One of the things I expected to be a potential problem when I first switched to Mac was the software. There just wasn't as much as there was for Windows. But a lot of the things I used at the time were cross-platform, so I figured I'd probably keep using those. I actually found that in most cases, there were better and nicer apps that were Mac-only, in many cases. ## The Basics * I use 1Password as my password manager. Apple's built-in password management is getting to the point I could probably manage ok with just that now, but 1Password is *really* good. ## Planning and Organising - I mainly use Apple Reminders. Most things I have to do don’t have to be done at a specific time, so I use Reminders much more than Calendar. - I don’t currently use Obsidian for my notes, but I have previously. And I may yet return to it. It’s really good. Obsidian Publish is great too, and I’m experimenting with using it again at the time of writing. ## Photography * Apple Photos. Yes, I just use that. No Lightroom. All my photo management, and the vast majority of my editing, is done in Apple Photos. Yes, it's a bit limited, but it's enough for me. Most photographers don't agree. I have used Lightroom, but the subscription is very expensive for a hobbyist. * Affinity Photo. Just for the odd occasions I need a more advanced editor. Does most of what PhotoShop can do, for a much lower price. I have the whole Affinity suite, and it cost less than a single year of Lightroom alone. * Photomator. Sometimes useful in between those extremes. A bit more powerful than Photos, but way easier than Affinity for anything that's not *too* complicated. Apple bought the company, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes. Maybe they'll finally get back to having a 'pro' photography app, that would be nice. ## Dev Stuff Just to be clear: I'm not a developer. I really can't code. But I dabble a bit, and I do sometimes do things that need developer tools. ### Nova My text editor of choice. Think VSCode, but beautifully designed for the Mac. Costs more than I really *should* have spent on a text editor when VSCode is there being *free*, but I do enjoy using it. I'm typing this in it right now. Update: I finally had to admit that I just didn't need Nova enough to pay for the updates, and went with VSCodium. It's VSCode without the Microsoft-specific bits added in, just the open source editor. Works pretty much the same, uses the same plugins, just skips some telemetry I don't want. ### Homebrew If you do a lot of work in the terminal, you almost certainly *need* Brew. If you only use it occasionally, it still might be very nice to have. Installs with a single command. Installs other stuff with a single command. Updates things with a couple of commands. If you've used something like Debian's APT, it's very much like that, on the Mac. To try using Astro and Starlight for making a previous version of this site, I needed Node and NPM installing. In Brew, that's just... ```sh brew install node ``` For a lot of terminal (or command line) stuff on the Mac, the instructions will assume you're using Homebrew, so it's very much the easy path. ## Utilities ### Amphetamine In the App Store, it just stops the Mac from sleeping. Way more options than I ever use, but if I've got something downloading, exporting, backing up, etc., I can tell it to stay awake for, say, the next four hours. ## Microsoft Office No, I don't really *want* to use it, it's for work. I do have a 365 subscription for our own email too, but accessed through Apple Mail, which is nicer to use than Outlook. I don't like Outlook.