My Must-Have Mac Apps, 2017 Edition

It’s been quite a year. At the start, I was still commuting to Chicago every day to work in a law office full of Windows PCs. Now I work from my home studio surrounded by Apple hardware, moving back and forth from a late-2016 MacBook Pro to iOS devices as I write and talk about apps each day.

When I was commuting, iOS played a central role. I was on the move and used my iPhone and iPad to write for MacStories when I wasn’t practicing law. Now, I have a dedicated workspace where I connect my MacBook Pro to a 4K 27” display and a fast, wired Internet connection.

During 2017, the work I do changed too. Not only did I leave my law job, but in addition to writing at MacStories, Federico and I launched AppStories, and I began selling sponsorships for the site and podcast.

With no commute, a dedicated workspace, and massive change in the work I do each day, how I get work done has changed significantly too. I continue to work on macOS and iOS, but the Mac now plays a bigger role in my workday than ever before. I haven’t abandoned iOS for work, but now, I work on iOS because I want to, not because I need to.

Just over two months into working from home, I’ve begun to reevaluate how I use the Mac. I expect to continue evolving how I work on macOS throughout 2018 as I feel my way around the best ways to be productive. Still, a couple of overarching themes can be seen in my picks below that I expect will continue to guide me in 2018.

First, I primarily use my Mac for work. If I watch a video, read a book or article, or play a game, it’s more likely to happen on iOS, which I expect to continue. The primary exception to that rule is listening to music, which I often do as I work. Second, I don’t like to be limited to macOS. As much as I work on my Mac, I value the option to do things like pick up my iPad to read email messages or grab my iPhone while I’m away from home to make a quick edit to something I’m writing.

With that context, below are 40 Mac apps and a few web services that I used this year and consider my must-have apps, divided into seven categories:

Writing

Reading and Research

Images and Video

Podcast Recording and Production

Utilities

Communications

Task Management and Planning

I’ve also included a few awards at the end of the story that highlight some of my favorites among the exceptional group of apps I use every day on my Mac, including an App of the Year.

[table_of_contents]

Writing

Ulysses. More writing happens on my Mac than any other activity, and almost all of that writing happens in Ulysses. The same holds true on my iPad, which is why solid sync and a full-featured iOS version are critical to my use of the app on my Mac. Ulysses has both and much more. I appreciate that the Mac and iOS versions look and feel almost identical. There’s no mental overhead moving from one version of the app to the other. The functionality is largely the same too, with only a few features that I rarely use missing from iOS.

Ulysses is where anything that’s going to be published is created, whether it’s an article on MacStories, a section of a Club MacStories newsletter, or show notes for AppStories. I spend most of my time writing in a dark theme created by Federico. I’ve used it for so long now that it’s become synonymous with writing, which has the added benefit of helping me slip into that frame of mind when I open a sheet.

Ulysses is a deeper app than it appears at first glance. Coming from another Markdown text editor requires some adjustment to Ulysses’ unique style for handling Markdown, but it quickly grew on me. For example, I like that Ulysses hides URLs that would otherwise interrupt the flow of reading what I’ve written, but still makes it just as easy to view and export standard MultiMarkdown.

I also love Ulysses’ integration with WordPress. If I choose Publish from the share menu, Ulysses automatically detects the title of my article and lets me designate a category and tags before publishing to MacStories’ WordPress dashboard as a draft. I use the web app’s preview functionality for final proofing and to see how an article will look on MacStories, but I rarely have to do anything else in WordPress because Ulysses has already taken care of it.

Byword. Writing that isn’t for publication often starts in Byword, which I use as a sort of scratchpad similar to how I use Drafts on iOS. It’s a fully capable text editor, but I like using it for things like draft emails and editing other MacStories team members’ writing. Like Ulysses, using Byword for certain types of writing helps me get into the frame of mind to do that work.

GitHub Desktop. We use GitHub to share drafts of our work among MacStories team members. It allows us to keep in sync with the latest version of a story and track changes made by others. On the Mac, I use GitHub Desktop, which is a relatively simple GitHub client. Developers may knock it for not having features that you can get from the command line, but it’s perfectly adequate for our purposes.

