Default Apps – November 2023

Inspired by Chris Coyier’s blog post, here are my default apps. There are a couple of differences between my work and personal environments. I’ll try to note those.

📨 Mail Client: Work: Outlook. Personal: iCloud/Gmail…both web clients…mostly Gmail.

📮 Mail Server: Work: Exchange…I guess? Personal: Apple/Google

📝 Notes: Work: OneNote. Personal: Notes app

✅ To-Do: Work: Microsoft To-Do. Personal: Notes app.

📷 Photo Shooting: Work: N/A. Personal: Mostly my iPhone 14 these days but I do have a Canon Rebel T5.

🎨 Photo Editing: Work: N/A Personal: Photoshop CC/Lightroom CC

📆 Calendar: Work: Outlook. Personal: iCloud.

📁 Cloud File Storage: Work: OneDrive (noticing a trend?). Personal: Mostly iCloud. I have some Google Drive stuff but I prefer to keep stuff in in iCloud.

📖 RSS: N/A. I need to fix this.

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: The iOS default contacts. Reminds me I need to clean some of this up.

🌐 Browser: Work: Firefox. Personal: Safari/Firefox. Mobile: Safari.

🌐 Operating System: Work: Windows. Personal: Windows and MacOS. I got a MacBook Air last year and have been spending more time on that. My strongest personal machine is a Windows device but I’m preferring

💬 Chat: Work: Teams. Personal: iMessage. I’m on Discord as well but that’s mostly just to lurk.

🔖 Bookmarks: Whatever the browser default is.

📑 Read It Later: An open tab…bad habit.

📜 Word Processing: Work: Word. Personal: Pages I guess

📈 Spreadsheets: Work: Excel. Personal: lol.

📊 Presentations: Work: Powerpoint. Personal: lol again

🛒 Shopping Lists: Notes app

🍴 Meal Planning: Notes app

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Notes app (I keep a very simple budget. Out of school, I used to just use a notebook. I basically use the same strategy now but on the Notes app)

📰 News: Apple News, Reddit (sadly)

🎵 Music: Spotify

🎤 Podcasts: Spotify

🧑‍💻 Code Editor: VS Code, Codepen, Xcode for Swift and Visual Studio for .Net. Honestly VS Code is it probably 95% of the time. Codepen is 4%. Everything else just falls into that 1%.

✈️ VPN: Mozilla VPN

Honestly, that’s a fun list to go through. I actually bounce between some stuff so I had to think fairly hard about it. As an example, I’ve tried using Apple Music and Podcasts since I’ve adopted so much of the Apple ecosystem. However, where I get stuck is I intentionally try to separate my work life and personal life regarding tech. So I’m not going to sign into my Apple ID on my work device to use Apple Music. However, I’m fine signing into Spotify, so that’s why I end up using Spotify more.