Hazel was still quite new when I didn’t have a Mac and planned to get one in 2007/2008. Before I bought my first iMac from my first money I made from working, I created a list on my Windows PC with applications I wanted to get. Before that, I virtually never bought software. But the stuff these productivity people did on their Macs, that was just magic. I wanted to have that magic in my life, too, and I was willing to begin spending money on it, like an adult.

This is how I got to know Macs, and it shaped my relationship to the OS and the indie app development scene.

Realizing there even was a scene made such a difference to me already. On Windows, you had … well, what did you have? I knew some hobby game developers in BlitzBasic and PureBasic, and folks were hanging out on IRC still, but the Mac folks were on the internet, writing, sharing stuff, building commercial software. Apart from WinRAR, I didn’t know of anything like that. And WinRAR was hardly gathering a community. It just “was”. I was also a happy user of a paid Windows app, ProMotion, a pixel art software that was quirky and kind of cool. It again was an isolated recommendation.

In comparison, the Mac indies felt like a tight-knit society of people with amazing ideas, sharing the love for the platform, pushing the design ever forward.

Hazel was part of the Mac-assed Mac app experience for me before that term. I don’t know when exactly I bought my first license anymore. Paul could probably look it up and then it turns out I sat on the idea of buying the app for 5 more years :) But that’s not important for this story: the story is about the community of indies in love with a beautiful operating system that grants infinite freedom and rewards you with loyal users and stability that a Windows user from the XP era could not imagine.

With macOS 27 Golden Gate around the corner and a year of Tahoe … oh dear, Tahoe … well even though the bright, colorful, kind of minimalist UI gave way to something worse, we’re all still here, we are all still trying our best to make using macOS an everyday delight.

Hazel is part of the reason a Mac is still cool for me.

Get Hazel 6 at a 35% discount today.

If you want to go paperless with Hazel and don’t know how, David Sparks also discounts the Hazel Field Guide – although not the Paperless Field Guide itself, which also mentions Hazel (I know because I bought it back then)