If I could slap one disclaimer over every Lifehacker article, it’d be this: Not every hack, tip, or app is for everyone. In that spirit, here are the Lifehacker-approved apps that I’ve stopped using. I didn’t install them on my new Mac, and I’m curious how many of you have abandoned them too.
I feel a sort of normie shame when I actually like Apple’s default apps. But while several of my Lifehacker colleagues use third-party note apps like Bearand Simplenote, I’m happy with Notes. It syncs easily through iCloud, it’s searchable, it uses folders. I’ve even gotten used to the bad, unchangeable default font. Because crucially, Notes supports basic text formatting.
Every otherwise decent Notes competitor is text-only or Markdown. I really don’t understand this! All the old-style text editors have WYSIWYG formatting: Word, Google Docs, TextEdit, Notepad. Hell, Mac’s Stickies app supports text formatting. Why can’t the “bundle of notes” apps handle this without resorting to pseudo-code solutions like Markdown? Why is it so hard to use bold and italics? I don’t want to resort to a heavy, subscription-based app like Evernote. Speaking of which:
I’m probably just using Evernote wrong. But now I’m not using it at all. I used to file away interesting bits of “inspiration” into this scrapbook app, saving images, ideas, web pages that might get deleted. But when I hit the limits of the free version (two devices per user, with no offline mobile access), I realized I could easily get by with simpler apps, rather than pay $8/month for Evernote Premium.
The vast majority of my notes are text, so I’m fine with Notes (and occasionally Wunderlist for list-based notes). If I’m working on a visual project, I sometimes save things to a private Tumblr (free). If you need to combine both, you could use OneNote or Google Keep. Or if you’re like me, you don’t really need an everything bucket.
I love Flexibits’s calendar app Fantastical, so I wanted to love their newest app too. Cardhop was supposed to reinvent how I interact with my contacts. Instead of hunting through different communication channels, I could start every interaction from the Cardhop app, using it as a command line, kind of like Spotlight or the Chrome address bar.
But as I wrote at the time, the hardest thing about Cardhop is remembering to use it. I can’t break the habit of using the default Contacts app, as inferior as it is, or beginning conversations in various apps, even if I later find myself hunting around for old messages—did I send Cole that link over Google Hangouts, Twitter DM, or text?
After a couple of weeks, I didn’t use my free review copy of Cardhop. So I can’t recommend paying $20 for it. It’s hard enough for me to figure out which tasks are faster or slower with Siri. I don’t have the mental room for another command line.
Maybe you really should switch to the browser that prioritizes privacy instead of hooking you into Google’s services. Firefox caught up to Chrome in speed and features. But during the years that it lagged behind, I grew reliant on a lot of Chrome extensions, and I’m not dying to hunt for, and calibrate, their Firefox equivalents.
Is there a secret government grant for everyone who invents a new writing app with “no distractions” mode? When I have a writing project that doesn’t involve online research, adding in links, or any other app-switching tasks, then I try to write in a physical notebook. So I stopped experimenting with these fullscreen, “locked down” apps like OmmWriter and OmmBits that supposedly force you to write.