I like first-party software. To be more exact, I like using good first-party software. It feels faster, better integrated, truly native, and purposefully designed to work with the hardware. This feeling may not be based in reality: some third-party apps can be better, and some preinstalled apps can suck.
On my Apple devices (don’t get me started on first-party software on Windows), I continue to use Safari for now, I love Apple Mail, and frequently use Maps, Notes, and Reminders. Other than these precious few, my overall computing revolves around a few third-party apps listed below.
Let’s start with the simplest setup of all: my dear MacBook Air. Uninstalling apps is one of my favourite things to do when it comes to organising my digital life, and, now that most of them have been uninstalled already, I am left with the essence of the software I need for my daily activities: four glorious apps.
MarkEdit・I’ve mentioned this app many times now, and it’s just great: pure, fast, with the ideal set of features and refinements.
Maestral・Easy to forget that it’s there: light, reliable, and the only GUI I interact with does its job well: indicating the status of the Dropbox sync in the menu bar (the way i publish on Blot).
NetNewsWire・I’ve tried many other apps for RSS over the last couple of years: Unread, Lire, ReadWise Reader, the old Reeder, the new Reeder, and for me, none of them come close to the “barebones-iness” of NetNewsWire, which I’ve grown to love.
GoodLinks・Without the recently-added highlight feature, it was already one of my four main Mac third-party apps, so, with it, it will be a tough one to uninstall.
Below are only listed the apps that I chose to install myself, not the few that are managed by the IT department.
Things・If you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, you are probably aware that Things is one of my favourite apps around. The word I want to use the most when describing this app is “delightful” but this app is so much more than that.
MeetingBar・When you work from home 95% of the time, being able to quickly glance at your menu bar and know exactly when your next online meeting starts is great, but having a hotkey shortcut to join that same meeting is precious.
Pastebot・I’m pretty certain that there are better clipboard manager apps around, but this one has proven to be very reliable and efficient. I may only use about 20% of its features but it’s been working great for me in the past couple of years.
ChatGPT・In my line of work, it’s very handy to have an assistant like that able to provide me with good-enough translations, quick feedback on an outline or an idea, or help me find synonyms or different formulations for a sentence or title. The Mac app is decent, justified mostly by the quick access shortcut feature.
MacWhisper・I barely use this very good app, but when I do, I want it to run smoothly. That’s why it lives on the M1-powered MacBook Air from work and not on my personal Intel-powered MacBook Air. I’d appreciate it even more if it didn’t seemingly need an update every time I launch the app, though.
BBEdit・Yep. I’m surprised by this too. While I don’t plan to adopt it as my main app, it’s just a great powerhouse of a tool to have around. If you work with text, any kind, BBEdit surely will help. Straightening and educating quotes? Sure. Removing blank lines or line breaks? No problem. Advanced finding and replacing? You bet. This app can do so many things, while also being pretty darn good as a simple scratchpad or writing app: safe, trustworthy, and it has that intriguing je ne sais quoi that makes me want to use it more (Things has that too). It doesn’t suck® indeed, but what feels like hours needs to be spent in the settings and menu options for it to be efficient enough, which I find overwhelming. I use the free version, but once or twice a year I subscribe for a month while I need to use a few specific premium features.
I won’t list all the necessary banking and local transport apps here because I don’t really see any value in sharing them (Trainline is good though), so I’m just going to focus on apps that might interest you or may be useful to someone you know.
1Writer・From the same developer who is already behind GoodLinks, this app is one of the best Markdown editors for the iPhone. It recently replaced Apple Notes for my personal notes because I wanted to use text files instead of the Notes database. These files are now synced via Dropbox (which this app can conveniently connect to) because the iCloud Drive syncing was acting up.
WhatsApp・Hard to not use WhatsApp if one cares about staying in touch with friends and family in Europe. The app itself is actually pretty good: fast, well made, and most of its features make a lot of sense in a messaging app.
RAW Power・My app of choice when it comes to photo editing. I edit all the photos taken with my beloved Ricoh GRIIIx on my iPhone, using the RAW format. I find it much more responsive and efficient at managing large photos than my aging non-ARM-powered Mac. The app needs some time and effort to get used to, but it works well and does everything you need. I prefer it to the great Photomator because the pricing model works better for me: one-time buy, and you’re good to go.
