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---
title: Apps, Tools & Services
slug: apps-tools-services
date: 2020-04-18
updated: 2022-04-30
date: 2020-04-18T10:00:00+02:00
updated: 2025-01-06
author: Stefan Imhoff
description: All the apps, tools, and services I use on my iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac.
tags: ["productivity", "software"]
@@ -18,6 +18,10 @@ This is a list of all the tools, apps, and services I use on my iPhone, iPad, Ap
## Productivity
### Raycast 🖥
[Raycast](https://raycast.com/?via=kogakure) is an exceptionally powerful and versatile launcher for macOS that combines the functionality of multiple apps into a single, intuitive interface, dramatically improving workflow and productivity for users. It offers over 1,300 extensions, advanced AI capabilities, and seamless integration with numerous tools and workflows. I have subscribed to the Pro version and use it every day. I wrote a [detailed review of Raycast](/raycast) on my journal.
### Things 📱 🖥
[Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/) is my favorite productivity tool, my task manager. I use it on all devices, and it synchronizes instantly via Things Cloud. It’s available for Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad.
@@ -54,28 +58,10 @@ I use [Scanner Pro](https://apps.apple.com/app/scanner-pro-pdf-scanner-app/id333
[Itsycal](https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/) is a tiny menu bar calendar that integrates with Apple Calendar. I use it to quickly add or look at events without opening the full calendar.
### Alfred 🖥
[Alfred](https://www.alfredapp.com/) is an award-winning app that boosts my productivity immensely. You can integrate the tools with an unbelievable huge amount of other tools and search, filter, move, control **ALL THE THINGS**™.
I use it to move files to folders on my hard drive, expand snippets, open apps, search on 20+ websites, calculate numbers, look up words in the dictionary, look up contacts, play music, convert colors and units, search DEVONthink, lookup my DNS and IP, emoji codes, generate test data, navigate to GitHub repositories, translate words and sentences, search for software packages, look up movies and TV shows, control my lights, or work with Things. To name a few.
Hundreds of [workflows](https://www.alfredapp.com/workflows/) are available.
### Hammerspoon 🖥
[Hammerspoon](https://www.hammerspoon.org/) is my window manager for many years. It’s an open-source tool that allows you to interact with applications, windows, mouse pointers, file systems, audio devices, batteries, screens, keyboard/mouse events, clipboards, Wi-Fi, and more. I use it to launch apps, move them to my preferred screen, and navigate between apps.
To get a basic workflow, you can copy [my settings](https://github.com/kogakure/dotfiles/tree/master/hammerspoon/hammerspoon.symlink) and modify them. If you want crazier automation, you’ll need [Lua](https://www.lua.org/) knowledge to code it yourself.
### Apple Numbers 📱 🖥
I use [Apple Numbers](https://www.apple.com/numbers/) for everything I need to do with spreadsheets. Calculating and tracking my income, my stocks, yearly expenses, and salary increases. I store all spreadsheets in DEVONthink and open them from there in Numbers. This way it’s encrypted and synchronized.
### JustFocus 🖥
[JustFocus](https://climstudio.com/justfocus/) is a nice, free tool to make sure you work focused and do regular breaks. It uses the [Pomodoro Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) to switch between work and break time. You can adjust the length of work, short, or long break periods. During break time, the tool will block your screen and show a nice wallpaper and a quote to make sure you spend your break away from the screen.
### Bartender 🖥
[Bartender](https://www.macbartender.com/) allows organizing the menu bar icons on Mac. You can rearrange icons, hide them, or show them for a short time when they update. It’s helpful to see what’s relevant at any given time on the menu bar.
@@ -84,16 +70,368 @@ I use [Apple Numbers](https://www.apple.com/numbers/) for everything I need to d
[Time Sink](https://manytricks.com/timesink/) is a Mac app that allows tracking of how much time you spend on which app. You can see which apps are active and how long and at what times.
### Habit Tracker
### Apple Workflow 📱
I use [Habit Tracker](https://apps.apple.com/app/habit-tracker/id1438388363) to track my habits. You can decide which habit you want to perform, the count per day or week, and then check off what you did during the day. You can see your streaks for each habit and stay motivated.
