Apps, Tools & Services
This is a list of all the tools, apps, and services I use on my iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac. I’ll update this list from time to time.
Productivity
Raycast 🖥
Raycast is an exceptionally powerful and versatile launcher for macOS that combines the functionality of multiple apps into a single, intuitive interface, dramatically improving workflow and productivity for users. It offers over 1,300 extensions, advanced AI capabilities, and seamless integration with numerous tools and workflows. I have subscribed to the Pro version and use it every day. I wrote a detailed review of Raycast on my journal.
Things 📱 🖥
Things is my favorite productivity tool, my task manager. I use it on all devices, and it synchronizes instantly via Things Cloud. It’s available for Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad.
It has won multiple prices, is easy to use, but powerful, and has one of the best user experiences on the market.
It follows the GTD approach (Inbox, Today, Someday) and has areas, projects, tasks, and subtasks. Everything can have tags, due dates, start dates, and notes. Projects can be structured with headlines. You can send tasks via email, capture your ideas with a quick entry dialogue, and integrate Apple Calendar. You can use the Things URL Scheme to send commands to Things.
DEVONthink 📱 🖥
DEVONthink is my complementary tool for Things. Things stores everything I have to do, DEVONthink everything I want to remember. I’ve used Evernote for many years and Notion for a year, but both Tools had too many things I didn’t like.
The company DEVONtechnologies that creates DEVONthink (and a handful of other software products) is 6 people but provides powerful tools for over a decade. Their tools are used by Attorneys, Journalists, Researchers, or Writers.
DEVONthink fulfills all my wishes. Your data is your data, it’s stored on your local hard drive (encrypted or unencrypted). You can store anything in it: Text in various formats, including Markdown. Images, PDF, Videos. You can create folders and use tags and have multiple databases for different topics. It’s possible to sync your data with Cloud solutions (Dropbox, iCloud, CloudMe, and WebDAV) or sync between devices via Bonjour. Your data is always encrypted on cloud storage containers. They have an iOS app: DEVONthink To Go.
DEVONthink has data science algorithms that analyze your content and suggest a location to sort your file into. It has advanced features to analyze, link, sort, and find your content. It has a powerful clipper that allows you to quickly grab the content of any website (converted and cleaned in numerous formats), and add text, video, audio, and screenshots.
I store everything in DEVONthink. Notes, PDF documents (scanned with OCR), images, videos, quotes, and use over 17000 different tags in 5 databases.
Obsidian 📱 🖥
I use Obsidian to write notes and connect ideas. It’s the best tool I know for note-taking. In less than 6 months, I created over 800 notes in Obsidian. It’s Markdown-based and the files are plain text files on your hard drive. I’m currently using the Minimal theme.
Scanner Pro
I use Scanner Pro on my iPhone and iPad. Nearly every document I get in a paper format I scan with this app. The documents get converted with OCR to PDF with searchable text and can be automatically saved to cloud storage like Dropbox or iCloud. From there, I move the documents directly into DEVONthink.
Apple Calendar 📱 🖥
Apple Calendar is the only calendar I use. It looks beautiful and can be integrated with Exchange servers, Google Calendar, and other calendar providers. My calendars are currently stored in iCloud, but I’m excited to move them to ProtonMail, as soon as the Bridge supports (hopefully) their new encrypted calendar.
Itsycal 🖥
Itsycal is a tiny menu bar calendar that integrates with Apple Calendar. I use it to quickly add or look at events without opening the full calendar.
Apple Numbers 📱 🖥
I use Apple Numbers for everything I need to do with spreadsheets. Calculating and tracking my income, my stocks, yearly expenses, and salary increases. I store all spreadsheets in DEVONthink and open them from there in Numbers. This way it’s encrypted and synchronized.
Bartender 🖥
Bartender allows organizing the menu bar icons on Mac. You can rearrange icons, hide them, or show them for a short time when they update. It’s helpful to see what’s relevant at any given time on the menu bar.
Time Sink 🖥
Time Sink is a Mac app that allows tracking of how much time you spend on which app. You can see which apps are active and how long and at what times.
