Current Mac software

This will be a regularly updated list of software I use—every change isn’t worth a new post.

The apps

• Alfred

  With an increase in AI crap on apps like Raycast, I decided to move to something I pay for, that doesn’t have a load of VC funding to justify. It’s my favorite kind of software: well built, fast, and run by a few smart folks.

• Apple Passwords

  With the launch of iOS 18 and Mac OS 15 there’s a new password app in town, and it’s made by Apple themselves. It works with passcodes, can share credentials, and isn’t built in Electron.

• Things

  I wrote a lot about how I do todos, and I love this app for its speed and ease of use more than anything on my computer or phone. A delight every time.

• Calendar.app

  Reverted to iOS Calendar since I can’t use a single app for work and life.

• iA Writer

  An indispensable app for writing and creating, and where I’m writing this very post! I love how simple and elegant iA Writer is; providing minimal configuration to help me focus on the words themselves. It also helps that black and blue are two of my favorite colors—if only I could customize the cursor to be a theme-matching purple.

• Parcel

  With Deliveries dying a sad death by losing its ability to track UPS and Fedex packages, I moved to its competitor.

• Reeder Classic

  I’m a little worried now that Reeder is the name of a new, very different app, and the one I know and love is called “classic”, but it still works really well, so we’ll see.

  This is my main news and entertainment app, and I read everything from blogs, to newsletters, to Twitter on it. It’s fast, cleanly designed, and integrates well with the RSS backend I use: Feedbin. If you want to support a different app, I recommend the excellent NetNewsWire, which is neat because it’s FOSS.

• Slack

  This is literally my job, and the main way I talk to my friends.

• Discord

  I’m part of a few small communities on Discord predominantly because of newsletters I read. These groups are pretty fun, and have mostly taken the place of “meeting interesting people” that Twitter once served.

• ImageOptim

  Do you write on the internet and need to upload smaller, optimized images? This is for that.

• Lunasea

  This helps with my collection of linux distros.

• Stacher

  A wrapper for youtube-dl; allowing for easy downloads of audio or video from a URL. The source doesn’t have to be YouTube, but it often is—other times maybe something cycling-related.

• ItsyCal

  I used this app a long time ago, and even though it’s probably out of date in some ways, it serves perfectly for my limited quick-calendar needs. I like how it has full keyboard navigation too. I wish it had semi-natural language event creation like Calendar.app now has, but alas.

CLI Utilities

• Brew

• Warp

• OhMyZsh

These apps are are a backing service for installing and managing packages, my terminal of choice, and a good Zsh customization now that Zsh is the standard on a Mac.

Anything else?

I might download and use other apps sometimes, but this is my core few. If I’m missing something you absolutely love, write in and tell me about it.