Reading and Research

Inoreader and Reeder. More reading takes place on my iOS devices than my Mac, but as I’ve worked increasingly on my Mac, I’ve started to use it more and more for reading, research, and general planning. Not long ago, I wrote a story for Club MacStories’ Monthly Log on how I’d overhauled my RSS feed system with filters and rules to capture a broader variety of tech news without receiving an overwhelming barrage of information. The backend of that system is a web service called Inoreader. I pay for a pro subscription, which includes advanced search, filtering, and rule-based features that I use to tame my feeds.

My current front-end to Inoreader is Reeder, an RSS client that’s been around a long time. Again, this is the type of app where I value the integration and syncing with iOS. Although I’m more likely to read the news on my iPhone or iPad than on my Mac, I don’t want to have to mark things read in two places. With Reeder, everything stays perfectly in sync.

Perhaps the greatest feature of Reeder on the Mac is its keyboard shortcuts. Nearly every feature has a keyboard shortcut, and what doesn’t can be custom added. I use shortcuts to navigate my feeds, mark articles as read, open links in the background in Safari, and send other articles straight to Pocket with a shortcut that I assigned. It’s an efficient way to move quickly through a lot of news. Reeder is also faster to use on a Mac because the iOS app’s shortcuts are limited to navigating the app.

Pocket. Pocket is the bucket where anything I’m not going to read right away goes. Sometimes that means articles that I think might make good links in MacStories Weekly, and other times that means research for a story, or just personal reading for later. Periodically during the week, I’ll go back to the list and skim through what I’ve collected. If I’m on my Mac and collecting links for MacStories Weekly, I read in the Pocket Mac app, and if I decide to link it in the newsletter, I press ‘B’ to open the article in Safari and use Handoff to send it to my iPhone, then use Workflow to send the story to the Trello board where we organize each issue.

1Blocker. When I’m reading in Safari instead of Pocket, two tools make the experience much better. The first is 1Blocker, a Safari content blocker. I don’t mind advertising on most webpages, but there are too many sites that don’t respect the reading experience. 1Blocker fixes that by filtering out distractions. The other solution I employ is Safari’s Reader mode, which, much like Pocket, strips away everything but the text and key images. With certain sites, I’ve made Reader mode the default, which has made getting through a large volume of reading a much better experience.

DEVONthink. DEVONthink is an app in which I want to invest more time in 2018. It’s become a must-have repository for research material for longer stories. With excellent tagging, search, and sync with iOS, I can access my research materials wherever I am.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of this powerful app though. One direction I’ve begun to take DEVONthink is to make it a destination for a broader range of reference materials that aren’t article-specific. Apple press photos, press releases, documentation, product specifications, and other historical materials are perfect for DEVONthink. Earlier this year, I pointed it at the MacStories RSS feed so that it automatically retrieves every article published, creating a personal, easily searchable database.

WWDC. I usually watch WWDC videos on my iPad and Apple TV, and although the web-based experience on macOS is good, I love the native treatment Guilherme Rambo has given the sessions in his unofficial WWDC macOS app. The app supports live viewing during WWDC, downloading for later, streaming to Chromecast devices, and excellent search functionality. If you’re a developer or just someone interested in the technical underpinnings of the apps you use, Rambo’s WWDC app is one of the best ways to consume conference videos.

Images and Video

Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro recently replaced Pixelmator as my go-to image editor. Many of the app’s more sophisticated image editing features are lost on me because my needs are relatively simple, but I made the switch because I love the new dark UI that spotlights the image I’m working on and the pane-based organization that makes the app’s tools easier to find.

Most days I use Pixelmator Pro for simple tasks like editing screenshots, but it’s nice to have the app’s more sophisticated tools available when I need them. Little touches like the ability to resize screenshots without saving changes to one before moving to the next save time and avoid frustration. Given my needs, Pixelmator Pro’s paid upfront model makes more economic sense than using an Adobe Creative Suite tool.

Softorino YouTube Converter 2. Also known as SYC2, this app is a Swiss Army knife for YouTube and other video sources. I use it to download Apple ads and other videos that we cover on MacStories. With a high-resolution video in hand, it’s easy to capture a single frame for an article. I’ve also used it to save live concert footage and audio of my favorite bands. It’s a great way to download the audio of conference talks I want to listen to without watching them, too.

