My 2022 Productivity stack of Mac Apps (Part Three)

In Parts 1 & 2, we covered Apps 1 thru 6 from my list of top apps to boost productivity on the Mac. In this post, we’ll close out the top ten so that in my next post, I can move on to a similar list of top apps for iOS.

One last time here is my current dock on the Mac M1Pro:

The apps listed below have been sorted by the amount of time I spend with them daily:

1. Craft.do

2. Superhuman

3. Things3

4. Cron

5. Day One

6. 1password

7. Evernote

8. Drafts

9. Ulysses

10. Acapela

I’ve marked in italics the apps I covered earlier. This post will focus on the remaining four.

Evernote

In summary:

Evernote is the OG note-taking app. If tomorrow the EN team decided to change the old Green Elephant logo to a Brontosaurus, I wouldn’t be the least surprised. Everyone comes across this app in their journey to find a note-taking or organising app, and eventually, it is left for greener pastures. I, too, had Craft.do in my numero uno position, so why still do I need Evernote?

From the official Evernote.com website

My Evernote setup — notice all the newsletter forwards

Cost: Varies depending on where you live in the world. See here for local pricing.

What works for me:

1. A familiar workflow which has now become part of my muscle memory — all the newsletter emails I want to process get forwarded to Evernote’s Inbox, where I periodically triage and take action on them
2. No data loss or weird sync issues since 2008 (side note — Wow, has it been 14 years of using this app? No wonder it’s part of my muscle memory)
3. The Evernote web clipper might just be one of the most impressive feats of engineering ever released — it is also single-handedly responsible for keeping a lot of people hooked on the EN app
4. Years of knowledge distilled on the Evernote blog plus a lot of resources to find exactly what you need on Reddit or the official Evernote Forums
5. The new tasks module is sweet and can suffice for most people who do not want to overcomplicate their notes and task management through fine jugglery — it just works
6. The search in Evernote has always been rock solid — in fact, this is the reason I’ve lately dropped the arcane art of tagging each note
7. Great support for APIs — this means that any automation service you would like to use, such as Zapier or IFTTT, all support sending data into Evernote
8. Evernote works very well as a digital repository or archive — no wonder that modern-day note-taking gurus such as Tiago Forte still use Evernote as their second brain
9. A development team that tries hard to keep up with the expectations of a rabid user fanbase
10. The new M1 optimised build is super fast

What can improve:

1. A minor glitch — some email newsletters look completely off inside Evernote, so it becomes a bit painful to read
2. The writing experience itself inside of Evernote leaves a lot to be desired — No markdown supported for one
3. If Evernote had magically been able to clean up their technical debt from having apps in every platform known to humankind and yet add each feature their users had requested over the years, there might never have been a Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Workflowy, Roam Research or Craft so in some ways, the world has become better for it but do not make the mistake of counting out the grandest of them all

Drafts

In summary:

It is simple to describe Drafts in a line — Where text starts. But then the rabbit hole begins. Wizards on the Drafts forums have made complicated workflows using Drafts as a starting point, so what is the hype all about?

From the official Drafts website — a short guide to everything possible

Different syntax or flavour options

Cost: $19.99/year / see the app store for more.

What works for me:

1. Breezy and clean design
2. A blank screen opens up when you launch the app allowing you to get your thoughts in without worrying about organising or tagging
3. Native design so supports best-in-class Apple features such as voice notes & share-sheet — Drafts’ voice notes are among the best in the business as somehow they’ve managed to bypass the standard time duration allowed by Apple
4. Numerous options to take action on your drafts — save them as reminders, schedule them as calendar events, archive them as journal entries, email them, polish them further in a word processor and many more
5. A passionate user base that is very helpful when asked all sorts of questions
6. A wide variety of syntax options (as shown in the screenshot above) for different flavours of markdown and even exceptional support for Taskpaper
7. Drafts (the app) can be as straightforward or as powerful (and complicated) as you want the setup to be
8. I use it primarily for jotting down quick notes that can then go into other apps or for ephemeral notes that can be safely archived with no further action
9. The search is fantastic, so you can dig out old drafts from the archives or wherever you’ve saved them in the app organisation structure