Apple Workflow 📱
Workflow is another automation tool, this time for iOS. Apple bought the company and integrated the tool into its ecosystem. There are much fewer services in Apple Workflow than in IFTTT, but it allows much more complicated workflows. You can automate many apps on your device depending on time, location, arrival, leaving, WLAN, Bluetooth, NFC, or opening an app. And build complex interfaces taking user input and doing something with it. But you don’t need to learn to program, it’s drag and drop.
Design, Photography & Conception
iA Writer 📱 🖥
My main tool for writing is iA Writer. I use it on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s the most minimalistic, distraction-free, beautiful writing experience. It supports Markdown, and has tools to analyze your words, and count reading time, characters, words, and sentences. I write my text in Markdown and either open it from DEVONthink in iA Writer or save my texts in iCloud and index the contents of these folders in DEVONthink.
Affinity Designer 📱 🖥
The British company Serif creates the best design tools I know. I worked with and owned Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for over 15 years, and use Sketch at work. But Affinity Designer is my tool of choice for everything I design: Websites, UI, flyers, and logos.
I switched away from Adobe when they started forcing people to their cloud solutions and making it impossible to buy a new version every few years, but instead have to pay monthly “rent”. Serif won multiple awards for Affinity Designer.
I use the iPad version and soon plan to buy a big iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil to create even cooler things with Affinity Designer.
Affinity Photo 📱 🖥
Affinity Photo is the second tool from Serif. I use it less, but when I want to work on photos or photo manipulations, I use Affinity Photo. Serif won multiple awards for Affinity Photo.
It has support for RAW, PSD, 360° photo editing, HDR, batch automation, smart objects, and montage. I’m not a professional photographer, but it’s made for them.
Affinity Publisher 🖥
Affinity Publisher is the newest tool by Serif. It’s an incredibly powerful DTP tool to replace Adobe InDesign or Quark Express. I started working with it, but I plan to create and lay out a book with it. It seamlessly integrates with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo and allows doing nearly everything you can think of.
Eagle
Eagle is my favorite tool to store design assets, like images, videos, fonts, and illustrations. It’s a tool with so many cool features; I use it every day. You can just drag and drop files into Eagle from any website, tag them, and search for them. You can batch save all images or create long screenshots of websites. It even supports OCR text recognition. It’s like DEVONthink but for design assets. You can search for colors, text, and many other things. There are many plugins available, some of which I use, including AI features to search on Pinterest, enhance images, or remove backgrounds. I have over 40,000 assets saved in Eagle.
MindNode 📱 🖥
MindNode is my favorite tool to create mind notes and map out ideas. I use it on all my devices. When I learned everything about Japanese Design, I used it to map out my research.
Typeface 🖥
Typeface is my favorite font app. It’s simple and beautiful, the price is fair, and it does all I need.
Blender 🖥
I don’t use Blender a lot, but it is an incredibly complex open-source 3D creation software. I used to work a lot with 3D in my first job (3ds max, Maya, and Cinema 4D) but when I moved to the web I stopped working with 3D software regularly. I love it, and I’m currently doing online training to learn Blender properly.
Instagram 📱 🌐
I don’t like Instagram too much because the browsing experience is crappy, and you can use it on the phone. No iPad app and the web app is limited. But it’s a nice app to publish photos from time to time and follow friends and family. I use it now exclusively on the web.
Development
Neovim 🖥
I use Neovim as my primary code editor. It’s the best editor available. You can see my configuration files, the mappings, settings, functions, and the plugins I use in my dotfiles repository.
Zed 🖥
I use Zed from time to time. I use a lot of extensions, which would be too much to list them all.
Ghossty 🖥
I used iTerm2 for a long time as my terminal, moved then to Kitty, followed by Wezterm but recently, I switched to Ghossty. It has lots of fun features, is easy to configure, and much faster which is important because I use Neovim in the terminal as my primary code editor.
I use additionally tmux and tmuxinator to manage and restore multiple terminal sessions. I can switch between projects or keep multiple servers running.
