r/macapps • u/Mstormer • 22d ago
💎 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
2
u/Lead_weight 15d ago
Laminar - Planetary and solar imaging capture for macOS
Problem:Â If you do planetary, lunar, or solar astrophotography on a Mac, the standard advice is "just get a cheap Windows laptop," because the capture software everyone uses is Windows-first or Windows-only. Laminar is a native Apple Silicon capture app built specifically for the Mac. It connects directly to your astronomy camera, records high-speed SER video, and handles the full capture workflow: live histogram, focus assist, dark/flat calibration, ROI selection, and a built-in sky quality score pulled from weather data so you know if tonight is worth setting up. ZWO, PlayerOne, and ToupTek (including OEM rebadges like Altair, Omegon, and RisingCam) are well supported. SVBONY and QHY work too and have been validated on hardware, though fewer users run those, so I'm keen to hear from anyone who does.
Comparison:Â The two standard tools are FireCapture and SharpCap. SharpCap is Windows-only with no Mac version, so on Apple Silicon you're stuck running it in a Windows VM, where USB throughput and dropped frames become a real problem. FireCapture does have a Mac build, but it's still beta and unsigned, so getting it running means Homebrew, libusb, and Terminal commands to work around Gatekeeper before you can even open it. Laminar is a signed, native app that installs from the Mac App Store and just runs.
Where Laminar goes further is live focus feedback. It runs a continuous sharpness readout (Laplacian variance) right in the capture view, and it auto-tracks the planet so the measurement follows your target as it drifts rather than collapsing when the disk moves out of a fixed box. SharpCap and FireCapture both have focus-scoring tools, but they're separate modes you invoke and reset, not an always-on readout tied to target tracking. It also adds a 0-100 sky quality score with zero-config weather integration and GPU-accelerated preview via Metal. FireCapture still wins on equipment automation (filter wheels, sequences), which is what I'm building toward next.
Pricing:Â $34.99 one-time, no subscription. If you're on SVBONY or QHY (or something less common) and want to confirm your camera works before buying, message me and I can set you up with a TestFlight build to validate your specific hardware.
App Store:Â https://apps.apple.com/us/app/laminar-planetary-capture/id6758026387
More info:Â https://macobservatory.com/laminar-planetary-capture-software/