My app stack

For anyone not familiar with the term, "app stack" refers to a collection of apps that work together to achieve a particular goal or fulfill a particular workflow. Simply said, it's a set of apps that you use daily to support your work and life.

As I mentioned in the About page, I am that kind of person who is constantly experimenting with all kinds of apps and workflows. As such, I subconsciously smile when I read numerous polls or posts on Reddit, Discord, or Slack communities about the app stack that this or that person is using. If I were to describe mine, I would need to write a new post every so often (and maybe I will, who knows))).

Is it even productive to switch apps or change workflows?

Over the years, I've found this experimentation with various apps and workflows both entertaining and insightful. And I rarely regret making it a habit or spending countless hours on it.

Every so often, I'm looking for the best app stack that would meet my needs (those needs evolve and change over time, and so does the app stack). This contributes to my daily efficiency, and joyful mood as well, especially when I manage to make my apps play together, integrating or complementing each other like an ecosystem of sorts.

Other times I'm just curious about something new that I find on the market. Eager to try it, curious to dive into the problem it is aimed to solve, the new value that the team strives to bring, and the unique approach that the developer takes. To understand deeply how the products are built and evolved — and to help the developers to build them, too, by providing deep feedback directly. This contributes both to my curiosity and skillset, such as product management, UX, marketing, and knowledge of the state of technology.

The writing apps

Currently, my writing apps stack comprises these apps, that I find to be the best in class, each for its own purpose:

• Drafts is a perfect starting point for any text when you don't know where to put it yet. Anything you need to write down quickly and process later. The app has everything you need for this kind of workflow: native "inbox" and "archive", tags and flags, and actions to process your text or send it to practically any other app.
• Capacities is an astonishing personal knowledge management "studio". It is well suited to contain your world, the things you want to keep, the things you value, or the things you would like to come back to. It handles any type of information pretty well, and has all kinds of powerful features for note-taking at scale.
• Craft is a modern and beautiful document-creation platform with collaboration at its core. While Capacities is a perfect personal tool, Craft is a perfect team tool. We use it as the main driver for our teamwork.
• Ulysses is an app that I haven't been using for some time… until I started this blog. I have always known it to be a really great app for publishing. Focused writing experience, high-quality revision features, integration with blogging platforms, keeping all the metadata and materials in one place — the overall workflow is very smooth from your first draft to final publication.
• Readwise is not a writing app per se, but I would call it a personal knowledge management platform. That's because its main purpose is to help you collect your highlights from books, articles, and videos in one place. Not only that, but also resurface those highlights for you to really learn them deeply, as well as send them to your favourite note-taking app for future reference.

Each of these apps cannot properly replace the other, and each serves its own unique purpose.

Tasks and lists apps

To-do apps have always gained a lot of buzz online, even though I did not find not too much innovation happening, actually. I've seen to-do apps borrowing each other's features or improving the existing ones.

It's easy to experiment with new to-do apps frequently because bringing all your data into a new app is a matter of one weekly review, and only takes a couple of hours if you know what you're doing. Naturally, this is where I experimented most over the years — trying different approaches within one app or switching between the apps.

The most flexible and robust of them all, and the one that I've been mainly using for the last couple of years, is OmniFocus. When I've been struggling with my responsibilities and goals, juggling too many plates, only this app has helped me to tame the chaos. It did so by outlining everything that needs to be done, hiding irrelevant things, and setting up perspectives for a maximum focus on moving the needle. Nested tags also helped me to keep track of everything that needs to be discussed with the people in various departments and teams in my company — I'm mentioning this because every other to-do app failed desperately at that.

The most fresh newcomer in this market that I've been trying recently is Godspeed. It's fast and keyboard-centric, and it's almost as flexible as OmniFocus, while also as markdown-centred as Todoist. And it offers some unique features, tool, like snoozing the task without affecting its due date, or binding tasks to the calendar events. It's a bit unstable, and the iOS app does not have feature parity with the desktop app, but it's pretty decent, and is being developed at a very fast pace.

Todoist and Things 3 have been market leaders for more than a decade, and I've been on and off with them throughout the years. These are outstanding apps worth attention, but they proved to be not flexible enough for my needs lately, so I did not stick with them for long.

The calendar

Fantastical has been my most reliable "partner" in calendar management for 5 years or so. Very mature, very stable, available across all the Apple's ecosystem, supporting Google, Apple, Microsoft, and even Todoist, and with feature set years ahead of the competition.

