iOS

essential

Apple Fitness

Mostly for the rings. Apple Fitness+ (£80/y) was okay, but the app is hard to navigate.

Strong ($30/y): Strength training log.

Nike Training Club: Decent free workouts.

Yoga Studio: Fine, but dated.

Citymapper

Public transport helper with generally good results, but very weird monetisation efforts.

TfL Go is probably a more sustainable alternative.

Clear

Simple and fun lists.

Foodnoms

Calorie tracker.

RSSRadio ($2)

Flexible, but awkward podcast client.

WhatsApp

Ubiquitous messaging app.

general

Amazon

Rarely the best price, but often a good starting point.

AutoSleep ($5)

More information than is useful, but the core sleep tracking (and manual control) is accurate and effective.

App Development

App Store Connect

Apple Developer

TestFlight

Google Translate

I’m ignorant enough to need auto-detect language.

Latest Chatty

Shacknews forum client. Interesting gaming-adjacent discussions.

Picsew ($2)

Stitch multiple screenshots together.

Procreate ($10)

Ridiculously well-designed painting app.

I’m increasingly fond of Adobe Fresco as an alternative.

Reeder ($5)

Solid RSS client.

Scanner Pro ($4)

Document scanner. Does the work.

Sim Daltonism

Color blindness simulator.

Tumblr

Sucks, but the web experience is even worse.

Vendor

Very specific apps for services!

Chase: Probably the best UK current account at the moment.

Curve: Handy proxy card, but may not be sustainable.

Nationwide: Brand loyalty, but they’ve earned it.

PureGym: Cheap and local.

Sainsbury’s SmartShop normally saves time at self-checkout.

YouTube

Premium is optional, but worth it.

YouTube Music isn’t bad either.

Zoom

Probably the best all-round video conferencing solution.

background

Authy

Simple two-factor authentication widget.

Occasionally need sign-in with Facebook.

GitHub Mobile has its weird sudo system

HMRC tax access codes; taccess codes.

Steam wants to do its own thing.

Discord

Quick, free and good group voice chat.

Firefox Focus

Straightforward ad-blocker.

Parcel ($5/y)

Track deliveries. Not instantaneous, but solidly reliable in the UK.

PayPal

Sales and payment receipt notifications.

Shortcuts

  • When I arrive at home, Set Mobile Data Off
  • When battery level falls below 80%, Set Low Power Mode

Slack

Necessary evil.

Wallet

Apple Store

Eventbrite

Meetup

Nectar

Trainline: cross-network digital tickets for a booking premium.

Withings Health Mate

Apple Health sync and spying on guest users.

I used Happy Scale before getting a smart scale.

X

Formerly Twitter.

purgatory

Audible

Audiobooks. Generally a rip off.

Chime

Annoy others with alerts on the quarter-hour. Irreplaceable.

EpocCam Pro ($8)

iPhone as a webcam. Free version has a watermark. Probably killed by Ventura.

Camo Studio is more extensive, but pricey and the free version didn’t let me rotate.

Foursquare

Dubious results for local eateries.

Try Yelp instead?

Google Maps

Low density of results and gross advertising.

Three Mobile

No longer has cheap on-demand data.

Yahoo News Digest

Twice-daily encouragement to read news headlines. Discontinued.

jailbreak

Protean ($2)

Rearrange status bar. “EEEE, d MMMM” and “H:mm”.

Springtomize 3 ($3)

General tweaks; mostly a convenience.

TetherMe ($5)

Mask Personal Hotspot as mobile data.

Activator

Use hardware buttons for media control.

BytaFont

Override default system font.

f.lux

Reduce colour temperature. Use with Dim.

Keyboard Tweaks

  • Bloard: Default to black keyboard
  • SmoothPop: Fade keypress feedback
  • SwipeSelection and NoTrackpad

Lock Screen

  • HotDog
  • QuickUnlock: Broken?
  • SimplePasscodeButtons

Status Bar

  • Bars: Old signal strength.
  • Beam: Hide battery icon.

Notification Center

  • ClearNotificationButtons
  • NC Date Customizer
  • SimpleNC/SimpleCenters
  • TinyBar

Spotlight

  • AlwaysMore for Spotlight
  • ClearOnOpen
  • OpenOnSearch

Safari Tweaks

  • BrowserBreadcrumbCleanup
  • Disable Frequently Visited Sites
  • TypeTab: Automatically highlight address bar.

Other Tweaks

Performance

  • iCleaner Pro: Clear unused files
  • Nitrous: UIWebView performance
  • NoMotion: Remove parallax only
  • PrivaCy: Disables analytics
  • Switcher Speedster: Remove blur in iOS 9

akemin_dayo

mikoto (beta) includes various system tweaks.
PreferenceOrganizer 2 sorts Settings.app into folders.

arcetera

Minimal Hosts Blocker is an up-to-date, low-memory ad-blocker.

macOS

general

Discord

Quick, free and good group voice chat.

