I don’t remember how much Photoshop and illustrator, etc. cost before they went subscription only. But upgrading 6 or 7 users every couple of years wasn’t cheap. At least our accountants didn’t complain when I switched to subscriptions.
I have a lifetime Plex Premium account but shutdown my server a few years ago. Almost all of my music is available to stream, and most of my movies are streaming for free. If I do want to watch something from my collection I just stream it from my iPad to my TV.
I used Apple Music for a while but now use Youtube Music because it came with YouTube Premium (I hate advertisements)
OK, here comes my list:
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- OmniFocus to manage my tasks
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- Obsidian for notes, knowledge, drafts and contact management (replaced Trello, Cardhop and Drafts for me)
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- DEVONthink for document and screenshot storage
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- BusyCal as a calendar (replaced Fantastical recently)
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- Apple Mail for my mail
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- MindNote for mindmapping
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- Bitwarden for my passwords and other secrets
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- Keyboard Maestro for most of my Mac automation, including text snippets (replaced TextExpander a while ago)
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- Alfred with many custom workflows to launch things
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- Home Assistant to automate things in my home and my life
I would like to emphasize how versatile Obsidian, Keyboard Maestro and Home Assistant alone are. All three apps cover a huge spectrum of quite different things.
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my turn to share my list
- Goodtask/Reminder as task manager
- Obsidian for daily journal and bible study. Upnote for sync notes and web cllipping across Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Linux . Notebooks App for creating documents and that need to be shared with the family
- Busycal as my calendar
- Mailmate as my email app
- 1Password for password manage
- Alfred as launcher
- Home Assistant for home automation
- Reeder / Readwise Reader / UpNext as my RSS reader and read it later app
- Anybox as my bookmark manager
- Arc as main browser with Chrome as backup
One thing I noticed that Curio is never mentioned in this discussion, despite that it was widely discussed as Software of the Month before
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Can you explain what happened here? I’ve been moving more and more over to devonthink, but hate the way it does database sync. I do a weekly “backup” but also completely export all files to plain file/folder structure weekly to make sure I have an up to the last week Plain folder export, but this concerns me that maybe I could be missing something and not know it…
I guess it’s my turn. Hope this is a “judgement free zone”.
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Notes: Logseq. I like that Logseq is open source and the way the database is built and how data is queried is extremely powerful. It took a while to click for me, but now that it has I’m extremely thrilled at how I can use it to organize my notes, help run my business, and my part time work as a pseudo-intellectual.
- Quick note: I don’t run any plugins in either Logseq or Obsidian because I don’t trust the security of either platform. Will most likely be transitioning to running this as a container off box but still thinking on it.
- File Management: Finder. I played around with Devonthink for a bit but after some data loss issues that they were having I stopped using it and never turned back.
- File Management 2: Hookmark. I use hook extensively to maintain a growing collection of PDF’s that I have to locate.
- Personal Finance: I transitioned to Beancount because I love being able to track my finances down to the penny and doing it all with text from the terminal.
- Journaling: was a Day One user but have transitioned to JRNL on the Mac and am using shortcuts and Data Jar on mobile which allows me to transition back in to JRNL when I’m back on the Mac. Another great text based tool that I can manage and manipulate if needed.
- Browser: Safari. I still use Brave on mobile because I watch YouTube videos there and leverage brave playlists. I don’t run Google apps on any of my devices.
- Quick Launcher: Raycast. Just digging in here because of this community. I like how fast and responsive it is and that it’s extensible.
- Task Management: was a heavy OmniFocus user but it became WAY too cumbersome. I throw most things in Logseq now and if it’s important I use “Due” to pester me about it until I get it done. I’ve played around with Todoist but do have issue here from a privacy perspective so I definitely haven’t put anything sensitive there.
- Calendar: I have a Fantastical subscription that I should probably cancel because I don’t use it. Outside of work I have no idea where I need to be; my wife just yells at me and I mindlessly go where I’m told.
