Our unexpected winners of 2023

[Pupsino]

As I was using Freeform for a task it was not designed for this weekend, I thought it would be fun to ask:

Which app turned out to be unexpectedly useful this year for you, and why?

Bonus question: which app did you think would be very useful, but then not use much?

Feel free to talk about an app you’ve been using for years if it continues to be great for you! There’s no rules where we’re going: it can be software for MacOS or iOS!

For me, two apps stand out:

• Freeform
  I was quite cynical about what this app. Do people need personal whiteboard-like apps? Yes, it turns out they do, and Apple was right After some very tentative forays into using it (hat tip to @Denny for inspiring me), it’s rapidly becoming my default “I need to throw some things on a page” app. In fact it’s this app that’s inspired this post - I’ve started using it to assemble a couple of shopping and reading lists. It’s better than Reminders or Notes because it shows a preview of the URL you’ve saved, making it a visual list, AND you can zoom out to see your entire list at once. During 2024 I plan to move some of my GoodNotes notebooks into Freeform - needing a blank page to put things on was one of my primary uses of GoodNotes, but Freeform is better suited for this.

• Drafts
  For years it puzzled me why people need another note-taking app. Surely Apple Notes is fine for quick notes? Then in autumn I thought I would download the app and see why so many folks on this forum use it. Turns out you were all right, and I’m now a Drafts convert. I can’t really explain it - it feels quicker than Apple Notes, I’ve got my themes set up how I like, I’ve created workspaces for different uses so that my reading notes don’t mix with work notes, and the many actions available just make life so easy. I’ve even tried dictating a couple of times - something that I’ve never done with any device!

App I thought would be useful but haven’t used much: Soulver. This is a great idea for a calculator app, and it’s very well executed. If you’re not confident with maths this app is probably essential (although it is iPad and Mac only). The thing is though, I did physics as part of my studies and have been doing maths manually for decades, and I just haven’t been able to switch to using Soulver even though I can see the benefit. In fact I use Apple Notes the way Soulver is meant to be used (writing out sums and comments to myself), but do the maths myself instead of letting Soulver calculate it. It’s ridiculous. I’ve paid for the app and will keep it round - I can see its value even if I can’t get into the habit of using it.

Over to you!

[Vincent_Ardern]

Same same but different. Soulver is great. Drafts I’ve tried to add into a workflow but just ended up finding it took more work to add than it saved.

Freeform is surprisingly handy.

[jaywigley]

Thanks for the Freeform commentary. . .it was another app that Apple delivered that I was in the same skeptical boat as you. Only I had stayed there so now I will give it a second look. Is there an iPad version that I could run on an M1 Mac? The App Store doesn’t seem to surface one surprisingly.

I’ve had Drafts on my phone and Mac for a couple years but never “remember” to use it instead of Apple Notes. I’ve used it now and then but it’s just not something I keep in a rotation. I use Bear, especially since they released Bear 2.0. That’s the app I am most pleased with this past year. I had been a fan for a while and the “finally” release of their 2.0 version cemented it with love in my heart.

[Bmosbacker]

@jaywigley

Is there an iPad version

There is an iPad version, but I’m not sure about running it on the Mac. There is a separate Mac app. I have FreeForm on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Here is the link to the iPad version:

‎Freeform

[Bmosbacker]

@jaywigley

I’ve had Drafts on my phone and Mac for a couple years but never “remember” to use it instead of Apple Notes.

I also use Apple Notes extensively but I’ve found Drafts to be useful on my iPad or iPhone for pasting content from a webpage or word processor to strip it down to plain text to use elsewhere.

[jayelevy]

Easy one for me… WorkOutDoors

‎WorkOutDoors

This is a wonderful multi-purpose mapping, workout tracking, interval prompter, Swiss-army knife Apple Watch app. If you are seeking markedly more (IMO) flexibility over the native AW workout app, this is it.

I use it primarily for running, though it handles essentially any sport.

Key features I enjoy are the completely customizable AW screens with hundreds (really) of data elements available to display, fully customizable voice announcements, and great support for structured interval workouts (audio prompts throughout the workout, user-definable audio warnings based on various parameters (hr, pace, etc)). The list goes on. Oh, and it has a great workout view that lets you view data from your workout in a very customizable format. Again, rich with data.

It’s hard to describe just how comprehensive this app is. The geek in me is amazed by the thought that has gone in to this app and the configurability. At first glance and use it is overwhelming.

I’ve used many similar apps over the years (Apple native, Stryd, Runkeeper, RunMeter, Strava). WorkOutDoors is levels above.

Partner it with another awesome app, HealthFit, and you can easily export workouts to TrainingPeaks, Strava, and others. Speaking of HealthFit, I could easily write about it, too. It is another wonderful app.

‎HealthFit

[Denny]

Glad to hear Freeform is proving useful to you!

