People sometimes ask me what apps I use, particularly on iPhone OS.

iOS (iPhone)

On my home screen:

  • Things – synced to Things Mac, but I use it mostly on my iPhone. I’ve recently grown frustrated with the lack of progress on this app. I use OmniFocus for work but it’s overkill for my personal list and has a confusing user interface, particularly on iPad, which is unusual for Omni Group. I have tried Apple’s new Reminders app and there are some things I like but it’s still bare bones functionality.
  • Groceries – I find this indispensable.
  • MoneyWell – synced to the Mac app. Still the best financial app, in my opinion, but the syncing is very buggy and often has to be reset.
  • Facebook – I use this far more often than the website.
  • Tweetbot – after the recent Twitter debacle, I went back to this app.
  • LinkedIn
  • Messages (Apple’s text message/iMessage app)
  • Analytics – great way to track what’s going on with my various sites.
  • Flipboard – now that this is available for the small screen, I’ve not touched Reeder or and I look at Tweetbot less.
  • Safari
  • Clock – I use this mostly for cooking (the timer).
  • Weightbot – fun and easy way to track your weight.
  • Settings – I wish there was a way to schedule muting the new mail sound.
  • Weather – because every single app gets Vancouver weather so wrong so much of the time, I keep the most simple and attractive weather app on my first screen.
  • Remote – to play music and podcasts on my Mac.
Others of note:
  • CycleMeter – amazing app to track bike trips via GPS.
  • Canadian (Canadian Oxford Dictionary) – I used to use CanOxford until Oxford apparently decided to switch developers, so I had to pay for this twice. This is one of those “future moments” apps: you’re carrying the entire Canadian Oxford Dictionary in a small slab in your pocket!) I much prefer this to dictionary sites: it’s faster, and it is the Oxford, not an “urban dictionary” or some such generally unreliable source.
  • OmniFocus – synced to my work laptop via MobileMe; I find this more appropriate for professional use than Things, and it’s good to keep things separate.
  • Flixster – what’s playing where.
  • Vancity – bank app.
  • Road Trip – good l/km and car expense tracking app.
  • Daylight – almost as useful as weather apps: lets you know when the sun rises and sets for any given day.

iOS (iPad)

  • Flipboard – One of my most frequently used apps. Great to have RSS and Twitter and assorted other things all in one place, and presented so beautifully.
  • Twitter – somewhat controversial user interface which I quite like
  • Globe & Mail – has improved a lot. Still frustrating how it auto-refreshes after a fairly short period of time, so if you were reading something you lose it.
  • The New Yorker – I subscribed on my iPad. (See the great intro video.)
  • New York Times – I subscribed on my iPad. Dumb how you have to subscribe separately on your iPhone or iPod touch, but I probably wouldn’t read it much there anyway.
  • The Guardian
  • TED
  • Keynote – Very handy at work; much easier to carry my iPad to a presentation than my laptop
  • OmniGraffle – I have to devote some time to learning this.
  • OmniFocus – syncs with my iPhone and Mac.
  • Remote – For control of my desktop iTunes
  • Flixster – Movies
  • Analytics HD – Google Analytics app

Mac OS X

I’ve been using the Mac since the 128K. After a quarter of a century, these are the apps I use every day.

  • NetNewsWire – RSS never seems to have caught on to the extent it should have. I find this absolutely indispensable, and much prefer it to Google Reader (to which it syncs). I like “hybrid desktop apps” better than web apps, almost without exception.
  • Tweetie
  • Adium – nothing beats it; all accounts in one highly customizable app. And it’s free (although most of the other apps here are very cheap).
  • Reunion – genealogy app.
  • Things – for personal GTD management.
  • MoneyWell – I reviewed a bunch of personal finance apps, and I thought this one was best. Syncs to the iPhone app (see above).
  • Delicious Library – beyond fun, a great way to manage and publish your library.
  • BBEdit – old reliable, the text editor I’ve used for virtually all markup I’ve ever done since the early days of the web. Every single word and tag on my Rhodes Chroma site, now totalling well over a million words (not counting markup), has been authored exclusively with this app.
  • Cornerstone – in my opinion, the best Subversion client for Mac OS X.
  • Interarchy – far and away the best ftp client for the Mac. It’s synced every file on my aforementioned Chroma site for over five years, but I’ve been using it for over a decade. I only occasionally use the ftp command line app.
  • Aperture – got this recently; still exploring.
  • OmniGraffle – still one of the best reasons to use a Mac. A joy. And they have a very liberal licensing policy: since I have a license at work, I can use it on my home computer for whatever I want. Brilliant.
  • Acorn – “The image editor for humans.” Enough said. Astonishes me that those who don’t really need all the bells and whistles (and accompanying performance hit) that Photoshop provides don’t move to this app.