[Workflow](https://www.workflow.is/) is another automation tool, this time for iOS. Apple bought the company and integrated the tool into its ecosystem. There are much fewer services in Apple Workflow than in IFTTT, but it allows much more complicated workflows. You can automate many apps on your device depending on time, location, arrival, leaving, WLAN, Bluetooth, NFC, or opening an app. And build complex interfaces taking user input and doing something with it. But you don’t need to learn to program, it’s drag and drop.
### IFTTT (Pro) 📱 🌐
## Design, Photography & Conception
I use [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com/) (If This Then That) to automate several tasks across multiple services and tools on the internet or at home. There are hundreds of services and home appliances that can be connected.
### iA Writer 📱 🖥
You can create powerful workflows to handover of data between two of these services without programming: Automatically publish a new blog post to 𝕏, save a new Instagram photo to Dropbox, save liked videos or tweets to Raindrop.io, record your weight into a spreadsheet, send out an email when you enter or leave a specific geographical area, to name a few.
My main tool for writing is [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer). I use it on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s the most minimalistic, distraction-free, beautiful writing experience. It supports Markdown, and has tools to analyze your words, and count reading time, characters, words, and sentences. I write my text in Markdown and either open it from DEVONthink in iA Writer or save my texts in iCloud and index the contents of these folders in DEVONthink.
I use around 20 services on that long list.
### Affinity Designer 📱 🖥
### Apple Workflo
The British company **Serif** creates the best design tools I know. I worked with and owned Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for over 15 years, and use Sketch at work. But [Affinity Designer](https://affinity.serif.com/designer/) is my tool of choice for everything I design: Websites, UI, flyers, and logos.
I switched away from Adobe when they started forcing people to their cloud solutions and making it impossible to buy a new version every few years, but instead have to pay monthly “rent”. Serif won multiple awards for Affinity Designer.
I use the iPad version and soon plan to buy a big iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil to create even cooler things with Affinity Designer.
### Affinity Photo 📱 🖥
[Affinity Photo](https://affinity.serif.com/de/photo/) is the second tool from **Serif**. I use it less, but when I want to work on photos or photo manipulations, I use Affinity Photo. Serif won multiple awards for Affinity Photo.
It has support for RAW, PSD, 360° photo editing, HDR, batch automation, smart objects, and montage. I’m not a professional photographer, but it’s made for them.
### Affinity Publisher 🖥
[Affinity Publisher](https://affinity.serif.com/publisher/) is the newest tool by **Serif**. It’s an incredibly powerful DTP tool to replace Adobe InDesign or Quark Express. I started working with it, but I plan to create and lay out a book with it. It seamlessly integrates with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo and allows doing nearly everything you can think of.
### Eagle
[Eagle](https://eagle.cool/) is my favorite tool to store design assets, like images, videos, fonts, and illustrations. It’s a tool with so many cool features; I use it every day. You can just drag and drop files into Eagle from any website, tag them, and search for them. You can batch save all images or create long screenshots of websites. It even supports OCR text recognition. It’s like DEVONthink but for design assets. You can search for colors, text, and many other things. There are many plugins available, some of which I use, including AI features to search on Pinterest, enhance images, or remove backgrounds. I have over 40,000 assets saved in Eagle.
### MindNode 📱 🖥
[MindNode](https://mindnode.com/) is my favorite tool to create mind notes and map out ideas. I use it on all my devices. When I learned everything about Japanese Design, I used it to [map out my research](https://my.mindnode.com/FGhdh66uMbi1aJ9RfriKUL3JoMCHd18aS8z9Uayw).
### Typeface 🖥
[Typeface](https://typefaceapp.com/) is my favorite font app. It’s simple and beautiful, the price is fair, and it does all I need.
### Blender 🖥
I don’t use [Blender](https://www.blender.org/) a lot, but it is an incredibly complex open-source 3D creation software. I used to work a lot with 3D in my first job (3ds max, Maya, and Cinema 4D) but when I moved to the web I stopped working with 3D software regularly. I love it, and I’m currently doing online training to learn Blender properly.
### Instagram 📱 🌐
I don’t like [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/) too much because the browsing experience is crappy, and you can use it on the phone. No iPad app and the web app is limited. But it’s a nice app to publish photos from time to time and follow friends and family. I use it now exclusively on the web.