ShotBox. Sometimes one of the handiest apps is also the simplest. ShotBox is a menu bar utility that I use when I want to share a quick screenshot. You take a screenshot the same way you normally would on macOS. ShotBox intercepts the image and displays it as a small thumbnail window with a toolbar for marking up, previewing, and sharing the image. When I’m finished and close the window, ShotBox gives me the option to save or delete the screenshot, which is my favorite feature because it helps me tame my screenshot collection by eliminating the ones that I know I won’t need again later.

Podcast Recording and Production

In April, Federico and I launched AppStories. In the months leading up to that and even after, I taught myself audio editing with the patient assistance of my pals Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett. The show is tightly edited to keep it to around 30 minutes and to eliminate as many vocal distractions as possible, which makes the effectiveness of the tools I use to edit important.

Over the course of the year, I’ve tried many different apps and finally landed on a workflow I’m comfortable with and that I think results in a professional sounding edit. Of course, there’s always room for improvement, but I’ve settled on a toolset that balances quality and efficiency in a way I’m happy with.

Skype. Skype is one of those must-have apps that is a necessary evil. It’s still the best VOIP app for conducting a low-latency conversation with someone who is thousands of miles away, but I’m not a fan of its UI or the direction it took in 2017. It’s a sentiment that’s shared by many podcasters, but we’re all still using it, so unless and until something better comes along, I’ll continue to rely on Skype for AppStories and Ruminate.

Audio Hijack. Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack is as much a pleasure to use as Skype isn’t. Federico and I each record our end of our weekly conversation, and I also record the Skype call as a backup. Audio Hijack allows users to drag customizable blocks of functionality onto a grid and connect them to create recording ‘Sessions.’

My AppStories session records two things at once: the Skype call and my track, creating a file with a specific naming scheme in a shared Dropbox folder where it’s waiting for me, along with Federico’s track, when I’m ready to start editing.

Adobe Audition. I use Adobe Audition for just one tool that works better than any other I’ve tried. The app has a loudness matching function that’s magical. When you drag tracks in, they’re analyzed to determine their relative loudness. Click run, wait a little while, and Audition creates natural-sounding leveled tracks where one track might otherwise have sounded too quiet or too loud. If I find an equally good alternative for loudness matching that isn’t subscription based, I’ll consider it because a monthly subscription for one feature is not something I like to pay, but the results are good enough that I pay it anyway.

iZotope RX Standard. This is the single most expensive app I’ve ever bought at $399, but it has already paid for itself in saved time and production quality. The app includes a long list of filters designed to do everything from removing background noise to eliminating mouth clicks and plosives from audio tracks. I spent a couple of weekends poring over tutorials and help files, creating a toolchain of filters tuned specifically to my and Federico’s recording environments that are saved as presets.

Even better, RX has batch processing. After setting up my filter sequence once, with just a couple of clicks, I can apply one set of filters to my side of the conversation and the weekly ad reads, and the other set to Federico’s recording. The filters can take a while to run, but with that going on in the background, I’m free to work on the show notes or something completely unrelated.

Logic Pro X with BetterTouchTool. After the audio is processed, I drag the files into Logic where editing begins. I have a template project I use each week that’s pre-populated with the AppStories intro and outro music and the usual number of tracks I use to edit the show.

When I started using Logic, I found myself hitting the wrong keyboard shortcuts too often, which had unintended effects on the tracks I was editing. The trouble is partly that Logic is designed to do so much more than just edit podcasts, and when my eyes were focused on the timeline, my fingers would sometimes stray in ways that resulted in unintended consequences. I could undo the damage, but if I didn’t notice what I’d done right away, that slowed me down.

The solution was to incorporate BetterTouchTool into my editing workflow. The app lets you record all manner of trackpad shortcuts on an application-level basis. BetterTouchTool is incredibly versatile and powerful, and an app I should probably make even greater use of, but it was nonetheless perfect for this particular problem. Instead of reaching for a letter in the middle of the keyboard, I assigned my most-used keyboard shortcuts to trackpad gestures combined with the Command key. That way, I can keep one finger on that key and another on the spacebar, which has vastly reduced the rate of my keyboard errors.

Forecast. Forecast is another recent addition to my podcasting toolbox. It’s a beta app from Marco Arment for encoding podcasts as MP3s with embedded metadata. If I export an episode as a WAV file with markers named for the chapters in the episode, Forecast encodes the file as an MP3 with embedded chapter markers.

By consistently naming the exported WAV file, Forecast also knows I’m working on AppStories and drops the show art in automatically for me too. All I need to do is add the title and description for the episode. Clicking on the file size and duration copies those values too, which I can then paste into our WordPress template. Although the app is a beta, I’ve been using it for a few months, and it’s been solid.

Utilities

The utilities I use on my Mac fall into a couple of categories. First, there are those apps that are so core to my use of macOS that they may as well be part of the operating system themselves. These are the first apps I install if I’m setting up a fresh Mac. The second category of utilities is typically single-purpose apps that make a particular task easier or help bridge my work between macOS and iOS.

File Storage, Backup, and Security

Dropbox. No utility epitomizes the kind that has worked itself into the very fabric of my macOS experience as much as Dropbox. I’ve had good luck with iCloud Drive, and might have moved a lot of my personal files there but for the superior sharing features of Dropbox. Sending links to files and folders is so easy that I couldn’t see using anything else for collaboration.

We have a Club MacStories folder that Federico, Ryan, and I share and I have another one with Federico for AppStories and other shared projects and resources. The hooks the app has deep within macOS make some people uncomfortable, and it can be a resource hog at times, but the convenience and utility of having my Dropbox files and folders synced across iOS and macOS and available offline has become an indispensable part of how I work.

Backblaze. I’ve used Backblaze for years. It’s a fantastic cloud-based backup service that I’ve had the good fortune of not needing very often, but for $50/year, it gives me the peace of mind of knowing that my files are safe somewhere else. As my kids have begun to go off to college, I’ve bought them Backblaze subscriptions too.

If you have a lot of data and a slower connection, the initial backup can take a long time, but after that, Backblaze just hums along quietly in the background keeping up with your changing data. If you need to recover a file, you can do so in a web browser or Backblaze’s iOS app. For recovery from a complete drive failure though, Backblaze can ship you a hard drive with your data on it.

SuperDuper. SuperDuper is another backup app and old favorite that I’ve been using for years. Shirt Pocket Software has done an amazing job keeping up with macOS changes, including the most recent shift to APFS.

Most recently, SuperDuper gained support for APFS snapshots, which has brought Time Machine-like versioning to the app.

Encrypt.me. Formerly Cloak, Encrypt.me is a VPN service. When I’m out and about at a coffee shop, using a public Wi-Fi connection, it’s nice to know Encrypt.me is providing an added layer of protection. My home network is whitelisted, so it doesn’t engage at home, and I get a push notification when it’s enabled while I’m out. There’s a menu bar app, but I keep it hidden with Bartender because I so rarely need to fiddle with the app’s settings. Like Backblaze, the service is largely set-it-and-forget-it, especially since I’ve never noticed any significant impact on the performance of my Wi-Fi connection.

1Password. Year after year, AgileBits continues to iterate its password service, staying just far ahead enough of Apple’s built-in password manager to keep me as a happy, paying customer. I don’t keep my 1Password vault nearly as organized and tidy as I’d like, but the app’s search functionality is so solid that it doesn’t really matter. Between the macOS and iOS apps, as well as the web, 1Password is always close at hand when I need to log into a website or app.

1Password brought a little extra utility into my life this year in an unexpected way. MailChimp changed the URLs it generates for newsletters in 2017, which required us to take the extra step of adding a random string to the end of each Club MacStories newsletter URL so they wouldn’t be guessable by people that don’t subscribe. The solution that saved this from being a hassle has been to use the password generator in 1Password’s menu bar app to create a long random string of letters and numbers that I copy and append to the URL for each issue. It’s not at all what 1Password was intended for, but it’s nonetheless been effective and makes me smile every time I use it.

Shortcuts

Alfred. While Dropbox and 1Password may be the first apps I install on a new Mac because so many other apps and projects rely on them, no app has become an extension of macOS more than Alfred. Alfred is mapped to the Command + spacebar key combination on my Mac. It’s how I open apps, search for files, search the web, and grab past items from my Mac’s clipboard. When I use a Mac that doesn’t have Alfred I can almost hear the needle scratching across the vinyl as I try to invoke it to no effect.

Perhaps my favorite use of Alfred is a custom workflow I created this year for searching MacStories. It’s a simple workflow that is triggered when I type the Alfred hotkeys and then ‘ms’ for MacStories, plus some search terms. The action drops the search terms into the search query used on MacStories.net and takes me directly to the results in Safari. It’s a command I use over and over all week long that saves me time and reminds me there’s a lot more I could be doing to harness the power of Alfred in 2018.

PopClip. This app is the macOS equivalent of the contextual menu that pops up when you select text on an iOS device, but it’s better because it’s customizable by the user. You can go wild adding lots of fancy actions to your contextual menu, but I find I get by for most of my work with just a handful.

I use cut, copy, and paste because if I’m already using my trackpad to select text, it’s easier to click one of the options in PopClip than reaching for a keyboard shortcut. I also use PopClip to display character and word counts for selected text. For research, the search and Wikipedia actions are ones I commonly use to look something up, and for URLs, I use the link action that detects links in a selection and opens them in Safari.

Also, every week I use a ‘Markdown to HTML’ PopClip action when producing the Club MacStories newsletters. The action not only converts Markdown to HTML, but it copies it to the clipboard automatically so I can simply paste it into our MailChimp template. There are other ways to achieve the same result, but because I often have to move parts of an article into MailChimp in multiple chunks, the ability to do it by just selecting each part is a big time saver.

Hazel. Hazel monitors folders and automates actions on their contents. It’s a nice way to do something as simple as periodically emptying the trash, or as complex as running a script on a series of files in a folder. Hazel also includes uninstall functionality, so when I delete an app from my Mac, everything is removed, which isn’t always the case if you simply move the app icon to the trash.

My most recent Hazel rule was set up in response to an iCloud disaster Myke Hurley experienced over the summer with Pages where dozens of files suddenly disappeared. Chatting with Myke about that experience made me realize that I have a handful of Numbers spreadsheets and other documents that are critical to the work I do, and that it couldn’t hurt to add an extra layer of protection to my backups. With Hazel, I set up a rule that copies those spreadsheets to a Dropbox folder every time they are modified in iCloud Drive. I haven’t had to resort to the copies, but it’s nice to know they are there in case I need them.

Copied. Much of the Club MacStories newsletter production process is automated with Workflow. As a result, parts of the newsletters are easier to create on iOS than macOS, and I find myself moving between the two OSes repeatedly. Apple’s Universal Clipboard and Handoff technologies go a long way towards making the process smooth, but they occasionally flake out, and when they do, I use Copied, a robust iOS and macOS clipboard manager that syncs between the two platforms, making it easy to access a long clipboard history. Copied has some cool automation tools built in too, but I’ve found that most days, simply being able to move data back and forth across iOS and macOS is all the functionality I need.

Tidying Up

Working within a lot of apps and files all day gets messy fast. That’s why a whole set of utilities I use regularly are designed to bring order to the chaos that my desktop can so easily become.

Moom. For window management, I use Moom by Many Tricks. You can set up custom configurations with Moom, but usually, I just use it to put windows on the left and right halves of my display when I’m working in two apps or to resize windows to fill the entire screen. I could use macOS’s Split View and Full Screen modes to similar effect, but I’ve never felt at home in Full Screen mode.

Bartender. It seems like every new macOS app release has some sort of menu bar component, but there are very few apps that need to be constantly visible in the menu bar. With Bartender, I hide some completely and display others only when there’s a change in their status. The rest are just a click of the Bartender icon away if I need them.

Yoink. I recently moved to a 4K 27” LG external display that I use when my MacBook Pro is docked. Dragging files around becomes a hassle the larger the screen you use. Yoink lets me start a drag and then drop a file or snippet of text into Yoink, which appears just below the pointer as the drag begins. The item is then whisked to the side of my screen until I navigate to where it’s needed. I also occasionally lock a file in Yoink’s shelf for a while, which comes in handy when I need to send a file as an attachment to multiple email messages.

CleanMyMac. Lots of cruft can build up week-to-week on a Mac, whether it’s caches of data, the trash, or other files I don’t need. To keep the junk under control and free up space on my MacBook Pro’s SSD, I run CleanMyMac once each week.

MacPaw constantly updates the app to keep on top of changes to macOS, and it’s always satisfying to free up gigabytes of data in just a few minutes.

Communications

Much of my day-to-day communications happen in Messages, which is a sort of catch-all spot that is a mix of friends, family, and work. It’s probably the most sure-fire way to reach me, but as a result, I also keep a tight lid on who can reach me that way so it doesn’t become overwhelming. Most other communication happens in Slack, on Twitter, and via email.

Slack. Most internal communications with the MacStories team happens in Slack, which is a reluctant must-have pick. The iOS version of Slack has a reputation for being buggy, but the macOS version is worse in a lot of ways because it’s a resource hog and takes forever to launch. As a result, I find myself using the iOS version on my iPhone even when I’m sitting in front of my Mac. Still, for all its faults as an app, Slack as a service – with its integrations, bots, and organization of group communication – is excellent. This past year, Alex Guyot built a bot for our Slack that allows us to keep tabs on what everyone is writing and assign stories to each other, which has been a fantastic addition to our Slack setup.

Tweetbot. Outside communications occur primarily via email and Twitter. I find that direct messages in Tweetbot can be a great way to have private conversations with developers about an upcoming app. It helps cut down on the volume of email I get and is more conversational like Messages. Mostly though, Twitter is a place to chat, catch up on what others are doing, find links, and discover topics for articles. I’ve used Tweetbot for years and have periodically switched to Twitterrific, which has come a long way now that the macOS app has been updated, but overall, I still prefer the way Tweetbot looks and works.

Airmail with SaneBox. Email is an area that I’m not entirely satisfied with as 2017 draws to a close. I’ve been using Airmail all year because I love that I can fine tune the experience in its settings. I’ve also used its integrations with apps and services like Todoist, Trello, and DEVONthink at times. Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that the ultimate integration is a link back to the original message that I can add anywhere that takes a URL.

What’s become a more important email must-have feature this year is SaneBox, which organizes my email on its servers before it even reaches me. Messages from people I’ve corresponded with in the past or trained SaneBox to recognize land in my inbox. Everything else ends up in SaneBulk for offers from companies and other promotional-type messages, SaneNews for newsletters, and SaneLater, which is a catch-all for unrecognized senders that will probably end up in another category later. There’s even a SaneBlackHole for persistent senders who won’t unsubscribe me from email lists. Once a message is sent to the SaneBlackHole, I’ll never see a message from that sender again.

The benefit of a server-side, rule-based email sorting service is that it makes it easier to switch email clients. I think I can live without Airmail’s integrations as long as I can copy a message’s URL, but I’m not sure I’ll be happy with another email client where I don’t have the same customization options. That’s an experiment for 2018 though. For now, I’m sticking with the familiarity of my Airmail setup.

Task Management and Planning

Todoist. I’ve used many task managers over the years, but few have stuck more than a year. I started using Todoist in late 2016 and am still using it. The app’s superpower is its special syntax. It can recognize dates and has special character prefixes for denoting details like projects and labels. Too often other task managers I’ve used failed me by requiring me to dump tasks into a catch-all inbox without a date. With simple project and date options, I can be sure that tasks wind up on the right list, or if there’s a deadline, with the right date. It’s a small thing, but critical because it lets me quickly enter tasks with just enough organization that they don’t get lost.

MindNode 5. I love that this beautiful mind mapping app is just as powerful on iOS as it is on the Mac and looks great without any tweaking by me.

I don’t use mind maps a lot, but I’ve begun using them for longer writing projects, like this one. It helps me organize my thoughts and keep track of everything I want to include in a longer article.

Trello. Trello is one of the better non-native apps I’ve used on macOS. It’s built with Electron, like Slack, but performs much better. I like that I have a standalone app to organize the Club MacStories newsletter each week and I prefer it to a tab in Safari that I’ll lose track of, but if I could replace it with a native app, I’d do so immediately. Like Slack and GitHub Desktop, Trello is more a must-have service than it is a must-have app; it’s great for organizing a small team collaborating on a project.

Numbers. I use Numbers to track sponsorships and other MacStories work. I find the app is more approachable than Microsoft Excel and works the way I think, which I appreciate. The sharing features work well too, though the spreadsheets I share are not the sort of documents that are edited simultaneously or frequently.

Bear. Another tool I use for tracking sponsorships is Bear. I pin a template note to the top of my notes list that I duplicate whenever I communicate with a new sponsor. I use notes to track details about discussions, past sponsorships, and the like. It’s a personal reference manual with fast search and tagging.

Fantastical. This year also saw more appointments on my schedule. Whether it’s an appointment to record AppStories or a call with a developer, they all make it to my calendar using Fantastical 2, which I also use on iOS. I switched back to the Apple Calendar app for a while this fall, but Fantastical’s natural language input is substantially faster for creating events, which is what brought me back to the app recently.

Feature of the Year

Pixelmator Pro’s Automatic Layer Naming

Machine learning was a common buzzword thrown about more often in 2017 than it was put to good use. Pixelmator Pro bucked that trend by using machine learning to automatically name images added in as new layers to the app. Drag in photos of a dog, a landscape, and a building and your layers will be named things like puppy, trees, and skyscraper. The feature is surprisingly accurate and a great time saver for organizing complex image projects.

Runner-Up

Todoist’s Task Syntax

There’s a learning curve with Todoist’s task syntax, but once you speak its language, you can become a master of sending tasks to the right projects with labels and proper due dates. As I think of something I need to do, it’s become second nature to summon Todoist’s input field and quickly type a task, complete with syntax, and receive the satisfaction of knowing it will be where I want it when I go back and look, instead of piling up unprocessed in an inbox.

Redesign of the Year

Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator was my go-to image editor before the Pro version was released earlier this year and would have made my must-have list without the new Pro version. However, Pixelmator Pro is a full redesign of the app that does two things I absolutely love. First, it stashes tools in side panels where it’s easier to find them, eliminating the jumble of palettes used by the standard version. Second, its dark gray color scheme puts the focus on the image you’re working on, which makes it a delight to use.

Update of the Year

MindNode 5

I wasn’t a fan of mind maps, but something about MindNode 5 clicked with me. With an update this fall, the app got a new look, improved outline view, and many other features that together have made mind mapping feel as natural as typing a nested outline. The ability to quickly organize thoughts with only the keyboard in a way that looks good, without fiddling with settings, has made the app one of my favorite releases of the year.

Runner-Up

Bartender 3

Bartender is an essential tool for taming a wild menu bar full of apps. Even with Bartender though, it can be hard to find the app you’re looking for, which is why I was so happy to see that Bartender 3 added search support. In addition, the app has been built from the ground up with macOS High Sierra in mind, with a look that is right at home on a modern Mac.

Debut of the Year

Forecast

I wouldn’t normally pick a beta app as a Debut of the Year, but Forecast by Marco Arment is far more stable than the typical beta and was used in production by Arment and other podcasters for months before its public release. The app is lightning fast at encoding podcast episodes as MP3s and supports chapter markers, show art, and other little time savers that anyone who has produced a podcast will appreciate.

App of the Year

Ulysses

There’s no single app I use more than Ulysses. Despite a few eccentricities, the app handles the entire writing process with a simple, elegant design that belies the sophistication that underlies it. I especially like how Ulysses handles Markdown, its ability to hide distracting UI chrome from view, and the WordPress integration.

Runner-Up

iZotope RX Standard

There’s no doubt that you can produce a good-sounding podcast with free or inexpensive tools. iZotope RX, however, is one of my favorite apps of 2017 because it helped shorten the production time of AppStories while simultaneously making it sound better, which made it a good investment despite its hefty price tag.

Looking Ahead

As 2017 comes to a close, I’m on my Mac more than ever. A lot of that has to do with changes in how I work and what I do, which in turn is reflected in the tools I use. That seems incredibly obvious as I write it, but too often the discussion of apps and productivity winds up divorced from the work itself. After all, it’s the changes in my work and life that should affect the apps I use, not the other way around.

Although 2017 has seen a shift towards Mac apps, my overall approach remains a hybrid one. Nowhere is this more evident than on Friday mornings when I sit at my desk assembling MacStories Weekly – juggling Safari, PopClip, Ulysses, Byword, GitHub Desktop, Slack, and Airmail on my Mac, while switching periodically to Tweetbot, Photos, Workflow, Working Copy, Blink, and Pythonista on my iPhone. I enjoy working in both OSes and don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Perhaps it’s just a reflection of the exciting direction that iOS 11 has taken the iPad Pro, but the one thing that makes me slightly uncomfortable with my hybrid approach is that the Mac app ecosystem has stagnated in recent years. At the same time, even though the Mac app landscape is littered with a broken store and developer resources that lag behind their iOS counterparts, the iMac Pro, upcoming Mac Pro, and updated pro apps serve as a beacon of hope that the best days of macOS are not behind it.

I don’t have a crystal ball into the future of Mac apps, but I do know I can count on change. And with the introduction of new Mac hardware, I know I can also count on developers to push that hardware’s limits with apps I can’t wait to try in 2018 and beyond.