12/9
I recently upgraded to macOS Big Sur and had to do some light software housecleaning along the way. OS upgrades are a good way to be reminded what software is essential to your day-to-day computer usage. In the spirit of 2020 being on the way out, here's the software that survived the upgrade for me.
Every time Safari gets a significant upgrade I tend to give it another try before returning to Chrome. The speed difference between Safari and Chrome is very noticeable and the improved extension support may keep me on board for a little longer. I won't deny that Chrome is the more feature rich browser, however.
honorable mention: Chrome
Mimestream is a newer native macOS email client. It's still in beta but it already provides a well designed and responsive experience. My needs from a desktop email app are pretty simple, though. If it works perfectly with Gmail, sends me notifications, and allows me to archive and delete, I'm generally happy. Mimestream does all that in a tidy, minimal package.
honorable mention: Boxy for Gmail
Only works with Gmail accounts but is basically an enhanced version of the web app with notifications.
Honestly, I'm mostly into Fantastical for its great menu bar calendar. When I do need to spend time in the full app triaging my calendar, Fantastical is intuitive and robust. It supports natural language input for creating events and boasts a satisfying user experience all around.
honorable mention: Boxy for Calendar
Only works with Google Calendar but is pretty much the web app experience on your desktop.
bonus honorable mention: itsycal
If all you want is a menu bar calendar then this will satisfy you.
Nothing surprising here.
Yes, I still use RSS. I believe in consuming news deliberately rather than by happenstance via social media. When I'm ready to settle in and catch up on what I may have missed from the sources I care most about, I scroll through my ever growing unread count in NetNewsWire's Today section. With iCloud sync across devices, I can watch my backlog grow faster than I can read on any screen I want. It's great.
honorable mention: Reeder
Soulver is a verbose calculator that makes certain kinds of math—like dealing with percentages—much easier than a standard 10-digit-like calendar UI. I use it for all the math I do on my iOS devices and for dealing with those pesky, aforementioned percentages on desktop.
The king of its hill. VLC plays any file I throw at it and, when combined with the VLC remote app, can help you set up an impromptu movie night in a snap.
I take notes in Mardown formatted plain text files and generally follow the Zettelkasten method of note taking. Obsidian allows me to more easily consume, create, and browse these files. I forfeit many luxuries apps like Notion offer, but when you do without you often realize how little of what you had you actually needed.
I strongly believe in note taking and for a long time chased the most robust apps possible to do this. I was a Notion junkie until this year, when I realized I wanted to have more control and ownership over how I take notes and where they live.
honorable mention: Notion
If you don't care about—or aren't willing to sacrifice for—the benefits of a text-based solution, you should just use Notion. Don't waste your energy on anything else.
I feel similar to task management as I do note taking and have an even longer history of app usage—Todoist, Things, OmniFocus, Wunderlist, Trello, 2Do, Reminders, etc. If it lets you manage tasks there's a good chance I've tried it. Obsidian allows me to keep my tasks close to my notes in the same format and location, keeping what I want to do as close as possible to my knowledge base.
honorable mention: Things
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Things is the perfect balance of features and design for most.
bonus honorable mention: Omnifocus
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Omnifocus is the task management apex but it requires a hands on, active approach to be most effective. It's expensive to get into and I wish the UX was better across all of their apps, but I won't deny how powerful the offering is.
iA Writer is a pleasantly designed Markdown-friendly text editor. I don't use it for general text editing but one of the benefits of taking plain text notes is that I can open them in any text editor and benefit from that particular app's suite of features. These days, I primarily use iA Writer as part of my publishing process for this blog.
I use JIRA to manage the projects I'm "serious" about. It's a little weird but I'm so familiar with working in sprints at work that operating that way personally feels familiar. JIRA's desktop app is pretty meh but I think it's related to the transition JIRA is going through from its legacy app to the more modern JIRA Cloud. In the same way the web app slowly improves, I expect the desktop app to as well.
While Bartender doesn't do all that much, it significantly improves my macOS feng shui. Bartender allows you to hide all those extra icons macOS apps are eager to send to your menu bar. If you want your menu bar to look "clean" at all times, then Bartender is for you.
Noodelsoft describes its app, Hazel, as "Automated Organization for Your Mac." I think that's a vague description but I also struggle to explain Hazel in a way that is concise while communicating how essential it is to me.
Instead, here's an example of a few Hazel rules I have working in tandem. My Desktop contains one folder in it, called "shelf." Any file that hits my Desktop is allowed to live there for a maximum of 2 days. Unless it's a screenshot—those get moved to the trash within an hour. Otherwise, any 2+ day old file gets moved from my Desktop to the shelf. Files in the shelf get a red label attached to them after a week and a half and after 2 weeks they're automatically moved to my trash. This entire set of rules allows me to keep my Desktop clear and uncluttered, gives me a temporary work space for files I may come across, and gets rid of what's unimportant. I have similar rules managing my Downloads folder. Hazel lets you do all that and much more.
Most people don't need a separate program to manage keybindings. I wanted VIM-style navigation system-wide so I had to turn to something more robust than the in-built macOS keyboard settings pane.
I use Magnet to quickly size and snap windows all over my screen. I use it so many times a day I couldn't even ballpark the number. The functionality is so essential to my macOS usage that I am noticeably slowed down when using machines that don't have it installed.
I've been using alternate app launchers for a while and am comfortable saying Alfred is the best one for most people in most situations. I primarily use Alfred for quick app launching, file searching, and pasting from my clipboard. However, it offers a host of other features that will make you more productive.
honorable mention: Launchbar
Personally, I prefer Launchbar's UX to Alfred but Alfred is a better overall product.
Similar to Sketch but better, web-based, and more collaborative. When my Sketch license expired earlier this year, I didn't renew it. That solidified Figma as the design tool of choice in my personal workflow.
honorable mention: Sketch
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. What creative professional doesn't have a version of Photoshop on their machine?
I run all images I'm going to host online through ImageOptim. It does an often surprising job of reducing the file sizes of images without visibly degrading their quality.
All of my personal projects involve code in some way, so I spend a significant amount of time in a terminal when I'm being productive. I've been using iTerm for so long time that I don't even know what the competition looks like; it's given me no reason to look elsewhere.
Aside from Xcode I haven't written any serious code outside of VIM in years. With its keyboard-first approach to doing everything, I don't think I could ever become as productive in another environment. VIM isn't intuitive or easy to master but the destination is more than worth the journey.
I often need to test responses from APIs I've written or are trying to integrate with. I use Insomnia to do this in a friendly and robust manner rather than firing off a bunch of curl requests from the command line.
honorable mention: Postman
You should be using a password manager to store all of your unique and complex passwords. I use 1Password because I'm firmly entrenched in the iOS ecosystem. You don't have to use it but you should use something.
You should be backing up anything digital that you're not comfortable losing. I let Time Machine handle my local backups.
Backblaze handles my remote backups, just in case something happens to all of my local hardware.
Cross platform file sync is practically a necessity now. Dropbox is my primary solution and I've been using it for a very long time. I've more recently started storing some files in iCloud because of how seamless it integrates across my Apple devices. I'd rather only have one solution to this problem but for now I'm juggling.