## Development
### Neovim 🖥
I use [Neovim](https://neovim.io/) as my primary code editor. It’s the best editor available. You can see my configuration files, the mappings, settings, functions, and the plugins I use in my [dotfiles](https://github.com/kogakure/dotfiles/tree/master/config/nvim) repository.
### Zed 🖥
I use [Zed](https://zed.dev/) from time to time. I use a lot of extensions, which would be too much to list them all.
### Ghossty 🖥
I used iTerm2 for a long time as my terminal, moved then to [Kitty](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty), followed by [Wezterm](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html) but recently, I switched to [Ghossty](https://ghostty.org/). It has lots of fun features, is easy to configure, and much faster which is important because I use Neovim in the terminal as my primary code editor.
I use additionally [tmux](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/) and [tmuxinator](https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator) to manage and restore multiple terminal sessions. I can switch between projects or keep multiple servers running.
### GitHub 📱 🖥 🌐
[GitHub](https://github.com/) (or [GitHub Enterprise](https://github.com/enterprise) at my workplace) is my tool for storing and working with source code. All my websites are on GitHub and a few dozen other projects. I use [GitHub for mobile](https://github.com/mobile/) and occasionally [GitHub Desktop](https://desktop.github.com/). I use Git on the command line.
### Coolify 🌐
[Cooligy](https://www.coolify.io/) is the tools I use for self-hosting my websites. If I push a new feature to GitHub, Coolify will automatically deploy my website on a preview URL. After all the tests have been running successfully, and I merge the feature, the new feature goes live without needing to do anything more.
### Kaleidoscope 🖥
I used [Kaleidoscope](https://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/) as my default tool for merge conflicts in Git, but Visual Studio Code has a much nicer way of fixing merge conflicts, I use Kaleidoscope to compare complete codebases or the differences in images.
### Image Shrinker 🖥
[Image Shrinker](https://image-shrinker.com/) is a nice, free tool to minify images and graphics with one drop. Easy, fast, and useful.
### Integrity 🖥
I use [Integrity](https://apps.apple.com/app/integrity/id513610341) regularly to check all my websites for broken links. It’s not something I do every month, but when I do it, this tool is helpful.
## News & Information
### Feedbin 📱 🌐
[Feedbin](https://feedbin.com/) is my primary source of information. I follow all my RSS and Atom feeds, YouTube subscriptions, newsletters, Reddit, and news sources. A great feature of Feedbin is its ability to track changes in articles. Additionally, you can filter out YouTube Shorts using a video length filter. You can view stats for each RSS feed, find replacements when a website changed their feed and find dead RSS feeds.
I save everything of interest automatically into Raindrop.io for later research. I used Feedly for many years since the Google News Reader shut, but recently the pricing and features did not match and Feedbin is much more fun to use.
### Reeder 📱 🖥
I use Feedbin together with [Reeder 5](https://reederapp.com/). Reeder is a beautiful newsreader which allows using read later services (Pocket, Instapaper) and many services (Feedbin, Feedly) and directly reading RSS/Atom feeds without service and synchronizing them between all devices via iCloud.
### Raindrop.io (Pro) 📱 🖥 🌐
[Raindrop.io](https://raindrop.io/) is my bookmark manager. It is a lot of fun, I save nearly everything in it. The tool allows for organizing bookmarks in collections (\$), tagging, and filtering (by type of bookmark).
A deduplicating service finds broken links (\$). The new highlighting feature allows using of 4 different colors and adds comments to any text. A browser extension allows highlighting the text directly on the website. Each collection can use a different view (Grid, Headlines, Masonry, or List). Full-text search will search every web page and PDF (\$). Raindrop automatically creates a backup of every website for offline reading (\$).
Raindrop.io can be used to create mood boards, and it is possible to upload common media files. Collections can be edited together with other users, and it is possible to share individual collections publicly ([here are mine](https://raindrop.io/kogakure)).
### Readwise 📱 🌐
[Readwise](https://readwise.io/) is my favorite tool to have all my highlights of different services in one place, no matter if it is my Kindle, Apple Books, Pocket, Feedly, Instapaper, Medium, or Twitter. Each morning, you get five random highlights to review, which is a fantastic way to be reminded of the ideas you highlighted.
