Rarely can I resist answering geeky surveys like the one currently making the rounds, so here are my default apps at the moment:
- Bookmarks: Raindrop
- Browser: Arc (but trying out Orion)
- Budgeting: YNAB
- Calendar: Fantastical
- Chat: Messages
- Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive
- Code: VSCode
- Contacts: Apple Contacts
- Mail Service and Client: Fastmail
- Mastodon Client: Mona
- Music: Apple Music
- Notes: Obsidian
- Password Management: 1Password
- Package Tracking: Parcel
- Photo Management: Lightroom
- Photo Shooting (iPhone): Halide
- Podcasts: yeah, no
- RSS: ostensibly Readwise Reader, but haven't really been using it
- Search: Kagi
- Shopping Lists: AnyList
- Spreadsheets: Excel
- Tasks: Obsidian
- Time Tracking: Toggl
- Voice Memos: an arcane combination of Apple Watch dictation and Drafts and Shortery and Obsidian
- Weather: Carrot
- Word Processing: I have no idea - Word, I guess? Byword?
A few notes:
Podcasting. I stopped listening to podcasts when they all started being longer than an hour. Well, longer than an hour and completely unedited. I do not have the time to listen to your unorganized rambling. My own brain does that on its own quite nicely, thank you.
Music. I used to use Spotify, and stuck with it for a long while because they had a good smattering of playlists, especially those "auto-curated" based on my listening. But then they started shoving podcasts in my face (see above) and their playlists got boring and I couldn't find my favorite tracks and yeah, it just wasn't doing it for me. Apple Music is absolutely, abysmally terrible as well, mind you, but it comes bundled in the One Ring - I mean, the One True Subscription Package, so at least it's "free". I'd like to find a better path to music discovery, but eh, just not a big deal in my life right now.
RSS. Oh, RSS. I used to use RSS extensively, and now I just don't. Every so often I try to revive it in my daily flow, but it just isn't sticking anymore. I have a few newsletters I subscribe to, of the weekly or monthly variety, and those just fit better for me these days.
Shopping Lists. I must give a shoutout to AnyList. It is a great grocery list manager, and recipe manager, too. We also use it to track the shows and movies we want to watch. We use Categories to show where you can find the movie (Netflix, Kanopy, Library Borrow, Rental, etc). And we use Stores for the genre (Action, French, Foreign {yes, that's different from French}, Happy, Noir, etc). And we use Package Size to designate whether it's a series or miniseries or whatever.
Voice Memos. Another one where I am trying to build a system that works for me, and continually failing. The front end part isn't too bad at the moment, I can dictate a note into Drafts with reasonable success. It's just a question of "then what?" and I don't have a good answer. Right now they go into - well, I really don't even know where they go. I think it might be some random note in Obsidian. Wherever it is, I rarely see them again.
Word Processing. If I have to send some kind of official letter, like printed out on paper, I do it in plain text, usually using Byword. Can't even think of the last time I needed to output text with any kind of formatting.
And there you have it. It's not a fancy setup, but it's mine.