I love software. I download apps for fun and test them out. How did they design the app? How is the user experience? Is it easy to use? Does it provide me more value than other similar apps? Why does it exist? Who are the users? Why is it popular/not-popular? Although I’m constantly downloading apps and going through them (yes, I’m a frequent user of ProductHunt!) I only end up using a subset of my downloaded apps on a daily basis. There are some I use weekly/bi-weekly, some I forget that I even have, til I try to download it from the App Store and realize I already have it. I’m going to list out some of my absolute favorites that I use on a daily basis, followed by a few honorable mentions that I use weekly/biweekly separated by type of app.
Mac Apps
iTerm : My go-to, of course we all have our terminal, but I always just liked using iTerm a lot more. When it comes to themes, my favorite has been the Dracula theme for the past few years now. I use it with oh my zsh.
Bear : I love using Bear for writing notes. It’s clean, easy to organize and you can access your notes from anywhere.
Sublime Text : It’s my favorite app to copy, paste, edit any text. It’s like notepad but way better. There’s probably an easier way to do this, but I love pasting in Sublime because I know it’s going to give me any text in plaintext.
VS Code : The only code editor I use when working on side projects. It just satisfies all my needs.
Postman : When I’m lazy to think of API calls and to write out a curl call, Postman comes to my rescue.
RescueTime : I love seeing how I’m spending my time at home, was I being productive this week or did I watch a lot of lifestyle Youtubers? It helps me understand my habits and set limits to commentary Youtubers on Beauty Guru Drama!
Mobile Apps
I’m going to skip out on the obvious “essential” apps for emails, social media and focus on some that are just slightly-less popular. I also have a huge list of photography and photo editing apps that I use based on the type of picture I want to take/ edit, I’ll probably reserve that for a separate blog post, but I’ll link some that I use the most here.
Pacer : I use this app as my pedometer. Gotta get my steps in! iOS | Android
SuperImpose : I like making random memes, this app helps me with that by allowing simple masking/erasing/layering functions. iOS | Android
Flora : Helps me stay off my phone and be productive. It’s just like the Forest app but it’s free. iOS (Also check out DonutDog for both iOS & Android)
Musi : Although I use Spotify Premium, sometimes I just want to stream songs in the background from Youtube like “Stolen My Heart” from KadhalViruz. iOS
LoseIt! : Tracking my health/weight, have been using this for about a decade on and off, my favorite in terms of data visualization of my progress. I like to enter what I ate when I’m not too sure of how many calories something takes up. iOS
TimeHop : I like seeing where I was 7 years ago, or what I posted 4 years ago on twitter. It aggregates social media posts from places like Swarm, Instagram, Twitter and lets you know your “memories”. iOS | Android
Web Apps
Remove BG : I make memes a lot, I love this web app it removes backgrounds from images. It’s hella fast.
JSFiddle : When I want to test HTML/CSS/JS out real quick, this is my go to.
JSONMinify: I like my JSON minified, so it doesn’t take up madd room.
JSONLint: For linting my JSON without npm/yarn and doing all that.
Pixlr: When I need a computer to have Adobe Photoshop and it doesn’t this saved me.
Polarr: For when I need to edit pictures and need something equivalent to Adobe Lightroom.
Well that’s been my daily software lineup. I might make one for websites I visit daily/weekly next! Hope you guys found at least one software you can add into your life. 😊