The unexpected winners for me: Obsidian, Shortcuts, Siri, Yoink

I’d tried that Obsidan several times before, but each time decided it wasn’t for me and generally went back to a combination of iA Writer and Notes for writing, notes, and collecting random bits. This time it’s proving a bit stickier. Why different this time?

• I looked a bit further at what didn’t work before. Namely, the interface fonts were too small, especially the sidebar file navigation. Found a fix which made a huge difference.
• Along the same line, I’d previously found the interface to be not quite right. As many have commented, it just felt a bit off. This time I’ve found a theme I like and am enjoying the experience more as a result.
• I added a new purpose/task to the app that I’m enjoying. Daily interstitial journaling. Thus far that’s also fairly sticky and Obsidian seems to be a good place for it. Though, in truth, that could also be done easily in Notes.
• Easy, one tap publishing to micro.blog. I moved away from WordPress entirely and have settled into micro.blog for 2 blogs previously hosted at WordPress. iA Writer has excellent publishing for micro.blog and so does Obsidian (via a plugin).
• I have come to prefer Obsidan’s sidebar over iA Writer for file navigation. Obsidian uses disclosure triangles to dropdown the file list of a folder which seems a bit easier than iA Writer’s use of columns that move one back and forth.

I’m thus far avoiding going crazy with Obsidian plugins. I have no desire to make this my do everything app. For me the job is for interstitial journaling, writing, blogging.

Shortcuts is less of a surprise as I’ve used it quite a bit over the past few years. But I’ve used it even more this year. Actually, I’d describe Shortcuts as a fundamental side-tool to much of what I do. I don’t really look for ways to use it so much as I more easily, naturally recognize processes that can be automated. It’s what Automator never became for me: A fairly easy to use tool for practical automations. Some automations only save me a few seconds, some save me minutes. And, like any tool, it really benefits from use and familiarity.

Siri! I know the popular opinion is that Siri as a big fail. Or at least that’s the way it’s usually discussed. I’ve always found it generally useful and the surprise this year was how much I appreciated the removal of the “Hey” part of the activation. Just a tiny word and tiny bit of friction. But a I use Siri constantly all day, every day I appreciated it immediately. Most used daily actions:

Home actions: Turning things off and on, asking the temperature of locations.
Reminders: This is the only way I add things to reminders. It works perfectly almost everytime.
Timers: For cooking, fairly often
Fact checks and searches: Constantly on the iPad
Sending texts while I’m out on walks

Yoink for clipboard management. Jason Snell recently wrote about wanting a native clipboard manager. I agree and would love Apple to add a native clipboard manager but until then Yoink works very well for me. On the M1 iPads it sits in the background monitoring the clipboard for hours everyday. Sometimes I’ll notice that it fell out of memory but that’s not often. With 8GB of memory it seems to be in a perpetual state of monitoring. Less so with an older device. As far as I know it’s the only app in this category (on the iPad/iPhone) that has this sort of background monitoring of the clipboard. Really useful when writing long replies like this in a browser. Every so often I just to a quick select all copy to ensure that I’ve got a back-up.

[KVZ]

Two winners for me in '23:

• CleanShot X, which keeps getting better. They added a feature (this year, I think) to pin a screenshot in an always-on-top window. This is very useful to me when I need to refer to something in one window while working in another. Just grab a shot of it and make it float. I probably use CleanShot X more than any other utility in the course of a week.
• Sip, a small but beautifully designed app that sips the color of an object so the color can be used in design work, by exposing the encoding for that color. It does what it does better than anything else I’ve tried. I first loaded Sip from SetApp on a whim, and immediately found it useful.

Katie

[Bmosbacker]

@Denny

Siri! I know the popular opinion is that Siri as a big fail. Or at least that’s the way it’s usually discussed. I’ve always found it generally useful and the surprise this year was how much I appreciated the removal of the “Hey” part of the activation. Just a tiny word and tiny bit of friction. But a I use Siri constantly all day, every day I appreciated it immediately. Most used daily actions:

I still run into frustrations, but I have noticed improvement over the last six months or so.

[svsmailus]

Obsidian. Syncs seamlessly on macos and android. I prefer it on android compared to iOS, the windows don’t swim about!

[Pupsino]

I still haven’t embraced Siri. I feel a bit uncomfortable with the privacy implications, which is daft really since I use iCloud… The kitchen timer function alone sounds like it would be worthwhile, since I set timers with my fingers on my (small!) Apple Watch screen currently!

[SebMacV]

My recent and incredulous discovery is Scribble on the iPad. It’s still a little hit und miss for accuracy as I guess the system needs to learn my hand writing, or more likely I need to start dotting my 'I’d and slashing my "t"s with a lot more care.

But I am handwriting this reply directly in the box on the screen and that is a little piece of magic.

Otherwise: Obsidian, Devon think, and Todoist, all of which have been rock-solid and giving me joy.

