Utility apps

A couple of days ago, I made a series of tweets that highlighted smaller utility¹ applications that I’ve found recently.

I love utility apps that solve a small need in an elegant way. Wanted to share three I’ve found recently (would love other recommendations)!

— Jasdev Singh (@jasdev) December 30, 2016

1/ Moon by @charliedeets: a clean moon phase calendar with a beautiful Today Widgethttps://t.co/rPEop0dzcp

— Jasdev Singh (@jasdev) December 30, 2016

2/ Tailor by @Foundry_63: Allows you to stitch together iOS screenshots into onehttps://t.co/yQJbZ19v1A pic.twitter.com/NKEXeKJNzI

— Jasdev Singh (@jasdev) December 30, 2016

3/ Spectator by @timonus: View Spectacles videos outside of Snapchat with the same rotation gesturehttps://t.co/FnMjcMVzNR

— Jasdev Singh (@jasdev) December 30, 2016

The thread hit home with others and served as a shout out to the developers behind these tools that impact my life. I wanted to aggregate the list here (along with replies to the thread), broken down by platform². If you have any other suggestions, please let me know!

iOS:

• Moon by Charlie Deets: A Moon phase calendar with a beautiful Today Widget.
• Tailor by Foundry 63: Allows you to stitch together iOS screenshots.
• Spectator by Tim Johnsen: View Spectacles videos outside of Snapchat with the same rotation gesture.
• Zero by Kevin Rose, Caleb Davenport, and Daniel Burka: A simple app to track your fasting.
• OneShot by Ian Ownbey and Jason Goldman: Easily highlight screenshots of text and share them to Twitter.
• Pinpoint by Lickability: My favorite tool to mark up screenshots.
• Captio by Ben Lenarts and Eelco Lempsink: The fastest way to send a note to your inbox.
• Deliveries by Mike Piontek: A delivery tracking app with an incredible attention to detail. Seriously, Junecloud sets the standard when it comes to new Apple API adoption.

macOS:

• Balance by Ben Baron, Chris Baroni, and Richard Burton: Ever since Mint deprecated their Mac app, I’ve been looking for a replacement. Balance has helped fill this void.

@jasdev @campedersen that was a big motivation for us. If you have any feature requests or ideas, please do let us know.

— Balance (@balancemymoney) September 13, 2016

• Bartender by Surtees Studios: Lets you organize your menu bar apps, by hiding them, rearranging them, or moving them to a separate bar.
• BetterTouchTool by Andreas Hegenberg: Takes macOS gestures and shortcuts to the next level. This is a must-install on all of my macOS devices.
• Chatology by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland: What ⌘ + F for Messages.app should be.
• Helium by Jaden Geller: Apple’s PiP on steroids.
• Boxy by Francesco Di Lorenzo and Fabrizio Rinaldi: An native wrapper for Google’s Inbox.
• Messenger for Mac by Rasmus Andersson: A native wrapper for Facebook’s Messenger.
• Redacted by Sam Soffes: A simple photo redaction tool.
• Spectrum by Eigenlogik: Easily manage your color palettes.
• Wallcat by Dustin Senos: Wake up every morning to a new, hand-picked desktop image.

watchOS:

While the following are larger apps, their watchOS apps make the device that much better.

• Fantastical by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland: Its complication gets a lot of details right that the default Calendar misses.
• Dark Sky: The detailed, local weather notifications and complication have saved me so many times.
• PCalc by James Thomson: The attention to detail put into this app is amazing. In the same league as Junecloud.

Web and Email

• Spoonbill by Justin Duke: Follow bio, location, and name changes in your Twitter following graph.
• Switchr by Jurre: Safari extension to quickly switch between .h and .m files on GitHub.
• DomainCloser (shameless plug 😆): Quickly close all tabs matching the domain of the currently active tab.

Footnotes: