Looking back at the applications I rely on for work and personal things, here’s at list of the Mac, iPad, and iPhone applications I see myself using going into 2026. I’ve been cobbling these lists together for years! Stalwarts and new apps abound.
Ulysses
I tried Ulysses again after a couple of trials that never resulted in me subscribing. I realized that it’s close to perfect for my needs for writing here on Uncorrected. I resisted the idea of a database-based app instead of just using whatever I wanted (iAWriter, Typora, BBEdit) organized into folders in the Finder, but it does a good job of posting with pictures to WordPress. I had to learn the hard way that something breaks down on the trip from Ulysses to WordPress if I don’t reduce the file sizes, a problem I don’t have using MarsEdit on the Mac. There’s a Shortcut I discovered that I can use to get photos out of Photos and resize/covert them for WordPress. Pretty great. Ulysses also looks awesome and feels at home on the Mac and the iPad. It has useful organization features. I love this app from tail to snout.
Notes
So. Many. Notes. Apps. I’ve tried so many: Bear, iAWriter, DevonThink, Drafts, OneNote, EverNote, Alternote, Editorial, NVAlt… Along wit to-do apps, notes apps are their own entertainment industry masking as productivity. That’s not to say a good notes app can’t help you be productive; they absolutely can. Commitment is the key.
I tried Notes’ Smart Script out when it debuted on one of the iPadOS 18 betas and, while I had embraced (or resigned myself) to using Onenote after moving back to the Mac from Windows, Smart Script compelled me to make the move. It turns out, Notes is great in a lot of other ways, too: there’s a wiki link-like function now, and the formatting is limited but focused.
An inspiration for narrowing and focusing, reducing options:
Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person. –Mark Manson, the Subtle Art…
One thing I hate about Notes is the general indifference to folders. You can next notes up to five levels deep, but Notes won’t search for a folder if you organize that way. It’s terribly painful to file notes if you let them get out of hand for a while. I hope they make it easier one day. I hold up DEVONThink’s filing capabilities in my mind as the gold standard for how you should be able to file in an application.
Safari
In the same vein, I don’t really browser hop much, but I have tried to employ more of Safari’s affordances. First on the list is the Reading List: It’s ubiquitous across your Apple devices, and offers a great reading mode. Using Profiles has made keeping work and home stuff separate. And it’s still fast. I have Shortcuts and AppleScripts and more that automate Safari for me. It’s always running. I confess to having great affection for the old Camino browser, which was I think the first Cocoa browser to debut on Mac OS X back in the early days, when we longed for non-Carbon, pure Cocoa experiences on our Macs. But it eventually went away, and happily, Apple debuted Safari.
Focus Modes
Not an app, I know, but a macOS/iOS feature: in combination with luminaries like Safari, OmniFocus, and Fantastical, I’m able to narrow distractions and, ahem, focus depending upon my context. I have a work focus, personal, weekend, vacation, and sleep focus, all of which I use daily. I’m hoping MailMaven will soon support focus modes.
Focus Modes allow you to set application-level restrictions on notifications you get from applications depending upon the time of day, location, or other criteria. I can make sure that I don’t see work email notifications when I’m on vacation, and likewise hide personal notifications when I’m at work. I can hide my work to-do list in OmniFocus on the weekends, but make sure work items are front and center during the work week. The only thing about Focus Modes that I don’t like is that I waited so long to use them.
MailMaven
I cancelled my Mimestream subscription in June because I was pretty sure that I was going to move to MailMaven. I have been using it for just about everything, home and work. I do still love MailMate, and despite the lure of having all of my email in the thoughtfully crafted MailMaven, I don’t see myself moving away from it for work email. But there’s a lot to like with MailMaven, and I keep it running on my desktop Mac all day.
Moves
I try a lot of Mac utilities when something looks like it would scratch an itch. I tried Moves with little expectation that it would stick, but I have to say, I really miss it when it’s not running (which is never), and one of the first things I miss when I use my iPad docked is Moves.
Moves lets you move and resize windows on your Mac using the trackpad and a keyboard shortcut: no more click and hold to drag and resize. It doesn’t sound like it, but It’s surprisingly useful. Essential, no less.