GitHub 📱 🖥 🌐
GitHub (or GitHub Enterprise at my workplace) is my tool for storing and working with source code. All my websites are on GitHub and a few dozen other projects. I use GitHub for mobile and occasionally GitHub Desktop. I use Git on the command line.
Coolify 🌐
Cooligy is the tools I use for self-hosting my websites. If I push a new feature to GitHub, Coolify will automatically deploy my website on a preview URL. After all the tests have been running successfully, and I merge the feature, the new feature goes live without needing to do anything more.
Kaleidoscope 🖥
I used Kaleidoscope as my default tool for merge conflicts in Git, but Visual Studio Code has a much nicer way of fixing merge conflicts, I use Kaleidoscope to compare complete codebases or the differences in images.
Image Shrinker 🖥
Image Shrinker is a nice, free tool to minify images and graphics with one drop. Easy, fast, and useful.
Integrity 🖥
I use Integrity regularly to check all my websites for broken links. It’s not something I do every month, but when I do it, this tool is helpful.
News & Information
Feedbin 📱 🌐
Feedbin is my primary source of information. I follow all my RSS and Atom feeds, YouTube subscriptions, newsletters, Reddit, and news sources. A great feature of Feedbin is its ability to track changes in articles. Additionally, you can filter out YouTube Shorts using a video length filter. You can view stats for each RSS feed, find replacements when a website changed their feed and find dead RSS feeds.
I save everything of interest automatically into Raindrop.io for later research. I used Feedly for many years since the Google News Reader shut, but recently the pricing and features did not match and Feedbin is much more fun to use.
Reeder 📱 🖥
I use Feedbin together with Reeder 5. Reeder is a beautiful newsreader which allows using read later services (Pocket, Instapaper) and many services (Feedbin, Feedly) and directly reading RSS/Atom feeds without service and synchronizing them between all devices via iCloud.
Raindrop.io (Pro) 📱 🖥 🌐
Raindrop.io is my bookmark manager. It is a lot of fun, I save nearly everything in it. The tool allows for organizing bookmarks in collections ($), tagging, and filtering (by type of bookmark).
A deduplicating service finds broken links ($). The new highlighting feature allows using of 4 different colors and adds comments to any text. A browser extension allows highlighting the text directly on the website. Each collection can use a different view (Grid, Headlines, Masonry, or List). Full-text search will search every web page and PDF ($). Raindrop automatically creates a backup of every website for offline reading ($).
Raindrop.io can be used to create mood boards, and it is possible to upload common media files. Collections can be edited together with other users, and it is possible to share individual collections publicly (here are mine).
Readwise 📱 🌐
Readwise is my favorite tool to have all my highlights of different services in one place, no matter if it is my Kindle, Apple Books, Pocket, Feedly, Instapaper, Medium, or Twitter. Each morning, you get five random highlights to review, which is a fantastic way to be reminded of the ideas you highlighted.
I synchronize my highlights with Obsidian, where I store them permanently as Markdown documents.
Pinboard 🌐
I use Pinboard as a backup for all the links I save. They get automatically transferred from Raindrop.io to Pinboard with IFTTT. I joined Pinboard when the price was a one-time payment of 9 USD.
𝕏 (Formerly Twitter) 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
After Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired all the woke and useless people, 𝕏 became my main source of news and truth. I even subscribed to 𝕏 Pro. It has a powerful AI built in (Grok) that is one of the few AIs that is not woke and answers accurately. It can also generate images. And services are now also free for non-paying members. I read it every day because all legacy media (formerly mainstream media) has become so unreliable, framed opinion garbage, that it’s the only source of news, besides some independent journalists and news outlets. I used Minds before, but it never got the traction it deserved. Mastodon was a place I had high hopes in, when Twitter was still woke and deplatforming people, but its now just a garbage dump of woke people.
Communication
Apple Messages 📱 🖥
Messages is the messenger I use with my family. We all have Apple devices, and even my grandmother can use the app. The app has nice features. I wish the Desktop app would get more love from Apple.
