My default apps at the end of 2024

Last year, I jumped on a fun blogger tradition of listing out my default apps. I'm glad Matt remembered haha! The side-by-side comparison was another great idea I borrowed from him.

I added a 🆕 emoji next to the ones that changed this year.

An unsurprising number of adjustments this year, considering how typically stodgy and unadventurous I am with new software.

• I love using Fantastical on the Mac, but I just can't bring myself to paying for the subscription to use it on my phone. Which is fine, because the built-in Apple Calendar app is nearly perfect. I haven't played much with Apple Intelligence, but if it can match Fantastical's NLP, I might be able to switch completely.
• I made a choice to keep Dropbox off of my new Macbook Pro. So far, iCloud Storage works great for what I need: a basic folder that magically syncs files across machines. I miss that about Dropbox. There's some weirdness to it that I can't be bothered to investigate further¹, but on the whole, I haven't had any problems.
• Yeah, I can confidently say that I no longer watch the news. I should probably write a blog post about this topic soon. There's gotta be some correlation between the decline of my news intake and the resurgence of my optimistic nature.
• My music player situation remains complicated. I use Apple Music to discover new music, and I'll buy MP3s of my favorites off of Bandcamp and add it to my Plex library. I've been on a big media cleaning adventure over the past few months, and it's honestly exhilarating to feel fully safe inside my Plex library again. It's a lot like spending a weekend and deep cleaning your house. It's surprisingly painful to spend hours agonizing over which music you no longer need in your crawl space.
• I added a category for AI Chatbot this year, and I'm pretty comfortable using ChatGPT's o1 model for nearly everything. 2025 may be the year where I finally figure out how to incorporate Ollama with Alfred.
• Speaking of application launchers: while setting up my work computer, I decided to give Raycast a try. I had to abandon it after two months. I couldn't handle going between Alfred and Raycast on my two machines, and there were a bunch of defaults with Raycast that my brain wouldn't turn into muscle memory.
• The new Retro Bowl rules. I'm 167 seasons into the original Retro Bowl, so it's fun to build back up from nothing.