Partly for my own edification, and because I’ve found similar posts interesting, I thought I’d share what tools and tech stack I’m using.
Hardware
- 2021 MacBook Pro 16 Inch (M1 Max): Picked this up when it came out, and it’s been a solid machine. I have to really try to get it hot enough to need the fans, it’s generally very responsive, and I can basically go all day with just the battery. No regrets, and will likely get its modern equivalent when it gets to be time to replace it.
- iPhone 15 Pro: I decided to splurge and get the Pro, mostly for the extra lens on the camera, and honestly that’s been worth it for me – your mileage may vary. I don’t really notice much else different from the non-Pro version.
- MSI MEG Trident X: This is my gaming desktop, and that’s basically all I use it for. Picked it up refurbished, and have had no issues. Main draw was the Nvidia 3080 GPU in it, and that has served me quite well. I know the 50 series is out now, but frankly I see no reason to upgrade any time soon.
- Dell 32″ 4K UHD – G3223Q: A relatively recent purchase, but it’s been doing quite well so far. 32″ is about as small as screen as I’d bother with 4k for – a QHD (2560 x 1440) is plenty for most scenarios. If you’re just getting a 27″, save yourself the money and get a QHD and call it good.
- Dell 32″ QHD with HDR – S3220DGF: Speaking of QHD monitors – I picked this up five years ago and it’s still been great. No complaints, would buy again (or the modern equivalent).
- Fujifilm X-E3: I picked this up for my trip to Japan back in 2018, and it’s still a good little mirrorless SLR. I plan to replace it with an X-T5 (or whatever version they’re up to when I finally get around to it) at some point, as I found I didn’t enjoy the viewfinder being on the side as much as when it’s centered, but I do like the camera in general. It’s not a high priority to replace, though, as frankly I find myself just using my iPhone for a lot of day-to-day photography.
- Nintendo Switch 2: Just picked it up, replacing my old Switch. It’s nice! I haven’t really put it through its paces (mostly just existing Switch games), but so far it’s a nice experience.
- Valve Steam Deck: Gaming on the go: Due to being a sucker for crazy sales and bundles, I have a kind of stupidly large back catalog on Steam. While it’s not my primary PC gaming solution, the Steam Deck was a great addition while we spent a year on the road and my gaming PC was in storage.
Software
- Gmail: Most of my email accounts currently run through gmail. I’m not thrilled about this, but thus far my annoyance with Google has been outweighed by the inertia of moving to a different system.
- Mail.app: while I use the web interface for Gmail a lot (especially if I need to access email on another machine), I also have it all hooked up using the default macOS Mail app, on both my laptop and my phone. Mail is… fine. I frankly haven’t been happy with a mail app since the days of Eudora, and frankly I think even going back to that would feel archaic at this point.
I’m one of those weirdos that actually tries to sort and filter my mail into subfolders, and no one frickin’ designs for that methodology anymore. If you put your filters in Mail, they’re constantly fighting with filtering Gmail tries to do. If you put your filters in Gmail, they randomly “forget” the filters after a while and you have to go in and recreate them (they’ll still be listed in the filters list, mind you, they just stop working until you delete it and make the exact same damn filter again).
Web Browsing
- Safari: This is my default browser. I know that makes me an outlier. It’s pretty fast, pretty reliable, pretty efficient. No real gripes. It doesn’t have a ton of extensions available or anything, but I frankly don’t use many (AdBlock, and the Obsidian Web Clipper are basically it), and the native integrations are excellent.
- Firefox: My backup browser, for cases where I want to see how else a page may render or in those cases where a site broke Safari support (which frankly at this point I view as lazy or shitty developers, not a failing of Safari, as so often it comes down to them only bothering to test in Chrome, or using browser-specific functions rather than actual web standards).
- Orion: Just trying this one out, so jury is still out, but I wanted to list it because I do think it’s interesting. It’s a privacy-focused browser by the same folks who make the Kagi search engine, with built-in ad blocking, support for both Firefox and Chrome extensions, and built on top of Webkit. After I’ve used it for a bit, I’ll write up something with my thoughts about it.
I’ve technically also got Arc on my machine, but I don’t really use it. I wanted to see what the hubbub about it was, and it’s my concession to having something Chromium-based on my laptop (I refuse to install Chrome, though I do have and use it on my work laptop). They’re doing some interesting UX things, but I kind of hate how pushy it is about signing up for their service and their prevalence of “share Arc” cruft makes me feel like they’re trying to get us to do their advertising for them.
Writing
- Obsidian: This is my go-to notes tool at work, and I also use it personally (but not as much). The writing is markdown (which is fine), but where it shines is the ability to organize and interlink your notes (including tossing in web clippings, pdfs, images, whatever else you need for a fodder folder), along with a crazily robust ecosystem of extensions folks have created to let it do or handle all sorts of different things. Some people even use it as the backend for their blogs, using a static site generator to build the markdown into HTML. My main gripe is that the only way to sync your notes onto iOS is to use their paid sync service.
- Scrivener: I don’t use this as much since I moved a lot of note taking to Obisidian, but I do still use it for writing and journaling, partially because I can use it on both my Mac and iPhone and keep it in sync with other sync services I already have (Dropbox in my case, but it can use other services if you want). I’m by no means a power user with Scrivener – if you look at the features list or even just go through the tutorial, it’s easy to feel super overwhelmed by what it can do. For my purposes, though, I did just enough tweaks to keep it largely distraction free and just let me write in a nice clean interface, and then called it good.
