Productivity
Things 3
The productivity system and its processes dominate the specifics of any apps. I follow some of the Get Things Done (GTD) doctrines (like the weekly review) and Things 3 is a great fit. It happens to be a one time purchase and the devs like to support new iOS features quickly.
With Things, I am content with my productivity system and don't feel the incessant urge to hop onto the latest tools and methods. Things' lack of drastic changes or feature additions avoids the feature bloat <-> subscription loop. For me, personal todo and project management is finally a solved problem.
Here are some resources I used to get started:
- Peter Akkies has some great videos on Things 3.
- This post on the fu master productivity checklist.
Proton, Duo plan.
I have used Proton mail since 2019. The native ios app is great and I enjoy their general design too. The all-inclusive Duo plan gives me unlimited email aliases and three custom domains, which I put to good use. This alone is worth the price to me.
I am also using Proton Drive and Proton Pass, which are included in the plan. Proton Drive has been a good replacement for my self hosted Nextcloud instance. I am much less enthusiastic for Proton Pass: the password manager works, but the user experience pales in comparison to something like 1Password. It is however functionally complete and imo worth dropping the subscription of 1Password.
Arc Browser
I really like the tab management of Arc. Tabs are kept on the left sidebar and divided into spaces. Frequently used tabs are pinned to thematic spaces (e.g admin, shopping, dev, etc). Other tabs are temporary, disappearing after 12 hours of inactivity. I don't use any of the AI features, nor do I care about easels (whiteboards) or their styling solution. In theory I can switch to the firefox based and open source Zen browser, in practice the plethora of Usability issues preclude any serious consideration.
With the advent of Arc 2.0, it is only a matter of time before Arc (the first) gets tossed onto the sacrificial butcher block. I sure hope Zen will emerge in time before I go for some of the more profane options (heard good things about Edge).
Quiche Browser, iOS
The hidden gem iOS browser! Not wanting to wax poetic about Quiche Browser just yet, I hope the following pointers will suffice to warrant a try: Quiche is my main mobile browser; it is completely free; and I send Greg, the responsive solo dev, money just to support him.
Knowledge Management
Capacities
Capacities is my main Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool. Note taking in capacities is networked (with bidirectional links), Object-based (where a note can be a Book, with attributes like published date or other objects e.g Authors), and centred around time (every node is linked to a time or the date of creation). Everything works out of the box and the devs have a clear roadmap. I like to dump info into the daily journal and turn common types of notes into objects. The principles of Capacities are a great fit with how I like to think. Not to say I am completely happy about the details of the implementation (e.g the editor is a little unintuitive), but the team is clearly headed to the right direction.
Apple Notes
Apple notes is a good enough solution for family notes. You can add all sorts of media, links to other notes, and edit in real time together. I set up a shared folder with ideas similar to forever notes to make navigation easier. It's useful to store instruction manuals and reference information.
Dev Tools
Zed Editor
The best (code) editor. Fast and beautifully minimal. Zed combines the terminal aesthetic with the ease of use of modern IDEs. It does not have the bloat and sluggishness of VS Code, yet it isn't austere out of the box like vim. My config (settings and keymap) overall is under 150 lines of json. The equivalent in neovim (even when configured upon the lazyvim distro) is at least multiples of that, not to mention the complexity required to set everything up.
The editor is not only open source, the Zed team also builds in public. There is a deluge of blog posts and casts about design decisions from industry veterans to glimpse into the internals of the editor. It's also easy to contribute: my shabby code lives on in main.
Wezterm
Wezterm is a feature rich, low config editor. A lot of things work out of the box without any feelings of bloat. Good documentation and pleasant dev. However I tend to use Zed's builtin (Alacritty) terminal more these days.
On the look out for ghostty, releasing end of this year.