Relying More and More on Apple's Native Applications

Happy new year! As the new year begins, I find myself re-assessing my workflow and tools.

I’m using more and more of Apple's native (to iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Mac) these days. They're not bad. I use http://Noteplan.app for my own note-keeping system, but Apple Notes is fine, especially for collaboration with the family.

I use Calculator all the time.

Dictionary, Pages, and Numbers work well, and Keynote is best in class.

Calendar, Reminders, Clock, and - when those all fail - Stickies are surprisingly good! Granular layers of time management solutions. (Maybe this is a call for help!)

Books works well enough.

Apple Music is fine.

Weather, Stocks, News are all fine.

Contacts is fine.

Maps is very good, especially on the Watch.

Never used Voice Memos, Freeform, or Automator in anger.

I'm not sure what else Photos could do or what "better" would look like, but even my partner Tammie's relatively tech-illiterate mom figured out how to use the new Apple Intelligence "Clean Up" feature without any prompting or help from us. So, well done there.

Even Mail has been a very pleasant surprise.

I don't (yet?) use Passwords, since I can't find an official CLI experience. The tool I am using, Bitwarden, has one but it's sort of inactive as a project. I think the Github repository is in archive mode. Not a good look, especially when the CLI throws off Node.js module errors when used.

Home's pretty good for my use cases.

I was even happy with Terminal, though I love Mitchell Hashimoto’s ghostty (just gotta remember to stop typing “Ter…” in Spotlight!)

Podcasts, Safari, and FaceTime are actually pretty GOAT'd.

This means that when I install a brand-new OS, I have a scripted restore of what was installed via Homebrew, SDKMAN, then download Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and Jetbrains’s Toolbox apps, and then download a few things from the App Store (like Pages), and I'm off to the races.