I synchronize my highlights with Obsidian, where I store them permanently as Markdown documents.
### Pinboard 🌐
I use [Pinboard](https://pinboard.in/) as a backup for all the links I save. They get automatically transferred from Raindrop.io to Pinboard with IFTTT. I joined Pinboard when the price was a one-time payment of 9 USD.
### 𝕏 (Formerly Twitter) 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
After Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired all the woke and useless people, [𝕏](https://x.com/home) became my main source of news and truth. I even subscribed to 𝕏 Pro. It has a powerful AI built in (Grok) that is one of the few AIs that is not woke and answers accurately. It can also generate images. And services are now also free for non-paying members. I read it every day because all legacy media (formerly mainstream media) has become so unreliable, framed opinion garbage, that it's the only source of news, besides some independent journalists and news outlets. I used [Minds](https://www.minds.com/) before, but it never got the traction it deserved. Mastodon was a place I had high hopes in, when Twitter was still woke and deplatforming people, but its now just a garbage dump of woke people.
## Communication
### Apple Messages 📱 🖥
[Messages](https://support.apple.com/explore/messages) is the messenger I use with my family. We all have Apple devices, and even my grandmother can use the app. The app has nice features. I wish the Desktop app would get more love from Apple.
### Apple FaceTime 📱 🖥
[FaceTime](https://apps.apple.com/app/facetime/id1110145091) is the video chat messenger I use with my family.
### ProtonMail (Plus) 📱 🌐
[ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com/) is my main email provider, end-to-end encrypted emails. I stopped using Gmail as my main email provider 3 years ago. I sometimes use the [web app](https://mail.protonmail.com/) or the [new beta version](https://beta.protonmail.com/) of the web app, which looks nice.
### Apple Mail 🖥
I use Apple Mail on Desktop to connect to my work email on an Exchange server and my ProtonMail server via the [ProtonMail Bridge](https://proton.me/mail/bridge).
### Signal 📱 🖥
[Signal](https://www.signal.org/) is a messenger I use with co-workers and friends. It is the messenger with the most security and privacy. Additionally, it’s open source, and no malicious code can be sneaked into it by the government or private entity. After deleting WhatsApp, it’s my favorite messenger to communicate across different platforms.
### Telegram 📱 🖥
[Telegram](https://telegram.org/) is a messenger I use with co-workers and friends. A nice thing is your profile can have a link you share with unknown people to contact you. It is the messenger with the nicest features. You can edit a send text and fix errors, create public or private chat rooms and encrypt your communication (unfortunately not the default setting, people don’t do it).
You can use encrypted Git repositories and link and validate your [profile](https://keybase.io/kogakure) with several external services. You can send messages that auto-delete and even send messages to users not yet on Keybase.
### Session 📱 🖥
[Session](https://getsession.org/) is a new decentralized messenger with an interesting security model. It collects no metadata. Not even your phone number or email. You are anonymous. The first time you use it, you get a session key. You can save a backup for this session to restore it on another device. To contact another person, all you need is to have the public session key. The chat is routed through an onion routing network, which makes it nearly impossible to leave any footprint. It’s open source and censorship-resistant.
### Brave Talk 🌐
[Brave Talk](https://talk.brave.com/) is a way to have unlimited video calls with up to 4 people for free. No download of any app is needed.
## Browser
### Brave Browser 📱 🖥
My primary browser is [Brave](https://brave.com/). It has the same engine as Chrome, but ad-blocking and tracker-blocking are included by default. It blocks fingerprinting, a way to track you across the internet. Brave is eager to implement new features, for example, crypto wallets or the [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/) peer-to-peer protocol. Plus: It supports all Chrome extensions.
### Firefox (Developer Edition) 📱 🖥
My secondary browser is [Firefox Developer Edition](https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/). I love the features of Firefox. The developer experience is fantastic, and I like in particular the bookmarking system (this sucks with other browsers). Firefox supports tags and has a nice bookmark bar to quickly filter and search bookmarks.
