Much of 2024 was me flirting with being a Windows user, and trying out software in that ecosystem to make the most of the platform. That was a lot of fun, and there are both delights and challenges on that side of the hobbyist platform. But I love the Mac, and by extension Apple’s mobile devices. Here are some applications I lean on every day and expect to be using in the new year.

OmniFocus: I moved back to OmniFocus after using Todoist for a year. I really like Todoist, but for me OmniFocus is the example par excellence of both what a to-do list manager should be, and an argument for using native apps over web-based solutions.

Apple Notes: As with to-do apps, the notes category of applications is rife with challengers. There are a thousand ways to take notes on your device, many of them good to excellent. What does Tiago say? Pick one. Narrow your focus, as the stoics say. Living with Windows meant embracing OneNote, and I learned that with windows, often the official solution was the best. That’s the case with the Mac, too, in some solutions. And for iPad, it’s Notes. Yeah, writing on the screen hits the battery hard, but smart script is amazing, and while it lacks some of the coolest features of apps like DEVON and Craft and Obsidian (flesh out), it’s a great app, fast sync, smart script, and more. Things it needs…

Soulver : where some people open a spreadsheet for quick math, I always reach for Soulver. I calculate expenses and divy up bills. It’s Excel for the markdown generation.

Ulysses: When an idea comes to me, I open a sheet in Soulver. If it’s an idea that would be made more clear by writing, I start a sheet here. The real reason I started using Ulysses was that I needed something to post to WordPress from iPadOS that supported posting images. Ulysses is secondarily a writing tool, in this regard; I was happy using iA Writer or another Markdown app, but happily, Ulysses is a great one and fun to use. There are some strange UI things going on, and I’m hesitant to engage another database app into my work flow, but there it is.

MindNode Next: I’m really late to the mind mapping game; I like them and find them helpful sometimes, but their usage hasn’t always stuck. MindNode, though, is such a nice app that I’ve always gone back to looking for uses for it. Recent updates have more tightly integrated the relationship between mind mapping and outlining, and as an inveterate outliner, I was happy to use MindNode as an outliner, and then eventually as a mind map. I love the confluence of these two very seemingly different ways to categorizing knowledge.

FoodNoms: during the week between Christmas and new years 2022, I’d resolved yet again to cut back the size of my nightly martini and subsequent wine consumption prion. I had a coupe of goals: sleep better, feel better, and maybe get down one pants size. One year later, during the week between 2023, I enjoyed the fact that I’d lost close to 80 pounds and had gotten down 4 to 6 pant sizes.

Despite this evident success, I worried constantly about gaining it back. Was it a ruse? Was it all a happy accident?

But in the same way I’d found Reframe helpful in logging my drinks, I thought to look for the food equivalent. I wanted to know what I ate and how I did it. How I’d lost the weight.

Apps like Foodnoms help you realize pretty quickly that weighing your food is the best way to really know. I do that now, when I can, and while I could write more about the internal struggle that comes even with successes like mine, I’ll just wrap up by saying that Foodnoms did exactly what I needed it to do, and I continue to learn about nutrition by using the app.

Health: Apple like FoodNoms and ErgData write to the Apple Health app, which serves as a database for your health information, but also a personal health dashboard. I can track my daily activity, sleep, heart rate (resting and otherwise), and other stats. My use of the Health app corresponds directly to my efforts to improve my health, and I look at it multiple times a day.

Fantastical: My go-to calendar on all of my devices. Native on Windows on ARM, no less. I started using the proposed meeting dates feature recently and that, by itself, is worth the cost of the subscription.

ChatGPT: LLMs got big during my Windows phase, so my first real blush with this implementation of AI was through Microsoft’s Copilot app. I liked using copilot a lot, and the Mac and iOS apps were good too. Eventually, though, Microsoft made the app on windows a web app, which I don’t prefer. I could go into the app ecosystem on Windows at this point, but that’s for another post.

