The Need for Silence

Greg Morris, reflecting on a walk he took without headphones:

I find that excessive consumption of content prevents me from fully developing my own ideas. The ideas I do have, influenced by various media, never seem to fully materialise or reach a conclusion if there’s a constant influx of new ones… I need those interludes of silence to explore and expand on them before moving on to the next.

I often find myself nodding along while I read Greg’s blog, but this one just felt like he was reading my mind. It’s important to make space for silence—even boredom—in our daily lives. It gives our brains time to process, synthesize, and form new ideas.

I think I’ll leave the radio off on an upcoming drive and let my mind lead the way.

Non-Default Apps

As we’ve established, I’m a faithful user of Apple’s built-in system apps. But as I was putting together my Default Apps list, I was struck by how many of the tools I use everyday don’t fall into the same categories as the ones that Apple provides.

While I get a ton of use out of Notes, Reminders, Safari, and the like, they don’t do everything I want my devices to do. So rather than turn to third-party apps as alternatives to Apple’s offerings, I rely on the App Store for software that accomplishes things my device can’t do out of the box.

I thought it was only fair that I share my go-to apps for these categories as well.

For day planning, I use Structured. I could block schedule everything in Calendar, but that would stress me out and mix critical meetings with mundane tasks that aren’t as time-sensitive. Structured puts my tasks, appointments, and day plan together in a way that makes perfect sense to me.

I consider my writing app to be something separate from a word processor. While Pages is the go-to for anything I plan to print, iA Writer is where I do the vast majority of my writing, including these blog posts. Markdown feels like second nature to me and provides just enough formatting options without getting in the way with too many.

My habit tracker is Awesome Habits. Could I piece together something similar in Reminders? Probably, but it wouldn’t be as nice, or as focused.

Everlog is my journaling app of choice. Technically, this still isn’t an alternative to an Apple app until iOS 17.2 ships, but I don’t think I’ll be straying anytime soon. The Journal app is iPhone-only for the time being, and that’s just a nonstarter for me.

An app that’s become really important to me lately is Mango Baby, which bills itself as a newborn tracker. It’s how I know when my son needs to eat, how many diapers I’ve changed in a day, and whether or not it’s bath night. I’d be lost without it, and trying to create something similar in a shared note or spreadsheet just wouldn’t be as helpful.

I save YouTube videos I want to watch later in Play. Safari Reading List might be able to save links, too, but I like Play’s auto-tagging system, and it’s got a big update coming soon that I’m quite excited for.

All of my media tracking is done in Sequel, which I mostly use to keep up with movies and TV shows. Nothing could ever fully replace Apple’s TV app for me, but Sequel is a great complement to it and my go-to for checking on what’s coming soon and where I’m at in a particular show.

Chronicling can be used to track anything you want, but I use it specifically to log household chores and make sure I’m keeping up. Again, Reminders could do this, but not nearly as well as Chronicling does. It’s a little silo just for household tasks, and I love it for that.

Finally, for countdowns I use Up Ahead. There’s some overlap between events in this app and my calendar, but I find it helpful to have a widget telling me how close certain big days are so I can plan accordingly. Up Ahead is instrumental for that in a way calendar alerts never could be.

While I find so much value in the system defaults provided by Apple, I also wouldn’t be able to get by without my favorite third-party apps. My devices would feel broken without them. I feel like I’ve struck a good balance between using the defaults for the basics while going beyond them with other tools when my needs grow.

It’s constantly changing, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m thankful for every app on this list, and my Default Apps list before it, because they each make my life better in some way.

Default Apps

Lots of folks seem to be having fun with this trend inspired by Hemispheric Views, a podcast I’m so glad I finally took the time to check out. This kind of discussion is right up my alley, so I thought I’d join in. These are the default apps I use for various tasks.

  • Mail Client: Apple Mail

  • Mail Server: iCloud

  • Notes: Apple Notes

  • To-Do: Reminders

  • iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera

  • Photo Management: Photos

  • Calendar: Apple Calendar

  • Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive

  • RSS: Reeder

  • Contacts: Apple Contacts

  • Browser: Safari

  • Chat: Messages

  • Bookmarks: Bridges

  • Read It Later: Reeder

  • Word Processing: Pages

  • Spreadsheets: Numbers

  • Presentations: ProPresenter, Slipity, + Keynote

  • Shopping Lists: Reminders

  • Meal Planning: eMeals + Mela

  • Budgeting & Personal Finance: OpenBudget

  • News: Apple News + Apple News Today

  • Music: Apple Music

  • Podcasts: Apple Podcasts

  • Password Management: iCloud Keychain

As you can see, I am very much a user of the built-in default apps for most things. But there are a few interesting out there choices on my list, as I’ve seen on others’. Thanks for checking out my default apps list! If you’d like to share yours, I’d love to see it.

Thoughts on Apple’s Scary Fast Event

Last night, Apple held their spooooookiest event of all time. To be fair, none of their previous events have been particularly frightening, so it was a low bar. But the start time alone was enough to have some commentators shaking their boots. Here are a few reflections on the event:

Date and time: When Apple announced an evening event a couple of days before an earnings call, I assumed this was a last-minute thing they threw together. But having seen the video now, it’s apparent that they’ve been planning it as a Halloween tie-in all along. From the evening setting to the dark backgrounds and graphics to the virtual bats flying around Apple Park, the company leaned into the theme with an earnestness only they could pull off. I thought it was fun and certainly different from anything we’ve seen before. More of this, please.

M3 Chips: It’s incredible that Apple are introducing almost the entire M3 lineup at once, and less than a year after the debut of the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. I don’t pretend to understand all of the ins and outs, and we don’t have any reviews or benchmarks to go off of yet, but these seem like decent improvements over the previous-gen processors. If the graphics enhancements are anything like what we saw on the iPhone 15 Pro last month, these chips will be a big deal. I’m the most casual of casual gamers, and even I’ve seen noticeable impacts from the work Apple’s done on GPUs this year.

MacBook Pro: I’m so pleased with the new MacBook Pro lineup. The base model M3 version now has all of the perks that come with a modern MacBook Pro—including the new design, MagSafe charging, HDMI port, SD card slot, XDR screen, and speaker system—without the cost of including a Pro-level chip. The $1,600 starting price seems just right, and I think a lot of people will be happy to get the high-end MacBook Pro experience without paying for MacBook Pro performance.

A brighter screen is always a plus, and the Space Black finish on the Pro and Max models looks cool in the promo shots. As someone who carried a Space Black iPhone for a year, I much prefer it to Space Grey and Graphite. Would it be too much to ask for a Space Black finish in the iPad Pro line next year?

iMac: Six colors forever! The iMac was the first Mac to be redesigned specifically for Apple Silicon, and it looks stunning to this day. I still find myself admiring the iMac I keep in the living room. It’s a great computer, and when I’m not using it, it blends elegantly into my home. Apple made the right decision in bringing the M3 chip to the iMac without changing anything else. It’s a near-perfect product.

A larger iMac with a more powerful chip would be great, and I believe it’s coming. But the iMac as it stands today is the ideal consumer desktop. Now it’s even better with M3.

Lightning: It’s disappointing that Apple didn’t update the Magic Mouse, Keyboard, and Trackpad to charge via USB-C instead of Lightning. There are only a few Lightning holdouts in the lineup, but we might be stuck with the port for a while on our Mac peripherals at least.

Overall, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Scary Fast event. I’m not tempted to buy a new Mac right now, so I’m just a spectator, but all of these products look amazing. And the way Apple presented them was quite coherent, despite all the confusion in the rumor mill leading up to the event.

I’ll be interested to read the review of these M3-based computers once they’re out in the world starting next week. I imagine they’ll be impressive.

The next big Apple event has to be the Vision Pro release, right? I can’t wait for that one. But in the meantime, these new Macs will give us plenty to talk about.