Mozilla has privacy as a much higher priority than Google. Google works actively on ways to prevent ad-blocking, while Mozilla blocks trackers by default and allows and provides all kinds of additional privacy tools (like container tabs).
## Media
### Spotify 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
I use [Spotify](https://www.spotify.com/) as my music streaming service. I stream music to my five Sonos boxes around my home and use it to wake me up, do workouts or relax on the sofa.
### Sonos 📱 🖥
[Sonos](https://www.sonos.com/) is my favorite sound system since 2012. I have two [Play:5](https://www.sonos.com/shop/play5-white.html), one Play:3, one [Play:1](https://www.sonos.com/shop/one.html) and the [Playbar](https://www.sonos.com/shop/playbar.html). It’s super cool to sync all boxes around the home and have no lag between the music in different rooms.
### YouTube 📱 🌐
I use the [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/) app and website a lot to watch videos from channels I follow. I use the extensions [DF YouTube](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/) and [Enhancer for YouTube](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/) to make the viewing experience more enjoyable. I hide all sidebars, comments, suggestions, and other needy crap. All videos stop by default and are automatically switched to full-screen mode.
### Odysee/LBRY 📱 🖥 🌐
[Odysee](https://odysee.com/) is a completely decentralized video platform that doesn’t censor anything except illegal things. It uses the [LBRY](https://lbry.com/) network for open, free, and fair digital content. LBRY itself doesn’t censor anything, it cannot do so because the content is shared peer-to-peer and the metadata lives on the blockchain.
### IMDb 📱 🌐
[IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/) is one of the more used apps on my devices. I look up actors, directors, movies, and TV shows all the time. I log all my watched TV shows and movies to keep track of what I have watched.
### TMDb 🌐
[TMDb](https://www.themoviedb.org/) is a nice collaborative movie database and I started using it to link to movies on my website because I like to support open projects.
### WerStreamtEs 📱 🌐
[WerStreamt.es](https://www.werstreamt.es/) (German for WhoStreams.it) is my favorite platform to keep track of movies and TV shows. You can put movies and TV shows on a watch list and add the streaming services you have. The app will send out emails with reminders if something on your watch list has a new season or is available for streaming.
### Netflix 📱 📺
I use [Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/) on my Apple TV and sometimes on my iPad. I stopped watching TV seven years ago and watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. Here is a [list of things I watched on Netflix](https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027045180/).
### Prime Video 📱 📺
The second streaming service I use is [Amazon Prime Video](https://www.primevideo.com/). It has much fewer good movies and TV shows, but it’s much, much cheaper. Here is a [list of things I watched on Amazon Prime Video](https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027045359/).
### Apple Photos 📱 🖥
[Apple Photos](https://www.apple.com/ios/photos/) is the default app Apple comes with. It’s good enough for me and easy enough to use by all generations of the whole family. This is where we share photos in the family.
### QuickTime Player 🖥
[QuickTime](https://support.apple.com/downloads/quicktime) is a nice player, and it’s the default on a Mac. Not much more to say. I quickly record screencasts with it. It’s quicker and easier than recording with apps like _ScreenFlow_.
### VLC 📱 🖥
[VLC](https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) is a good and free player. It can play **anything**. Even corrupt or partial videos. I use it to stream my videos from my [Synology NAS](https://www.synology.com/).
### Shazam 📱
I use [Shazam](https://www.shazam.com/) for one case: To recognize songs and find them on Spotify.
## Security & Privacy
### Proton Pass 📱 🖥 🌐
[Proton Pass](https://proton.me/pass) is my Password Manager. I switched from 1Password to Bitwarden, but when Proton released their own Password Manager it was included in my package and it has a pretty design.
### Proton VPN 📱 🖥 📺 🌐
[Proton VPN](https://protonvpn.com/) is my current VPN provider. I switched to it from NordVPN, to ExpressVPN, but now I have it included in my package and it works even on my Apple TV, so I can watch shows from other countries.
### Cryptomator 📱 🖥
[Cryptomator](https://cryptomator.org/) is a free tool to encrypt cloud data. I encrypt all private data either in DEVONthink or with Cryptomator storage in Dropbox.
