Great session, sorry to miss it.
Regarding the Setapp service - I’ve made a quick reference googlesheet for those interested in perusing their current offerings without having to wade through screenfuls of iconery…
Edit: made the link shareable.
Cool. Which ones are your favorite? I use Bartender, Downie, TextSniper, Houda, REcord audio from the past, Trac CPU, CleanMyMax, Expression and a hand full of others.
I already have† lots of these, or else SetApp would be appealing. But if I didn’t, it seems a sweet deal if you can predict you’ll use the service for a few years.
†. Of these those bold are used regularly: Aeon Timeline, Dash, Expressions, Hype, iStat Menus, RapidWeaver, Screens, TextSniper, TextSoap. If I hadn’t got proficient with regex in BBEdit or sed on the CL, I’d still use TextSoap more - so no shade there. If I didn’t WFH so much I’d also go for Bartender as I have a 2010 MBPro 14" with a notch and the single-screen menubar UX … sucks; luckily I’ve 2x24" externals when WFH.
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I use (or have used) the following:
BetterTouchTool - BetterZip - ChronoSync (full ver) - Commander One - Disk Drill - ForkLift - Gemini (switched to Duplicate Detective as I found it more reliable) - PDF Squeezer - Renamer (now mostly using Finder) - TaskPaper (less so these days) - Ulysses (moved to Scrivener)
For me as well, setapp is not practical at this time. I’m committed to lessening my app footprint; moreover I don’t really need most of their current collection. Exception - I’m intrigued by apps like Coherence X and Unite, as there are a couple useful applets and customized calculators that would be good to have locally as apps for when I’m on the road and offline.
A point on TextSniper - nice little app! However, Monterey offers this functionality now built into MacOS, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the forum; using it involves an additional step or two over TextSniper, but I don’t really mind as it helps me fix the inevitable typos and also gain muscle/mental memory in the process.
Interesting re TextSniper. Agree the OS option is there. I struggled to make it work smoothly† to the point where dropping $ in the AppStore on TextSniper made sense. Driving that was the fact I’d been asked to ‘just’ quickly get the text from this monster, a mural poster in JPG format:
TextSniper got me there—822 discrete text line/paras—faster than expected‡. I liked the additive clipboard option (not used above as the individual ‘box’ texts needed to remain discrete), but I did use the ‘ignore line breaks option’ and that worked well. Fidelity of capture from slightly blurry JPEG text was impressive. Rotated text, if clear of other text was detected OK. Only challenge points: text wrapped around images with ragged margins and tables/charts. The letter I didn’t expect to just work as the layout is not like linear text so would need extra processing. Still I reckoned I only needed to correct less than 1% of the capture in the above dataset, and only then for such reasons as being from tables, etc.
I’d agree that the free OS (Monterey, Apple CPU) LiveText-like option makes sense unless one will do this sort of thing often/in volume. In that case, if you have setApp or if $7.99 isn’t out of budget, I’d consider TextSniper
†. Probably that’s me misreading the instructions so my failure to use the OS method quickly/efficiently must not be read as negative against the feature.
‡. Great for a first real use, but underlining the point we often make here re utilities vs toolsets like Tinderbox. The utility does a (set of) very narrowly defined task(s) with few if any optimisations. The user does what the utility allows and as long as that aligns with the user’s need, happiness occurs. With a toolset, the user chooses the right tool to fit their task as—counterintuitively for the new user—we don’t all do the same thing or do the same thing in the same manner. Thus the differing, disparate and sometimes complex workflows we see here and the fact some user thought is usually needed.
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Good points and review; I don’t do that much capture yet, but would definitely invest in TextSniper were that to change.
My thought at the time, too. The things we volunteer for 
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I haven’t really had much occasion to use it, but played with TextSniper some because I already have Setapp.
I like that TextSniper can just grab text from anything on the screen, without having to be displayed as an image in Preview or Photos (or maybe something with Apple’s screenshot tool, but that was feeling clunky).
As always, whatever works for you!
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