Another year has gone by, and my toolkit hasn’t changed much since the last time I did a post like this…
📨 Mail Client: Fastmate
📮 Mail Server: Fastmail (since 2013!)
📆 Calendar: Fastmail via Fantastical
📁 Cloud File Storage: Fastmail, iCloud Drive, and Hetzner Storage Box
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Fastmail via Cardhop
📝 Notes: Obsidian
✅ To-Do: Obsidian for day-to-day business-related work and high-level planning, Linear for (code) project planning and issues, Apple Reminders for personal stuff
💶 Banking: MoneyMoney
🔖 Bookmarks: Obsidian, but to be fair, I don’t bookmark much these days.
📖 RSS: Feedbin (for the 3rd year in a row!)
📑 Read It Later: Feedbin
🌐 Browser: Vivaldi, but currently test-driving Orion for macOS and really liking what I see!
💬 Chat: Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, and all of them mostly through the macOS Beeper client). Slack but only rarely.
🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders
🎤 Podcasts: Pocketcasts
🔐 Password Management: Strongbox
📼 Backup: Arq, Hetzner Storage Box for storage
🚀 Launcher: I’m firmly back in the Alfred camp.
📈 Metrics: iStat Menus
🧑💻 Code Editor: VS Code, Xcode + Copilot Plus for Xcode (see “LLM”, below), Script Debugger 8
💻 Terminal: iTerm
👨🏼🏫 Making Videos & Tutorials: DaVinci Resolve, currently switching over to ScreenFlow.
🎙️ Dictation & Transcriptions: MacWhisper
🎹 Music: Apple Music (because TIDAL’s apps are terrible at almost everything), Doppler (iOS)
🌅 Photo Management: Apple Photos
🛠️ Automation: Keyboard Maestro, Apple Shortcuts
🤖 LLMs + “AI”: For most things, including work on my Swift code, I prefer Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet over any other model. On the Mac I use BoltAI for “LLM chatting”. In general, I tend to connect to any remote LLM by way of OpenRouter (a unified interface for accessing various large language models), because it allows me to mix and match as I go without having to pay monthly subs for different LLM providers. It’s great.
