macAppLibrary

Do you ever feel like you have more apps on your Mac than you know what to do with? What was that app you downloaded last week that you forgot about? What was that app that converts images you got? What’s its name again? If these questions resonate with you, then macAppLibrary is the app for you.

macAppLibrary scans all of the Mac apps you have installed and presents them to you in a list or gallery with some useful information about the apps, like their description and developer, if it can find it. From there, you can add your own description, notes, and categories. Or if your’e lazy, enter your Anthropic API key and have AI see if it can come up with descriptions for you.

If your app is listed in the community database, you can pull information about your apps automatically! And if you’ve entered some info about an app, you can give back my sending your app info back to the database… right from macAppLibrary!

macAppLibrary is a free and open source application that you can download below. Check it out!

Download #

Download macAppLibrary

View Changelog

Screenshots #

Features #

• Organizes apps into various sidebar sections, like categories, developers, and others
• Sidebar section to show your currently running applications
• Close a currently running app right from macAppLibrary
• Shows unused apps, recently installed, and recently updated in the sidebar, with configurable time thresholds for each
• Full search of app names, descriptions and categories
• Optionally enter an Anthropic API key to generate app descriptions using AI
• Pull app info from the community list
• Submit your own app info to the community (all info will be manually reviewed before submission)
• Button to reveal app in Finder
• Open an app right from the library

Setup and Help #

To get started, just install macAppLibrary and then open it. It will begin scanning your list of applications to build up the library of information and show what’s running. From there, just open an application to add to or edit the information.

AI Descriptions #

Before you can use AI descriptions, you need to get an API key from Anthropic. Once you have it, open up settings and paste your key.

Once you have your API key set up, just click on the “Generate with AI” button next to the app’s description.

Community App Information #

You can populate information about apps from the community if you’d like, either per app or for your whole library.

To import information for an app, navigate to the app. From there, you can click on the ‘Community’ icon next to each field to pull from the community if it’s available. The icon will be green if it’s available, red if it’s not available, and grey if your information matches the community’s. Or, click on the “Pull All” button to import and overwrite all of the information from the community.

You can also choose to submit your app’s information to the community, or submit a correction to the community. To do so, just click “Submit Information.” This will submit your version of the apps’s information to the app’s GitHub repository where a pull request will be created. If it’s accepted, your information will be incorporated into the library!

If you’d like, you can also submit all of your app info across your whole library by choosing “Submit all to community” from the File menu.