My Apps of the Year

Last December, I was inspired by Lachlan to share my favorite app of the year. Actually, I cheated and chose two: Structured and Up Ahead, which I dubbed my favorite new app of 2022.

Independent app developers have continued to amaze me with their work in 2023, so I couldn’t resist doing another retrospective. Instead of picking just one or two picks, though, I’d like to cheat again and share the handful of the apps that I’ve enjoyed most this year.

New-to-Me Apps

Mango Baby

The app that’s had the most impact on my life over the past year has to be Mango Baby, a newborn tracker by Yilei Yang. It’s not a new release, but since my son Noah was born, Mango Baby has been an indispensable tool for keeping track of his care.

The app is so well-designed and makes it simple for me to log feedings, diapers, and more. The information I need most is always right at hand, often not even requiring that I open the app thanks to Mango Baby’s extensive set of widgets. Shortcuts actions allow me to log diaper changes hands-free, and the iCloud-based collaboration is rock-solid, keeping everything in sync between my devices and my wife’s.

I’m a fan of anything that helps my kid and makes my life a bit easier. Mango Baby does both of those things every day.

Sequel

After nearly giving up on the category as a whole, I finally decided to try Romain Lefebvre’s media-tracking app Sequel, and I’m glad I did. It feels like it was made for just the way I like to track things.

I mostly use Sequel for keeping tabs on shows and films, but it can be used to track video games, books, and audiobooks, too. The design is intuitive and puts your content at the forefront, and the app as a whole does its job well: helping you enjoy your favorite media.

Sequel has become my source of truth for where I’m at in a particular show, as well as my go-to way of seeing when new episodes are coming out. At this point, I can’t imagine how I’d be able to keep up with everything I watch without it.

New Apps

Bridges

I’ve been intrigued by the concept of Jonathan Ruiz’s link-saving app Bridges since I first heard about it in beta. On the surface, it works a lot like any other app in the category: You share a link to the app and save it to use later. But Bridges takes that idea a few steps further.

Beyond just saving links, the app enables you to organize and share them in really helpful ways. Sorting links into folders and categories makes it easy to keep everything tidy. And once you’ve compiled your list of links into a folder, you can share them all in a variety of formats with a single button press.

I use Bridges to compile the show notes for my podcast Magic Rays of Light every week. The app has made this process simpler, speedier, and just plain fun. Bridges is now a central part of my creative workflow, and I really enjoy the time I spend using it.

Chronicling

First-time app developer Rebecca Owen came out with Chronicling this summer, and it is quite the app. Self-described as a way to “track anything,” Chronicling is a flexible and powerful tool that’s been a pleasure to explore.

The open-ended nature of the app is its strong suit. It can be whatever kind of tracker you want it to be. While I imagine a lot of people will use it for habit-tracking, I’ve gone a different route. Chronicling has become my trusty tool for staying on top of my chore schedule, something I needed some external assistance with after the birth of my son. It helped a lot!

I plan on doing a full write-up of Chronicling and how it works in the new year, but suffice it to say that it’s one of the most impressive new entries I’ve come across in 2023. I’m constantly looking for new ways to use Chronicling it because I just like it, and that’s one of the best compliments I can give to any app.

Updates

A few of my long-standing favorite apps received major updates this year:

A few things you’ll notice these apps have in common is that they’re made by independent developers, they’re continually updated, and they offer versions for Apple’s various platforms that sync between each other via iCloud. I consider them the best-designed offerings in their respective fields, and each one has a unique identity and use case that makes my life better in a real way.

For me, 2023 has been an incredible year for discovering new apps and continuing to benefit from the apps I already love. Maybe that’s why this list is so long. 😅 But it represents a group of apps that have defined the year for me, and I’m grateful for each one of them and the great developers who work so hard to make them.

What have been your favorite apps this year? I’m always looking for new ones to try (and to write about), so I’d love to hear your picks! I’m always down to talk about apps, so feel free to reach out anytime.

Merry Christmas

A baby can change everything.

I certainly learned that this year. The arrival of our son marked a major shift in the history of our family. Things would never be the same—not for us, anyway.

Today, we celebrate the arrival of a different baby, after which things would never be the same for anyone. God With Us, Immanuel, has come. The birth of Christ changed the course of history itself and the hearts of countless many.

He is the greatest gift that could ever have been given, and today especially, I cherish his presence here with us. Jesus is born! And because of that, we celebrate.

Life is filled with marvelous gifts, big and small, the best of which are the people who make our lives rich. I’m thankful for my son, my wife, my dog, family, friends, and for all the kind people I get to interact with and learn from daily, including you. My heart is full this holiday.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Structured Adds Shortcuts Actions

This morning, Unorderly released version 3.3 of Structured, the day planner app that’s been my go-to for nearly two years now. The headlining feature of this update is the introduction of Shortcuts actions, which give users the ability to make the app work for them in all-new ways.

For those unfamiliar, Shortcuts is an app made by Apple that lets you create automations on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. App developers create actions that can be customized and combined to make your device do all kinds of things for you automatically.

Structured 3.3 comes with some prebuilt shortcuts you can use right out of the box. These include Today’s Schedule, which will instantly bring up an overview of your day plan, and Focus Now, an action for starting a focus timer in the app as well as a live activity for the current task. I’ve already added Focus Now to my iPhone’s action button.

I’m glad the app’s development team included these premade options, but I’m even more excited about the possibilities of creating my own shortcuts using the great set of actions Structured offers. Here are all the actions included in today’s update:

  • Check Schedule

  • Delete Tasks

  • Duplicate Tasks

  • Edit Tasks

  • Find Tasks

  • New Task

  • Open Day

  • Open Inbox

  • Open Task

  • Show Inbox

  • Show Tasks

  • Start Focus Timer

This is a fantastic set of building blocks that unlocks a whole new level of functionality and customizability for the app. I’ve already used a couple of these actions to create a custom shortcut that clears my day plan for tomorrow in case I want to start fresh. And I have lots of other ideas for Structured shortcuts that I can’t wait to try.

These actions can be used in combination with other apps as well. People often ask if Structured is compatible with third-party task managers and calendar apps. Until today, the answer was no; now, it’s yes! With the power of Shortcuts, anyone can combine their favorite apps with Structured’s excellent day-planning tools.

Shortcuts actions are a huge boost to a productivity app, and when they’re done this well, they unlock unlimited possibilities. It’s an exciting day to be a Structured user. My thanks and congratulations to the team for a great release.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some work-in-progress shortcuts to attend to.

Journaling Suggestions Come to Everlog

Apple has entered the journaling space with its latest app, simply called Journal. It’s iPhone-only for now, which means it isn’t a realistic option for me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t benefit from its introduction.

Journaling suggestions come from various apps on your phone.

Alongside Journal, Apple also released journaling suggestions based on various activities that you perform: songs you listen to, places you go, people you spend time with, photos you take, and more. Your phone collects this data all the time and stores it privately out of reach of any other apps.

But with journaling suggestions, users have the option to make this information available to third-party journaling apps, including my app of choice, Everlog. They can only access the information you explicitly choose to save, so your private data is safe and secure.

This is honestly the best of all possible worlds for me. I’ve written hundreds of entries in Everlog and have no intention of switching away from it. At the same time, using activity data from my phone as a starting point for journal entries is an intriguing idea. I’m happy that I can stick with the app I love while getting the benefits of Apple’s foray into journaling.

What that practically looks like for me right now is basically a feed of my various daily activities mixed in with my daily journal entries. It’s a fascinating way to get a deeper look at my life and record things I have no chance of remembering, like particular podcast episodes I listened to and my workout routine.

A few of my Everlog entries that include journaling suggestions.

In the past, I’ve tended to shy away from adding photos and other attachments to Everlog entries. That choice was mostly meant to avoid the mental overhead of going through my phone every day to pick out what I want to save. Now, my phone can just do that for me! This unlocks some really exciting possibilities.

The Journal app and its suggestions are still early in their development. I have changes I’d like to see to the system, like the ability to access journaling suggestions on my iPad and the inclusion of TV app viewing data. (How cool would it be if I could build my own TV-logging system in Everlog?) And I expect we’ll see the Journal app eventually grow beyond the iPhone and its current barebones text editor.

But for a 1.0, Apple’s first step into journaling is an impressive one. I hope that more people than ever will give journaling a try with the new Journal app on their home screens. And if anyone gets the urge to go further with their practice, more mature apps like Everlog will be ready and waiting with access to all the same suggestions that Apple’s own app has.

Props to Apple for this release and for sharing their journaling tools with others. Props to Wessley Roche, developer of Everlog, and other third-party journal app developers for being on top of this new technology. It’s a great time to be a journaler on Apple’s platforms, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

For full details on the Journal app, I recommend checking out the excellent MacStories review from Niléane, who’s been journaling in Day One for over eight years.

Habit Over-Tracking

I’ve long been a believer in the practice of habit-tracking. Ten years ago, I first came across the concept through an app called Way of Life. I eventually moved on to the category-leading Streaks, spent a brief time with Grow, and ultimately landed on Awesome Habits, which I’ve been using for nearly two years now. Regardless of the tools we use to do so, I think it’s a good idea to consciously choose meaningful routines and intentionally keep ourselves accountable for sticking to them.

The funny thing about a habit tracker, though, is that its purpose is to eventually make itself obsolete. By nature, habits are habitual, meaning we don’t need external forces to keep them going. We just do them. The point of these tools is to turn our desired behaviors into regular parts of our everyday lives through repetition.

At a certain point, the tracking part becomes unnecessary, and that’s a victory. It means we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. But still, I’ve found it hard to stop tracking these habits even when I know I don’t need to anymore.

After all, the entire premise of habit-tracking is built on the idea of positive reinforcement, and that can become a habit in and of itself. I like seeing my progress bar for the day fill up, and I love the feeling I get when it hits 100%. Don’t get me started on how much joy I get out of building up a long daily streak for each goal.

It really is a fun process, but I have to remind myself that the process isn’t the point. I’m not doing these things to check them off a list; I’m doing them because they’re important to me. It’s not about the tracking at the end of day.

I recently realized that many of the habits I’d been keeping tabs on had become regular parts of my routine. I didn’t need the app to remind me anymore. I was just logging them out of… well, habit.

And so I decided to get back to the true purpose of habit-tracking by removing the items that are now fully-formed. I cut my list of daily tasks in Awesome Habits down from ten to five. This allows me to focus on the habits that truly need my attention instead of just logging data for the sake of it.

I’ve been able to keep up all of my deleted habits naturally, without the use of the app, which only proves how effective the app has really been. Now, I have a much shorter list of habits I’m trying to integrate into my daily routine, and the others are just a normal part of everyday life.

Do I miss the ridiculously long streaks when I check the app? A little. But I have to remind myself that the tracking isn’t the point. It’s forming good habits that matters, and in that sense, this move is a win.

I’m thankful for tools like Awesome Habits that help me live a more intentional life every day. Even more so, I’m happy that I can rely on these sorts of tools less and less over time as I become better at living out my desired habits on my own. There’s no way to quantify personal growth, but I think my list of archived habits is at least an indication that I’m moving in the direction I want to go.