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!
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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).”
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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.
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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.
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.
The JetBrains suite of tools (I use DataSpell, Pycharm, CLion and WebStorm) has released its own chatbot that is integrated into the IDEs. It is nothing short of a miracle for my workflow. I can copy code from one IDE and paste it into another and it converts language. Also, refactoring is much better than ChatGPT4 as it is trained on much better data. It automatically writes GIT commits, adds documentation and error handling to code and makes great suggestions for improving code. A close second is Adobe Creative Cloud’s AI; in particular, the image generation in Illustrator has allowed me to design media for presentations and saved me so much time in dealing with the media department where I work.
I’ve really wanted to get into using a read it later apps and when Readwise Reader came out I thought it would be the app that makes me want to save articles from the web. However, I never use it as I read articles when I see them and never need to save them (if I need anything for research, it gets saved into DEVONthink). In the end, I saved a grand total of two articles and ended up removing the app as I really do not need a service like that when I keep all my research in DT.
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Very interesting - I will give that a try- thank you for the suggestion
Thanks for this. Not familiar with the app… I will check it out
I could not agree MORE! The Spotify UI has gone downhill for years now. I am old enough to have grown up with mixed tape cassettes; to have a CD collection; saved lots of MP3 in lovingly curated folders; and so on – and so the new ways in which S likes to promote new services (podcasts; audio books; concert tickets); and their general ‘organisational’ features, make it a very bloated app that’s unpleasant to use to me,
I’ve also been a subscriber for many years, in part because I am lazy and can’t face moving my stuff to Apple Music. I’m listening to a ‘Deep Work Jazz’ playlist at present (of my own making). And when I just wanted to change over a tune, this popped up and it says it all really:
I recently bought a refurbed iPhone 12 for my other half and she expressed an interest in changing over to Apple Music so perhaps it’s now finally on the cards.
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The unexpected winner for me is an app that has not been released yet and it’s currently in beta. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to disclose any details about it, but it has replaced Ulysses for my long-form writing and iA Writer for short-form. I believe many users of this forum will be very happy with this app.
Apart from that, I’m really enjoying using FS Notes. It’s very fast and keyboard-friendly—two features that most note apps seem to be lacking these days.
but it has replaced Ulysses for my long-form writing and iA Writer for short-form.
Will you let us know about it when you are able? As a Ulysses user, I’m interested.
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Just commenting because I’m in the same boat. Would love to know what it is, I’m really interested now.
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Me too; I like Ulysses a lot, so I’d be surprised to find something even better. 
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Sounds like nvUltra!
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Sorry folks, it wasn’t my intention to create suspense. It’s the new app from Literature & Latte: Something New: Beta Testers Needed | Literature and Latte
Unfortunately, they are not accepting new beta testers for now.
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