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.
| Category | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| 📨 Mail Client | Apple Mail | Apple Mail |
| 📮 Mail Server | Fastmail | Fastmail |
| 📝 Notes | Apple Notes | Apple Notes |
| ✅ To-Do | Apple Reminders | Apple Reminders |
| 📷 Photo Shooting | Apple Camera | Apple Camera |
| 🌅 Photo Management | Apple Photos | Apple Photos |
| 📆 Calendar | 🆕 Apple Calendar / Fantastical | Fantastical |
| 📁 Cloud File Storage | 🆕 iCloud Drive | Dropbox |
| 📖 RSS | Reeder | Reeder |
| 🙍🏻♂️ Contacts | Apple Contacts | Apple Contacts |
| 🌐 Browser | Safari | Safari |
| 💬 Chat | Slack | Slack |
| 🔖 Bookmarks | Pinboard | Pinboard |
| 📑 Read It Later | Instapaper | Instapaper |
| 📜 Word Processing | Google Docs | Google Docs |
| 📈 Spreadsheets | Google Sheets | Google Sheets |
| 📊 Presentations | Google Slides | Google Slides |
| 📰 News | 🆕 n/a 🎉 | AP News (once a week or so) |
| 🎵 Music | 🆕 Plexamp / Apple Music | Plexamp |
| 🎤 Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Pocket Casts |
| 🔐 Password Management | 1Password | 1Password |
| 🎮 First game I play each morning | 🆕 NFL Retro Bowl '25 | Retro Bowl |
| 🔈 Podcast editing | Logic Pro X | Logic Pro X |
| 🎞️ Video editing | Final Cut Pro X | Final Cut Pro X |
| 🧮 Code Editor | Visual Studio Code | Visual Studio Code |
| 🚀 Application launcher | Alfred | Alfred |
| 🤖 AI Chatbot | ChatGPT | N/A |
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.
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I keep seeing a folder show up in my Trash that will continuously re-appear no matter how many times I empty the trash. Probably will be fine with a system reboot, but maybe not? 🤷♂️ ↩