My Default Apps for 2024

The end of the year is near and I thought it would be fun to revisit last year’s article on the apps I used in 2023.

Just to recap, in this brief post, I’ll list the default apps I use in the 2777th year since the foundation of Rome (a.k.a. 2024).

• ✉️ Mail service: Fastmail (and Gmail for the spam).
• 📬 Mail client(s): Apple Mail. I don’t mess with emails a lot. I have zero requirements.
• ✅ Tasks: Things 3 just last year. But recently I am using Todoist more (because they finally added proper deadlines). I expect some changes in 2025.
• 📰 RSS service: Inoreader
• 🗞️ RSS client: Reeder. The old one. Not the unusable (for me) new one.
• ⌨️ Launcher: Raycast
• ☁️ Cloud storage: Dropbox
• 🌅 Photo library: iCloud (and a local backup; make your backups guys)
• 🤳🏻 Photo editing: Pixelmator Pro
• 🌐 Web browser: Firefox. I tried more browsers this year, but nothing was so great to make me switch.
• 📆 Calendar: the Apple default one.
• 📖 Reading: Readwise Reader (Last year I wrote that I could sitch. Apparently, I didn’t.)
• 🌤️ Weather: Meteoblue. It is the only one that actually works in my area.
• 🎙️ Podcasts: Spotify or PocketCast. Overcast became too fucked up for me.
• 🎶 Music: Spotify and local mp3 on Plex. I moved from Apple Music because it is the worst.
• 🎼 Music Tracker: Last.fm and RYM
• 🛹 Clipboard manager: Paste
• 🔐 Passwords: 1Password
• 💸 Budgeting: hledger (I love it but it is for crazy people)
• 🐘 Mastodon: I mostly use Phanpy nowadays.
• 🍿 Movie discovery/tracking: TV Time and Letterboxd.
• 💁🏻‍♂️ Social: Mastodon and Bluesky via mirroring.
• 🖼️ Screenshots: CleanShot X
• 📝 Notes: Obsidian
• 🧮 Code Editor: Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ/PyCharm (for work stuff)
• 👨🏻‍💻 Terminal: iTerm.
• 🔎 Search: Kagi
• ✈️ Flight tracking: Flighty
• 📦 Package tracking: Parcel, when I rarely need it.
• 🖊️ Shortform writing: iA Writer/Obsidian
• 📝 Longform writing: Scrivener
• 🌍 Url Archiving: SingleFile

The list is mostly the same as last year. I just removed some apps, especially the more Apple-specific ones. However, the list doesn’t capture the apps I used for a short time to test them (I even re-tried Evernote for a while). In the end, I am quite happy with this year stability. I thought I changed more apps than I actually did. Good for me!

There are probably things I could remove and save some money. We will see in 2025.