Apple FaceTime 📱 🖥
FaceTime is the video chat messenger I use with my family.
ProtonMail (Plus) 📱 🌐
ProtonMail is my main email provider, end-to-end encrypted emails. I stopped using Gmail as my main email provider 3 years ago. I sometimes use the web app or the new beta version of the web app, which looks nice.
Apple Mail 🖥
I use Apple Mail on Desktop to connect to my work email on an Exchange server and my ProtonMail server via the ProtonMail Bridge.
Signal 📱 🖥
Signal is a messenger I use with co-workers and friends. It is the messenger with the most security and privacy. Additionally, it’s open source, and no malicious code can be sneaked into it by the government or private entity. After deleting WhatsApp, it’s my favorite messenger to communicate across different platforms.
Telegram 📱 🖥
Telegram is a messenger I use with co-workers and friends. A nice thing is your profile can have a link you share with unknown people to contact you. It is the messenger with the nicest features. You can edit a send text and fix errors, create public or private chat rooms and encrypt your communication (unfortunately not the default setting, people don’t do it).
You can use encrypted Git repositories and link and validate your profile with several external services. You can send messages that auto-delete and even send messages to users not yet on Keybase.
Session 📱 🖥
Session is a new decentralized messenger with an interesting security model. It collects no metadata. Not even your phone number or email. You are anonymous. The first time you use it, you get a session key. You can save a backup for this session to restore it on another device. To contact another person, all you need is to have the public session key. The chat is routed through an onion routing network, which makes it nearly impossible to leave any footprint. It’s open source and censorship-resistant.
Brave Talk 🌐
Brave Talk is a way to have unlimited video calls with up to 4 people for free. No download of any app is needed.
Browser
Brave Browser 📱 🖥
My primary browser is Brave. It has the same engine as Chrome, but ad-blocking and tracker-blocking are included by default. It blocks fingerprinting, a way to track you across the internet. Brave is eager to implement new features, for example, crypto wallets or the IPFS peer-to-peer protocol. Plus: It supports all Chrome extensions.
Firefox (Developer Edition) 📱 🖥
My secondary browser is Firefox Developer Edition. I love the features of Firefox. The developer experience is fantastic, and I like in particular the bookmarking system (this sucks with other browsers). Firefox supports tags and has a nice bookmark bar to quickly filter and search bookmarks.
Mozilla has privacy as a much higher priority than Google. Google works actively on ways to prevent ad-blocking, while Mozilla blocks trackers by default and allows and provides all kinds of additional privacy tools (like container tabs).
Media
Spotify 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
I use Spotify as my music streaming service. I stream music to my five Sonos boxes around my home and use it to wake me up, do workouts or relax on the sofa.
Sonos 📱 🖥
Sonos is my favorite sound system since 2012. I have two Play:5, one Play:3, one Play:1 and the Playbar. It’s super cool to sync all boxes around the home and have no lag between the music in different rooms.
YouTube 📱 🌐
I use the YouTube app and website a lot to watch videos from channels I follow. I use the extensions DF YouTube and Enhancer for YouTube to make the viewing experience more enjoyable. I hide all sidebars, comments, suggestions, and other needy crap. All videos stop by default and are automatically switched to full-screen mode.
Odysee/LBRY 📱 🖥 🌐
Odysee is a completely decentralized video platform that doesn’t censor anything except illegal things. It uses the LBRY network for open, free, and fair digital content. LBRY itself doesn’t censor anything, it cannot do so because the content is shared peer-to-peer and the metadata lives on the blockchain.
IMDb 📱 🌐
IMDb is one of the more used apps on my devices. I look up actors, directors, movies, and TV shows all the time. I log all my watched TV shows and movies to keep track of what I have watched.
TMDb 🌐
TMDb is a nice collaborative movie database and I started using it to link to movies on my website because I like to support open projects.
WerStreamtEs 📱 🌐
WerStreamt.es (German for WhoStreams.it) is my favorite platform to keep track of movies and TV shows. You can put movies and TV shows on a watch list and add the streaming services you have. The app will send out emails with reminders if something on your watch list has a new season or is available for streaming.
