alin23

Thanks! Yes, I mostly need to change some setting with the system settings window or click on a dialog, and this is easier to use because it can show only that window and I don't have to log in or use a keyboard.

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing. I use this for clicking around my MacBook from my iPhone while I'm away. What you're describing is for recording videos of the phone .

Thanks! I started with the prompt from https://www.aiformortals.co/blog/sonnet-5-5#test-1-make-the-... which helped a lot in creating a general direction. The default output otherwise is that fast paced, epilepsy inducing AI slop that doesn't explain anything.

It helped to give it access to the app code and ability to screenshot its UI and interact with it.

I mostly list the features I want showcased because I know best what needs demoing and what looks good on video, and then let it do a full video. There's still a lot of slop on the first try but it's a much better start than what I'd do by hand.

I used Hyperframes and started with the prompt from https://www.aiformortals.co/blog/sonnet-5-5#test-1-make-the-...

Gave it full access to the app code and ability to screenshot its UI and interact with it so it knows what it really works like in real life.

And then listed some features for it to showcase and let it one shot it. It needed a lot of polishing after that, but the start was the 80% I needed to make this feel possible.

Yes I made Clop, thanks! I won't be doing Windows apps anytime soon, I simply don't have a need for them and an app that I can't use daily will be a bad app.

The nice thing about it being open source is you can point claude at it and fix them and run your own custom version. The bad part is you need to reinstall it every few days to keep it from expiring if you don't have an Apple developer account.

That thing about seeing only the desktop or window also bugs me out, I like how in RealVNC I can zoom to fill my phone with the Mac screen and move around with the zoom.

Yep here it is https://youtu.be/fJnNkfHLdFw

Thanks for the Lunar purchase! Unfortunately the config messing up is done by the monitors themselves. All Lunar does is send standard DDC brightness, volume and contrast set commands, but some monitor firmwares change their presets and calibration completely when they get such a command. Impossible to know beforehand, DDC is a mess .

There's a play pause button at the bottom right of the page. Its possible you have Reduce Motion or Low Power Mode enabled? That pauses videos by default.

Youtube comes with an iframe and privacy concerns when embedding, I need full control of the playback of my own HTML5 videos.

Got it. No worries. Have you ever had a friend at your place tell you in passing about a problem they recurrently have, and you have just the right tool to help them? And you can't help yourself and have to tell them about it?

That is my thinking on sharing these links to my work. I did something that helps me, and I want to see it helping others. Most of it is free.

There are no shop fronts for my work, no targeted ads, there are people that could benefit from it and me talking about it is one of the only ways to do that.

I myself found about Hyperframes from a comment like this, being in awe of what can be achieved with careful prompts and the right tooling. I struggled for years in DaVinci Resolve making stupidly high effort videos that looked amateurish and didn't convey the information I had in my head. I thought others might want to see that.

I get how seeing links in irrelevant comments can raise spam alarm bells, I thought I'm being useful and tried not to add links so often. But memory can be deceiving.

Is sharing now the new spamming? If I just say Cling people will have no idea what I mean. If I leave a link, people either will click and find something useful, or at least get some context on what I'm talking about or move along.

I get that we have to be skeptical nowadays with all the bots, but I would never have guessed that my day to day writing will be taken as robotic ad-reading.

Brilliant! So much faster and seamless than VNC. Already helped me two times today.

This is the first time I discover an app through a Youtube video recommendation. I was watching The Rest Is Science when this 1 minute video appeared on the right side with 230k views about a macOS app?? It got me curious for sure.

Claude got really good at making demo videos with Hyperframes apparently. Just did my own this week for Cling (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) and Clop (https://lowtechguys.com/clop) and users are already appreciating that they can discover app features through easy to digest video snippets.

Most people don't read the website copy at all unfortunately so I had to adapt. But I would never have the patience to do that in After Effects.

Of course, not saying those should be allowed by default. But being such often used in utilities, they would benefit from

    rcmd wants to read window titles. Allow? Deny?

Instead of the scary and totally unnecessary screen recording permission.

I have a file search app that does its own indexing similar to Everything on Windows (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) and I only index paths.

I don't need file contents, I can skip showing file sizes and date modified on protected paths. Hell I can skip indexing Mail and Messages files altogether since they're pretty useless anyway. But how am I supposed to know beforehand which path will trigger a scary Cling wants to see your <private folder> when doing a simple traversal.

Similarly, window switchers like my rcmd app (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) need access to window titles to function properly, but for that, the app has to ask for Screen Recording permissions. I don't need to record anything, I just need the damn title text and users will be happy to give access to that, but not to recording the screen.

This goes on and on.

Want to register a more interesting hotkey like fn-letter? You have to act like a keylogger and ask for Input Monitoring.

Want to focus a specific window instead of activating the app and letting the OS decide which window comes forward? You need Accessibility permissions and full access to control the whole computer.

Want to paste some text into a text field? Accessibility Permissions.

Too granular permissions is hell. But there are these decade-old common use cases for macOS utilities that would make it much easier to keep permissions locked if they became their own permissions.

Yep, I'm aware of that, I listen to a lot of live small room concerts of Jason Mraz for example, which aren't even on Youtube, I mostly get them from fan uploads on archive.org.

I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.

Oh tell me about it, it's so hard to expand into other genres using online services.. Noiseblend is no better at it since it relies on the same data.

I mean, in its 30-50 recommended albums, one might be just the one I might be looking for, but how am I going to find it? Am I supposed to sit through 29 albums I don't really like, just to find that?

That's why friends are the best here, they act like impromptu curators :)

But on some occasions, I find Noiseblend useful when I hear a song at a cafe or restaurant or some friends' place, "shazam" it, then put it through Noiseblend and get dropped into a musical area I might have never looked into otherwise.

