is about carefully picking the words and crafting the meaning of what you’re saying, things that AI do not—and patently cannot—do.

LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they cannot care about anything.

Speaking of two things that are not the same, John rightly points out the difference between the phrases “he leaped at the chance” and “he jumped at the opportunity”. Those are indeed distinct—if semantically similar—phrases, each of which might be more apt in a particular situation; or, to put it in another fashion: the use of each of those phrases tells us something different, whether about the person being described or the writer.

But the LLM doesn’t know which of those phrases is the right phrase to use. It has a guess, based on its models and weights and inputs. But the ultimate choice of those phrases tells us nothing about the writer because there is no writer.

All of this outrage presupposes the existence of a “correct” answer that the LLM is eschewing because it was told to pick different words, but if there were a correct answer, then shouldn’t it be chosen every time? But an LLM’s non-deterministic nature doesn’t work that way. Because, at the end of the day, the AI does not truly know what any of these words mean. There is no ur-text. You might as well get mad at word choice in a lorem ipsum generator.¹

Likewise the example of “my favorite tropical fruit.” John points out the ridiculousness of a watermarking scheme substituting “pineapple” for “banana.” Of course! Those are not reasonable substitutions (outside of a smoothie).

For a person. But a computer has no favorite fruits. It could not possibly know the right word to use. It has never tasted the sweetness of a pineapple or cut up a banana for its yogurt. So why would I possibly care what it thinks is the correct word for that scenario, right or wrong?

I get being mad about computers interfering with what we, the users, want. But in this, AIs are only the latest example. Autocorrect and autocomplete, computational photography, search engine algorithms: all of that has led us down this path where we’re willing to accept the decisions a computer makes for us. The LLM is just the ultimate expression of that.

Getting mad about your LLM’s choice of words is like being pissed that Godzilla stomped on your garden. Dude, the rest of your city is in flames. Sorry about your flowers, but, you know, *gestures at everything*. We’re already talking about technology with huge environmental, societal, and ethical ramifications. This, to me, is quite possibly the least upsetting thing that AIs have done.

Anyway, welcome to the “mad about AI” fold. Glad to have you, even if I wish maybe you would have been a little more upset about all the words that it stole from me and other writers—words that were all carefully chosen.

In the end, I can’t summarize it any better than to ask: if you care so much about word choice, why are you using AI to generate text?

If this does truly make AI-generated text worse, well…good. A lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM churns out as “good enough” and, if I’m being realistic, I don’t think this will change anything. But if it does lead to more people being dissatisfied with the pablum they’re being fed and turning instead to writing and editing their own text, then that would actually be a positive outcome. Maybe it’d even mean fewer human writers being put out of jobs.

In the end, what upsets me the most about this is the tacit equating of AIs generating text to writers writing. A computer that has digested the work of thousands if not millions of people and regurgitated them according to a statistical model is equivalent to a person toiling by the sweat of their brow to bring meaning into existence from nothingness?

Get out of here with that garbage.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

August 13, 2026 2:20 PM PT

Review: SuperDuper! 4 gets a stem-to-stern revamp, but is just as seaworthy as ever

Backups, as any computer user knows, are worth their weight in gold. If it isn’t backed up, it might as well might not exist. That’s why I have for years trusted ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! to ensure that all my data is safe and sound. And now, for the first time in a very long time, the venerable backup utility has gotten a top-to-bottom update that brings it into the modern era without sacrificing any of the features—and, most importantly, the reliability—that its users have come to depend on.

While SuperDuper! 4 may look like an entirely new beast, its history has stuck around. It still explains what it’s doing in plain English. It still allows you to make complete, bootable backups. It still has its excellent Smart Update option to optimize the copying process.

But it’s gotten some significant updates too. There’s a new interface, for starters, which conforms to Apple’s current Liquid Glass aesthetic, love it or hate it. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long without a change, but it’s hard to deny that the old look had grown somewhat antiquated. The result is an app that makes backups as simple and straightforward as they should be, so that anyone can figure it out: click here to set your destination, choose what method, and click Go.

The changes to SuperDuper! 4 also run more than just skin deep. For example, it’s considerably faster than the previous version—up to an order magnitude faster using the new Turbo implementation of Smart Update, according to Shirt Pocket. That’s borne out in my real-world usage. For example, my last nightly backup of 20.55GB took less than 4 minutes.

There are new capabilities here, too. A new Preview feature lets you perform a dry run of your copy job, letting you see every file that will be changed without actually doing any of it. With a new background helper app, copies won’t interrupt whatever you’re doing. And there’s Shortcuts support, so you can run a workflow when your copy job is completed—or even have one of your shortcuts kick off a copy job.

I’ve been using betas of SuperDuper! 4 for a month or so now, and what’s impressed me most is how much it maintains that set-it-and-forget-it strength of the previous versions. The most important thing for a backup is that element of reliability, so when I open up the app and see “31 successful in a row” note, I know that my data is right where it should be. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier than ever to see what happened: click on a failed job and you’ll get the details, including an Apple Intelligence-powered summary of the job. (You can get that for completed jobs too.)

There are way more features here too, ones that I just don’t have much reason to use for my purposes, but might just well be what you’re looking for. For example, copy rules that let you handle certain files and folders in granular ways, such as excluding certain ones from backups; support for any file system that macOS understands; and there’s support for multiple copy jobs at the same time, even for those that are scheduled.

Backup apps may not be the most exciting software category, but I dare you to find one that’s more crucial. For me, SuperDuper! has done the job for years and I’ve never had any reason to complain about it. Nothing about that seems poised to change with version 4.

