I'm going to be boring and say ChatGPT. It's genuinely an astonishingly useful bit of technology, at least the way I use it.
A more pedestrian app: Bring!, the syncing shopping list app. Great stuff .
Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#32My favorite everyday product still is the iPod Nano 7G.
Although released in 2012, My use case is mainly to listen to audio books (m4b) and music. Of course there are smartphones these days that also could play them well, but in my opinion nothing comes even close to the user experience of this device:
- Size: This device is SMALL
- Durability: Still works fine after 10 years
- Battery life: Lasted for days with 220mah, after some years of course it decreases a bit
- Connectivity: Works fine with bluetooth
- Usability: Decent UI with remote support (4 different ones)[1], Sleep timer, etc.
- Versatile: Podcasts, Audiobooks, Music, Sports and even Video (kind of limited though)
Of course there are some drawbacks (no linux support, no wifi, hard to repair, proprietary connector, no FLAC, "unhackable" except [2]), but I'll take it together with the benefits.
I desperately tried to replace it with other (Android) devices, such as:
- Unihertz Jelly 2
- Fiio M6
- HiBy M300
but they are all to bulky, slow, miss important features or just feel bad to me.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#33There are a ton of little macOS apps I love. Part of the reason I’m married to the Apple ecosystem, despite wanting to switch out of it. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in iA Writer over the years. It’s the only way I can get any writing done, I find every other writing app too distracting. Somebody on HN called it an “overpriced minimalist lifestyle app” in a reply to one of my comments, not realizing th…
Overpriced? Interesting. I don't remember ever asking for anything else since the first time I bought it years ago. I still use it every day (macOS and iOS). I use Obsidian to manage the notes, but if I want to just write or pick one file to work on, I use iA Writer. I don't even have Obsidian on the phone; I open the file(s) from the Dropbox folder with iA Writer.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#34I've been using Kagi for about a year and love it. Searching without ads, with a bunch of power-user features, and a thoughtful approach to AI, has been very nice. - https://kagi.com I've also been enjoying NotePlan. I stumbled upon a system I like for managing my work in Obsidian at work using some plugins, and then found NotePlan is basically an app designed around the exact system I cobbled together, with some add…
I'm working on an even more user-friendly version of Merry Sky: https://weather-sense.leftium.com Still very WIP, but I'd love any feedback/requests. (What do you wish either Merry Sky or Weather Sense did differently?)
Very cool! I'll definitely keep an eye on it.
Looking at it right now, here would be my initial feedback and some ideas:
- Depending on where you're located, I'm not sure if you've noticed that when there is a space in the city name it throws a %20 in there instead of space. Probably need a url decode on there... interestingly, this issues goes away when I just the locate button within the map and location services are triggered.
- It seems to find my location without actually prompting, are you using an IP lookup or something instead of location services? It seems to work, but having the ability to also specify a location where I'm not at would be good (I'm sure this is planned). As mentioned above, the location services are called when using the map locate button, so I imagine the bug in the first bullet is related to the 2 different methods of gathering location.
- I'm not sure if showing the a date or two in the past is for your testing or on purpose, but I kind of like it. People seem to ask me all the time if it rained yesterday, so having an easy reference for things like that is nice. For something really extra... something that shows what the forecast was vs what actually happened would be really interesting for getting a sense of how accurate the forecasts were. Presenting something like that well, so it's easy and obvious would be a big UI challenge. I know a lot of people complain about weather apps having bad data and are always looking for a better one. Having actual data every time the site/app is opened that shows how far off it was would go a long way to prove those criticisms right or wrong. My trust in a weather report would go way up if I regularly saw those deltas were small.
- A way to visually see temperature and precipitation for the full 7 day forecast is always the main thing I'm looking for. High and low temp, graphed, for the week (this is the one thing Apple did take from Dark Sky that I still like). Inter-day temps for each day in a similar format to the week. And the precipitation like you have it (or as an area chart). I did really like the Dark Sky way of having a vertical bar for the precipitation, with the temps plotted next to it. I think that made it easier to see the separation between the days, while having everything horizontal makes it all blend together a little more.
- I'm not totally sure what's going on with the 3 precipitation forecast bars. It looks like 2 of them have a current time marker. I'm going to assume this is you playing with different ways to show it, 24hr vs 48hr? My initial gut thought for the current weather view is a 24 hour bar with 4 hours in the past and 20 hours into the future (for temp and precipitation). Then the 7 day forecast can show 24 hours at a time for each day, which could be expanded or collapsed.
