Fresh Brews: ZenBell, AirBudBrew, MailCafe, and SteamBlur
Four apps joined the menu this week: ZenBell rings until you sit, AirBudBrew tracks every Bluetooth battery, MailCafe brings a private native inbox, and SteamBlur hides faces locally. Latte finally has a full menu.
Four apps joined the menu this week. Two of them are brand new. Two of them just left the Coming Soon board. All four are native, local-first, and included in every subscription.
ZenBell: A Bell That Rings Until You Sit
ZenBell is a meditation bell that lives in your menu bar, or the Windows tray. You set how many minutes you want to sit each day. It rings until you get there, then it leaves you alone.
Everything counts in minutes, not sessions. Three short sits add up the same as one long one, so a busy day never becomes a missed day.
The menu bar shows how far along you are without opening a window. Reminders nudge you every few hours, or at fixed times like 07:00 and 21:00, and go quiet the moment the goal is met. Quiet hours keep it silent outside the window you choose, even if your day runs past midnight. An interval bell strikes every 3, 5, or 10 minutes to bring you back to the breath. Pause and resume cost you nothing, and stopping early still logs the minutes you actually sat.
Seven bells ship with it: singing bowl, temple bell, gong, crystal bowl, wind chime, tingsha, and wood block. Or point it at any sound file you own.
ZenBell is now pouring in Americano (Skills & Growth).
AirBudBrew: Every Bluetooth Battery, In One Place
AirBudBrew shows the battery level of every Bluetooth device paired with your Mac. Wireless earbuds report down to the left bud, right bud, and charging case, each on its own bar. Your mouse, keyboard, speaker, and controller sit below them.
macOS already knows these numbers. It just buries them under submenus. AirBudBrew reads the same system Bluetooth report, lays every device out as a card with its own color, and keeps the list fresh while you work.
The lowest cell across your connected devices sits beside the clock. One notification fires when a device drops below your threshold of 10, 20, or 30 percent, and not another until it charges back up. Connected devices sit on top, the rest stay listed below with signal strength. Green above 40 percent, amber under it, red under 20.
AirBudBrew is live in Espresso (Quick Utilities).
MailCafe: A Native Inbox That Minds Its Own Business
MailCafe is a desktop mail client that connects to the mailbox you already have over plain IMAP. No account to create, no inbox to migrate, no ads between you and your mail.
Your mailboxes sit on the left, the message list beside them, and what you're reading fills the rest. Everything it's synced stays on your machine, so the list is on screen before the app touches the network.
It works with any IMAP account and finds the servers for you. Big providers are built in; everything else resolves through autoconfig, the same directory Thunderbird uses. It sends only the domain, never your address. Passwords live in the system keychain, on macOS or in Credential Manager on Windows. Never in a config file, never in the app's database.
Remote images are blocked by default. Message HTML renders sandboxed, with scripts off and remote images refused, so a tracking pixel can't report that you opened anything. Add as many accounts as you like and switch from the sidebar. Reply, archive, and delete over SMTP, with a copy filed in Sent.
MailCafe is live in Latte (Daily Essentials). It was the last Latte app still marked Coming Soon, which means Latte now has a full menu with nothing on the waitlist.
SteamBlur: Hide Faces, Nothing Uploaded
SteamBlur hides faces in photos and videos. Blur them, pixelate them, or drop an emoji over them, entirely on your own Mac.
Apple's on-device Vision engine finds the faces. No model to download, no server round-trip. Drop a file on the left, watch the masked result on the right, save when it looks right.
Three ways to hide a face: a soft gaussian blur, a chunky mosaic, or one of 32 emoji from your system font dropped on as a sticker. Photos and video share one workflow, so nothing has to be re-learned. A photo re-renders as you drag a slider; a video shows twenty masked frames sampled across its length, plus a fast 480p scrub render.
Click a face in a photo, or a person in the clip's cast list, to exempt them. Everyone else stays masked. The masks track across the whole clip and smooth out, so they stay put through a turned head instead of flickering off. Tune the look: oval or box, soft or hard edge, and how far past the detected face the mask reaches.
SteamBlur joins Americano (Skills & Growth), and it pairs naturally with the same privacy story as CremaClear for photos.
The Menu By the Numbers
With these additions, the menu stands at 63 published apps and 4 coming soon across 7 categories:
- Espresso (Quick Utilities): 14 live. AirBudBrew joins the counter.
- Latte (Daily Essentials): 9 live. MailCafe graduates, waitlist empty.
- Mocha (Creative Tools): 7 live, 2 coming soon. VectorStudio and MokaStudio still brewing.
- Americano (Skills & Growth): 8 live. ZenBell and SteamBlur both land.
- Cold Brew (Focus & Productivity): 9 live.
- Frappe (Connectivity & Data Tools): 7 live, 1 coming soon. MapPoster on deck.
- Pour Over (Precision & Pro Tools): 9 live, 1 coming soon. MergeImages in the pipeline.
On the House keeps four free apps: TorrentMilk, FileShipper, TinyImage, and Pixpresso.
Everything on the menu is native, offline-capable, and included in one subscription. Solo Cup is $9.99/month for one device. Family Roast is $15.99/month for up to five. No credit card needed to start the 7-day free trial.
Related: Fresh Brews: Bartender, BreathBloom, DocConvert, and TinyImage covered the previous wave of launches, and CremaClear: Remove Image Backgrounds Locally digs into the local-first privacy approach SteamBlur shares.