Gosh. This changes. No way to name one all time favorite.
Right now, with iPad as my preferred device, it’s Pages and Affinity Photo for work. Oh, and Textastic, also for work. Messages for fun and communication. Reeder for RSS - been using that for years one Mac and iOS. Twitterrific.
A few years ago FileMaker Pro was getting much more use and I consider it one of my all time top 5. I still use it often for client invoices and astronomy observations. Works great on the iPad!
Dancing Demon on the TRS-80? (you SAID ever). If you want to limit me to this century I’d probably have to go with OmniFocus. No matter how many different productivity apps I try I end up back there.
But programming black and white graphics using pixels the size of my fingernail? Saving the program to a cassette tape? Does it get any better than that?
Sketch is where I make all my vector graphics on macOS. I have Affinity Designer and have never opened it. Yet. I make graphics on iOS with Affinity Photo.
iOS: Documents from Readdle is the best document viewer and organiser I’ve used and especially the possibility to sync folders on e.g. NAS, SMB network folders, Dropbox etc. is great. Annotating with the Pencil works very nicely.
macOS: I love playing with Mathematica Home edition - I have been fascinated by this since I saw Mathematica running on a NeXT cube in my university bookstore in 1989 or so.
Notes! This simple app has been my go to vault forever. I throw bits of info in there on all subjects often and file away later. I always teach new IOS users how to use it.
Easily Alfred. I switched to using a MacBook Pro in 2015 after using Windows all my life. Alfred made me a faster Mac user in less than a week than I was ever able to use Windows. I use many more power apps now, but one of the first things I look for is their Alfred workflows others have made. It makes OF and Fantastical and so many others on my Mac more powerful.
I might just bring my iPad with my task manager to work. It might take a bit of convincing with the upper management but if they can see that your work performance will be better with your preferred tools and they’re not paying for it, they’ll probably let it go. But f you can convince them to buy you one, more power to you!
I think you’d have to be in a location with high security concerns that would prohibit bringing your own device. I’m thinking military installations or closed access areas like federal/local courts or inside airports where outside technology such as cellphones, tablets, and caneras are usually not allowed. Some places might put firewalls and block website access. Some of the office places I’ve visited usually block Facebook, Twitter, and popular sports sites. But they might also block others because the company doesn’t want internal company information residing on external servers.
But no one can stop you from using pen and paper. It’ll be tough but we gotta find a way to make it work somehow.
It’s been a long time but I still have very fond memories of MacDraw. It was one of the first Mac programs that I used and I was astonished at how much better it worked for me than the alternatives that I had available at the time. My other favorites were mostly text editors that I lived in while I was coding and writing. Two of the most memorable were Flash for the Xerox Alto and GNU Emacs for pretty much everything else.
Hypercard… introduced “programming” to me. By the late 1980’s, a colleague and I wrote a progress note program (stack) for us Neonatal Nurse Practitioners to use to manage infants in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
I have been using Sketch for more layout, but i still use illustrator for the bulk of my logo/icon design. I have not tried Affinty on either Mac iOS will have to check it out for iOS.
For the most part, I think I could sub out a bunch of my favorite apps with something else albeit maybe a little inferior and maybe that could be the case with 1Password as well but I’m not sure I can comprehend how valuable a password manager is. It’s just part of life for me.
My “can’t live without it app” has to be Drafts. It changed the way I work, to be infinitely better. My workflow depends on it. Speaking of workflows, WorkflowHQ is at the top of my list, too.
