Default apps in January 2025

Jan 09, 2025

I love these posts! Scroll to the bottom of the page for a bunch more of them.

My major update in January is switching from Obsidian to Bear.app for notes. This is a big deal for me. See this post for my early thoughts on this.

Software

• Mail: Gmail in general, Apple Mail to handle custom domain mail
• Mail server for custom domain: iCloud+
• Notes: Heavily Obsidian Bear.app, occasionally Apple Notes as a scratchpad
• Todo: Primarily Things, plus Apple Reminders for quick capture via Siri (which gets auto-imported into Things later)
  • I've left and come back to Things many times over the years. It's just so good.
• Launcher: Alfred. Previously Raycast, and way previously Quicksilver.
  • Related: I also use Karabiner-Elements to make the Caps key simulate "Hyper" key, and then I use that Hyper key to launch things with Alfred.
• Writing: Obsidian Bear.app for anything long-lived, and some iA Writer for ephemeral stuff
• Journaling: Obsidian Bear.app
• Blogging platform: Bear Blog (I guess I like bears)
• Coding: Visual Studio Code, Vim on rare occasion (I miss using Vim as my daily driver, but it doesn't make sense currently)
• Passwords: 1Password, but evaluating Apple Passwords
• Music: Spotify, with mixed feels
  • If I were single, I'd probably move to either Apple Music or YouTube Music to take advantage of one of the bundles. But I'm on a group plan with my wife, and she'll kill me if I make her migrate.
• Terminal: macOS Terminal with Fish shell
• Mindfulness: Waking Up
• Photo library: Google Photos (it was the first to have good library sharing between my wife's and my accounts)
• Calendar: Most Google Calendar, some Apple Calendar
• Window management: Rectangle Pro
• Cloud Storage: Google Drive for documents and general archival, iCloud Drive for iOS backups and letting my wife send a gazillion videos via Messages
• Contacts: Google Contacts
• Browser: Mostly Chrome, but trying on Safari
• RSS: Reeder Classic
• Budget: YNAB
• Backup: Arq
• Pomodoro: Session
• Cooking: Trying both New York Times and America's Test Kitchen. I save recipes to Obsidian Bear.app.
• News: Evaluating The Economist (paper version), New York Times (Sunday paper version)

More defaults

Here are other defaults pages I've found while thinking about this post.

• There's a big list at Hemispheric Views - App Defaults
• My Default Apps at the End of 2024 | Kev Quirk
• Default Apps for 2024 | Brandon's Journal
• Default Apps for 2024 | Linkage
• My Default Apps 2024 | Rant Notes Graveyard
• My Default Apps for 2024 | Digitally Nick
• My default apps 📱 | gobino's bites
• App defaults [fromjason.xyz]

Cheers!