Netflix 📱 📺
I use Netflix on my Apple TV and sometimes on my iPad. I stopped watching TV seven years ago and watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. Here is a list of things I watched on Netflix.
Prime Video 📱 📺
The second streaming service I use is Amazon Prime Video. It has much fewer good movies and TV shows, but it’s much, much cheaper. Here is a list of things I watched on Amazon Prime Video.
Apple Photos 📱 🖥
Apple Photos is the default app Apple comes with. It’s good enough for me and easy enough to use by all generations of the whole family. This is where we share photos in the family.
QuickTime Player 🖥
QuickTime is a nice player, and it’s the default on a Mac. Not much more to say. I quickly record screencasts with it. It’s quicker and easier than recording with apps like ScreenFlow.
VLC 📱 🖥
VLC is a good and free player. It can play anything. Even corrupt or partial videos. I use it to stream my videos from my Synology NAS.
Shazam 📱
I use Shazam for one case: To recognize songs and find them on Spotify.
Security & Privacy
Proton Pass 📱 🖥 🌐
Proton Pass is my Password Manager. I switched from 1Password to Bitwarden, but when Proton released their own Password Manager it was included in my package and it has a pretty design.
Proton VPN 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
Proton VPN is my current VPN provider. I switched to it from NordVPN, to ExpressVPN, but now I have it included in my package and it works even on my Apple TV, so I can watch shows from other countries.
Cryptomator 📱 🖥
Cryptomator is a free tool to encrypt cloud data. I encrypt all private data either in DEVONthink or with Cryptomator storage in Dropbox.
Learning
Duolingo (Plus) 📱 🌐
I love Duolingo! I learn on Duolingo without missing one day for more than 2 years now. It’s an intuitive and fun way of learning. And it’s free! I started switching to Plus recently, which removes advertising and adds offline support and streak repair. I learn Japanese and Spanish every day. They have good podcasts for Spanish and French, stories, progress quizzes, leagues, and much more.
Shirabe Jisho 📱 🌐
Shirabe Jisho is a powerful Japanese-English dictionary. It shows nearly everything you can wish for, even the visual stroke order of the characters. The iOS app is a complete offline dictionary.
Japanese 📱
Japanese is another beautiful Japanese dictionary for iOS and Android. You can even use Flashcards and test your knowledge about Kanji.
Human Japanese 📱
Human Japanese is a paid app to learn Japanese. The interface is dated, but the content is good.
Goodreads 📱 🌐
Goodreads is the only decent social reading platform. I use it to track the books I want to read and the books I’m reading and update my status once a week. You can save books to shelves, follow friends, and get inspiration about what to read next or do a reading challenge every year. You can follow me on Goodreads or look into the books I’ve read.
Kindle 📱 🖥
I use the iPad and iPhone Kindle app and the macOS Kindle app as a companion to my Kindle Paperwhite. I use the app either to look at color photos or illustrations or after I’ve finished a book to review my marginalia (notes and markings).
Health & Fitness
Health 📱
I like the Health app of Apple, the only drawback is that there is not an iPad or Desktop version of it. It gets better with every release and aggregates data from all kinds of other apps and services. I get my Meditation times, movement data, and workouts from my Apple Watch, audio data from my AirPods Pro, my weight from my Withings Body Cardio scale, and my sleep from my Fitbit Charge – though this needs an extra app to get the data over an API, as Fitbit and Apple have a vendetta and Fitbit doesn’t give their data to the health app.
Activity 📱
The Activity app is the app delivered with an Apple Watch. It’s nice to track workouts, movement, and changes in your activity over time. It allows competition with family and friends. And the data is transferred to the Health app.
Health Mate 📱 🌐
The Health Mate app by Withings is a nice way to have an insight into my weight, fat, water, muscle mass, heart frequency, and pulse wave velocity every morning. I use the Withings Body Cardio scale, the Sleep Analyzer, the BPM Connect blood pressure monitor, and Thermo.
