When using an external monitor, you might want to turn off the MacBook display to focus on the large screen.

Closing the lid does that, but you lose TouchID, the webcam, the nice keyboard and trackpad. Surely there must be a way to call into that same code that lid closing does.

Have you ever tried Command Tabbing through 10 different apps, 50 times a day? What a pleasant experience, right?

Well it definitely wasn’t for me, so I created an app switcher, published it on the App Store, then noticed I also needed a window switcher, noticed there’s no such thing on the App Store and proceeded to find a way to create one.

The 2021 MacBook Pro came with a greatly improved miniLED XDR display which is advertised as being able to handle 1000 nits sustained brightness.

Contrary to everyone’s expectations, when the machine got into the hands of users, it was clear that the display was still capped at the previous 500 nits for normal usage.

My attempt at trying to break through that limit failed, but the details might be useful for someone more determined.

You might notice that a very small number of your installed apps come from the App Store.

While developing rcmd, a simple app that I really wanted to publish on the App Store, I ran into a lot more limitations than I was prepared for.

Here’s my story of how I overcame those limitations and then tried to understand why other useful apps chose the self-publishing route.

When M1 Macs were launched, a new GPU with iOS-like architecture started driving the external monitors.

This meant that the old method for controlling monitors using DDC wouldn’t work anymore.

Apps like Lunar and MonitorControl had to find other ways to change the brightness of the monitors.