Apps for 2024

Last updated: Fri Jun 28 2024

Let’s check in on what my default apps are these days. I enjoyed this exercise two years ago, so let’s do it again!

Table of Contents

Email

I have a Gmail account that I’ve used for pretty much my entire adult life. However, I actually access it via Mimestream, which is both a wonderful Mac-native app and a fully-featured Gmail client, including some nice additions like Google Calendar support.

On mobile, I use the built-in Mail app, since Mimestream for iOS isn’t available yet 😞

Calendar

Until recently, I used iCal, but after one too many instances of broken Calendly links, I’ve switched to using Google Calendar via Fantastical. Like Mimestream, Fantastical is a wonderful Mac-native app while also being more fully-featured than Apple’s Calendar app.

Maps

I strongly prefer Apple Maps over Google Maps, since its directions are much clearer and, at least in the Bay Area, the quality of location listings is just as high.

As a regular transit rider, I also swear by Transit, which shows a list of nearby transit lines and their next arrival times, as well as forwarding transit alerts via push notification.

Task Management / Reminders

Things 3 remains possibly the best software I’ve ever used, just as it was two years ago. I continue to abide by “if it’s not in Things, it doesn’t get done.”

I use Apple’s Reminders app very specifically for its geofencing capability — when there’s an interesting landmark or store I want to visit next time I’m in a particular neighborhood, I add a reminder with a push notification when I’m within 0.2mi of that location.

I’ve also been trying Streaks, an app which tracks daily “streaks” like writing or drawing, but it (ironically) hasn’t stuck yet.

Notes

For “longform” notes and goal tracking, I still swear by Obsidian, with my notes sorted by a set of a hundred or so tags. As described last time, I also have a macOS Shortcut to quickly grab links from Safari and plop them in my Obsidian vault.

I used to store my Obsidian notes vault in iCloud, but after running into various frustrating iCloud issues, I finally paid for Obsidian Sync, which has worked fantastically so far.

For “quick” notes — stray thoughts I want to come back to or lines of dialogue for a novel — I use Drafts. I have a button on my iPhone homescreen to open Drafts to a new note, which works because Drafts has the fastest startup time of any iOS app I’ve used. I use tags in Drafts very sparingly, mostly to categorize notes that are related to an ongoing project.

Writing

For fiction, I’m still using Ulysses, especially for its fine-grained word-count-goal settings.

For non-fiction and blog posts, I’m increasingly turning to iA Writer, which is a very similar Mac-native Markdown-based editor with slightly different design tradeoffs. Notably, it’s missing goal settings (at least on macOS) and requires file-based management (you have to actually name new files when you create them), but it can open arbitrary Markdown files (like this very blog post!) without clobbering them with app-specific metadata.

For collaboration, I use Google Docs, because it’s the de facto standard. Typically, I’ll export to a Word file (.docx) from Ulysses or iA Writer and upload that to Google Drive, then send that as a Google Docs link to collaborators.

For outlining, I adore Bike Outliner, one of the best-thought-out text editing applications out there. Its typing affinity rules should be adopted by pretty much all text-editing applications. Unfortunately, I only use it to outline the occasional nonfiction piece, and not always then.

Editor

As a software engineer not devoted to any particular stack, I primarily use Visual Studio Code with various extensions. I’ve also been trialing Zed, which is basically “VS Code with less extensions but noticeably faster performance”, and I occasionally lean on Neovim in the terminal, where I make heavy use of the mini.nvim library of plugins.

Spreadsheets

I’ve become a devotee of spreadsheets for basic tasks like “split out my friends’ portion of this shared bill” or “track how much of my career growth budget I’ve spent this year”. For these purposes Google Sheets suffices — it’s available everywhere, it has all the basic functionality needed for these kinds of tasks, and it enables easy collaboration when necessary.

Budgeting

I’ve become a fan of plain-text accounting and in particular I use the command-line app hledger to track my finances. I try to update every time I make a purchase or receive income, followed by a brief biweekly reconciliation. This involves a bit of manual work, but a.) I don’t have to rely on a service like Mint that might shut down and b.) hledger provides various ways to chop up and query the data which sometimes come in use (e.g. “how much have I spent on food in the last three months?”).

RSS/Feed Reader

I’m still using NetNewsWire and have no complaints.

Read-It-Later

I’m still using GoodLinks and have no complaints.

Bookmarking

Earlier this year, I built my own bookmarks site with full-text search, but it was too much of a hassle to maintain. Instead, I set up Raindrop.io, which supports full-text search and PDF uploads on the pro plan. It works like a charm if I need to search for an old article about, say, geometric algebra.

To port links from GoodLinks and Obsidian, I wrote a script that parses links from both and exports them to a CSV that I can upload to Raindrop.io.

Podcasts

I’m still using Overcast, although now I have the complaint that its performance is suspiciously sluggish.

Web Browser

I still use Safari, since Safari is the lightest browser. That said, when I do need a Chromium-based browser (e.g. for React Dev Tools), I don’t mind using Arc Browser.

Adblock

I switched to 1Blocker, which seems to be the consensus pick for “best Safari adblock”; it’s certainly better than Magic Lasso, which advertises heavily on Apple-enthusiast blogs but doesn’t work that well. I also use StopTheMadness Pro to handle various annoyances, like blocking autoplaying videos and protecting copy/paste.

Search

Until recently, I was trialing the paid search service Kagi, but:

• Dan Luu convincingly argued that Kagi’s results are no better than Google or Bing and, in some cases, are actively worse.
• I don’t use most of the advanced features, like domain blocking or the various “lenses”.
• There’s been various issues with the Kagi search extension for Safari; every so often it would break and I would suddenly realize I was looking at a DuckDuckGo page!
• This rather spicy article led me to question the priorities of Kagi’s leadership.

This week, I’m trying a switch back to Google, despite the ongoing AI fiasco, and so far the results have been… fine?

Music

For various reasons I’m on Apple Music instead of Spotify. On iOS, I use the fantastic Marvis Pro instead of the default Music app, which supports pretty much all the features of Apple Music in a much slicker interface. I also sometimes use Playlisty, which converts Spotify playlist and album links into their equivalents in Apple Music.

Password Management

I was always too lazy to set up a “real” password management app, so I’ve always just used Apple’s Passwords, and I’m overjoyed that it’s finally getting its own app 😭