Reps & Sets
I use the Reps & Sets app for my Calisthenics training, multiple times per week. As an early adopter, I get the Premium features for free.
InsightTimer 📱
I use InsightTimer for my daily meditation. I honestly don’t use much of its features, except the feature to create custom timers.
Finance & Calculations
iFinance 📱 🖥
iFinance is my tool to track income and spending. Every day, I track my expenses and income for ~5 minutes and make sure everything is fine with my accounts. iFinance has nice tools to automate and analyze your expenses to find out how you spend your income.
I use the iOS or Apple Watch version to track expenses while I’m on the way. The data is synchronized with iCloud or Wi-Fi across devices.
Stocks 📱 🖥
I use the Apple Stocks app to keep track of my stocks and funds. It’s simple and easy to use and available on iOS and macOS.
Calcbot 📱
Calcbot is a beautifully designed calculator and unit converter I use for many years. It’s available for the Apple Watch and has nice features such as sending your calculations as an email, syncing across devices with iCloud, and much more.
Weather
Netatmo 📱 🌐
I use the Netatmo weather app to monitor the temperature, CO₂, humidity, noise level, and air pressure in all my rooms and on the balcony. I use a rain monitor. The devices are beautifully designed and have a long life duration (I use them since 2013).
Weather Pro 📱
WeatherPro is the best and most accurate weather app I know. It’s a free app but for €9.99 per year, you can get more detailed data, hourly forecasts, and other nice features. All advertising gets removed from apps by MeteoGroup.
RainToday 📱
RainToday is the second app from MeteoGroup on my devices. There are live updates on upcoming rain in your location that show the estimated duration, intensity, and direction of the rain.
SolarWatch 📱
SolarWatch is my favorite app to show the sunrise and sunset.
Tools
Hue 📱 🖥
I use the Philips Hue app to control the light in my home. Nearly all my light bulbs are now from Hue, and I automate a lot of my light cycles. I turn on lights automatically when dusk starts and wake me up with lights during wintertime. I dim down my lights every day at the same time and shut them off at the same time. As I always follow the same routine, this works fantastic. I use multiple different switches and Siri to control the light around my home manually. I even use an Alfred workflow to control my light directly from the computer.
Apple Maps 📱 🖥
I switched to Apple Maps because I dislike Google for a while. But occasionally, I switch and use Google Maps because the information for stores and opening times is much better.
DeepL 📱 🖥 🌐
DeepL is my favorite translation app.
Dropbox (Plus) 📱 🖥 🌐
Dropbox is my cloud provider. My Synology NAS synchronizes automatically everything in Dropbox as a backup. Never trust cloud providers.
iCloud 📱 🖥 🌐
iCloud is my second cloud provider. The new CloudKit sync is fast and seamless with Apple Devices and Apple services work optimally with iCloud.
The Unarchiver 🖥
The Unarchiver is the best, free, and only app you need to unpack nearly every format available.
DaisyDisk 🖥
I use DaisyDisk to find and delete unneeded files from my computer. It’s the best visual representation of your hard drive I know. Files can be collected and deleted with one click.
AppCleaner 🖥
AppClearner is a nice and free application that allows uninstalling unwanted apps and deleting all traces and left-over settings at the same time.
Find My 📱 🖥
I use the Find My app to find my devices … and my family. And to get random calls from my grandmother about why I’m at home and not at work. 😆
Komoot 📱 🌐
If you’re into Biking or Hiking, Komoot is the best app I know. It’s free but possible to buy better hiking maps for regions or the whole world. It allows for creating tours and sending them to the iPhone or even Apple Watch app and navigating with it. The route gets even broken down into kinds of streets, height profile, and difficulty. And you can record your tours and share them.
Citymapper 📱 🌐
Citymapper is a fantastic routing app available for selected big cities around the globe. My home city Hamburg is included. It knows all available transport options and times and calculates the best tour to your target. It even shows you when to get on and off transport and on which side of a subway you have entered.
DHL Paket 📱
The DHL Paket app is the best way to see all packages on the way to your home or somebody from your home.