Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

Sketch (https://www.sketchapp.com/)

It's hard to imagine what life was like before Sketch. You'd work with a UX designer, who would pass you PNGs and PSDs. There would be designs, and then there would be a whole 'nother set of files for specifying dimensions, colors, typefaces, sizing, kerning, and a whole slew of other stuff.

You'd also have to get asset packs from your designer - for mobile devs you'd get a large set of assets of different resolutions and sizes specced for different device types.

Need a design change? Be prepared for another mega-sized download from Dropbox, not to mention the labor intensive task of the designer re-exporting all of these bits.

Then comes Sketch - good for anything from wireframing to pixel-perfect designs. All measurements can be taken directly from the app, so you send the working project file to the engineer and the engineer can take all the measurements they need. Automatically accounts for dp/px translation. Automatically exports all relevant sizes/resolutions for assets into their expected native formats. Color palettes embedded, type parameters embedded.

It's saved us mobile devs so much time.

I'm not sure there is really a wrong way to use it. If you google every little thing to find a good solution (not manually inserting and formatting references for example), I don't think there is too much to be done better. At least, to my beginner's eyes it doesn't seem like it.

And maybe Redis too.

Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update, probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed.

I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.