SuperDuper! 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. A free trial version lets you make unlimited full erase backups, but to unlock the rest of the features requires a one-time payment of $43.95. There’s also an upgrade discount for owners of SuperDuper 3 of up to 30 percent. (And, if you bought version 3 very recently, you may be able to get version 4 for free.) And good news: if you need to run backups on older systems, SuperDuper 3 is sticking around.

For everybody who’s already backing up their Macs, SuperDuper! 4 may offer some new features and speed increases that will make the process even smoother. For those of you who aren’t yet…what are you waiting for?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

August 12, 2026 2:50 PM PT

MLB hires indie Mosaic app developer

Formerly indie developer Jason Weingardt, on Threads:

Some personal news: I’ve joined the team at Major League Baseball, and the Mosaic app has come with me. The last 3+ months have, without question, been the wildest of my life. I’m beyond thankful to MLB for the chance to help shape how fans experience baseball, and even more thankful to the community of fans around the world who tried Mosaic, filed bug reports and feature requests, and helped shape it along the way.

We believe Mosaic can be a valuable tool to help learn more about what fans want…. I will keep working on Mosaic as part of my job…. Most importantly: Mosaic is sticking around. Features may come and go, but my ask is that you continue to write in with your feedback about what you like, don’t like, and what you’d want to see in a baseball app. I’m excited for what’s next, and I hope you are too.

Mosaic is a baseball app that’s been in TestFlight for a few months. (Scroll back through Weingardt’s Threads history for details.) From the moment I saw it, I was dazzled—it’s a great iOS baseball app that uses all of Apple’s platform technologies to lay out live game data and show off other MLB features in ways that MLB’s own app just doesn’t. And it even integrated with MLB TV, so if you’re a subscriber to MLB’s premium video service, you can watch games via Mosaic, including in the most mind-blowing multiview I’ve seen.

I don’t want to lean too much into the current state of the official MLB app, but it used to be so cutting-edge and great that when I was at Macworld, we gave it a zillion awards and ended up just inducting it into our “app hall of fame.” But over the years, that app has become generic and unfocused and one-size-fits-all. It is no longer a joy to use.

So Jason Weingardt wrote Mosaic, by himself, and it’s a properly great iOS app (that also runs on iPad and Mac and, as of today, Apple TV). I ran into Weingardt at WWDC and he was so happy that people had already fallen in love with his own personal semi-secret passion project.

We all pretty much expected Mosaic to be crushed by MLB once it figured out what was going on. No matter that it was using public APIs and honoring MLB’s own premium content subscriptions, it just felt like the kind of thing that was too good to be true.

Instead, to their immense credit, MLB hired Weingardt, and Mosaic is now apparently a part of MLB’s digital strategy. I almost can’t believe it. It’s the best possible outcome for Weingardt, MLB, and baseball fans with Apple devices.

I’m so happy to think that MLB’s apps may now be on a trajectory to go back to where they belong—in the app hall of fame.

By Jason Snell

August 12, 2026 10:53 AM PT

TerminalWidget makes custom widget building easy

I’m a huge fan of displaying ambient information in my computer interfaces, which on my Mac tends to involve putting data about weather, solar power and the like in my menu bar, so it’s available at a glance. My tool of choice for this is SwiftBar, itself a follow-on to BitBar (which has been rebooted as xbar). On my iPad, I’ve been using custom widgets generated with Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app to do the job.

Now here’s a new contender that generates widgets on both Mac and iOS: Brett Terpstra’s $20 TerminalWidget, which lets you send data to a widget from a command-line script, Shortcut, AppleScript, or a URL scheme.

Widgets are more complicated than little items that live in the menu bar. That’s why Scriptable uses little JavaScript scripts to build them. TerminalWidget has a basic set of terminology that lets you target specific widgets and provides some pre-filled functionality that lets you generate some design elements without much hassle. It’ll also just… take text you give it and display it if you want.

If you’re working via Shortcuts, you can update TerminalWidget using a bunch of different template types: Chart, Image, Progress, Table, or Text. Just as with the command line, each Shortcuts action contains a bunch of variables, so you can customize colors and fonts, add a caption and title, or other things that help fill out TerminalWidget’s templates. It’s by design a lot less flexible than something like Scriptable, where the sky’s the limit—but it’s also a lot more approachable, since you’re basically filling in the blanks with whatever data you want to provide.

I wasn’t really able to replicate my beloved Scriptable weather widget in TerminalWidget—not flexible enough—but TerminalWidget also supports straight-up image use, which allowed me to generate the contents of my Scriptable widget via script, output it as an image, and then tell TerminalWidget to load that image. So if you wanted to offload widget duties to your Mac or a remote server, you could do that and just display the image in TerminalWidget.

In a way, TerminalWidget turns its limitation (lack of flexibility) into a strength, because the learning curve is so gentle, especially if you use Shortcuts, which literally shows you every single possible variable you could possibly use, so you can tinker and figure out what you want to display. Dr. Drang is using it for planetary positions, because that tickles his fancy. If there’s something you’d like to put on a glanceable widget across iPad, iPhone, and Mac, TerminalWidget will let you do it. That’s a beautiful thing. Now I need to figure out what widgets to add to my own devices…

By Philip Michaels

August 12, 2026 8:32 AM PT

App report: Talk back and track on a Mac

Clearly, creating Mac apps that make the most of your voice continues to be a focus of developers — at least based on the offerings coming across my radar lately. Following last week’s profile of two different takes on on-device transcription software, we’ve got yet another voice-powered app to take a look at, with this macOS download supporting dictation that you can then paste into other apps.

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]