Thanks! sure, if you click to open in the Spotify app or webapp, it will open a created playlist with those songs. You will need to connect your Spotify account for that though.

I got myself an iPod Nano recently and love curating my songs to fit the 8GB [0]

But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.

So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com

Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.

[0] https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/ipod-nano.mp4

I had no idea this was a thing: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...

Definitely saving it for further use, I sometimes need to have small invisible watchers and I don't want a full fledged app or shell scripts for that.

Not really. macOS may wait for idle time, may prioritize internal disk and the backup will go extremely slow on an HDD, there's no notification whatsoever.

It's a very specific thing for me really, I connect the HDD specifically for doing backups as fast as possible then I want to disconnect and store it back so I can keep using my laptop. I don't have a desk anymore where I can keep these things connected all the time.

That's smart! That reminds me, I have to get back into HomeAssistant. I had my whole house through it a few years ago, but the complexity and things breaking in hard to debug ways made the experience too frustrating for my wife and visiting relatives.

Having an agent keep an eye on stuff and fix things proactively should make the experience much better. Plus I can no longer write yamls at last.

No offense taken, I can see the irony myself :)

Oh for sure, I would prefer to have the automations as invisible things running at the system level, doing exactly what I want and nothing else, not wasting resources on UIs and event watchers I might not need. I would get rid of my own apps if that was easy to do.

But it seems we need to waste some resources to get some usability in return.

Nothing in there is innovative or unattainable, Clop uses open source tools behind the scenes anyway so obviously you can replicate it with scripts.

But this is for people that already use the app, researchers, writers, students, people that aren't necessarily comfortable with a terminal. And given Clop already implements the basics: an efficient file events watcher, tuned encoders for the Mac silicon, fail safe backups and UI for seeing the result and interacting with it in real time, it has advantages over trying to do it yourself.

This is for giving the existing users of my apps the ability to describe what they want the app to do without having to navigate and learn the UI.

Not sure if you got the right context, your question doesn't really make sense to me.

Thank you! Yes, macOS 27 continues to be a pain with the all new rewritten window manager.

Still working on finding all the edge cases, so sorry if you still encounter problems there. I've been using it since June and still find problems in input handling.

Like there's this thing, where if an app has Accessibility Permissions and listens to key events (like rcmd does) and then you revoke that permission while the app is running, then your whole system will stop responding to keys and clicks. Until you kill the app in question, but how are you going to do that without a keyboard?

All apps have this problem, even established ones like BTT, because it's a recently introduced macOS behavior in how the internals of CGEventTap work.

The most important reason is that I can keep the CLI output and help for humans, while the MCP can be crammed with information for agents.

Plus I can add some complex commands like in the rcmd Stages [1] case where the agent can create a 4 monitor layout with apps and windows placed where you want, with every window opening the document/folder/project/URL you want and running the terminal commands you need. Sure you can do that with the CLI, but it's hard enough to get right because of shell quoting issues, that even an agent can get it wrong.

For simple tasks though, sure, the CLI is just enough and the agent can use it without needing to install yet another MCP. You'll know when you need it.

[1] https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd

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EDIT: I just remembered, you can even hook the Claude/Codex/Gemini desktop app to the MCP, while you can't get it to use the CLI. so there's that for users that still don't feel comfortable at a terminal, which is a number higher than you might estimate.

Yep like a self-documenting RPC since you don't have to read docs first to use it. You just ask.

In my apps, CLI came first which works through Mach ports as the IPC, so the "REST equivalent" of macOS apps is also present. MCP takes advantage of the same client-server architecture I created for the CLI, so there's nothing you can't do with the CLI that needs an MCP.

But in my case, a CLI was not enough.

Like, to the MCP I might say:

    Set Clop to make every video copied in ~/shots smaller, 2x and silent 

Then the MCP can use elicitation and say:

    By smaller, you mean re-encode to compress file size (factor can be 0 to 100 max compression) or downscale resolution (100% same size, 50% half size)? 
    And does 2x mean faster speed? In which case do you want to keep frames so the video plays smoother or drop frames for size? Or does 2x mean upscale? 

And the agent will present those as nice choice menus I can decide schematically on.

With the CLI I have to first read, learn and memorize the requests and commands needed for each app, the accepted values and formats and the steps to reach a specific result.

There's only so much space in my head I can leave for implementation details of arbitrary apps. I'd rather have an agent care about that.

And yes I get the irony, those are my apps, I coded them by hand for years, I should know their implementation details, yet even I forget if I should pass 50% or 0.5 for half size.

Btw Clop is a media file compressor for context: https://lowtechguys.com/clop

Hey thank you! Always nice to hear when my work helps others ^_^

Lately I found MCP to be much more than a coding tool. For example, I implemented it in my more complex macOS apps [0] like rcmd, Clop, Lunar, so they can be configured by natural language.

So even with a local Qwen and Pi you can now say things like:

    Set up Clop to optimise any PNG that I drop in my website assets folder and convert to a webp with the same name near it

    Get Crank to start Time Machine backups immediately when I connect my HDD and notify me when the backup is done.

    I want to be able to hold rcmd and fuzzy search and focus cmux agent panes

BetterTouchTool has a great MCP which can create native SwiftUI views and bind them to hotkeys, trackpad gestures etc. It can leverage its immense macOS automation tools and private APIs to let agents do Computer Use.

You would need a much more capable coding model to code those tools from scratch and get the same fail-safe logic that the apps have honed over the years.

Like, since MCP, Crank [1] has fully replaced my use of crontab, launchd, scattered scripts I run once a week. Not that it could not do that before, but it's so much simpler now to just describe the automation and have it happen reliably and visible in the UI. The friction is gone.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1wkv0dy/mcp_in_macos_a...

[1] https://lowtechguys.com/crank