in the depths of my post-cohost blog dive, i somehow ran into this blog post made by a podcaster who had run a "who has the most defualt apps" gameshow-type deal. i love lists and i love seeing what people's daily driver softwares/apps are, so i figured i'd fill out this thing too, in order the skew the demographics slightly away from the "tech-forward" crew.

📨 Mail Client/📮 Mail Server: apparently these are two different things? i guess one for the frontend and one for the backend. i just use gmail, although i've heard good things about protonmail and if i were a little mores security-minded and a little less lazy i'd figure out how to switch to that.

📝 Notes: the default iphone notes app. i used to keep a personal discord server that had a "notes to self" section, but i don't really use it that much anymore because the good folks of cohost raised enough of a stink about using discord as anything but a chat app, given the VC-backed, privatised nature of it and how volatile those services tend to be. i also actually used twitter as a notes-to-self service as well, but stopped for similar reasons.

✅ To-Do: also the default iphone notes app, or just as often the default reminders app. same deal as above, i used to use twitter and discord for this as well. also, i had a tag on my cohost page (this link will no longer work in 2025 because i haven't figured out a good way to publicly archive cohost pages since archive.org only saves the first couple posts on each page) and i posted a to-do list on tumblr recently as well. i think "posting your to-do list on social media so there's social pressure to do what you intend to to do" has been slightly more effective than "privately saying 'ok, i'm gonna do this' and then not doing it because i don't care if i follow through on something or not", but the effacacy of the former has only been around 50% -- better the 10% of the latter.

📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: ok i think the wording of this entry is a consequence of this coming from an apple-centric podcast so they just kind of assume you, also, have an iphone. which i do. i just use the default camera app. that being said, i'm not opposed to finding a 3rd party app given that stock camera apps can have unwanted post-processing in them. i'm just a little too paranoid about my photos being sent elsewhere without my knowledge to use 3rd party apps.

🟦 Photo Management: default iphone photos app. i have 11k photos on my phone but i'm willing to bet that 65% of that is screenshots, and that 10% of those are accidental screenshots i was too lazy to delete.

📆 Calendar: when i DO need a calendar-view of upcoming dates, i use the default calendar app on my iphone/macbook. i used that pretty frequently in my middle-two-and-a-half years of university. nowadays that i have less due dates, i just stick upcoming appointments and deadlines in the default reminders app and set that to remind me a couple times before the date. i used a physical planner for a couple weeks after i snagged a blank one from a garage sale for a dollar, but at work i didn't really have a need for one so i fell off (+ L + ratio + etc etc). though now that i'm done that job, maybe i could start it back up again.

📁 Cloud File Storage: depends on what we're storing. my phone/ipad backups are on the family icloud account, but i have to figure out a solution that isn't tied to people i'd rather not be financially reliant on. which will probably just be paying for my own icloud account once i can find a way to pay for that. i do have a lot of stuff in my google drive accounts, but that's mostly other people's documents that they've shared publicly, or stuff i've written in google docs/sheets/slides.

📖 RSS: netnewswire, synced between my laptop and phone via my icloud account. i've enjoyed it so far, it's the only free rss reader i've found that has unlimited feeds available to you that doesn't require you self-host a way to sync stuff. i used to use fraidycat, but the lack of syncing to my phone and the fact that it's essentially abandonware at this point means i have a hard time recommending it to people unless they want a low-committment, uniquely-styled rss reader. actually it's not much of a reader even, it just shows you who's been recently active and you have to click through to read what's been posted, unless it's a one-sentence post on a microblog. i still keep the extension installed though because it acts as an rss-detector, the icon lighting up whenever there's something i can add to nnn.

🙍 Contacts: default contacts app, NOT synced via anything, so texts on my phone that have a name and icon associated with them via the contacts app just show up as numbers without an icon on my laptop. it's a bit of a mess.

🌐 Browser: safari on my phone, firefox on my desktop... mostly. on my phone i have firefox focus installed, which i downloaded during a period of time i was logged off and blocking tumblr on safari because my brain was that desperate to get around the blocks i set up for myself. nowadays i use it to check if things that break on safari work on another browser or if it's just a "doesn't work on mobile" thing. on my laptop, i still have chrome downloaded just in case something breaks on firefox. also for some reason bracket's Live Preview mode defaults to chrome, but not the chrome profile i used? not quite an incognito window, but a default "person 1" profile without any of the settings or history of the chrome that i used, when i still used it. strange.

💬 Chat: discord. one could say that i also use imessage/sms, which i do, but i would hardly call the conversations i have on there "chatting", more like "answering things my family sends me". any sort of meaningful 1-on-1 conversation i've had in the past 4 or 5 years has happened on discord. or face-to-face, but this is online we're talking about here. i used to use kik but i haven't touched it in years and i have to assume my account is gone or inaccessible now, because i cant find it in any of my password managers and i don't see any signup emails for it in my email accounts. rest in peace to all the fantroll porn in there.

🔖 Bookmarks: so technically i'm using raindrop.io for bookmark management, but i haven't sorted and tagged everything yet and i still have all my desktop and mobile bookmarks on my default browsers for each respective platform. i also used to use my private discord server for this.

📑 Read It Later: also raindrop.io. i've seen people say good things about omnivore, but something doesn't feel right to me about using two apps for bookmark management and read-it-later stuff because i frequently bookmark things to read them later. the more moving parts i add to a workflow, the harder for me it becomes to use and the more likely i am to just drop it and let things become chaotic and unmanaged. if raindrop becomes unworkable for my purposes then i'll probably switch to omnivore, or maybe even firefox pocket for its kobo intergration in the event i make a switch from my hand-me-down kindle 4 to a new kobo.

edit november 2nd 2024: well, omnivore is shutting down, so 1. that makes that decision easy, and 2. reminds me i should never rely on 3rd party apps to manage my brain and knowledge. i should really become one of those people who self-hosts a personal wiki.

📜 Word Processing: used to be google docs, and i still use it for the most pedestrian of my writings like resumes and cover letters, but these days i get jumpy about companies randomly taking down my accounts for breaches of increasingly-conservative TOS, so i've moved my most salacious and concerning writings to either pages or textedit on my laptop, or the notes app on my phone. you could call brackets a word processor too since i write my blog posts directly in it, but i think this is one of the points in my workflow where i wouldn't necessarily mind having an extra step, because if i could snag a word processor that lets me type in a rich text editor like pages or google docs, and then export as user-friendly html that could be parsed in brackets with minimal editing, it would be a net zero amout of steps to add since i wouldn't have to remember to html-ize everything i write for this blog. actually i should check if this would work with gdocs (tested it, the output is disgusting-looking) or pages (no export as html option) before i go downloading something shiny and new. now that i've confirmed that my initial options won't work, this is one of the things on this blog that i will actually be taking comments for, which you can send on my neocities profile, email me with at the email on my portfolio page, or just message me normalstyle on a website or app you've already connected with me on.

📈 Spreadsheets: for work this past summer i used microsoft excel. in the past i have most often used google sheets, but most recently i stuck all of my cohost follows' external links into the numbers software on my laptop, because i wasn't sure google would like me linking to dozens of porn sites. of course this became obsolete when cohost sent us our archives and included a "friend's links" page, but it was nice to have when there was ambiguity about what, exactly, the export would include.

📊 Presentations: man, when was the last time i made a presentation? in summer of 2020 a coworker of mine introduced me to canva, but i hated the shared document experience so much it put me off of using it even for things only i had worked on. google slides was my go-to for school presentations. i don't think i've ever used keynote.

🛒 Shopping Lists: reminders or notes, depends on what i open first. my current shopping list in reminders is as follows:

🍴 Meal Planning: unfortunately i live at home with my parents so i'm at the mercy of whatever they want to eat. i should probably look into this though

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: i'm not telling you what bank i use, you little perverts.

📰 News: a handful of palestinian people i follow on social media, as well as a good portion of the sites linked in alyaza birze's Cohost Union News blog, put into their own folder on netnewswire. looks like they've added more since i last checked, so i gotta add those. if i have to read the words of some jerkoff politician without a degree of separation between their mouth and my brain, i will burst a blood vessel.

🎵 Music: primarily apple music, but more-than-incidentially a user of spotify for the things my best friend sends me that they hear on the SomaFM lush channel. i've also been getting back into mynoise.net as a replacement to twitch streams or youtube videos as background noise. i just realized im rawdogging silence as i write this blog post because i have a rare moment of being home alone.

🎤 Podcasts: apple podcasts. current shows in the rotation are The Death Panel, Gender Reveal, Drawing a Dialouge, Game Studies Study Buddies, and this one episode of a sleep podcast i've been using to fall asleep to for over a year now. i should probably figure out how to download it locally in case tragedy strikes.

🔐 Password Management: bitwarden. it was pretty easy to switch over after saving stuff in browsers or icloud keychain or the weird, jank on-machine keychain on my laptop.