Software that's enjoyable ... software that's a drudgery

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 21, 2015 at 06:44 PM

Yes, your list is interesting precisely because it’s aesthetically varied – some of those apps are less than attractive, but they’re all pretty good at what they do.

A good combination of streamlining and aesthetics does mean an app becomes a real pleasure to use.

One of my favourites, despite the fact it isn’t cross-platform (yet), is Quiver, because it’s, well, beautiful and practical at the same time.

Others I actively enjoy using include:
- Airmail 2 (don’t take any notice of the negative reviews of this latest version of Airmail 2; if you’ve got lots of mail accounts, it’s absolutely brilliant!)
- Keep Everything (neat, tidy and cross-platform)
- Outlinely (probably one of the most elegant outliners, although alas not being developed very actively. The same team develops SlickTasks)
- Preview (I love Apple’s Preview! Apart from anything else, it’s so much faster than most other PDF viewers)
- Letterspace (probably the most practical and elegant hybrid Markdown editor, especially now the syncing has been improved)
- SimpleNote (super-simple, super-elegant, super-fast)
- Curio (because it’s just so gorgeous)
- Scapple (because it’s the best and simplest mind-manager-like tool around)
- Ulysses (well, I’m hoping I’ll be using this a lot in the near future, once the iOS version has emerged)
- Notebooks (but the desktop version still lags behind iOS)

Apps I really like but don’t use enough:
- Scrivener (just, somehow, a bit too cumbersome)
- OneNote (fantastic on certain platforms - the latest iOS version is amazing)
- Outline+ (a wonderful OneNote alternative, but suffers from the same issues, really)
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