This article was originally written for the December 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus.
For this issue of Hemispheric News, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this article to see what, if anything, has changed. Given our collective consternation about Electron, the average capabilities of Swift-based apps, and the sad state in general that Mac development seems to be in against the influx of web apps, has the Mac App of the Year category shown improvement?
In 2017 I defined the apps on the list as those I used extensively, value and enjoy. I also noted them as those I would most miss if they suddenly went away.
Given that criteria, my nominations for Mac Apps of 2022 are:
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire has taken the job of feed reading away from Reeder. NNW doesn’t do a lot, but it does what is needed. The app works fast, never crashes, and plays nicely on macOS.
Arc
Still in beta, this browser is efficient in our modern web world. I don’t use a number of its more esoteric features such as Boosts (site based code injection) or Easels (weird pinterest-like pages), but its ability to manage multiple independent spaces/containers that let me stay logged in to multiple Microsoft accounts - while keeping me spatially aware of which is which, is better than any other implementation I’ve found.
The only downside I feel is that it isn’t as battery-efficient as Safari, and I feel a bit guilty about that. It’s built on Chrome though, so at least every single website out there renders correctly.
OmniFocus
I continue to rely on OmniFocus to steer my work and my life. Having said that, after being on the v4 beta train on macOS for some time, I don’t love it. OmniFocus have taken a gamble and built the new app in Swift, and it seems they are really an excellent edge-case for the language. They are asking a lot of it.
I stick with OmniFocus at this point because I know it inside-out, I have workflows built around it, and it keeps me on track. I don’t love it nearly as much as I used to. This is unfortunate.
MarsEdit
A rekindling of my enjoyment for blogging has coincided with the enjoyment of using MarsEdit and the new version 5 has made it even better. There are still some weird things about the way it uses Markdown (I wish it had more affordances and keyboard shortcuts), and it intermingles HTML with Markdown too much in my view, but it is solid. Lots of other apps can push to my micro.blog host, but only MarsEdit offers a seamless editing experience.
I also love its browser extension, but I wish it was available for Arc.
MarsEdit remains an honest-to-goodness Mac app.
Launchbar
Without Launchbar I’m inefficient, and I don’t even remember to use half of its available features. I’ve tried to replace it with Alfred, and Raycast, but I always come back to Launchbar. It works how my mind thinks - or at least it has trained my mind to think like Launchbar. I wish development was faster and that third-party support was greater. But it works and I can’t be rid of it.
Agenda
Thanks to the additional shortcuts from friend of Hemispheric Views, Scotty Jackson, Agenda has become an important cog in my macOS arsenal. I use it to take day notes and meeting notes.
I don’t love its in-built text editor, so sometimes notes might start elsewhere (Drafts, iA Writer, Tot…) but then I can dump them into Agenda. It’s helpful to be able to find notes either by project/client or by meeting/date.
Agenda has seen a lot of development over the past year and it continues to scratch an itch.
Apps that are no longer on my list from 2017:
1Password
I use this app, but I do feel that if push came to shove, iCloud Keychain is probably good enough that I could move into that. 1Password has a few niceties that keep me using it, plus inertia. Also my mother-in-law is part of my Family account and
I dare not disrupt that workflow.
It is interesting to note that 1Password 8 uses an Electron front-end and a Rust backend. Not very macOS-like at all.
Logseq
I have fun using this app, but I could just as easily move its content into any number of other apps and go on just fine.
Logseq is another Electron-powered application and its current sync system makes me nervous.
Bear
I haven’t used Bear for years. Also for years, they were promising a new text engine. Agenda has taken over the role Bear once played.
Ulysses
I sometimes use Ulysses for work-related writing, but that’s about it. Any Markdown writing is done somewhere else, such as Drafts or iA Writer.
DEVONthink Pro
It’s like infrastructure in my system. I keep things in there. But I don’t enjoy using it. It has the capability to do almost everything that I use a whole bunch of other apps for. But it can be confusing, even after I’ve been using it for more than a decade.
StockMarketEye
I continue using the old version 4, despite version 5 being out for a few years. I like v4 more, plus its not a subscription. I don’t need much, and SME4 does enough.
Update: As of a couple of weeks ago, StockMarketEye has closed down.
Reeder
NetNewsWire took the crown.
PDF Expert
Wow, I haven’t used this for ages.
BusyCal
I’ve been on a Fantastical subscription for a couple of years, but don’t worry BusyCal because I’m coming back. The Fantastical price increases were too much, and I get BusyCal through Setapp, so come March I will be back as a full-time user.
Apps that came close in 2022:
Craft
Bike
Discord
Day One
This iPhone 15 Pronis my first one with an OLED screen and I love it.
I keep getting older. Not even an iPhone 15 camera can change that.
Finished Loki Season 2 and loved it. I wish it had a longer season but then it might have overstayed its welcome? 📺
This shortcut provides a quick and easy way to publish a quote from a Safari webpage (or in-app Safari web view), with or without a comment, to Micro.blog. Just select the text you want to quote, hit the share button in the toolbar, and run this shortcut. You’re given the option to add a comment and review the text before publishing.
I really like this Shortcut that Jarrod Blundy has created.
The RBA slugs the economy with another 0.25% interest rate rise. What a terrible decision. Monetary policy is a blunt instrument that smashes those who can least afford it, and benefits those who already have it.
