My 2022 Productivity stack of Mac Apps (Part Two)

Edit: Here is the link to Part Three.

My Part 1 post surprisingly blew up with many views on Medium and positive feedback from the App developers themselves. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, everyone is actively looking out for app recommendations as part of an elusive quest to find that app which will make them more productive.

Remember that no app is as essential as the one using it. Before starting on the app journey, it makes sense to start with a mindful approach. Using pen and paper, most productivity apps can be mirrored (with minimal features). You can adopt the digital versions after you benefit from their analogue counterparts.

But enough proselytising for now. Back to the apps!!!

Here again, 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

A reminder of where we left off in the first part — I’d covered my top three used Apps: Craft.do, Superhuman and Things3. This post will go through the next three apps on the list. I was going to do all of them here, but I realised there was a lot to be written just for apps 4–6, so the rest will go into a third post.

Cron

In summary:

Cron took over my dock, replacing Fantastical, which I had used for three years. On iOS, I still rely on Fantastical, which had a revolutionary user experience when it first came on the scene. Cron was a stealth-mode startup which gained traction and was quickly bought by Notion. Hopefully, we will continue to be able to use Cron going forward.

From https://cron.com/

Cost: Free for now.

What works for me:

1. Native design on MacOs with a beautiful UX
2. Shortcuts make it intuitive to create events and move stuff around like T for today, D for day view, W for week view and more
3. Command+K command palette is handy for navigating common tasks
4. Adding participants to any event is effortless
5. Smart notifications allow me to directly join Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls with one click making it easy to hustle from one call to another in this post-pandemic world
6. The show as busy feature — If you have personal and work calendars, you can set it up so that each personal event shows up as Busy on your work calendar without revealing any private details
7. The first calendar app that enabled me to snooze a notification till the time of the event for taking action only when it was required
8. There were regular updates via email and Twitter by the founder, and I hope with Notion’s acquisition, the development pace remains good, and we will get a mobile app soon
9. If you are using this in a team environment and you have access to multiple calendars, a shared event only shows up once (with small coloured tabs), unlike GCal, which will mess up your calendar view

What can improve:

1. No natural language parsing like the one offered by Fantastical
2. Missing iOS companion app

Day One

In summary:

Day One is the ultimate journaling app — it has been a major enabler in getting me on a 1069-day don’t-break-the-chain streak of daily journaling. It is also one of the first apps I open daily on my phone to look back and reflect on entries from the same date in the years gone by.

https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/the-very-best-journaling-logging-app/

A tale of two continents — clearly, I need to get out more

Cost: $2.92/month (billed annually) / see here for more.

What works for me:

1. A fast and clean design
2. Native design so supports best-in-class Apple features such as voice notes & share-sheet
3. Excellent and trusted syncing — I’ve yet to lose any data in three and a half years of using the app
4. Designed to start typing and get your thoughts into the app quickly
5. The ‘Today’ feature is a game-changer — it shows you the photos that were taken that day, which places you’ve visited and any calendar events (once the appropriate permissions have been given to the app) so you can add a journal entry for any of them
6. The ‘On This Day’ feature, which recaps all entries for that date (one of my first reads of the day, as I mentioned above)
7. The multiple ways to view your content (by calendar and the media gallery) are excellent, but the ability to view all your journal entries by location in a geo-tagged map takes the cake
8. All the different font options for all types of writers and readers (my personal favourite combo for superior readability is Whitney on mobile and Open Sans on the M1)

What can improve:

1. Audio transcribing — I would love it if there were an option to link up an Otter.ai account and use that for better speech-to-text
2. More ways to journal — Recently, there was an option added that allowed journaling by texting, but it was for Canada only (Journaling via Whatsapp seems like a no-brainer to me in this day & age)
3. Search — I’m not saying the search is terrible entirely, but I think it can improve; being primarily text-based content, if the search can resemble Obsidians, it would be fantastic

1Password

In summary:

The biggest password manager app today, 1Password, has been an excellent investment for hassle-free security management over the past three years. It’s my most-used app which doesn’t sit in my dock cause I mainly trigger it in-app or in the browser when I need to add passwords. Everyone should be using this app.

All your passwords in one secure location

Security — all along the watchtower. Thanks, 1Password.

Cost: $2.99/month (billed annually) / see here for more.

What works for me:

1. I need to remember one password — the app takes care of the rest
2. Seamless user experience across macOS and iOS
3. A tight control on vulnerable passwords on hacked websites via the Watchtower feature
4. Setting up 2FAs is a breeze
5. The new universal fill makes entering passwords (and the relevant 2FAs) friction-free
6. Strong generation of passwords
7. The Vault feature allows the creation of multiple secure lockers — for example, for personal use and work — If you use the Families plan, you can share a vault with your loved ones
8. Biometrics — Face ID on iOS and Touch ID on macOS make entering passwords faster and secure
9. Credit cards — Store your credit cards securely and use the details when checking out on major eCommerce websites
10. Secure notes — You can add your bank information or anything you want to save securely

What can improve:

1. There are a few websites where the browser extension autofill does not work as desired, so that could be ironed out
2. This is an irritant more with other apps, and I don’t know what 1Password can specifically do there — on iOS, some apps don’t support autofill and nor do they allow shifting to a different keyboard (Swiftkey is my keyboard of choice) from the default Apple keyboard which makes it a bit painful to copy over passwords and if the app does not allow pasting of passwords then I wish you luck typing out your complex 14 letter password with upper, lower and special characters plus numbers on your first attempt

And there you have it — the next three recommend apps on my list. In the final part of the series, I’ll round up the remaining ones.