Image Sync・The app I need to use to download pictures from my camera wirelessly. I wish it could connect faster to the camera, but it’s fine. I’ve also been very happy with the USB-C port of the iPhone 15 to import photos en masse to the phone directly in the Files or Photos apps via an SD card reader.
NetNewsWire・Just like GoodLinks, this app is also on my phone: I find the iOS version of the app to be just as good as the Mac app, if not better.
The Sequoia update pushed me to try the new Video Viewer Safari feature so the great Vinegar is not listed below. It may come back in a couple of days, but as I’m writing this, Vinegar is not in use. I want this list to be as accurate as possible. You’re welcome.
Wipr・The only Safari extension you need, I think. I only use the three content blocker parts and have disabled the “Extra” add-on to make my life easier when it comes to managing which website gets which content blocker activated or not (and potentially make Safari less sluggish?). The Wipr 2 release appears to be just around the corner, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.
Feedbin・The backend for my RSS syncing needs. The web app is great too, and although it’s rather on the expensive side, there is not a single thing to complain about in terms of its software.
EditGPT・My proofreading tool of choice. It is based on ChatGPT, but the UI makes a lot of sense for me and for my needs regarding grammar, spelling, and style checks. It will be interesting to see how this compares to Apple’s upcoming Writing Tools.
Many apps I love are sadly not installed on any device right now, because I don’t have a use for them, despite being great and lovable. Drafts, iA Writer, Tot, The Archive, StopTheMadness, StopTheScript, Piezo, Kino, etc. All great apps that I can only recommend.
Recent previous editions:
I’ve been using Safari since around 2005, when the first Windows version was made available.1 Back then, I loved the way iTunes worked and looked, so I was all in for Safari on Windows. Two years later, I continued to go deeper into the Apple World by getting my first Mac: the 2007 iMac, the first made in aluminium, and only the second iMac to feature an Intel processor.
Today, after nearly 20 years of loyalty to Safari, I’m considering switching to another default browser on my personal computer. I mean, why is it so hard to watch a YouTube video without hiccups, and why can I only choose from a selection of 4 search engines, including three Bing-based?
I had a similar hesitation back when there was this controversial redesign a few years back. Apple eventually allowed users to revert to the old Safari design in settings, but there were a lot of debates and talk about Safari’s direction and about what Apple’s priorities should be regarding its cherished and despised WebKit browser.
While I immediately appreciated some of these changes (especially the URL bar at the bottom of the screen on mobile for instance), I gave the new desktop design a chance but ended up keeping it “traditional.” The whole thing felt like a lot of noise about nothing, but surely a sign that Safari wasn’t getting better fast enough. Group tabs and user profiles are welcome additions, but I feel like the essentials of the web browser are lagging behind some of the competition.
Maybe this is part of the web development community and some of their practices, or Google’s — in its own selfish interests, but for instance I found that Safari is particularly under-performing while using YouTube, and, to a lesser extent, Google Workspace web apps and some public service websites, often only optimised to work on Chrome’s engine.
When I watch YouTube videos, my computer heats up, and the battery drains quickly. I initially attributed this to the aging Intel processor of my early 2020 MacBook Air, or speculated that Google might be nudging users towards Chrome, which presumably handles YouTube better. I’m not sure anymore. Nonetheless, in the past few months, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with Safari, having to toy around extensions like StopTheMadness or Vinegar just to be able to enjoy my web browsing times. This is when I started considering alternatives and keeping an eye out on what is available.2
I’ve experimented with other browsers. I even gave the latest version of Firefox a try. My frustration with Safari stems from its less-than-smooth performance and limited search engine options. Meanwhile, new browsers like Arc and SigmaOS are innovating in terms of UI and functions, with features like integrated content blockers, JavaScript functions per site, note-taking systems, and side-by-side tab views.
Meanwhile, Safari remains conservative and simple, which could be a welcome philosophy in the age “A.I. this and A.I. that” but in that particular case, this feels outdated, and missing the point on making it great under the hood. By itself, Safari’s performance has not been particularly great in the past couple of year. I guess it has been fine, and resting on the “historical” advantage of preserving the Mac battery life better. Other than this well-deserved reputation, the rest of the app feels a little out-of-time and lacking appeal.
I’m not savvy enough to talk about web standards, web engines, and HTML rendering and such. I’m just a user, for whom the web browsing experience isn’t getting better, while the browser features mirror a lack of ideas and will to make Safari truly better, competitive, and attractive to new users.
