AppleSoft

AppleSoft is one of the five parts of AppleX. It’s where every “why doesn’t the Mac have this?” ends up: new apps that should feel like Apple made them, and Pro versions of the Apple apps that are nearly great. These are concepts. Each one has a working demo you can try, but they aren’t shipped products.

The rule for the Pro apps is the same every time: they run on top of the real app. Notes stays Notes and your library stays your library. There’s no import and no second copy of your data, and if you turn Pro off, nothing is lost.

Clear

A Mac browser made of glass. One bar, tabs that get out of the way until you need them, and Claude in a sidebar that can read the page, do a deep dive or browse for you. It’s the one AppleSoft app with a real build: written from scratch in Swift on WebKit. It has its own world.

Console Pro

Log out of your Mac and into a console. One shelf for every game, a boot sequence, and controller first. Within days of the first beta in June, it was launching Minecraft and an Android game (Brawl Stars) from the same shelf.

Notes Pro

Still Notes. Finally finished. Write in Markdown and watch it link up: type [[Seed list]] and you get a backlink, type #garden and you get a tag. It also adds version history you can scrub through, a command palette, split view and templates. Your notes stay in iCloud.

Music Pro

A real desktop player for Apple Music, with the same library and subscription. One small window with everything playing: mini player, queue and lyrics you can click to jump to. Now-playing sits in the notch, there are global shortcuts, and crossfade and gapless playback are where a desktop player should have them.

Reminders Pro

Type it the way you’d say it: “friday 5pm !!!” or “every sunday morning” comes out as the right date, time and priority. Sub-tasks get a progress bar on the parent, one shortcut opens a capture box over any app, and the next thing due sits in the notch.

Calendar Pro

Drag a meeting, and the travel time and warnings move with it. Drop a task onto the week and it becomes a block, ghost a shared calendar over yours, or type one line (“lunch fri 1pm at the café”) and get a placed, timed event.

Mail Pro

Apple Mail with the missing half. Press one button and a messy inbox splits into needs a reply, FYI, read later and noise. Snooze, send later, tracking pixels stripped before an email opens, and replies drafted from one line of intent.

Messages Pro

iMessage, grown up. Write it now and send it when they’re awake. A shelf collects every link anyone sends you, searches can be pinned, and you can answer the last message from the notch. It’s still iMessage, end to end.

Photos Pro

Search it the way you remember it: “kyoto at night”, “summer last year”, “snow videos”. Edit four hundred photos at once, or cull with one key. Metadata gets a proper panel, and an album can stay in step with a Finder folder.

Preview Pro

Preview, but it can edit. Highlight, redact, sign and merge PDFs without leaving it. Scans become searchable text, you can fix a typo in a PDF, and the files stay plain PDFs.

Finder Pro

The Finder power users build for themselves. Tabs that remember, columns sorted by tag, and quick actions that run your own scripts. A command palette, visible bulk rename with patterns and counters, and two folders side by side.

Freeform Pro

An infinite canvas that tidies up after you. Stickies snap into line, a rough circle, box or arrow becomes a clean shape, and connectors stay attached to their cards. Kanban, retro and mind-map templates, plus a mode to present a board card by card.

Terminal Pro

Terminal, with a brain. Stuck? Press Explain and the error comes back in plain English. Split panes you resize from the keyboard, sessions that come back when you reopen it, snippets for the command you always forget, and search through the output itself, not just your history.

Why it’s a concept

Apple’s own apps can’t be extended this deeply today, which is why these live as demos. Designing them still taught me the most useful question I know for software: what is this app almost doing already, and what’s the smallest thing that would finish it?