Mailplane

Mailplane

Probably by now a lot of people know what Mailplane is. So, as you can imagine, I use it to manage my four Gmail accounts. It has the features of a desktop app combined with the power of the Google machine.

YoruFukurou

YoruFukurou

Still my favourite Twitter client. I cannot find anything better in the market. But with its moderate stagnation and my ever-growing “following” number, YoruFukurou might not be as appealing as it once was. So the thought of building my on Twitter client is back.

1Password

1Password

It’s difficult to give it a better description than I have last year. Maybe this video of David Teare at Çingleton will shed some more light on the company(AgileBits) that makes 1Password. Also, have a look at the App Store “Best of 2013”.

Evernote

Evernote

Another one from last year’s list. I use it for a lot of things. Like keeping stuff that might be helpful in the near future or writing blog posts, like this one. Because it’s just easy to switch from my iMac to my iPad and that’s a feature that I appreciate a lot.

Skype

Skype

Chat and video calls. That pretty much sums it up. It does a good job at these two things. And it’s great that it runs on all the popular platforms, since I gave my old iPad to my parents.

Miro

Miro

I use this application to listen to podcasts. It’s free and open-source. A great combination, if you ask me. The main reason I chose it over iTunes consists in a feature that I consider crucial for a podcast app. I’ll talk about this in a later blog post.

LittleSnapper

LittleSnapper

Although discontinued and replaced with a shinier app called Ember, LittleSnapper still works great for me. Because it serves my purpose so well I haven’t even tried the new app yet. Maybe that’s a mistake I’m gonna fix in 2014, though.

Pixelmator

Pixelmator

It helps me with everything that is not “client work”. So at home I use it quite a lot for making the screenshots for CSS Religion, for example. I feel the need to also mention Sketch here, although I haven’t had the chance to use that much. But that might change soon.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

This famous text editor is very reliable and makes my coding even more enjoyable. If you might have any feature request there’s probably a plugin(package) that can do what you’re looking for. In 2013 I’ve also started using Vim. But mostly on my iPad via ssh.

Transmit

Transmit

I have been using Transmit for a very long time. With no complaints. It does FTP very well, but the thing that impresses me is the way it works with Amazon S3. It makes it seem so simple! Also, Cabel Sasser gave an excellent talk at XOXO about Panic(the company that makes Transmit).

Dropbox

Dropbox

Dropbox is so good that I’ve never thought of using Google Drive or iCloud or SkyDrive. I just wish it had more pricing options. But it probably doesn’t make sense from an economic standpoint. Anyway, be sure to check Drew Houston’s Y Combinator Funding Application for Dropbox.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim

Drag-n-drop awesomeness and hassle-free image compression. I can’t find a reason why to not use it. By compressing images I save a bit on my Amazon S3 bill, but more importantly, my website’s visitors save time and bandwidth.

Plug

Plug

I found this little gem of an app a few months ago and I’ve been using it every day since. It plays music from The Hype Machine. With a beautiful and space efficient design it fits my desktop quite well. And did I mention it’s free?

As a note to this list, I want mention that after quite a few years of using Chrome as my default browser, in 2013, I went back to Safari. For speed and more privacy. And although I use Adobe products at work, I didn’t add them to the list because I’m not excited to talk about them.


Here are some other projects of mine:

Front-End Front – A crowd-curated news website focused on front-end development
PSD Repo – Free quality PSDs available for download
Sketch Repo – Free, high quality Sketch resources