Defaults 2024

Last year’s inventory of application defaults was fun. At the time I had noted several apps I wanted to replace. Let’s see how things shook out.

• Mail server: Dreamhost
• Mail client: Thunderbird, Mail.app on iOS
• Calendar: Calender.app but interested in trying BusyCal (but still haven’t yet)
• Contact management: Contacts.app
• Browser: Firefox on desktop, Safari on iOS (not like there’s a choice!)
• Chat: Messages.app, Signal
• Notes: Obsidian and Standard Notes
• To-do: Obsidian, Standard Notes, Reminders.app
• Photography: Camera.app and currently iPhone 15 Pro
• Photo management: Photos.app
• Photo editing: Acorn
• Image compression: Squoosh
• Word processing: Libre Office, Google Docs
• Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Libre Office
• Presentations: I don’t do these often, but the only one I did in 2023 was with Miro
• Visual thinking / wireframing: Miro, Freeform.app
• Color picker: Pika
• Shopping lists: Not really, but sometimes I’ll note something out of the regular rotation I want to remember in Standard Notes or Obsidian
• Meal planning: Nope
• Budgeting and finance: Nope
• News: RSS feeds
• Music: Apple Music
• Podcasts: Nope
• Code editor: VS Code (minor 2024 update: waiting for better HTML autocomplete in Nova)
• Text editor: BBedit
• Mastodon: Web on Desktop, PWA of web app on mobile
• Backups: Weekly Time Machine back-ups to a G-Technology 4TB drive
• FTP: Transmit, yes I still use FTP for a few things and Transmit is awesome
• Batch image processing: Retrobatch
• Screenshots: Mostly built in OS screenshots with some CleanShot X when I need to annotate, use backgrounds, etc.
• Search: DuckDuckGo, with occasional follow-up Google for code questions

These are the ones where I did change my default app.

Last year’s entry went like this: “Mostly Dropbox, some iCloud, testing out Proton Drive”.

I went on to discuss my dislike of the Dropbox app’s mobile privacy settings and that I wanted to give Proton a proper try to see if it was ready for prime time.

Perhaps this time next year Proton Drive will be my main cloud storage.

Yeah, no. In my limited tests the desktop version encountered syncing issues on a multiple occasions. Their support was prompt and helpful, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable using it beyond copying specific files I’d like be to be able to access on mobile from Dropbox to Proton. Maybe next year? But guessing probably not.

From last year’s post…

After writing the above paragraph (that noted that I had previously tried Inoreader and wasn’t willing to switch) I went back and signed in to my Inoreader and NetNewsWire accounts. Happy to report Inoreader seems much more like a contender than my first review, and they’re having a nice holiday special. I’ll probably grab the holiday deal and slowly migrate/test it out.

And…

We’ll see if Inoreader has replaced Feedly by this time next year.

Ding, ding. We have a winner! Not only was it an easy transition, I like Inoreader much more than I ever liked Feedly.

Ugh, Omnivore. It was going so well at this time last year!

Aside from a few galling choices, such as lack of flexibility in export options and handwaving repeated requests for a simple export to CSV (“people can just use the the API”), Omnivore was exactly what I wanted in an read-it/find-it-later app.

An unfortunate thing that turned out to be fortunate was that I noticed that the “ai-ideas” channel in their Discord server was active enough to prompt me to have an exit plan.

Because of this I found a python script to export my library to CSV, and created a reminder (Reminders.app, still a default!) to run the script weekly. This meant I had an up to date CSV file of all my 900+ saved articles that I may never read again ready to go when the inevitable happened.

In fairness, the save to Obsidian feature turned out to be the thing I liked the most, and the thing I can’t find anywhere else. I ended up migrating to Raindrop, and while it doesn’t have offline reading in the way that I would like, I am making great use of the Collections feature and have so far imported bookmarks from all my failed bookmarking attempts of yore, including Pinboard, Instapaper, Pocket, and Evernote. I’m also going to create collections for my saved mobile tabs, which I have been backing-up annually since 2021. I might make a post about all of this later.

The most annoying thing is that I would use the Apple weather app if I could read it during the day.

Yeah, I just gave in and now use Apple’s weather app exclusively, despite still hating the lack of daytime contrast and ability to customize appearance.

Nothing on the radar to swap for next year, we’ll see if anything changes. Hopefully I’ll even make a post or two between now and then. Happy defaulting in 2025!