P.S. Writing these app names by hand just now took about 10 corrections so anything that is non-standard language is still a struggle for Scribble.

[cornchip]

I think my unexpected winner was moving to Downie. I never thought Downie was bad, but I’d been sure that yt-dl was all I needed. However, this year, what’s been working this year is to have a Youtube downloader that stays out of news cycles and isn’t perceived as a threat to revenue by Google.

[ryanjamurphy]

It sounds like you use this regularly. What for? I use Downie for plenty of one-off things but I’m curious about using it to escape the trappings of Youtube.

[rkaplan]

Unexpectedly Useful - 1Password8 - I had delayed updating given that I read so many concerns and mediocre reviews. I discovered that its use of the cloud makes syncing among devices instant and a total non-event and makes sharing with family super easy.

Plus its ability to add custom fields let me create automatic logins to sites I could never use with 1Password before.

Best of all - 1Password8 has an amazing emulator of Google Authenticator MFA so I need not take the 2nd step to look up MFA codes.

Biggest Disappointment - Widgets on Sonoma. I was really looking forward to this. But the inability to set widgets on a “per Space” basis makes it useless.

[cornchip]

I mostly use it to make mp3s. Downie’s default postprocessing is set to mp3. Hazel watches the output and sweeps it into the podcast sideloads folder. If I want to watch the actual video, I switch the post-processing type to mp4 while the download is in progress.

Channel subscriptions are in RSS (readers discover the feed URL when you paste in the channel page.) I just copy the URL from the RSS client and paste into Downie. Then I mark as read after getting what I actually want to hear or watch, so revisiting isn’t an issue.

There’s another nut I’d like to crack, which is using this approach to build a library of conversations and documented experiences. Part of replacing Youtube is replacing it as the place you go to see or hear something you’ve heard before. The metadata on Youtube is so poor and I hate how it trains us to hunt until a familiar thumbnail and title jumps at us. I It’d be something similar to the (hopefully) eventual answer to @beck 's unanswered question from a few days ago.

[hpm]

You may want to check out Training Today which looks at your health data to create a “Readiness To Train” score from 0 to 10. This is from the FAQ

“your Readiness To Train (RTT) score is a calculation based on your HRV data collected automatically by Apple Watch. We consider your 60-day baseline, the direction of the chart (which way it is sloping), smoothing and intensity values (which you can adjust), and feed them all into our algorithm to get your current value which ranges from 0 (total rest) to 10 (ready for peak performance).”

‎Training Today

[jslp]

Downie is awesome. I too use yt-dlp usually, but even on pesky sites where yt-dlp (or any alternatives) can’t figure out how to grab the video, Downie does it perfectly thanks to the guided download (not sure what it’s actually called) feature.

Downie saves a ton of time, not that I even use it particularly often these days. Permute by the same devs is also really polished, but now I’ve switched to teaching myself ffmpeg since my use case requires more complex video/audio transformations.

[pantulis]

Two unexpected winners for me:

• Buzz Transcriptions, I am still at awe how good it is with the largest Whisper models.
• Orion Browser, not much to dislike about this one and is as mac assed as it gets.

[AppleGuy]

Two unexpected winners for me would be Spotify and Spark. Must be the year of the S’s.

I’ve used both in the past and neither one is new to me, but I used them more consistently in 2023 than ever before.

Generally speaking, as a huge music fan with a fairly large range of tastes and albums in my “collection”, I can’t stand Spotify. The way they handle “artists” is weird to me. When you click on “Artists” it takes you not to a list of artists in your saved music library, but a list of artists you “follow” on Spotify. When you finally do manage to fumble onto an artists page, it lists all the songs in one giant, mushed together list. I’ve always maintained that it’s the worst app for a serious music listener. I don’t want a radio replacement, I want a shelf-with-700 CD’s replacement – most of the time.

That said, when I’m working, I like Lo-Fi music. Background music, jazz, piano, electronic etc etc. I can pop on a Spotify playlist, enjoy the amazing album artwork, and get to work. Apple Music has playlists in the same genres, but they miss the mark a lot. I’ll always get distracted by a song that seemingly has no business being in a particular playlist – or I find the music annoying instead of relaxing.

So, Spotify for background music when needed.

Second – Spark (free version). I’ve used it before, had privacy concerns here and there, found it a little slow to load emails. But it works so well. Using the stock app I’d get emails from people at work that I’d try to reply to – but I couldn’t, because the cursor would refuse to drop to a new line. My sentence would require scrolling horizontally. Also, when I snooze an email in Spark, it actually gets out of the way until the snooze is over. In Mail, it sits in the Inbox? What use is that?

Finally, I love how it formats all the emails to look the same. It’s not 100%, but it offers a far more consistent email experience than most apps. Emails don’t change font size randomly. I can also pin emails, and I don’t know – the whole experience is consistent and a joy to use.