2025 Tools Audit
A snapshot and inventory of the tools I use regularly.
Posts tagged “reviews”
51 posts.
Best Vinyl of 2024
Reviewing a few special albums from this past year.
Impactful Books
A Slack icebreaker asked which programming books shaped your career. Here are mine, in a more long-lived format.
Hacker Culture Movies For The Kids
For your amusement, a compiled list of hacker-culture movies to recommend to 'the kids'.
Book Thoughts: Company of One
Useful reading if you are weighing a new project or company, though it has more to say about growth than the title suggests.
Framework Laptop First Thoughts
It has only been a week, but so far I am very positive about my Framework laptop purchase.
Book Notes: Dreaming in Code
I finished this book over the weekend. Here were a few highlights.
Video Book Review: Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro (5m)
A five-minute video review of Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro's case that designers are responsible for what they build.
A Month with the 2019 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K Display
One month with the 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K after returning the UltraWide, and what retina and native controls actually buy you.
The Great Monitor Search Continues
The LG 49-inch UltraWide is cool but fights macOS. Why I am trading screen real estate for the 4K UltraFine instead.
Book: The Common Good
Notes on Robert Reich's The Common Good, a case that a shared moral imagination is the essence of any functioning society.
31 Days, 31 Products: Skitch
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 31 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Skitch, the screenshot and annotation tool I lean on when I am running an app audit.
31 Days, 31 Products: OmniDiskSweeper
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Day 30 of 31 Days, 31 Products. OmniDiskSweeper, the free OmniGroup tool for finding what is actually eating your hard drive.
31 Days, 31 Products: iOctocat, GitHub on your iPhone and iPad
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Day 29 of 31 Days, 31 Products. iOctocat, the iPhone and iPad app I use to track GitHub pull requests while on the road.
31 Days, 31 Products: Reeder
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Day 28 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Reeder, the RSS app that got out of the way when my reading habit came back with the iPad Pro.
31 Days, 31 Products: Flixster
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Day 27 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Flixster, the app I keep on my phone for movie trailers, showtimes, and the release calendar.
31 Days, 31 Products: Dash
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Day 26 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Dash, a clean API documentation browser with 150 docsets and good editor integration.
31 Days, 31 Products: Sketch
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Day 25 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Sketch, the Mac vector tool that has become a standard for designing user interfaces.
31 Days, 31 Products: SuperDuper!
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Day 24 of 31 Days, 31 Products. SuperDuper, the backup tool that kept me calm when my 2TB media drive would not mount.
31 Days, 31 Products: Status Board
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Day 23 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Status Board, Panic's app for turning an old iPad into a wall of actionable data.
31 Days, 31 Products: BBEdit
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Day 22 of 31 Days, 31 Products. BBEdit, the editor I reach for on huge files, giant find-and-replaces, and config work.
31 Days, 31 Products: Vimeo
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Day 21 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Vimeo, where I host video because paying for it buys real control over presentation.
31 Days, 31 Products: OmniGraffle
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Day 20 of 31 Days, 31 Products. OmniGraffle, my go-to for flow charts, data models, and website wireframes.
31 Days, 31 Products: Trello
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Day 19 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Trello, an online Kanban board I have leaned on for years to see the flow of work.
31 Days, 31 Products: Postbox
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Day 18 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Postbox, the mail client sitting on top of my heavily filtered Gmail setup.
31 Days, 31 Products: Elgato Game Capture HD
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Day 17 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Elgato Game Capture HD, a passthrough box for recording whatever is on your console or screen.
31 Days, 31 Products: Hearthstone
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Day 16 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Hearthstone, the card game that became my way to destress between long coding sessions.
31 Days, 31 Products: Charles Proxy
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 15 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Charles Proxy, for watching the HTTP traffic your web or mobile app is actually sending.
31 Days, 31 Products: OmniFocus
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Day 14 of 31 Days, 31 Products. OmniFocus, the task manager I keep coming back to for Getting Things Done.
31 Days, 31 Products: SourceTree
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 13 of 31 Days, 31 Products. SourceTree, a Mac front end for Git that makes history and staging much easier to see.
31 Days, 31 Products: Instapaper
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Day 12 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Instapaper, for saving articles to read later in a clean, ad-free view.
31 Days, 31 Products: TextExpander
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Day 11 of 31 Days, 31 Products. TextExpander, which turns a few typed characters into whatever boilerplate you type most.
31 Days, 31 Products: Byword
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Day 10 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Byword, my Markdown editor of choice, plus a pitch for writing in Markdown at all.
31 Days, 31 Products: Today
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Day 09 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Today, my weather app of choice, mostly for its visual seven day highs and lows.
31 Days, 31 Products: SimPholders
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Day 08 of 31 Days, 31 Products. SimPholders, a menu bar app that gets you into recent Xcode simulator builds in a click.
31 Days, 31 Products: TweetBot & Twitterrific
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Day 07 of 31 Days, 31 Products. TweetBot and Twitterrific, the two clients that have made Twitter usable for me since 2007.
31 Days, 31 Products: Duet
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 06 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Duet, which turns an iPad into a wired second monitor with none of the AirPlay lag.
31 Days, 31 Products: ScreenFlow
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Day 05 of 31 Days, 31 Products. ScreenFlow, my tool of choice for recording and editing screencasts.
31 Days, 31 Products: Acorn
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Day 04 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Acorn, a Mac image editor with a truly native feel and some of the best docs around.
31 Days, 31 Products: 1Password
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Day 03 of 31 Days, 31 Products. 1Password, for generating and retrieving a unique password for every site you use.
31 Days, 31 Products: Fin
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 02 of 31 Days, 31 Products. Fin, an iOS app that turns your device into a large countdown timer for talks and performances.
31 Days, 31 Products: MindNode
· Series: 31 Days 31 Products
Day 01 of 31 Days, 31 Products. MindNode, the mind mapping tool I use to branch out from an idea and see where it goes.
24 Hours with My iPad Pro
First impressions after a day with the iPad Pro, from someone who has owned nearly every iPad since the original.
Farewell Edge Cases
Edge Cases is ending after 128 episodes. A goodbye to the rare Apple developer podcast that actually talked about code.
Star Trek: Into Darkness, Nitpicks and Plot Holes
Spoiler country. My running list of nitpicks and plot holes in Star Trek Into Darkness, starting with Khan's blood.
Panic’s Status Board for iPad
A first look at Panic's Status Board for iPad, and why the free-form widgets are where the real power sits.
Book Review: The Lean Startup
A review of Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, read while deciding what project to take on after selling ProfitTrain.
Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age
A must-watch Lawrence Lessig lecture on the life of Aaron Swartz and the legal battle that led to his death.
Netflix’d: Peep Show and Breaking Bad
I binge shows rather than follow them weekly. What streaming has served up lately, namely Peep Show and Breaking Bad.
Instapaper Gripes
A list of gripes from a daily Instapaper user who still likes the app. Small annoyances, mostly about how I read.
Core Intuition
Core Intuition is a weekly podcast about the indie Mac and iOS software business, hosted by Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece.