Software I Like
NOTE: This page is still a draft.
This is not a “Uses” page, it’s simply a collection of what I consider to be well-crafted software. I don’t have a particularly high bar for what constitutes “good”, the features I care about are but a few.
Reliability, because unexpected crashes are bad.
Purpose, because there’s too much software out there that does nothing useful.
Speed is a feature, and it’s probably the most important one.
The combination of these three usually takes the form of a pretty small app. Made to do one thing, and to do it well. They also tend to be as free from cloud dependencies as possible, because latency is not a bottleneck that can ever truly be optimised away.
Web stuff
Arc
It’s been my default browser for the past 8 months. And it hasn’t gone away yet.
Useful things you can do in Arc include:
Renaming a tab: You double click on the tab name, and start typing in a new one, simple as.
Separate your accounts: You can set up separate Spaces to have different Google accounts logged in. I used to have a separate space for college stuff. I have one for working on projects, and one for open-ended browsing.
Speaking of Telegram, it’s a really well-designed app and I run a pretty cool micro-blogging platform on top of it.
Pin tabs: You can kinda do this on other browsers, but Arc seems do it better by ensuring that they load instantly whenever you open them. My current pins include Spotify, Github, Telegram, Are.na, and a localhost tab where I test my apps.
Control media playback: There are two kinda of mini-players in Arc. The first is the classic picture-in-picture that hovers atop your desktop when you switch away from an in-progress Youtube video. But it also has another one that shows up in the sidebar whenever a tab is playing audio, great for controlling Spotify.
Marginalia
It’s not one of those fancy LLM-based search interfaces, this an actual, honest-to-goodness, search engine.
Modern
Arc has these things called Boosts, a way to inject user JS/CSS into sites. So technically, I could write my own theme for Wikipedia if I wanted to, but I think Modern already does a great job.
This one might not be your thing at all. Many people like Wikipedia’s default layout and design choices. I happen to like a scroll-position-tracking sidebar and pretty fonts.
NetNewsWire
RSS reader for MacOS/iOS. Customizable, dependable, solid design. I made some themes for it, because the default ones aren’t that great.
Misc
Displaperture
It gives your Mac screen rounded corners, that is all.
It’s one of those apps that literally do not matter in the grand scheme of things, but I’m happy someone took the time to create it. Most of my own projects are like this.