What can improve:

1. Syncing — Sometimes, I have issues syncing my active notes between iOs and macOS (a quick app shutdown and restart usually fixes the problem)
2. Gradual onboarding of complexity — I wish there was a beginner’s mode where only the basic actions were shown to users (I feel I would have adopted the app much earlier if the onboarding was better)

Ulysses

In summary:

This writing app allows me to get into flow mode the quickest so I can focus on the writing. A mature app in the Apple ecosystem, this app is widely used and is the reason I got SetApp in the first place (there might be a separate post about the top apps in the SetApp app bundle in the future)

A very meta-screenshot — this was taken as I was writing the paragraph above.

Cost: $49.99/year / see here for more (also available as part of SetApp).

What works for me:

1. A superior, clean, and customisable writing experience
2. A native UX across macOS and iOS with reliable syncing
3. A distraction-free design
4. Vast and best-in-class export options for PDFs or other mediums
5. Direct export into Medium is brilliant
6. An unique markdown flavour which just works
7. The statistics bar, which shows word counts and read time, is fantastic for keeping track of progress
8. Works out-of-the-box as expected but still offers numerous formatting and tweaking options, so the writing environment reflects the fact that no two writers are the same
9. Support for external folders means I can access my exported Craft notes or Obsidian vault that is saved in Dropbox within Ulysses directly
10. Active development pace with new versions released regularly
11. Fun fact — the font I use for writing is iA Writer’s Duospace (iA Writer is the app I used before Ulysses, and I realised it was because of their unique font, so now I have the best of both worlds)

What can improve:

1. Images can be handled better when writing — for example, I can’t increase their size or enlarge them after they’ve been added to a doc
2. Organisation of documents through tagging can be improved
3. An approach similar to my suggestion for Drafts above, a gradual onboarding of the user with a periodic unlocking of all the features, would make it easier for people to jump in and adapt

Acapela

In summary:

Acapela is the latest addition to my dock. When things were heating up on my work front, and I had to keep switching between Slack, Linear, Figma and Clickup — this was my secret superpower to keep up with everything.

From Acapela’s website

Take action on notifications

Cost: Free, $8, $12 /year — see here for more.

What works for me:

1. One inbox for all critical work-related app notifications
2. Smart filtering options to focus on the signal and not get stuck in the noise
3. A clean distraction-free design
4. No more do I worry about missing some important but buried Slack notification — Acapela does not remove ‘notifications’ till you have taken action on them (Resolve, Snooze or Open notifications directly within the app)
5. Shortcuts for a keyboard-first design
6. I love the speed — this app helps me triage my notifications across apps at rocket speed with laser focus
7. I am an inbox-zero addict, and this helps me get all notifications down to zero as well while ensuring nothing has slipped through the cracks
8. Disclaimer — Being a ProductHunter, I got the first year of Premium for free

What can improve:

1. It’s still early days in their journey, being the youngest app on this list, so I’m sure they’ve got a long roadmap
2. One thing I would like is if they enabled taking Slack messages and converting them to tasks in ClickUp or taking a Figma design and sending the preview link via Slack — they could end up being a Zapier but hyper-focused on productivity apps which could be massive
3. Pricing — To attract millions of users from India and other similar countries, it would be beneficial to add some form of Purchasing Power Parity discounting — I adore the banner below on Akiflow’s pricing page (why can’t more apps recognise this?)

60% discount for users from India — Please support purchasing power parity.

And there you have it — these are my top ten recommendations for a productive Mac.

If you missed them, here are the Part 1 and Part 2 posts. Stay tuned for the next series which will focus on iOS apps to prime your iPhone for productivity.