This was a fun emoji list to compile last time, so here we are again!

📨 Mail Client: Mail.app, MailMate + SpamSieve + GPG Suite
📮 Mail Server: MXroute
📝 Notes: Obsidian + Tot
✅ To-Do: Obsidian
📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone, Lumix GH5
🎨 Photo Editing: Photomator, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator Pro
📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud + Syncthing
📖 RSS: Reeder
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
🌐 Browser: Safari
💬 Chat: Apple Messages, Discord, Slack
🔖 Bookmarks: Raindrop
📑 Read It Later: Obsidian
📜 Word Processing: Apple Pages
📈 Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers
📊 Presentations: Apple Keynote
🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders
🍴 Meal Planning: Mela
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Soulver
📰 News: The Atlantic + Mastodon + a jillion blogs
🎵 Music: Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
🔐 Password Management: 1Password
🧑‍💻 Code Editor: VS Code, PhpStorm, Sublime Text
✈️ VPN: NordVPN

Bonus Items

Important enough to include here, ordered roughly by how often I rely on each.

🚀 Launcher: Alfred
🐚 Terminal: iTerm 2
☂️ Backup: Arq + self-hosted MinIO on a storage VPS (replacing Backblaze)
🚫 Ad Blocking: Vinegar, Wipr 2, StopTheMadness
🔎 Search Engine: Kagi
📓 Journaling: Day One
🗂️ Version Control: Tower
🖼️ Screenshots: CleanShot X
🐘 Mastodon Client: Ivory
👨‍💻 Local Development: DDEV
🗄️ Code Repositories: GitHub
🛌 Sleep Tracking: AutoSleep
💽 Database Manager: TablePlus
📖 Reading: Kobo, Apple Books
✍️ Writing: Obsidian, VS Code, Sublime Text, Scrivener, iA Writer
🧾 Invoicing and Time Tracking: Harvest
👨‍🎨 Design: Figma
🕹️ Games: BattleBit Remastered, Hell Let Loose, Star Citizen
📊 Web Analytics: Plausible
🗓️ Schedule Booking: Cal.com
🤖 Server Provisioning: Coolify + Ansible
🩺 App + Server Monitoring: HetrixTools + Sentry + GlitchTip
📦 Package Tracking: Parcel
🧠 Brainstorming: Mindspace (RIP iThoughtsX 😢), Obsidian, reMarkable
☎️ Video Calls: Cal.com, Zoom
📋 Snippet Sharing: HedgeDoc
🎛️ 3D Modeling and Slicing: Autodesk Fusion 360, PrusaSlicer
🗺️ Maps + Driving Directions: Apple Maps + CarPlay
🔥 Wildfire + Air Quality Tracking: Watch Duty
🎬 Filmography Reference: Callsheet
📽️ Video Editing: DaVinci Resolve
🐎 Motion Graphics: Apple Motion
🎹 DAW: GarageBand
👀 Editor Analytics: WakaTime

Bonus Commentary

The few things that have changed reflect my desire to slowly get away from VC-funded apps and platforms, instead choosing smaller ones even if it leaves me with a bit more work to do.

The one with the biggest daily impact was moving from Raycast back to Alfred, which gave me a chance to audit my workflows and update my custom ones. That was fun.

When we cancelled our Amazon Prime subscription I replaced my Kindle with a Kobo. (With the Bookerly font for reading; I can’t give that up.)

More for the adventure than anything, I moved my perfectly-good mailbox.org email to a lifetime MXroute plan. imapsync made this simple and reassuring.

I wrote about wandering into Coolify even though Ploi is still great and I’d still cheerfully recommend it. Docker, Traefik and I are still uncomfortable friends but it’s been good for learning.

Speaking of infrastructure, I added a backup category just so I could point out moving from Backblaze to Arq and MinIO. Arq lets you back up your Mac to an impressive variety of sources, and MinIO lets you self-host S3-compatible volumes. So I used Coolify to get MinIO running on an inexpensive storage VPS on another continent with plenty of room, and now I have incremental, encrypted backups with a much less frightening restore process than Backblaze offered. Cheaper than Backblaze, too. So far a win all around.

I was particularly thrilled to try Photomator again and discover it’s exactly what I’d like for managing my own photo library. I bought a license days just before the team announced being acquired by Apple. I’m assuming that’s bad news for Photomator continuing to support file management outside the Photos library and I’ll have to find some other app again. Or give in and trust Photos and give up on my directory structure. That’s bitten me in the past, but maybe I should channel my inner Tobias Fünke and hope mindlessly that it’ll be fine.

Tot has been the biggest surprise. I was sure I had no need for such a simple notepad, but after trying it just for fun it turns out I do? The Iconfactory knew before I did: a simple place to dump ephemeral blurbs of text in visually-distinct little buckets, that also happens to sync automatically across machines—I apparently need that to improve my mental RAM. An empty Sublime Text file I never save is fraught with danger. Tot is a lovely little friend to have.

I’m still without a suitable Notion replacement for collaborative docs and planning, particularly with friends outside of work (where subscription fees are hard to justify), but maybe in 2025 I’ll find it.

I realize I’m heavily into the Apple ecosystem and this is all relative, but it’s been nice getting smaller again and I hope I can continue the trend however slowly.