Fresh Brews: CalCafe, FlightTrack, and TinyPDF Join the Menu
Three new apps joined the menu this week: a calendar that never touches a server, a live 3D view of the world's air traffic, and the third member of the tiny compression family.
Three new drinks landed on the menu since the last Fresh Brews: a calendar that never touches a server, a live 3D view of the world's air traffic, and the third member of the tiny compression family. The menu now sits at 78 apps.
CalCafe: a calendar that lives on your Mac
CalCafe is a desktop calendar for macOS and Windows, and the whole selling point is where your events live. They sit in a SQLite database on your own machine. No account, no cloud, fully usable offline.
The views are the ones you actually use: month, week, and day, with a live "now" line and M / W / D to switch. Click any slot to add an event, all-day or timed. Recurring events repeat daily, weekly, or monthly with an optional end date. Reminders fire as native desktop notifications, from "at time of event" up to a day ahead. Categories color-code the whole month.
Think about what a calendar contains. Appointments, health visits, the people you meet, the days you're away. That's a dataset nobody needs to see, and a hosted one puts it on someone else's server by default. CalCafe keeps it in a file you can back up, move, or delete. It joins Latte, the daily essentials shelf, where it fits right next to DocCafe and NoteCafe.
FlightTrack: the sky, on your desktop
FlightTrack puts live air traffic on a 3D globe, fed by the OpenSky Network, an open collection of ADS-B data from receivers around the world. Every aircraft turns to its own heading and gets colored by its phase of flight. Between data refreshes each plane flies on at its own reported speed, so the picture never freezes.
The globe is the app. Pan and zoom to any part of the sky and FlightTrack requests exactly that window; the traffic list, the filters, and the aircraft panel all read the same data, so what you see in the list is what you see on the planet. A real globe rather than a flattened map means the polar routes that carry half the long-haul traffic look like the great circles they are. A flat projection is one click away when you want it.
It's the second globe we serve after TripRoute in Frappe: one animates trips you plan, the other shows the sky happening right now.
TinyPDF: the tiny family grows
TinyPDF makes PDFs smaller. Drop in the 40 MB deck that won't attach to an email, the scanned contract, the brochure someone exported at print resolution, and you get back the same document at a fraction of the size. Pages stay in order, text stays selectable, links and outline stay intact.
No single method of shrinking a PDF wins on every document, so TinyPDF tries several and keeps whichever came out smallest. You get the best result without knowing any of the methods exist. The original file is never touched: the smaller copy is written beside it, with a suffix you choose. Everything runs on your Mac through Apple's own PDF frameworks, so a payslip or a signed contract stays on the machine.
It completes a trio in Americano: TinyImage for photos, TinyVideo for clips, and now TinyPDF for documents. I wrote about TinyVideo when it joined the menu in the Lungo3D, TinyVideo, and ScanStraightener post, and the family keeps the same promise: compression that stays on your computer.
Around the menu
Latte now has fourteen live apps and nothing on the waitlist, the deepest shelf in the café. DocConvert quietly moved into Latte as well, so the daily essentials row covers documents, spreadsheets, slides, notes, PDFs, tasks, and now your schedule.
Still steeping: VectorStudio in Mocha, Emojito in Frappe, and Decoresso in Affogato.
One subscription, the whole menu
All 78 apps come with one subscription. Solo Cup is $9.99 a month, Family Roast is $15.99 for up to five devices, and on the annual plan that works out to about $1.60 per device per month. I've made the local-first argument before in Why Your Mac Apps Shouldn't Need the Internet, and these three are the argument in practice: a calendar, a live map of the sky, and a file shrinker that all work without uploading a byte.
Seven-day free trial, no credit card. See plans and pricing.