(Copying this idea from Chris Coyier)
Favorites this year: Arc, Obsidian, Linkding, Feedbin, Cursor, Ivory
📨 Mail Client: Gmail (web) and Gmail (iOS). My email needs are pretty basic but I really enjoy the snoozing feature, which Gmail’s own apps handle the best. Any time I get an appointment confirmation email or concert tickets or anything like that, I snooze the email until a day or two before the event so that I won’t forget and so that I can easily access the ticket or confirmation email etc. I rely completely on the vim-like keyboard shortcuts on the web app.
📮 Mail Server: Google
📝 Notes: Obsidian. I love Obsidian so much even though I’ve pretty consciously avoided diving into the deep end of the plugins etc. I use it for organizing my personal life reference material as well as for private 1:1 and reference notes for work (separate vaults, work vault is local only to my work machine).
✅ To-Do: OmniFocus. I really dislike the direction of OmniFocus 4 which was released about a year ago, and the app generally feels old, overwrought, and stale. But I’ve been OmniFocus to organize my life constantly since 2007 and it’s solid enough that I don’t feel the need to switch. In particular I hate how they made quick capture harder to do on iOS. If I were starting fresh now I’d probably use Things.
🐘 Social Media: Ivory. I’m pretty much only on Mastodon these days. I was a heavy user of Twitter until about 3 years ago when I was able to drop off. Mastodon is quiet but has a few people I care about on it, and I follow a lot of local Bay Area folks who are generally posting positive things about local events and pictures of when the sunset or clouds look cool. Almost no one on Mastodon appears to have a sense of humor or post things that are funny, which is a bummer but keeps me from being sucked in. It’s not a replacement for Twitter, but I don’t really think I want a replacement for Twitter right now. If I did I’d go to bluesky, I have no interest in supporting anything Meta does if I can avoid it. Also I’ve never installed TikTok because I know it wouldn’t be good for me, but I’m bummed that they’ve made their website so unusable that I sometimes can’t watch silly videos my wife sends me.
📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 14 Pro
🎨 Photo Editing: Photos app on my iPhone. With a young child I’m mostly trying to capture as many moments as possible more than taking the perfect shot and editing it. A live photo where she’s doing something cute is worth much more to me at this point than a perfectly composed shot.
📆 Calendar: Google Calendar with email reminders for events. My personal calendar is pretty sparse.
📁 Cloud File Storage: I don’t really think about this much these days. My photos sync with iCloud and I also sync them on Google Photos, I pay for both because they aren’t too pricey to just never have to think about it. I assume my computer uses iCloud to do something? I have Dropbox for a few legacy media workflows, and use BackBlaze for cloud backups.
📖 RSS: Feedbin, which I absolutely love. I especially like the custom email addresses to sign up to newsletters but get them in my RSS readers instead of cluttering up my inbox. I also set up some automatic filters so that I can tag some feeds as “Hiatus” and have them automatically get marked as read but still be around in case I want more of a firehose of sources I trust. I consume my RSS feeds using Reeder on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone. I also have a light Reeder clone that I built for fun up at drews.club. I haven’t touched the code in ages but it still works pretty reliably and I use it all the time. If you’ve got Feedbin feel free to give it a try, there’s very little control UI just keyboard shortcuts (j/k to scroll items, n/p to scroll feeds, m to mark as read/unread).
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: macOS Contacts
🌐 Browser: Desktop: Arc for browsing, Chrome for Development. My default browser is actually Velja, which lets you configure what browser to use based on the URL you’ve clicked (and auto-opens links like Zoom and Notion etc in the App directly, except for Slack because Slack’s URL structure is horrible). iOS: Safari
💬 Chat: In order of quantity: Slack, Messages, and occasionally Discord
🔖 Bookmarks: I switched from Pinboard this year due to some unreliability as well as hateful political statements from the founder. I had been a loyal Pinboard user since 2010, paying since around 2015. I’m now using linkding that I pay to host on PikaPods thanks to Brett Terpstra’s recommendations and have been quite happy with it so far.
📑 Read It Later: I subscribe to my own linkding bookmarks as an RSS feed which pipes it back into Feedbin.
📜 Word Processing: I tend to write in either Obsidian or VS Code. iA Writer is great, but I’ve found that I need vim mode to feel productive at all.
📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets but pretty rarely. I also love Soulver which replaces a lot of needs I have for a true spreadsheet.
📊 Presentations: Didn’t do many presentations this year, but I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with iA Presenter. It’s got a bit of a learning curve and you have to just accept that you can’t lay out slides in a pixel perfect way, but once you grok it you can whip together a decent looking presentation while typing in markdown in no time at all. Great for throwing together a quick presentation without needing to use my mouse much.
🛒 Shopping Lists: I’ve been using Clear for forever, and the new version that came out in the last year or two has been great. My wife doesn’t believe in shopping lists so for better or worse I haven’t had to deal with any sort of shopping list syncing behavior.
🍴 Meal Planning: N/A
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Honestly at this point I just try to make as much money as possible and not be completely unhinged with my spending, and hope for the best.
📰 News: RSS, New York Times & SF Chronicle although I have major frustrations with both, and Ars Technica which I love. I’ll also shout out Simon Willison’s AI Coverage, which is more focused on the tech than the business stuff and I find generally optimistic and engaging without selling any snake oil.
🎵 Music: Spotify. They’re evil in a bunch of ways and I refuse to use them for podcasts on principle, but it’s the best music app and integrates well with my Sonos and Alexa devices. A few friends have switched to Apple Music as a principled stance which I respect, but I’ve never heard anyone actually enjoy using Apple Music. I still miss Rdio and think of it often.
🎤 Podcasts: Overcast. Don’t love the new version released this year, it’s been pretty buggy and I find it pretty hard to manage a large backlog. But like OmniFocus I’ve been using it for forever and I’m used to it. I’d probably go with Pocket Casts if I was new to the scene.
🔐 Password Management: 1Password, it’s fine.
🧑💻 Code Editor: VS Code and Cursor. I haven’t really used the advanced AI Cursor features heavily but I really enjoy Cursor Tab. It takes some getting used to, I’ve described it as trying to type while an overly caffeinated intern screams suggestions at you that are right roughly 70% of the time. But once you get used to it it’s great for the tedious parts of coding.
🔍 Search Engine: I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but I still almost always prefix a search with !g to initiate a google search. I mostly just like the ! prefix functionality where I can search wikipedia with a !w or google images with a !gi, and I’m more aligned with what DuckDuckGo is trying to do as a company than Google.
🚀 App Launcher: I switched from LaunchBar to Raycast this year but haven’t noticed a huge difference. I mostly just use for app launching, although I did create a few snippets in Raycast as well as one integration to quickly append text to a list in a specific section of a document in Obsidian.
✈️ VPN: Tailscale at work, nothing in my personal life. I’ve heard really good things about using Tailscale for a personal setup and would definitely reach for it first if I found myself in a situation where I might need it.