Kagi Search + Assistant
I knew well before I ran out of “enough searches to get you going” that I liked Kagi enough to consider a subscription. What I didn’t anticipate was how much I like the AI assistant. You can switch AI models, and it is blissfully free of the obsequious compliments Copilot was buttering me up with. I made a shortcut of the URL and saved it as an app on my iPhone and iPad Home Screen, and things are just ducky.
Yoink
I don’t care if it’s been on the list year after year: Yoink is infrastructure for me. I constantly drag files to the shelf and share or otherwise move them. I just love it. I wish I could figure out how to make use of it on iOS and iPad, but it’s enough on its own on the Mac.
OmniFocus and Planned Dates
My strategy with OmniFocus, for a long time, was to flag tasks that I considered most urgent, and ideally to be completed during the week, and the defer those I didn’t think I’d be able to work on that day.
That didn’t always happen, but that’s not the point. A new feature introduced this year, Planned dates, let me continue this practice, but further winnow my list (using a Perspective) by assigning planned dates instead of (mis)using defer dates. OmniFocus users have always known that using defer dates this way was a hack, but it did its trick. Planned Dates rescue the otherwise-useful defer date feature, preserving its utility.
Planned dates aren’t due dates; there’s no suggestion that this task must get done today. It’s exactly as it sounds: I’m planning on doing this today. If I don’t? I can move the Planned date. It’s a great way to plan your day and your week, and you can easily create perspectives that show you your planned tasks, separated by the day you plan to do them. You can hide everything except for your today list, and poof: suddenly, you have the OmniFocus you’ve been wanting for years. It’s such a small thing, but emblematic of the purposeful, thoughtful way that OmniGroup iterates on its applications.
I’ve tried Things, Asana, and ToDoist, to name my most notable digressions, but I always come back to OmniFocus. Planned dates make it hard to imagine leaving ever again. It’s an app that harbors lots of things I don’t necessarily want to do, but am obliged to do; OmniFocus brings peace of mind when you feel overwhelmed, and its a joy to use every day.
TabTab
One of the things I liked about using Edge and Chrome during my Windows phase was tab search; you tap a key command, and either browser will give you a vertically oriented list of your open tabs, which you can search.
Safari has the same feature, but I don’t love it; it shows a tile board of tabs, which takes up way more information than I need. I really just need to see the title of the URL, and a dense list works just fine.
There are a handful of ways to recreate the Chrome or Edge experience in Safari, if that’s your browser of choice, but I really like TabTab the best. You get way more in your search results than just Safari tabs, but it looks great and the search works. It’s got a great animation upon being invoked.
Glass
I signed up for Glass years ago but never subscribed. With my renewed interest in taking pictures and sharing them online, I thought that I should check out Glass again. I love the idea of Glass and its effectiveness of keeping a lid on the photo shitposting you often get with social media. Glass users seem to pick some of their best work to share, and the service itself offers you a chance to see photos categorized (wide angle, landscape, long exposure, for example) without the user necessarily having to tag his or her samples. You can even view pics organized by camera models or lenses, which can be helpful if you’re curious about how a lens or body might meet your wants and needs.
New Reeder
If I recall correctly, the new Reeder came out before Tapestry. I tried it and even subscribed before cancelling the subscription, and then when Tapestry came out, I tried it, too, and realized that it was pretty cool that the developer of one of my favorite RSS readers had come out with a rev to the venerable Reeder before IconFactory released Tapestry.
Both apps enable you to add feeds of many stripes to the app: RSS feeds, sure, but Reddit feeds, YouTube feeds, and more. It’s a more manual configuration experience, but it’s a great way to curate different kinds of feeds. It hasn’t replaced RSS for me, but it’s a cool distillation of RSS feeds and other content I don’t want to miss. Reeder is a steal compared to Tapestry, so I went back and hit the subscription button
Bike
I will always have a text editor of some stripe running on my Mac. I generally try to use Notes for this type of writing, but there are times when I need to start writing from left to write, top to bottom, and a text editor seems like the way to go. It’s been BBEdit, it’s been TextMate, it’s been Drafts… there have been many. Recently, it’s been Bike, because I love to use outliners, but Bike will let you ignore that mode of writing and just scrawl away in rich text. I just love it and I use it all the time. I find Jesse’s stuff fascinating and inspiring and simple.