Microsoft Remote Desktop

Reeder ($10)

Solid RSS client.

Safari Technology Preview

Generally improved over the regular version, but unusable with the odd site.

Chrome: Sucks for battery life, but generally the most compatible browser.

Firefox: Also needed for compatibility sometimes.

Ghostery: Third-party script blocker. Privacy Badger is also good.

Honey: Automatic voucher codes. Disable when not in use.

Steam

Renting a Shadow PC (£30/m) is probably better than actually trying to play games on macOS.

Typora ($15)

Simple writing application with excellent formatting options.

Visual Studio Code

Customisable generalist text editor.

EditorConfig seems like a standard for code formatting.

JetBrains Mono is my font of choice.

Warp

AI-powered terminal replacement. Seems more practical than looking up what to type in anyway.

I used iTerm2 in the past for small quality of life improvements over Terminal.

work

Blender

Amazingly free 3D pipeline.

CodeKit ($39+)

Intuitive web workflow.

Creative Cloud (£17/month)

An occasional need to use Photoshop and Illustrator, but overall, an inconsistent, bloated, expensive mess.

Browser-based tools like Photopea often do the job just as well.

The Affinity suite (£160) may cover non-collaborative projects.

Still need to put assets through ImageOptim.

Optimage ($15) may do that slightly better.

GitKraken ($35/y)

Visual Git client with decent merge conflict resolution and straightforward rebase/history editing.

Sourcetree is free and good enough most of the time.

Homebrew

Install Xcode first!

Install node using nvm.

Use rbenv, not rvm.

Sometimes we have to use Python.

MAMP

Reliable one-click install of a local PHP server.

Paw

Form and test HTTP requests.

Slack

Necessary evil. Sign in to workspaces on a case-by-case basis because performance sucks.

The beta occasionally has breakthrough improvements.

Transmit ($45)

SFTP client.

Xcode

Proprietary Apple development tool. Install using Xcodes.

DevCleaner: Remove unused device support

fastlane is great for managing exports.

Charles Proxy ($50) for debugging network requests.

Reveal: Occasionally handy for UI debugging.

Zoom

Probably the best all-round video conferencing solution.

Vysor: Reliable device mirroring.

utilities

Amphetamine

Prevents macOS from sleeping.

AppCleaner

Attempts to remove associated files after deleting apps.

battery

Finer control over battery charging for better battery health.

AlDente ($25) may have a nicer UI.

Energiza ($20) looks good, too.

BetterTouchTool ($10)

Basically paying for window snapping. It does other stuff, too.

Tiles might do the job better and for free.

HEIC Converter

Converts proprietary image format to JPEGs. Or switch the iOS Camera to Most Compatible.

Jumpcut

Clipboard manager. Free, so I never bothered to try others.

Karabiner-Elements

Remap macOS keyboard weirdness.

LICEcap

GIF screen recording.

LinearMouse

Scroll wheel control; G305 switch debouncing.

Logitech G Hub

I use on-board memory, so this is only for occasional configuration.

noTunes

Prevents Apple Music from hijacking play controls.

OBS Studio

Video production and fancy webcam stuff.

BlackHole might help with recording desktop audio.

Audacity has also been useful; use Brew to install ffmpeg to open .mkv files.

RescueTime

Tracks time usage and productivity.

Daily (£25/y)

Timing (£70/y). Pricey.

Qbserve (£30)

The Unarchiver

Unzip .rar and .7z archives.

TinkerTool

Saves me needing to look up how to hide/show hidden files.

TopNotch

Hides the MacBook notch.

TunnelBear ($60/y)

Cute VPN, used occasionally.

purgatory

Elgato Camera Hub

Use iPhone as a camera. Probably killed by Ventura.

Macs Fan Control

Helps prevent kernel panics from overheating on Intel devices.

Next Meeting

Upcoming meetings in the menu bar. Useful, but maybe anxiety inducing.

Sketch ($99/y)

For a short time, the industry standard design tool.

ToothFairy ($3)

Easier Bluetooth headphone connections. Less useful since Monterey.

Unshaky

If. you have. a bbutterfly keybboard.

Wacom Intuos Tablet Driver

Overrated.

Dev Recommendations

  • Contrast: Quick WCAG colour lookup.
  • JetBrains seem to make some cool IDEs.
  • RStudio: IDE for R.
  • OmniGraffle is expensive, but I think I’d like it.
  • Pixelmator: Alternative to Photoshop.
  • Patterns: Regex helper / tester.
  • Screenflow ($99): Screencasts.