Following changes to running shortcuts from the Home screen in iOS 13, I realized how much I was going to benefit from the ability to execute commands with the tap of an icon, so I decided to mix and match apps and shortcuts on my Home screens to maximize efficiency. The second theme, unsurprisingly, is my adoption of a hybrid Home screen that combines apps and shortcuts powered by our custom MacStories Shortcuts Icons. I’ve written about the idea of comfort in the Apple ecosystem before, and I’ve seen that concept work its way into my app preferences more and more over the course of 2019. First, thanks to various improvements in iOS and iPadOS 13, I increased my reliance on “first-party” Apple apps: I embraced the new Reminders app and its exclusive features, stopped using third-party note-taking apps and moved everything to Notes, and switched back to Apple Mail as my default email client. Two themes emerged over the second half of 2019, though. Having settled on a specific writing workflow revolving around iA Writer and Working Copy, and having figured out a solution to record podcasts from my iPad Pro, I spent the year fine-tuning my usage of those apps, refining my file management habits thanks to iPadOS’ improved Files app, and cutting down on the number of apps I kept tucked away in folders on my iPhone and iPad. In terms of app usage, 2019 was a year of stabilization for me. As a result, it took me a bit longer to finalize the 2019 collection of my must-have apps in the process, however, I’ve come up with a slightly updated format that I believe will scale better over the next few years. As you can tell by the date on this article, the 2019 edition of this story is different: not only did I spend the last months of the year testing a variety of new apps and betas, but I also kept tweaking my Home screen to accomodate MusicBot and new Home screen shortcuts. Here’s the themes I mainly use in light mode and in dark mode.Every year in late October, I start putting together a rough list of candidates for my annual ‘Must-Have Apps’ story, which I’ve historically published in late December, right before the holiday break. I’ve wasted a lot of time creating/tweaking my favorite themes. Ulysses does much more, but also allows for lots of dawdling and twiddling. IA Writer is a text/Markdown app whose appeal is that it’s no-nonsense and fast. With Ulysses I have separate folders for individual projects, and you can add in-line notes that don’t get printed, along with image attachments in a sidebar view. In Ulysses I break up text blocs, reassemble them, and compile them into single document pdfs. Ulysses lets you tweak themes, download themes created by others, or make your own themes from scratch. Ulysses lets you choose any font you want, any size, any color, and background color, special formatting (eg bold/italic/color choices) for Markdown code, and more. As I said, the developers are quite strict about how the app should be used - that can be a very good thing when you want to sit down and write, but a bad thing if you prefer another font or font-size, or color for text or background color. (This year they included their version of the open-source IBM Plex font, which they made into a duospace-font anyone can download.) There are minimum and maximum font sizes you can use with the app. The devs are quite strict about enforcing just two themes - light mode and dark mode, and until this year you could only use the embedded (excellent) Nitti Light commercial font. IA Writer is much more narrowly focused than Ulysses. I still love BBEdit - it’s a fast and bombproof text editor - but I got used to the niceties of WYSIWYG when using Markdown (with customized colors/backgrounds) in Ulysses. In olden days (before 2015) I wrote almost entirely in BBEdit, in conjunction with the outliner Opal (which has its roots and the same developer as the old Mac app called Acta ). I use it in conjunction with OmniOutliner Elements (though I’m thinking of auditioning replacements, including the Outlinely app, or an outliner service like Dynalist or Checkvist.)įor quick-and-dirty writing I really enjoy using IA Writer in both Mac/iOS, an app which I’d probably still be using if Ulysses didn’t exist. Scrivener is just a little too kitchen-sink for me in both user interface (even the new version, which I own) and capabilities, and I was never able to use it as comfortably as other apps. I have Scrivener but I really stopped using it for the most part after subscribing to Ulysses just over a year ago.
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