Typinator
I don’t have a good reason to switch from TextExpander; it’s a fine app. I have an old subscription at the intro rate, back when Smile bought them and suffered the umbrage of a thousand raging nerds who couldn’t believe it went from free to subscription. Smile surely knew what they were doing moving away from it being solely a Mac app (and I appreciated that it was available on Windows when I started using Windows 11), but I don’t feel the same affection for it as I used to. I got Typinator on sale and it’s essentially the same feature set, but it has a Mac-ish feel to it that I appreciate. There’s a beta out now and potentially an iOS version (although I don’t think it will work in a way that’s useful to me).
Hookmark Pro + Hookmark Pal
I’ve been using Hook (now HookMark) for years; It’s a great way to link files, notes, and tasks together. One pain point, though, was that all of the linking I’d do on my Mac disappeared once I was using my phone or iPad. This year’s release of Hookmark Pal changes things, such that links I’ve created on the Mac work on my other Apple devices. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s been a nice addition to an otherwise essential feature.
Cleanshot X
I purchased Cleanshot X about a year ago when it was featured in a Bundlehunt deal. I didn’t think, at first blush, that the features would justify switching away from macOS’s default screenshot features, but after using it over the past year, I’ve come to rely on it. I love how screenshot previews hang out in the corner of your window, instead of vanishing just before you get to mouse over it for use, and the editing and markup features are handy.
Fantastical + Cardhop
Fantastical has been my calendar app on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone for a long time. In my current job, I love being able to send meeting proposals to groups of people and let Fantastical sort out the details. Its support for Focus Modes is excellent, allowing me to tune out work when I need some time away, but show my professional obligations based on my when and where.
I wasn’t much of a Cardhop user, but its Google Directory integration is better than Apple’s Contacts app, so I use it all the time to find the email addresses of colleagues and other professional contacts in the organization.
Anylist
Since I’ve joined Rhonda in weekly grocery shopping, I appreciate Anylist more than ever before. The meal plan feature helps me keep track of our dinner plans for the week, and prompt me when we forget about meals we’ve had (or not had) recently. And while we have availed ourselves of the pickup service, which shortens our trips to (and, generally, frustrations with) the grocery store, the grocery list feature is a godsend when we pop into the store to pick up a few items that we like to choose ourselves. It has great Siri integration, too.
Foodnoms
I’ve written a fair amount about losing weight since December of 2022. I lost most of it without logging my food, but my fears of putting it back on let me to understand more specifically how many calories I was eating so that I could get myself back on track. I use FoodNoms to track my calories every day, and measuring my food has helped me understand some larger principles I can apply when I can’t log my calories.
Wallaroo
Searching for iOS wallpaper isn’t a chore, per se, but it’s nice to have an app prompt you with high-quality wallpaper from an accomplished developer with bespoke taste. Wallaroo, from IconFactory, provides a small number of wallpapers according to season, holiday, popular culture, all for a cheap subscription.
Jetpack
Jetpack isn’t exactly exciting; it’s WordPress infrastructure. It’s helpful for seeing the hits on your site and for repairing some goofy damage if you tried to upload some too-large photo assets.
Tally
Related to FoodNoms: I use Tally to summarize my snacks and wine when I’m out so I can log them later on. It’s such an open app, deceptively simple, but infinitely configurable.
Plate Calculator
I got back into weight lifting this summer, just adding squats and the benchpress in on the weekends. This simple app lets me figure out how many plates I have to add to the bar. I still use Wendler 5/3/1 but with a Numbers spreadsheet instead of an app. It’s fun.
Tripsy
You can absolutely plan a trip using Notes, or Craft, or PDFs in a folder, or whatever other version of organization suits your fancy. I love how Tripsy organizes everything for me, and even sucks reservations out of emails and puts them on my calendar. It’s fun to lavish over the details and throw everything at Tripsy.
Preview
Preview has been one of my most used apps on the Mac forever; I use it to read and mark up PDFs all the time. I’m super happy to have it on the iPad now; PDFs were viewable natively only using the Files app, and that never was a good user experience.
Calcbot
Calcbot has been my go-to calculator on iPhone for years. It’s fine for basic calculations that I need, but the conversion features make it a must-have. I miss having it on the Mac.