- Notes.app: I used to use this more heavily before I moved a lot of my daily notes to Obsidian. For a built-in default notes app, it’s actually pretty good, and it can do a lot if you decide to explore it a little. I still use it, but mostly for stuff like shared notes and lists with my girlfriend (grocery lists, house stuff, etc). My only real gripe is that organizationally it leaves a little to be desired, and sometimes it struggles to keep shared notes in sync.
Development
- Zed: Lightweight, fast as hell, and doing some interesting stuff. It’s the same folks who created Atom back in the day (along with Electron, for better or worse), but written in Rust. (It’s not like Rust is some magical language that makes everything faster and better, but with Rust also came a return to doing things natively, rather than trying to shoehorn everything through a browser that pretends to be an app.) Things I don’t like: the built-in chat that doesn’t have an obvious way to turn off. That’s basically it.
- Nova: Made by the folks over at Panic, and is the successor to their previous IDE, Coda, which I’d also used. It’s nice enough, and has a lot of nice features, but for whatever reason it just hasn’t been “clicking” for me as my day-to-day IDE. I’m not a huge fan of their project/collection management, but that doesn’t really matter once you’re past that screen, so I’m struggling to put a finger on why it’s not more of my go-to.
- BBEdit: Not strictly a modern IDE (though I suppose you could use it as one) so much as a ridiculously capable text editor. I’ve been a big fan for literally decades, and I use this heavily for any time I need to do any sort of text transformation, parsing, etc.
- Transmit: Also made by Panic. Easily the best FTP/SFTP/S3 client, in my humble opinion. I don’t need it often, but when I do, it always comes through.
Also-rans include Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains IntelliJ and Xcode – I’ve got VS Code installed and have used it from time to time, but it’s not really my thing. IntelliJ I live in at work, but don’t really use in my personal life. It’s kinda big and much more of a “traditional” IDE, and is a bit more focused around Java systems, but it does what it needs to do well enough. Xcode is in a similar boat of being a larger, more complex IDE and is good at what it does, but I’ve always bounced off the interface, going all the way back to the days of Project Builder. I don’t know why.
Communication
- Signal: Great privacy-focused messaging client, free, would recommend. If you haven’t looked at it in a while, it’s worth a second look – they’ve added a lot of features (group chats, video and voice calls, better media sharing support, user nicknames so you don’t have to share your phone number with everyone, etc).
- Discord: Good for a number of communities I’m part of. This has taken up a lot of the headspace of IRC. It originally targeted gamers, and a number of features are still oriented around that, but don’t let that deter you – a lot of other communities are making use of it as well.
- Slack: Another service that sort of fills the same headspace as IRC, but more oriented around businesses. It’s also used for a number of other communities, like XOXO (RIP), the Write the Docs communites, the IndieWeb developer community, and others.
- Messages.app: Apple’s default messaging app. Useful for texting, and since I’m mostly in the Apple ecosystem anyway, works just fine. I think as far as the experience goes I think actually prefer Signal, but it’s good enough.
- Messenger: Facebook’s inertia is real, and there are still a small handful of folks that I talk to through Messenger and would likely lose contact with if I didn’t. I’m not a fan, and look forward to the day I can just wash my hands of Facebook’s entire ecosystem entirely.
Art
- Photos.app: I was a long-time Lightroom user, but when Adobe decided to get rid of the standalone version and start requiring a subscription service, I decided to move on. The issue is that finding an alternative that did what I wanted it to do was… challenging. I tried a bunch (Capture One, Darkroom, Luminar, ACDSee, the list goes on and on), and more often than not, while their actual photo editing was fine, their photo MANAGEMENT experience sucked. Eventually I landed on the default macOS Photos app, because I didn’t really need extra bells and whistles, I could still edit in a separate app if needed, and the management was… adequate (after a few tweaks like making sure to turn off sequestering all the images into some hidden folder). I’d frankly love to see the Affinity folks at Serif put together an asset management tool.
- Affinity Photos/Affinity Designer/Affinity Publisher: The Affinity suite are great, you can actually buy the software (and that comes with both macOS and iOS versions, and they also have Window versions if you need). Obviously I’m not a power user, but for my needs they scratch the itch, and for a fraction of the cost Adobe charges.
- Procreate: I’d argue this is the gold standard for iPad drawing apps. Very capable. There’s a learning curve to do more than the basic stuff, but that’s true for any of the tools out there, and once you start digging in, it can do a lot.
- Instagram: Not strictly for making art so much as posting/sharing stuff. I don’t post super frequently, but I do use it, and is how I’ll share photos if I want to also post them to Facebook (rather than use Facebook’s posting directly). Frankly the thing I use it for the most is sharing silly/cute videos and memes with Simone.
Other
- Passwords: I used to be a die-hard 1Password user, but they switched to subscription only, and I refuse. (If you’re not bothered by subscriptions for everything, it’s still a great option). I originally switched to Strongbox, and that was fine. A little clunkier than 1Password, but still pretty good, and it works. More recently, however, Apple finally came out with their own Passwords app, and it’s been more than adequate for my needs, so that’s become my primary password manager.
- Alfred: Alfred is like Spotlight on steroids. It’s faster, gives better results, and can do more/integrate with more. We used it at Dropbox, and when I left there, I liked it so much that I bought a lifetime powerpack license. It might not be your cup of tea, but if you’re the type that like the notion of being able to hit a keystroke to bring up a command line and access or look up basically anything, it’s the tool for you.
I’m sure there’s other stuff I could list, but I feel like this covers a lot of the core stuff, and it’s getting long enough as it is. Let me know if you agree/disagree or have suggested alternatives on things, I’m always curious what folks are using.