Update: Apple Passwords just screwed up badly, so I went back to 1Password 😅 There will be a blog post on this soon.

Now that my blog is alive again, I decided to follow all those other bloggers with a list of defaults (and not so defaults) on App Defaults, inspired by the 97th episode of the Hemispheric Views podcast.

I’m a Mac user. I won’t be linking out to the Apple apps listed below that come preinstalled. Some entries have footnotes. 😄

📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail1
📮 Mail Server: Fastmail
📝 Notes: Apple Notes
✅ To-Do: Things
📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Halide
🟦 Photo Management: Apple Photos
📸 Photo Editing: Apple Photos2
📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive (with Advanced Data Protection)
📖 RSS: Reeder
📇 Contacts: Apple Contacts3
🌐 Browser: Apple Safari
💬 Chat: Apple iMessage and Signal
🔖 Bookmarks: Safari Bookmarks
📑 Read It Later: Reeder and Safari Reading List
📜 Word Processing: iA Writer and Apple Pages4
📈 Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers
📊 Presentations: Apple Keynote5
✍🏻 Writing Books: Ulysses
🛒 Shopping Lists: Things
🍴 Meal Planning: Mela
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: bunq
📰 News: -
🎵 Music: Apple Music
🎤 Podcasts: Overcast
📚 Books: Apple Books6
🔐 Password Management: 1Password7
🔍 Search Engine: Google8
🍿 Movie Tracking: Callsheet
📝 Blogging Platform: Jekyll
🚚 FTP: Transmit
🧑🏻‍💻 Code: Nova
🎬 Visual Effects and Finishing: Autodesk Flame9

  1. Sometimes I use the Fastmail web app which I’ve installed as a Safari Web App. ↩︎

  2. I have Adobe Photoshop licensed due to my profession and if Apple Photos is not up to the task, I will default to Photoshop. ↩︎

  3. iCloud + Fastmail on the server side with Linked Contacts) active. This quite fascinatingly works and keeps all changes to contacts up to date across servers. ↩︎

  4. On the publishing side, I need to revert to Microsoft Word unfortunately, because it’s the industry standard and people expect Track Changes to work. ↩︎

  5. This would be iA Presenter if I held presentations more often. What a nice app. ↩︎

  6. I simply can’t stand Kindle anymore. The UI on their devices, the reading experience, and the horrendous companion apps on iOS and Android distract me from reading the actual books. At least the text looks nice in Apple Books, where I’m using the Paper Theme and Iowan as my font. ↩︎

  7. Starting with macOS Sequoia and iOS 18, I was able to fully move from 1Password to Apple Passwords. Went back to 1Password within 2 weeks, because Apple Passwords screwed up. Blog post coming! ↩︎

  8. I’m sorry, everything else is just very bad in 🇩🇪. ↩︎

  9. Don’t look at the price. ↩︎