Waiting for Siri to catch up, I installed the Chat GPT app on my Mac and other devices. I like it a lot, use it constantly, and am excited to try out newer integrations, including how it works with Notes. It sounds a bit like Microsoft’s long-delayed Recall feature, and I’m excited to take this step. I’m good at capturing info, but organizing and searching are always challenges. Search should, and will I suppose, rule your Mac anew.

ErgData: I row every day pretty much. I use this app to track my stats and recommend interval efforts for me. I got back into rowing using apple fitness, but I haven’t used that in over a year. I got really competitive with myself and a little stats obsessed, but that has calmed down and now I focus on lots of base mileage and zone 2, and toss in intervals to train VO2 max. It’s not an entertaining app by any stretch, but it is crucial infrastructure.

Reddit: there’s a lot of shit on the web. And there are a lot of “experts” writing listicles about topics they know very little about. The same is absolutely true of Reddit, but if you’re looking for how someone solved a particularly familiar itch you have, someone on Reddit probably shared it. It’s fun to help people who are having a problem you already solved, too. I like Reddit a lot.

Carrot: we were on our annual ocean city NJ vacation many, many years ago, and the rain that had kept us cooped up for a few days was still hanging around. We decided to brave the elements and drove north up the island to an area near the boardwalk. The rain continued, but I remembered hearing about Dark Sky on a podcast, and how hyper-specific and accurate it was. I downloaded it from inside our car and learned that the rain was to stop in five minutes. That actually happened, just as Dark Sky forecast, and we went on to enjoy our day.

Since then, I’ve always taken note when tech cognoscenti coalesce around their affection for a weather app. In Apple’s ecosystem, Carrot gets all the love. It’s a great, flexible app, with a strange sense of humor attached to it. I don’t have the same feelings for it that I had for Dark Sky, and to this end, both Apple’s weather app and Carrot vie for my attention (and widget space).

Readwise: Less app, more service, Readwise allows me to review information that I’e highlighted from a variety of sources. Highlights from Kobo and Amazon ebooks, web articles, and other sources are collected in Readwise and only lead to my using it for a few minutes each night while I brush my teeth. I get five highlights to review from my past readings, presented in a schedule I can only describe as random. It’s a great way to revisit information you read and thought worthy of a highlight somewhere. Readwise has a strange and somewhat scattered landscape, but I think the developers’ dream of creating a catch-all for your digital errata is right-headed.

Safari: Using Windows found me trying to stick to one browser for just about everything; I cycled through Brave, Firefox, and Edge, generally using Edge the most. One of the reasons I used to always run two browsers on the Mac was that I’d use Chrome, signed in to my work account, and then Safari for mostly everything else. Edge prompted me to try using Microsoft’s implementation of profiles, which work like they do on Chrome but with an unsurprising Microsoft twist: they require you to have separate Microsoft accounts for each profile. One Microsoft account is plenty, thanks! Can you imagine having to create multiple iCloud accounts to use profiles in Safari? But reengaging with Safari led to my discover that Apple’s implementation of profiles is pretty much like Googles, which is the way it ought to work.

DayOne: I like to write, and especially post here on Uncorrected. I don’t know how most people feel, but reading and thinking make me want to write, and to share what I’m thinking about and writing. I suspect it’s a lot like musicians, who aren’t content to keep what they’re doing confined to the bedroom or basement. But not everything is fit to print, and that’s what DayOne is for: thinking, private thoughts, quotidian journal entries, and things that could, at some point, become a post here. I like being able to text to DayOne, too, for quick thoughts on the go.

Photos: I take a lot of pictures. I use the Photos app all the time to view and edit my pics. As with writing, I like to share them, too.

Other Stuff:
– 1password
– OmniOutliner
– Drafts
– Acorn and Pixelmator
– Pastebot
– TextExpander
– NetNewsWire and Unread
– Shortcuts