But in 2023 I stumbled into other modern calendar apps, like Cron (that is now Notion Calendar, seemingly stagnant since the acquisition) or Rise Calendar (that has since pivoted to a calendar-based project management tool) or Vimcal. All of them focused on innovative approaches to time management, appealing to power users — with advanced scheduling features (organically leveraging AI technology), focus on keyboard shortcuts, and focus on work and team collaboration.

And that's when I suddenly noticed that these newer calendar apps meet my needs much better, even though they were not as mature as Fantastical. Eventually, Vimcal, which sticks to its original vision of "the most efficient calendar for people with too many meetings", has won me over because of its smart meeting scheduling features, keyboard navigation, and other power features that improved my workflow. And it's even though its iOS app is relatively slow and unstable, and the menubar dropdown is basic, so in a way it is inferior to Fantastical, you might say.

The email

I have always been a proponent of native macOS apps instead of the browser. They are much more performant, accessible, and integrated into the operating system — which results in a good experience.

I tried to stick with Apple Mail, and it's pretty good, but it completely misses crucial email organization feature that Gmail introduced literally decades ago: nested labels. Apple Mail still, in 2025, does not support Gmail labels, and operates old-school folders instead. I still use it for simple things because it's accessible across all the Apple's ecosystem, on any device, and it's rock-solid stable when it comes to email rendering (some other email clients fail desperately when rendering some emails, often making the emails unreadable in all sorts of ways).

I've been using Mimestream since its beta, and it's a remarkable native Gmail client for macOS. Waiting patiently until they release iOS and iPadOS version. Meanwhile, I'm using it in combination with Apple Mail.

Last year I've also tried the phenomenal Superhuman for multiple months, which is, as it might seem, just another Gmail/Outlook client. I can tell you, it's notably better than Mimestream that I've praised above, and it's equally outstanding on iOS/iPadOS as well. For me, it was not worth the price, though, because the majority of my email communication migrated into Slack. But I still think that if I was a sales person or if my company was using email more than Slack, Superhuman would be my best solution.

MacOS improvements

Over the years, I've discovered quite a lot of the apps that enhance macOS in all kinds of ways.

By the way, it's because of this freedom of extensibility that macOS is decades ahead of iPadOS, and all kinds of iPads cannot become "your next Mac replacement" if you're a power user. And for this very reason, I was discouraged to find out that visionOS is basically based on iOS/iPadOS and not on macOS, which would make the device way more powerful, IMO.

Here are the apps that I find essential for my daily Mac usage (in random order because I cannot say clearly which is more important than the other):

• Alfred — this is the ultimate replacement for Spotlight that allows me to do all kinds of things on my Mac, starting from quickly opening links or apps, to toggling appearance mode, VPN, removing notifications, mounted DMG images, killing apps, processing files, doing quick calculations, etc. Majority of power users start with Alfred and then try some other alternatives, like overhyped Raycast, but I went the opposite way: started with Raycast, and then switched to Alfred as cheaper and more proficient solution.
• A bunch of macOS enhancement apps that I use come from Setapp, a single subscription service from which I currently use around a dozen apps (including the above-mentioned Ulysses, Gitfox, SQLPro Studio and some others). In particular, these proved to be indispensable macOS improvement tools:
  – Bartender — menubar manager, which is especially useful on these silly modern MacBooks with a notch– CleanshotX — don't even try to find a better tool for screenshots and screen recording, this one beats them all– Hookmark — very useful for consistently copying deep-links to a content in all sorts of apps (Finder, Apple Mail, Mimestream, NotePlan, Drafts, OmniFocus, and the list goes on), which is indispensable when interlinking pieces of content dispersed among different apps– Lungo — small but handy tool to prevent your Mac from falling asleep.
• Magnet — bought this window management tool years ago, as soon as I bought my first MacBook, it's simple, and still very useful after all these years.
• Homerow — it's an astounding tool for "reaching the unreachable" with keyboard shortcut. It enhances the capabilities of some not-so-keyboard-oriented apps by making any button, checkbox or select accessible via simple keyboard shortcut, with zero setup.
• 1Password — last but not least. Similarly to Fantastical, this app has been my companion for many years, and will likely remain such. It has a remarkable quick entry system-wide command bar, deep browser integration, and the ability to securely store and share all kinds of secret information. No other password management app was as reliable and as useful as this one.

Conclusion

This is not the full range of apps I'm using right now, I could tell you more about the development tools, web browsers, AI tools, and many other things. But these might be good as a topic for their own article, don't you think?

If you'd like me to write more on a particular app, workflow or topic, do not hesitate to subscribe and contact me directly via email or LinkedIn. I'd like an honest feedback, and I'd love to be useful.

Until the next time!