On Episode 097 of my podcast Hemispheric Views we held a Duel of the Defaults! competition. Jason and Martin fought head-to-head to see who used the most default apps on macOS. As I was the compere and judge of the competition, it wasn’t for me to speak of my choices during the show.
For the sake of the record, and to follow some of ourloyallisteners who have blogged their defaults, here is my list:
Mail Client: Apple Mail & Fastmail Web App (plus MailMate)
Mail Server: Fastmail & Apple Mail
Notes: Obsidian (plus Agenda & Apple Notes)
To-Do: OmniFocus
iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
Photo Management: Photos.app
Calendar: BusyCal (plus Calendar.app)
Cloud file storage: iCloud (plus OneDrive)
RSS: Reeder with FreshRSS
Contacts: Contacts.app
Browser: Safari (plus Arc)
Chat: Signal
Bookmarks: GoodLinks
Read It Later: Readwise Reader (will be moving back to Omnivore)
Word Processing: Pages
Spreadsheets: Numbers (plus Excel)
Presentations: Keynote
Shopping Lists: AnyList
Meal Planning: AnyList
Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB
News: Apple News (plus ABC RSS feed)
Music: Apple Music
Podcasts: Overcast
Password Management: 1Password
I encourage you to join in the fun, both by blogging your defaults and listening to our show.
I’m having fun editing @HemisphericViews this week for E097. It’s a different and fun episode coming up!
Four months ago I took an opportunity for a career change. A move from consulting to managing two Centres of not-for-profit WA Police & Community Youth Centres. It’s been an opportunity to learn, grow and improve. What I love most is working for my staff. The people at Rockingham and Fremantle Centres are first-class. As their manager it’s my job to make their work days better. When employees are happy, customers win. Culture is king.
Tim Cook chasing more of that sweet services revenue. A 16% increase! Even though I don’t use Arcade & Fitness they still have me over a barrel.
I can hardly believe I’ve installed Obsidian again. It didn’t gel with me last time; let’s give it another go.
That, along with this being my very first time on the speaking side of a podcast rather than the listening side, made me quite nervous, but it paradoxically felt both exhilarating and completely comfortable to just chat with an internet friend. All those hours listening to RSS and another of Martin’s shows, the also great Hemispheric Views made it easy to jump into our conversation.
I enjoyed hearing from Jarrod just as much as I did other Internet luminaries such as John Siracusa, John Gruber and Jason Burk.
This article was originally written for the November 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus.
Martin has set me a challenge as to what to write about this month. He told me I have to write something about old office technology; maybe an office app feature that I used to use, or something similar.
Because I’m so old, I have many topics to potentially write about; but also because I’m old I have forgotten so many of them.
Ideas that I considered and discarded: fax machines, binding machines, shredders, Lotus Notes, Windows NT Workstation… All great things that I had to deal with that Martin did not.
In our current era we take embedding items as a given, notably in web pages, where elements are easily embedded, be they Flickr images, Twitter tweets, or podcast episodes. Adding multiple content forms in a single page is not innovative in 2022.
There was a time, however, where embedding items from one place into another was indeed innovative. It was Microsoft leading the innovation as they pushed the concept of OLE - Object Linking and Embedding. How amazing would it be to embed a live spreadsheet chart into your Word document. Make a change in the spreadsheet, and suddenly the chart data in your report is updated! Incredible! Excel not cool enough for you? No problem, create a view in Access and include that in your Word file. This was a time when the combined power of the MS Office Suite with its stylised puzzle art design on the box, actually made sense. You weren’t using a single application one at a time; you were working within a connected ecosystem.
At least… that was the dream.
Now it’s time to hit you with a dose of the reality from those times I tried to use OLE in a meaningful way within a work context. There were a number of drawbacks that I can recall — and I’m sure there were others that I do not. Let’s work through the shortlist of those I do:
PC Speed. The 166 MHz Pentium I was probably using, that would also have had limited RAM, didn’t love running multiple applications at one time. Having to run an instance of one program inside another one; well that made everything that much worse.
Hard Drives. Have you forgotten how slow spinning hard drives are? Try to think how slow a 5400RPM drive, running in an old PC with limited throughput, might handle swap files, which once OLE was enabled, was an automatic outcome.
File Servers & Sharing. This was an era of local files and a bit of network sharing via Novell Netware, or maybe the first instance of Microsoft’s network stack. I recall for a long time we had to use a terrible Document Management System called Hummingbird, which added version control and check-in/check-out features. Now imagine how well a system like that worked when one file was calling the contents of another file embedded within it. More often than not, if it was somebody else opening the file, they wouldn’t have access to the embedded data.
Printing. We used to print a lot. It was surprisingly difficult to get the window into the data displayed on screen in such a way that it would also print that way. And heaven help you if somebody clicked inside the OLE to activate it. There went your careful print-aligned view.
To be fair to Microsoft, they weren’t the only company going down this path. Apple tried something similar with the OpenDoc standard. It too, didn’t deliver.
In hindsight, all these years on, it is evident that this technology didn’t work. The ideas, however, of embedded content and live data, made sense. With web applications backed by database systems we’ve now arrived at a similar destination, albeit via a different route. However, I’m still not sure we have hit upon a complete standard, that OLE tried to deliver.
Maybe one day. For now, though, I do not miss OLE.
Not sure if this is a compliment or a brickbat, but I think I prefer micro.blog as a Sonoma Safari app ahead of the native Mac app. Sorry @manton and @vincent
