Indie Apps I Enjoy

Sublime Text

This is my text editor of choice for many years and I’m a happy paying customer. It’s fast with a very light feel, and does the basics well – editing, navigation, search – while staying responsive and almost bug-free.

I’ve tried VSCode before but couldn’t get past inelegancies in the user interface or the laggy feeling of the editor. The folks behind Sublime Text also make a visual Git client, Sublime Merge, which I also use.

superwhisper

This is a great little app for speech-to-text transcription. In fact, I’m writing this post with it. I like it for its relatively reliable and responsive text-to-speech functionality (press a keyboard shortcut, talk, press another one, and have it paste the transcribed text). I haven’t been interested in any of their more recent developments that add additional AI features.

Little Snitch

A nice firewall and network monitor app for Mac that comes with some nice visualizations of data rates over time, and geo-located servers that your computer is talking to.

Things

This is a to-do app that does the basics well and has an extremely pleasant user interface. I mostly use it to add tasks on the go using a shortcut on my home screen. These tasks go into an Inbox area that I can triage later. It’s mostly helpful during the times of my life when things get busy and I need some external memory to stay organized.

Bike

Bike is a text editor and outlining tool. I like its approach to text editing and use it for some of my freeform notes because it makes it easy to create a hierarchy and jump around a big outline. There are some features that I have consistently missed (I want to be able to paste in images & files), so I’m in the process of moving on to other apps for my writing, but I still like many of its ideas, including a novel caret affinity system that solves a common issue when editing rich text.

Weather strip

This app has a really nice visual way of presenting the weather. I’m always excited about clear and clever data visualizations.

Capo

This is a fun app that helps you learn how to play a song by doing some helpful signal processing and showing you an annotated spectrogram with chord changes, and gives you the ability to slow down and loop particular sections of a song.

Others

This is getting a bit long so I’ll end with a few other indie apps (all created by independent developers or small teams) that I either use or spiritually approve of: Bear, Overcast, Halide, Puzzmo, Datasette, and Kirby.

And on a related note, there are a few individuals who make fonts I like a lot: MB Type and Fabrizio Schiavi.