## Learning
### Duolingo (Plus) 📱 🌐
I love [Duolingo](https://www.duolingo.com/)! I learn on Duolingo without missing one day for more than 2 years now. It’s an intuitive and fun way of learning. And it’s free! I started switching to **Plus** recently, which removes advertising and adds offline support and streak repair. I learn [Japanese](https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/ja/en/Learn-Japanese) and [Spanish](https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/es/en/Learn-Spanish) every day. They have good [podcasts](https://podcast.duolingo.com/) for Spanish and French, [stories](https://stories.duolingo.com/), progress quizzes, leagues, and much more.
### Shirabe Jisho 📱 🌐
Shirabe Jisho is a [powerful Japanese-English dictionary](https://jisho.org/). It shows nearly everything you can wish for, even the visual stroke order of the characters. The [iOS app](https://apps.apple.com/app/shirabe-jisho/id1005203380) is a complete offline dictionary.
### Japanese 📱
[Japanese](https://japaneseapp.com/) is another beautiful Japanese dictionary for iOS and Android. You can even use Flashcards and test your knowledge about Kanji.
### Human Japanese 📱
[Human Japanese](https://humanjapanese.com/) is a paid app to learn Japanese. The interface is dated, but the content is good.
### Goodreads 📱 🌐
[Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/) is the only decent social reading platform. I use it to track the books I want to read and the books I’m reading and update my status once a week. You can save books to shelves, follow friends, and get inspiration about what to read next or do a reading challenge every year. You can [follow me on Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/28460819) or look into the books I’ve read.
### Kindle 📱 🖥
I use the [iPad and iPhone Kindle](https://apps.apple.com/app/kindle/id302584613) app and the [macOS Kindle](https://apps.apple.com/app/kindle/id405399194) app as a companion to my Kindle Paperwhite. I use the app either to look at color photos or illustrations or after I’ve finished a book to review my marginalia (notes and markings).
## Health & Fitness
### Health 📱
I like the [Health](https://www.apple.com/ios/health/) app of Apple, the only drawback is that there is not an iPad or Desktop version of it. It gets better with every release and aggregates data from all kinds of other apps and services. I get my Meditation times, movement data, and workouts from my [Apple Watch](https://www.apple.com/watch/), audio data from my [AirPods Pro](https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/), my weight from my [Withings Body Cardio](https://www.withings.com/body-cardio) scale, and my sleep from my [Fitbit Charge](https://www.fitbit.com/charge4) – though this needs an extra app to get the data over an API, as Fitbit and Apple have a vendetta and Fitbit doesn’t give their data to the health app.
### Activity 📱
The [Activity](https://apps.apple.com/app/activity/id1208224953) app is the app delivered with an Apple Watch. It’s nice to track workouts, movement, and changes in your activity over time. It allows competition with family and friends. And the data is transferred to the Health app.
### Health Mate 📱 🌐
The [Health Mate](https://healthmate.withings.com/) app by Withings is a nice way to have an insight into my weight, fat, water, muscle mass, heart frequency, and pulse wave velocity every morning. I use the Withings [Body Cardio](https://www.withings.com/body-cardio) scale, the [Sleep Analyzer](https://www.withings.com/sleep-analyzer), the [BPM Connect](https://www.withings.com/bpm-connect) blood pressure monitor, and [Thermo](https://www.withings.com/thermo).
### Reps & Sets
I use the [Reps & Sets](https://repsandsetsapp.com/) app for my [Calisthenics](/calisthenics/) training, multiple times per week. As an early adopter, I get the Premium features for free.
### InsightTimer 📱
I use [InsightTimer](https://insighttimer.com/) for my daily meditation. I honestly don’t use much of its features, except the feature to create custom timers.
## Finance & Calculations
### iFinance 📱 🖥
[iFinance](https://www.syniumsoftware.com/ifinance) is my tool to track income and spending. Every day, I track my expenses and income for ~5 minutes and make sure everything is fine with my accounts. iFinance has nice tools to automate and analyze your expenses to find out how you spend your income.
I use the iOS or Apple Watch version to track expenses while I’m on the way. The data is synchronized with iCloud or Wi-Fi across devices.
### Stocks 📱 🖥
I use the Apple [Stocks](https://apps.apple.com/app/stocks/id1069512882) app to keep track of my stocks and funds. It’s simple and easy to use and available on iOS and macOS.