- Storage/Backup: restic/rclone; used Arc for awhile and then got spooked by some of the stuff I saw on Reddit.
Really like hearing ideas from others and seeing what folks have encountered with their workflows. Having principles of how I store and manage data has kept me from some of the headaches that others have had related to data loss and lock in.
I’m a work in progress but do everything I can to remove apps and simplify workflows to reduce cognitive load. Being a part-time pseudo-intellectual is tough so I need all the help I can get!
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Basically the short form is that a doing weekly verify and repair database and monthly optimize and the occasional rebuild as per DT support recommendations still did not prevent DEVONThink from saving empty as in zero byte files but reporting the files as valid until I actually went to look at some old archive files I rearely use. Then I discovered they were empty. It happened to both indexed and imported files.
I had backups going back over a year but the files were lost prior to that in some cases and continued to be lost until I gave up on DT.
It took a huge number of people and someone else coding a check to identify zero length files before DEVONThink even acknowledged the problem. The only current “fix” is to run periodic Check File Integrity commands in DT often enough that you can recover a file that gets set to empty.
The primary purpose of a database and file storage system like DT is to provide safe and secure storage of your information. They failed and even failed to accept that the results I and others were reporting were real problems. We got told it was always a user error. I got fed up and left.
Prior to that fiasco I had been a happy user and strong proponent of DEVONThink for years.
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I agree DT won’t acknowledge any problems ever and typically blame user. I actually had a lot of issues with sync but then setup personal WebDAV and haven’t had an issue since. Curious what your sync solution was (I had issues with both iCloud, Dropbox).
Private WebDAV on my Synology server.
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Well now I’m concerned! I’ve started transitioning archive notes (mainly from Apple notes/obsidian) over to devonthink.
Have you been using your synology drive instead? I tried this but I hate the label search (aka if selecting 2 labels it shows thing tagged with either or label not both). Also it is nice to have devonthink ocr, but I do my ocrmypdf running on synology.
Also any issues with data loss on Zotero? I’ve had loss with WebDAV and Zotero multiple times and nothing in about 6 months DT.
There are many, um, “lively” Roon vs Plex threads all over Reddit, which may give you more insights than my comments since I know next-to-nothing about Plex. My guess is it’s going to come down to the nature of your collection, your equipment, and your listening habits.
My audiophile husband and I have built up a huge library of LPs and CDs over the course of both of our lives. I went through the exercise of digitizing all of our CDs a couple of years ago when the audio quality of a digitized CD (I chose FLAC) played over good equipment matched the quality of the CD itself. The convenience of being able to stream anything from your collection via a nice app on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad made doing it a no-brainer.
We chose Roon as our server for several reasons. First among them was that it obviated the need to tag the ripped files. (WAV files can’t be tagged as straightforwardly as MP3s or FLACs, so when you convert from WAV to FLAC the resulting file will have next-to-no metadata.) Roon does an absolutely awsome job of matching even the most obscure classical, jazz, or world music recording with metadata, album art, credits, artist bios, reviews, etc. and presenting your collection as a well-organized library. Secondly, our equipment was “Roon-Ready,” i.e., it was pretty much plug-and-play to get excellent playback.
We’ve augmented our digitized collection with Qobuz, which we chose because, at the time, it offered a bigger library of hi-res classical and jazz recordings than its competitor, Tidal. It also has an extensive library of deep-dive articles, interviews, curated playlists, and “if-you-like-this-give-this-other-thing-a-listen” rabbit holes that my husband can’t get enough of—so much so that I suspect he spends more time listing to the byways he’s discovered via Qobuz than our own collection. Qobuz also has downloadable PDFs of the CD inserts.
Which leads me to the second part of your question: honestly, if I were doing it all again I’d be tempted to just bypass digitizing the collection and go straight to Qobuz since about 90% of my CD collection is there and I can gorge on what I don’t own to my heart’s content at an affordable price. (The LPs are a different matter altogether.) The advantage of digitizing is that you can get rid of all those little silver disks taking up too much valuable space, however.
And here’s where I’m going to be really heretical: if I were 99.9% convinced that high-quality streaming of genuinely deep back catalogues were here to stay, I’d ditch the collection without bothering to digitize it.
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Just a note to say I think this is the command-line app jrnl, not the one in the app store, which looks like a direct competitor to Day One.
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I don’t try to sync Zotero to anything. I run it on my main mac, the papers are stored on the server an the nly thing I do is download them to my iPad for annotation and hten back to my mac using zotfile
I guess you meant Arqbackup ? Would you mind sharing what is the issue mentioned on Reddit ?
Keep finding things I missed in my initial post. Specifically…
Ditched Alfred, switched to Raycast. It’s just wonderful!
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Yes. Not to be critical, but there were support issues reported and other happenings where things got a little weird between the users and the developer (Reddit - I know; consider the source). Since it was developed by a single dev (at least I thought at the time) I moved on. Nothing wrong with the product; it just spooked me a bit. Plus, I prefer to leverage open source tools with strong community support when possible. Again, the product worked flawlessly when I used it and I still have a license; more of a personal preference and my own paranoia…
There is nothing wrong with being paranoid. I haven’t trusted a backup system since I lost three days of company files back in the ‘90s. Since then it’s been my habit to test my backups.
Earlier today I restored a couple of files from a few months ago and a couple more from 2020 just to make sure Arq and Backblaze were doing their jobs.
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Music discovery is the big selling point of Roon for me, and I also use it with Qobuz. I can start listening to an album and read through the information in Roon about the artist and can then go off on a trail of links in the data that ends up with an album I’ve not heard from that artist or discovering a new artist. I find it so difficult to do that in Apple Music.
I keep most of my collection as rips or purchased downloads (from the Qobuz store), I’m just not keen on being at the whim of the labels to either remove music or restrict versions that I can stream. Bob Dylan is the big culprit for me, the Bootleg series albums tend to only offer a ‘sampler’ version to stream.
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Here’s what I’m up to lately, original categories and a few new ones. Will be interesting to check in a month (or week?) and see if they’ve changed.
Original Set:
- Calendar: Apple Calendar
- Email: Apple Mail
- Task management: Pen and Paper
Time tracking- Quick notes: Pen and Paper
Longer notes/articles- Asset management:
- Finder (using a modified Johnny Decimal scheme) for most things
- Google Drive for collaborative assets
- Devonthink for academic articles
- Eagle Filer for email archive
- Project dashboards and business management:
- Whiteboard, 12x18 paper, post it notes
- Starting a new job and imagining we’ll adopt Asana or Trello
- Passwords: Apple Keychain
- Text automation: Typinator
Some extras:
- Screenshots: Xnapper
- Writing:
- Scrivener for drafting
- Word or Google Docs for editing, depending on collaborators
- Drawing: Procreate
- Thinking: Tinderbox
- Comms: Slack and Loom
Things I’m trying since reviewing this thread:
- Raycast
- Planner Pad
Apps I wish I used more:
- Curio
- iAWriter
- Bike
- OmniOutliner
- Tot
- Eagle
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- Calendar: BusyCal (for many years)
- Contacts: BusyContacts (for many years)
- Notes, PKM, etc.: DEVONThink
- Tasks: Things (switched to Things last month after MANY years with Todoist)
- Launcher/Snippets/Workflows: Alfred
- Passwords: 1Password
- Email: Outlook (I can’t believe this, honestly, but I changed to Outlook about 6 months ago and it is actually pretty good. If you had suggested this to me I would have laughed). Fastmail is my backend.
- Automation: Hazel (and Alfred)
- Document Preparation: MS Word (I hate it, long time InDesign user, but my work requires it and it is a lot cheaper)
- Personal Finance: MoneyDance
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