- A way to change between imperial and metric measures would be good. Right now I'm seeing the temp in Fahrenheit, while the distance and precipitation is in metric, so it's a bit of a mix out of the box.
- Sunrise / Sunset timing is something I find useful, though I have it on my phone's lock screen at this point.
- Something I've recently discovered in Apple's weather app is the Averages tile. I've started using this a lot any time I'm looking at traveling somewhere, so I can get an idea of when to go or how to pack. This isn't a critical MVP feature at all, so I wouldn't prioritize it. But if you end up taking this really far, that is something I find pretty useful and cool.
- Just spitballing... I wonder if the 7 day forecast bars would be good all lined up horizontally with a horizontal scroll to look into the future, so it's more like looking through a calendar week. I think this might make it easier for someone to more easily see it will ran in 3 days, rather than having to know today is Friday and it says it will rain on Tuesday, which is 4 days away. This would be another UI challenge to do well without it being a cramped mess. It would probably need to default to a collapsed view, then clicking on a day would expand that day's bar to show more details.
- I assume all the json data is for your own testing
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#35I have gone through many apps and begun to simplify as much as possible. I try to be independent of any particular app; instead, I build up usage patterns. So, I do have to spend extra time, especially in the beginning, for most tools I use regularly. I also try to stick to native (OS-built-in) apps as much as possible.
For instance, Apple Mail—mine has a stark layout[1] with just two panes and no tools visible (nothing)—I learned the shortcuts as a muscle memory so I can get lots done. When I forget, I remember the keystrokes to fire up the panes, toolbar, etc.
What I use and swear by now are physical Pen(s) and Notebook(s). For notebooks, Midori[2] stationery is “my precious” for now. I shuffle between a few fountain pens (Lamy, Kaweco, looking for more) and a bunch of gel, sketch, and felt roller pens (Rotring, Parker, and the like). Midori is expensive to buy in India. I need to get a bunch while traveling next time.
1. https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#36- Syncthing (for syncing files without paying anybody)
- Ebookdroid and PDF & DJVU Reader (for reading books and papers. Have great features that seems obvious yet absent from other apps)
- Lithium (best EPUB file reader)
- Antennapod (best app for podcasts)
- Obsidian, Simplenote (for notetaking)
- Raindrop (for bookmarking)
- Sketchbook (for drawing)
- Fedilab (for connecting to the Fediverse)
- Feeder (FOSS RSS reader app)
- Flora Incognita, Plantnet (use AI to recognize plants and flowers)
- Sweech (opens up a wifi file server)
- Xplore File Manager (THE best file manager app for android)
- 8 bit Wonders (Emulates old computers like Commodore 64)
- Poe (for different LLM chatbots)
Some dev apps: MicroREPL, Termux, X11-BASIC, notin, Sensor Server, ntfy, nRF Connect, gFORTH
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#37Softwar, self-hosted FreshRSS. I haven't used RSS since trying Feedly for a few months after Google Reader was killed. I like reading all my "updates" in a single unified location, and FreshRSS has been fantastic for my needs.
Hardware, my jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite. I've used the same device nearly everyday going on about 7-8 years. Still works great and battery life on airplane mode lasts a good 3-4 weeks. I keep airplane mode on permanently, and transfer whatever I need with Calibre.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#38There are a ton of little macOS apps I love. Part of the reason I’m married to the Apple ecosystem, despite wanting to switch out of it. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in iA Writer over the years. It’s the only way I can get any writing done, I find every other writing app too distracting. Somebody on HN called it an “overpriced minimalist lifestyle app” in a reply to one of my comments, not realizing th…
IA writer was amazing from day one and keeps improving. A beautiful product defining a perfect environment for writing. I am deeply inspired by its design, by the discipline and thoughtfulness behind it.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#39I use cleanshot 30+ times a day and it’s perfect.
Things. So simple yet powerful.
Basecamp is incredible for collaboration.
Obsidian. SublimeText.
Recently started using n10.app and it does help with focus.
Ruby is such a beautiful language. I feel grateful every time I use it.
CraftCMS is small and perfect.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite everyday app or product?
#40Supersonic -- amazingly-good Subsonic client for the desktop. I've gone through... way too many Subsonic clients, and I just can't find one that beats Supersonic; my only complaint is that, for some reason, MPRIS can be intermittent.
The developer's also like... super responsive on GitHub, and frequently pushes updates to make it better. Great stuff! :-)