Yesterday's Top Launches: 5 Tools from January 20, 2026 | thistools

Yesterday brought another interesting batch of tools for developers and productivity enthusiasts to dig into. From a clever twist on Mac hardware to specialized APIs and indexing utilities, January 20, 2026, was a solid day for new developer tools that aim to solve specific, often tedious problems. Here’s a look at what landed.

NotchDrop

For MacBook Pro users, the notch has been a topic of conversation since it first appeared. NotchDrop decides to make that space genuinely useful instead of just a design quirk. It transforms the notch area into a smart productivity hub, giving you instant access to file management, your clipboard history, music playback controls, and screen recording functions. The idea is that you can trigger these actions without needing to switch away from your current application, all through a native macOS interface built with Swift.

If you frequently bounce between apps to copy a file path or quickly start recording your screen, this could save you a surprising number of clicks. The freemium model means you can test the core functionality before deciding if the premium features are worth it. It’s one of those utilities that feels obvious in retrospect, asking why the notch wasn’t being used for more than just housing a camera.

LiveSyncDesk

Remote collaboration on visual concepts can be clunky. Sharing a screen often means one person drives while others watch passively. LiveSyncDesk tackles this by providing a real-time shared whiteboard environment. It’s built for collaborative drawing, teaching, or brainstorming sessions where everyone needs to be on the same page—literally. A particularly useful feature is the ability for participants to upload images to the canvas and have their zoom levels sync automatically, so everyone is focused on the same detail simultaneously.

Being a free web-based tool lowers the barrier to entry significantly. A team could jump on a call, share the link, and start diagramming immediately without any downloads or subscriptions. The main question mark is its performance with a large number of concurrent users, but for small teams or one-on-one sessions, it looks like a straightforward solution to a common remote work headache.

Mac Cleanup Go

Every macOS user accumulates digital clutter over time: cache files, old logs, and temporary data that slowly eat up gigabytes of storage. While there are plenty of GUI cleaners available, Mac Cleanup Go takes a different, more transparent approach by running entirely in the terminal. It’s written in Go and presents a Text-based User Interface (TUI) that scans your system, shows you exactly what it found sorted by file size and location, and, importantly, lets you preview and select items before anything is deleted.

This is a tool for those who prefer precision and control over a one-click "clean all" solution. The terminal-based nature might intimidate some, but it offers a level of detail that graphical apps often hide. You know precisely what’s being moved to the Trash, which is a big win for avoiding accidental deletions. As a free and open-source tool, it’s a worthy addition to a developer’s utility belt.

Quetzly

Working with geospatial APIs can be a specialized and sometimes frustrating task. Developers dealing with services like ArcGIS or standards like OGC WMS/WFS often have to cobble together their own testing methods. Quetzly steps in as a professional GeoAPI testing tool designed to streamline this process. It allows you to test, monitor, and visualize responses from various geospatial endpoints. You can see your data plotted on an interactive map and set up health checks to ensure your APIs are responding correctly.

For developers and companies whose products rely heavily on location data, a tool like this could be invaluable for both development and ongoing maintenance. The freemium pricing suggests there’s a robust set of advanced features for power users, likely centered around more complex monitoring and alerting. It fills a clear gap in the market for a dedicated geospatial workflow tool.

IndexMachine

Getting new website content indexed quickly by search engines and large language models is crucial for visibility, but it’s often a waiting game. IndexMachine automates this process by automatically submitting your sitemap or individual page URLs to Google, Bing, and LLMs like ChatGPT. Beyond just submission, it tracks the indexing progress, sends you daily reports, and can even alert you if it encounters 404 errors during its checks.

This is a straightforward tool for SEO specialists, content marketers, and website owners who want to minimize the delay between publishing and discovery. As a paid web service, its value hinges entirely on its effectiveness and reliability. If it can consistently shave days off the indexing time, it would be a justifiable expense for many businesses. It’s a focused solution for a very specific part of the content lifecycle.

A quick reference for all the tools covered: