A question came up on Independent Work about nifty tools people use. (Independent work is a small community for freelancers built by Dave Smyth I’ve been a part of for a while.) I wrote about this topic a while back and was going to link to it, but it’s very much out of date. I could go update that one, but I think it’s kinda neat to see what I use throughout the years so here is the list for 2024…
The Basics
- Brave Browser
- Apple Mail & Calendar (using Fastmail for work)
- Good ol’ organized file folders using this structure for clients
Apps, Tools, and Services
- Dropbox for file sharing, backup, and works with my file structure.
- Dropbox Paper for any sort of notes/doc sharing, project management, and my project hub.
- Sketch for design work despite everyone swapping to Figma.
- Harvest for invoices and expenses.
- VS Code for a while now, as Coda (now Nova) just took forever to release.
- Transmit because I still FTP like it’s 2000.
- Asana I use for some reminders but also with a retainer client.
- Pocket for read for later articles that keep piling up.
- Local for WordPress dev. Works great with my Flywheel hosting (referral link).
Little Apps
I enjoy small apps that do one thing really well.
- iA Writer may be my most used app for years. Recently started using this for daily and simple todos also.
- Optimage to compress web images.
- Contrast mac app to quickly check for text color contrast.
- Kap for quick screen recordings (put into dropbox).
- Numi calculator is too good and the little conversions it does are great.