### Calcbot 📱
[Calcbot](https://www.tapbots.com/calcbot/) is a beautifully designed calculator and unit converter I use for many years. It’s available for the Apple Watch and has nice features such as sending your calculations as an email, syncing across devices with iCloud, and much more.
## Weather
### Netatmo 📱 🌐
I use the [Netatmo](https://www.netatmo.com/) weather app to monitor the temperature, CO₂, humidity, noise level, and air pressure in all my rooms and on the balcony. I use a rain monitor. The devices are beautifully designed and have a long life duration (I use them since 2013).
### Weather Pro 📱
[WeatherPro](http://www.weatherpro.eu/) is the best and most accurate weather app I know. It’s a free app but for €9.99 per year, you can get more detailed data, hourly forecasts, and other nice features. All advertising gets removed from apps by _MeteoGroup_.
### RainToday 📱
[RainToday](http://raintoday.weatherpro.de/lang/en.html) is the second app from _MeteoGroup_ on my devices. There are live updates on upcoming rain in your location that show the estimated duration, intensity, and direction of the rain.
### SolarWatch 📱
[SolarWatch](https://apps.apple.com/app/solarwatch-tageslicht-wetter/id1191365122) is my favorite app to show the sunrise and sunset.
## Tools
### Hue 📱 🖥
I use the [Philips Hue](https://apps.apple.com/app/philips-hue/id1055281310) app to control the light in my home. Nearly all my light bulbs are now from Hue, and I automate a lot of my light cycles. I turn on lights automatically when dusk starts and wake me up with lights during wintertime. I dim down my lights every day at the same time and shut them off at the same time. As I always follow the same routine, this works fantastic. I use multiple different switches and Siri to control the light around my home manually. I even use an [Alfred workflow](https://github.com/benknight/hue-alfred-workflow) to control my light directly from the computer.
### Apple Maps 📱 🖥
I switched to [Apple Maps](https://www.apple.com/maps/) because I dislike Google for a while. But occasionally, I switch and use [Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps) because the information for stores and opening times is much better.
### DeepL 📱 🖥 🌐
[DeepL](https://www.deepl.com/translator) is my favorite translation app.
### Dropbox (Plus) 📱 🖥 🌐
[Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/) is my cloud provider. My [Synology NAS](https://www.synology.com/) synchronizes automatically everything in Dropbox as a backup. Never trust cloud providers.
### iCloud 📱 🖥 🌐
[iCloud](https://www.icloud.com/) is my second cloud provider. The new CloudKit sync is fast and seamless with Apple Devices and Apple services work optimally with iCloud.
### The Unarchiver 🖥
[The Unarchiver](https://theunarchiver.com/) is the best, free, and only app you need to unpack nearly every format available.
### DaisyDisk 🖥
I use [DaisyDisk](https://daisydiskapp.com/) to find and delete unneeded files from my computer. It’s the best visual representation of your hard drive I know. Files can be collected and deleted with one click.
### AppCleaner 🖥
[AppClearner](https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/) is a nice and free application that allows uninstalling unwanted apps and deleting all traces and left-over settings at the same time.
### Find My 📱 🖥
I use the [Find My](https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/) app to find my devices … and my family. And to get random calls from my grandmother about why I’m at home and not at work. 😆
### Komoot 📱 🌐
If you’re into Biking or Hiking, [Komoot](https://www.komoot.de/) is the best app I know. It’s free but possible to buy better hiking maps for regions or the whole world. It allows for creating tours and sending them to the iPhone or even Apple Watch app and navigating with it. The route gets even broken down into kinds of streets, height profile, and difficulty. And you can record your tours and share them.
### Citymapper 📱 🌐
[Citymapper](https://citymapper.com/) is a fantastic routing app available for selected big cities around the globe. My home city Hamburg is included. It knows all available transport options and times and calculates the best tour to your target. It even shows you when to get on and off transport and on which side of a subway you have entered.
### DHL Paket 📱
The [DHL Paket](https://www.dhl.de/de/privatkunden/kampagnenseiten/dhl-app.html) app is the best way to see all packages on the way to your home or somebody from your home.