What Fine Apps Are You Drifting Away From?

bowline · February 1, 2019, 8:57pm

I do a surprising amount of quick-n-dirty spreadsheet calculations, including percentages, currencies and conversions, with Soulver.

https://www.acqualia.com/media/movies/SoulverIntro.ogv

gerrymcil · February 24, 2019, 1:35am

I couldn’t agree more. I loved Pocket Casts until their last big update. In all honesty, I believe it’s so called “user shock” but with the fundamental changes they’ve made to the app, they have seriously lacked in supporting documentation.

cornchip · February 24, 2019, 4:33am

I left PocketCasts when watchOS 5 came out because Overcast was ready and PocketCasts wasn’t. The redesign validated my choice a bit. I really miss seeing all my podcasts on a grid of icons, though.

Tim_Stewart · February 24, 2019, 8:14pm

When Snow Mojave comes out, will the wallpapers look like Hoth? If so, I want the early beta!!

tomalmy · February 25, 2019, 2:38pm

I’ve found some more. I’m writing an EBook on the Arduino. KindleGen (for Kindle epubs) and the AVR GCC compiler chain (for the Arduino) are 32-bit.

Isaac · February 25, 2019, 8:53pm

I moved to DTP from EN and have been very happy. It took a while for the AI to click. Once I figured out DT to Go on iOs it really made a difference. I started this thread back in June, and it helped me.

Yaakov · February 26, 2019, 3:37am

I am in a WIP with DEVONthink, but enjoying the process. All the best!

leo · February 27, 2019, 7:57pm

I’m slowly drifting away from Things, as their stubbornness towards the ability to save searches for reuse makes it hard to use.

Saved searches would allow me to seach within a specific project/area and filter by tags, which would come very close to perspectives in OmniFocus.

acavender · February 27, 2019, 9:10pm

Just in case it’s helpful: it actually is possible to save searches in Things, though it’s not baked in the way it is in OmniFocus.

Also, I can’t claim credit for this idea. I got it from another member of this forum, but my quick search to try to turn up the original thread was unsuccessful.

Here’s an example of a search I might want to save:

I can click on the three dots at the top, then select “Share” and “Copy Link.”

In my sidebar, I’ve created an area called “Saved searches.” Under that, I can create a new project. I’ve given it the name “Demo,” followed by the link:

That link is live, and clicking on it gets me a list of all tasks with that tag, divided by the actual project they belong to:

It works pretty well, though it is admittedly a bit limited. Things doesn’t seem to do Boolean searches, so it looks like you can only search for one thing at time.

leo · February 27, 2019, 10:08pm

Damn, I should create fake accounts just to be able to like your post multiple times!
I totally missed that this was added. They must haved added it along with the extended URL-scheme support.

Thank you!

acavender · February 27, 2019, 11:17pm

You’re welcome! I just wish I could remember which forum member I stole the idea from.

bodiequirk · February 28, 2019, 12:22am

True, but KeepIt still seems to have more active development than DEVONthink by far

acavender · February 28, 2019, 10:55pm

Argh! It appears this only works on the Mac. The changes sync over to iOS, but the links aren’t live there for some reason.

If anyone knows of a fix for this, I’m all ears…

acavender · February 28, 2019, 10:57pm

Nevermind. Adding the link to the notes field for the project (not just in the title) seems to do the trick.

iPersuade · March 1, 2019, 3:07pm

This deserves its own topic thread. I have literally made lists of all these apps that I have (particularly writing apps, PDF annotation tools, and note-takers) and how I use them, and pros and cons, etc. to determine how to make sense of it all.

omnifocuser · March 1, 2019, 6:53pm

TextWrangler is BBEdit’s free offering that I thought was still around, but now I see it’s been retired and merged back in with BBEdit. However BBEdit does come free with some features turned off after the 30-day evaluation period:

BBEdit offers a 30-day evaluation period, during which its full feature set is available. At the end of the evaluation period, you can continue to use BBEdit for free, forever, with no nag screens or unsolicited interruptions.

In “free mode”, BBEdit provides a modified set of features, which incorporates all of TextWrangler’s features, and offers unique features of its own. In the best tradition of TextWrangler, using BBEdit in free mode costs you nothing, while providing an upgrade path to advanced features and capabilities.

bowline · March 1, 2019, 7:00pm

TextWrangler was retired exactly two years ago.

The basic non-unlocked version of BBEdit 12 has more features than TextWrangler anyway, and gives more people a taste of what they could get by purchasing the unlock to the app. BB should have done this even earlier than 2017.

andrew.j.pfeiffer · March 9, 2019, 11:07pm

Airmail. Sync issues that caused emails to be temporarily or permanently lost. And now that OmniFocus mail drop links back to the original message (with application-independent URL schemes), I have no need for this on my iPhone (or Mac).
MS Office. I used this for ages, but Open Office works fine and is free!
Evernote. This was ages ago, but worth a mention. Using Dropbox, plain text files, etc. is just much cleaner - and accessible using Terminal! Getting all my stuff out of Evernote was a summer project, it took ages!

Robert · March 10, 2019, 10:31am

My MS Office subscription just ran out. I will try to get away without for a while. If I run into trouble I can still reactivate it.

Zack · March 11, 2019, 5:02am

For the past few years –like many people– I’ve bounced between the hottest “productivity” apps to make lists, take notes, outline projects, plan projects, etc.

But I’ve finally gone back to my one and only true love: .txt files in TextEdit

(And, of course, Notes…)