As a symbol of this, Safari’s reading list feature has seen zero updates in the past 12 years. It remains impractical, providing minimal information on saved articles — only the title and URL — with no indication of reading time or authorship. There is also no default reader mode for articles, making the reading list nearly indistinguishable from simply bookmarking a page.
This lack of functionality can push users to alternatives like Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, or Goodlinks. These services are great and work well on Safari, but for other apps and tools, like search engines, extensions can be a getaway to eventually using another browser, where better versions of the extensions often exist if they even exist in the first place.
Paradoxically, I keep using Safari because of its high-quality extensions. Despite not having many, the ones I use are excellent, such as the Wipr content blocker, Vinegar, StopTheMadness or StopTheScript. I wish some of these features would become natively integrated into Safari, like the ability to disable JavaScript on a per-site basis, which currently isn’t possible. Without these extensions though, Safari is almost unusable, and while this is also true for other browsers, they don’t suffer from the same performance and lack-of-features issues.
I’m contemplating trying the Safary Technlogy Preview to see if any of its regular improvements could make Safari more competitive: I’ve read one day that the way Safari is updated — linked to OS update — is one of the reason for its limited evolution and incremental improvements.
Speaking of WebKit, I worry about the future of browsers based on the WebKit engine. If users increasingly switch to Blink-based browsers like Chrome, particularly in regions like the EU, fewer websites will end up being tested on WebKit, and Apple’s commitment to maintaining Safari may wane, along with Safari support by extension developers. This will get worse with the weakened position of Safari on iOS. This can potentially lead to an even greater influence of Google in the adoption of web standards, a scenario I find concerning given Google’s existing influence over the web itself.
This trend highlights a paradox in the Digital Markets Act, which aims to provide more user choice but might — ultimately — lead to less diversity in browser and web engine options. As of today, whether we like it or not, and whether Apple abuses its dominance or not, Safari plays a critical role in preventing Chrome from completely dominating the market, but this is definitely not an excuse for Safari to stagnate and to reign exclusively on iOS and iPadOS. John Gruber writes:
Imagine if Chrome could deplete your iPhone battery as fast as it does your MacBook battery. Imagine if you were one of the millions (zillions?) of people whose “incognito mode” browsing history was observed and stored by Google and deleted only after they lost a lawsuit. Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit.
This is fair, but it is also fair to say that if Safari were truly better — a truly great browser — made available on other platforms (like iCloud is on Windows, and like Apple Music is on Android) and not only hiding behind its battery efficiency legacy on Apple platforms, maybe Chrome would not be so popular in the first place. Nobody is forced to use Chrome and its Blink engine, even on Android (I think?), and even if most people are victims of a groupthink effect and effective — if not questionable — strategies from Google. Anyone can decide not to use it, but many still do. Chrome is not a fatality, it’s factually a choice. This cannot be said about Safari on iOS and iPadOS.
The signs of Safari going downhill have been on display for a while, but I guess we decided to look away. It’s disheartening to see Safari, a browser that introduced me to the world of Apple and Mac, in such a downfall, becoming a shadow of its former self, a decline that seems mostly self-inflicted. I’m not the only one feeling like this. Recently, this is what Michael Tsai wrote:
I’m having so many problems with Safari for Mac: sites that don’t work properly, or that stall and stop updating, or that forget that I just logged in; the app beachballing for 30 seconds at a time, the whole browser getting wedged and not loading any pages until I restart it. After 20 years of using Safari, I find myself using Chrome more and more, and it seems faster and much more reliable. (Surprisingly, it even offers more search engine choices than Safari.) I don’t like this. Chrome is still not as good of a Mac app, and I want it to have solid competition. But Apple has dropped the ball, and Chrome “just works.”
Apple needs to spend more resources on their browser, and find new ambitions for it now that it will be more challenged on iPhones and iPads. The world needs a strong, well-funded alternative to Chrome. Maybe the Apple Intelligence features and A.I. will be one way to help Safari, but I’m pretty sure this won’t be enough, unless Apple starts becoming more ambitious with their browser and the web engine behind it.
After watching the 2024 iPhone event yesterday, I had a good night’s sleep to reflect on what I saw, and here are nine quick observations, powered by an early morning coffee, and yet untainted by other people’s opinions (that I will start reading tonight after work).
