| There are a ton of little macOS apps I love. Part of the reason I’m married to the Apple ecosystem, despite wanting to switch out of it. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in iA Writer over the years. It’s the only way I can get any writing done, I find every other writing app too distracting. Somebody on HN called it an “overpriced minimalist lifestyle app” in a reply to one of my comments, not realizing that the minimalism is a real feature for those of us who have brains that work differently. In the same vein, the only task management app I can use without tearing out my hair is Things. It makes a distinction between the start date for a task and the deadline, which very few other apps do. I might want to start working on my presentation on Monday, but it might not be due for another two weeks. Those two dates are different! I don’t understand why few other apps allow you to do this. I feel a sense of physical anxiety when all my tasks in Apple Reminders show up in red because that app is just the worst. MindNode and Bike Outliner are great “tools for thought”, if you like to brainstorm digitally. I’ve tried infinite canvas apps like Freeform and Muse for this, but I personally prefer the structure of an outliner or mind map. MindNode is my favorite app to fire up when I need to break down a big idea into smaller chunks, or when I need to drill down into the specifics of a problem, or when I want to impose some structure on the chaos of the problems I’m dealing with at work. These are the apps I miss when I use Windows or Linux. If I ever switch to a non-Apple computer as my primary machine, I might get irritated enough with what’s on offer to build clones of these apps. Nothing like them exists on Windows or Linux, despite my attempts to look for equivalents every few months. |