Mimestream native mail client.

Fantastical – alternative to Apple Calendar. It has natural-language event entry, calendar sets, multiple-time event proposals, and conference call detection. It can hide events and ignore notifications from shared calendars.

Things – to do manager. I dump everything into this.

Safari as go-to browser. Main features: performance, battery life, tab-sharing with iPad and iPhone.

Arc for workspaces and ad hoc scrapbooks / dashboards (via Easels feature).

Google Chrome for when I need multiple personae. (Maybe I will switch to Arc now that it supports this.)

Apple Shortcuts

Raycast Spotlight (and Alfred, and Quicksilver) replacement.

Better Touch Tool can distinguish some keys that Raycast can’t. It is also the best tool for adding items and displays to the Touch Bar. (It does a lot more than this, but that’s all I use it for.) See

Keyboard Maestro. All my app launch shortcuts, plus a few more complicated macros to manage Sidecar and my VPN. See

StreamDeck: out on loan.

Visual Studio Code (VSCode). Previously: vi, emacs (for decades), Sublime Text (years) and Atom (ditto).

Typora is a markdown editor with code and WYSIWYG modes. Visual Studio Code with markdown extensions keeps improving but I still occasionally use Typora. I went ahead and paid for Typora because I got so many years of use out of it while it was in free beta, but I now use VSCode for editing Markdown since VSCode has caught up in so many ways and I’ve generally got it open when I’m editing Markdown anyway.

Git and Github. (Previously: Perforce, Subversion.)

GitHub Desktop. I prefer this to the command line now that I don't use git every day, and for quick visual review of changes (although VSCode is catching up in this regard).

Kaleidoscope is a folder and file comparison app. It also does conflict resolution (only for files, not people).

More recently, I’m evaluating Warp.

Dash documentation browser. (I've contributed a couple of shortcut Cheat Sheets to this.)

MDN developer documentation.

Duck Duck Go’s Bang shortcuts. I use Raycast (and formerly Keyboard Maestro) to create key bindings for these.

Octotree browser extension for exploring code in GitHub online.

Pixelmator Pro for quick and easy photo editing, retouching, and compositions.

Affinity Photo (Adobe Photoshop alternative) for more involved photo projects. It is slower to launch; many things that can be done in either Pixelmator or Affinity can be done more easily in Pixelmator; but Affinity is more capable when Pixelmator hits the wall.

Affinity Designer (Adobe Illustrator alternative).

OmniGraffle for diagrams. Magnets and movable arrows diagramming simpler and more flexible in OmniGraffle than any workflow I’ve yet found for Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, or Sketch.

Sketch for vector graphics. Most of my work is straight-up diagraming or illustration, not UI design, so I’ve mostly switched to Affinity Designer for what I used to use Sketch for.

Sip application-independent screen color picker and formatter.

PixelSnap for taking screen measurements. (Previously: XScope.)

Typeface is a font book. It organizes the fonts and includes sample text.

Final Cut Pro is my general-purpose go-to video editor. I prefer the Magnetic timeline, and of course its performance and crash-free experience, to Adobe Premier.

DaVinci Resolve. I am learning this; I may switch to it from Final Cut Pro.

Screenflow for editing screencasts. It's simpler than Final Cut Pro / Resolve, and has built-in support for adding keyboard and mouse annotations in post-production (so that you don't have to burn them in at recording time).

Permute for quickly transcoding media files.

QuickTime Player for video playback, and for quick video editing (trimming and extracting clips) when it's not worth creating a Final Cut project.

Elmedia Player is an alternative to QuickTime Player, with better support for playhead positioning and subtitles.

Downie for downloading videos from web sites – generally to use as B roll or as backup during presentations.