Apple — as far as I can tell — is the only big tech company with such a big focus on health. I think that besides Cook, VP of health Dr. Sumbul Desai was the Apple employee most on screen. This focus on health is obviously a great selling point for Apple, and seeing all the things the Apple Watch can do today (now capable of detecting sleep apnœa), I’m always tempted to get one for myself or my mother. The features and their benefits for the user are indeed very convincing, and now it seems that Apple wants to bring this health approach to the AirPods and Beats lineups too.
The new Apple Watch was introduced by Tim Cook as featuring a brand-new design, but I was a little disappointed when it was revealed a few seconds later, as it is basically the same design, same looks, but thinner. I don’t pretend to know what a new Apple Watch design should look like, but maybe they should have simply said “same great design, even thinner.” Also, despite this thinner design, I found that most of the speakers in the video were wearing an Apple Watch on their wrists that looked oversized, with the band almost coming at a right angle near the case (not flushed against the skin). I wonder if they don’t want to wear smaller-sized watches when filming these videos.
Some products from the last couple of years only had small updates this year: the AirPods Pro, with USB-C and the hearing test/aid feature via an upcoming software update, the AirPods Max, with a few new colours and USB-C, while the Apple Watch Ultra got a new black colour, which I think looks pretty cool with the orange accents. They allowed the speakers of yesterday’s event to mention updated lineups, but I found it very strange that the Apple Watch SE was not updated but still mentioned, and the iPhone SE - now two and a half years old - was shown but not really mentioned. It’s a rather bad look to let the value of the cheapest products decrease while the regular products get better every year for the same price. Updating the SE models more regularly would avoid this two-tier look I believe.
The iPhone Pro lineup always had the best camera for stills and video, along with the best features for recording, such as Dolby Vision and Apple ProRAW. I appreciate that they have added sound quality to the list of “Pro” multimedia features of the iPhones Pro this year, with the new microphones. The new Voice Memos app looks really cool, and I can see how it can become a very popular tool. It’s just strange that it’s still called “Voice Memos.”
The new Camera Control button is a bit disappointing. For a camera button I believe I’m not the only one who expected a simple two-stage button, with the first stage locking the focus and/or exposure, and the second stage taking the picture. This would have been simple and great, and I’m sure Apple would have been capable of designing the “best button ever” for that purpose. The new capacitive button can do that, but may be tricky to use with gloves or with a case, and feels a bit complicated. I don’t think all the settings it can access are more useful than having a single function at a time for the half-pressed state. Maybe this single function could have be changed in the settings, like it can for the Action button, and the sliding/swiping thing made optional? It looks like I’m not the only one having this thought (haven’t read this yet, just glimpsed over it this morning), but of course we’ll see how the reviews and usage go.
The significant improvements for the processors were mostly justified by Apple Intelligence, as it was repeated what felt like a thousand times throughout the entire presentation. I can’t wait for Apple Intelligence and A.I. to become so mainstream that we don’t have to hear so much about it in every marketing presentation. Also, by overhyping Apple Intelligence so much, the real-world experience of Apple Intelligence can only be a disappointment, right? Haven’t they learned anything from Siri? Undersell, overdeliver, that’s how it should go. Currently, the overselling part of Apple Intelligence and A.I. seems already overwhelming to me. Oh and by the way, did I mention Apple Intelligence?
The new iPhone colours kind of suck, don’t they? It’s one thing for Apple to keep the overall iPhone design the same: the fact that they need to manufacture millions of them every quarter leaves little room for brand-new manufacturing processes required for a breakthrough design. It will surely come, maybe with a thinner body (that would be fantastic) but in the meantime, of course, Apple will continue using this design. But how difficult is it to offer more colours? Or different, more daring colours? I can maybe understand when EV companies only offer five dull colours (red, blue, white, black, and usually gray), but for the iPhone? I know most people use cases anyway, but why not keep some colours in the lineup for several years?
I thought that the little video snippets were great. The slo-mo explosion video was fun. The Audio Mix demo was excellent. The iPhone 16 promotional video was impressive. The behind-the-scenes video featuring The Weeknd was classy and compelling. The opening video was also very well made and to the point.
I won’t be so complimentary of the overall format of the event, though. Like I said last year, this Covid-era format feels tired, repetitive, long, and almost cold and rigid. If someone told me some presenters were, in fact, A.I. renderings, I might believe you. I would prefer for Apple to double down on the video snippets I mentioned previously and present their new products that way, with bespoke videos for each part instead of the awkward standing in an empty Apple Park with — I’ll admit — cool drone transitions. But I’ve even grown tired of them too.