Hello/Salut Interoperable readers!

I'll spare as much of the New Year dribble as I can. This year will be less about setting challenging goals and more about maybe "themes?" to borrow a term from the venerable duo of Myke Hurley and CGP Grey. This year's theme is to balance novelty and comfort: continue to read, write, and be thoughtful about the world around me and how I — ahem — Interoperate with it. But also try new things, and push harder at some old but forgotten hobbies and vocations. 

Without further ado. I've never covered my "technology stack." What software tools do I use daily personally and professionally? This is not a particularly exhaustive list and only covers the "productivity" desktop apps I use on my Macintosh computers. However, many apps are cross-platform or have Linux/Windows alternatives. I'll probably have to cover a "creative" workflow in a future edition. 

It's pretty much a given that you need a password manager to navigate our modern world. I don't remember what led me to use 1Password umpteen years ago, but it has been a solid and reliable tool for managing life's logins. This is not a wholehearted endorsement of this particular product, but you should use a password manager that is not tied to your web browser or phone. 1Password is cross-platform Win/Mac/iPhone/Android and has browser extensions for popular browsers.

BetterTouchTool is like a hidden "power user" preference pane your Mac always needed. I mainly use it for its ability to enable Windows-like window snapping in MacOS, but it has hundreds of other useful tweaks that make everyday computing more comfortable. A notable example is the ability to leave "natural" scrolling enabled on a trackpad, while having "normal" scrolling work on your 'regular' mouse's scroll wheel (why vanilla MacOS has married these, I will never understand!). BetterTouchTool's bread and butter are creating customised shortcuts based on hardware input. These can be massive time savers or, again, just making your environment more user-friendly.

I am, to my gooey, alphabetised core, a list person—parts lists, to-do lists, lists of places to see, people to google, etc. Clear is a dirt-simple list app for MacOS and iOS that syncs between devices and makes those everyday "simple" lists fun and easy to write and tick off. 

I am a reluctant Discord user, but it seems more and more "techie" companies/fandoms are moving their collective discourses to Discord (think of it as Slack for dorks). I've probably spent most of my time in Discord playing around with Midjourney, whose platform solely runs within Discord. I could see this being more of a trend in the future of needing Discord to interact with a community or a new tool.

Firefox has been the most reliable and feature-rich browser I use (I've probably been a FF user for 20 years!) As much as I would like to remove myself from being locked into either Apple's or Google's ecosystems, I'm not 100% Chrome or Safari-free, but close. I think the Mozilla Foundation (the collective leaders of the Firefox project) have a good outlook, especially regarding privacy. I believe I should be able to control what traffic reaches the computer that I own, especially when it concerns my privacy and attention span. Blocking advertisements and cross-site tracking is a must for me, and Firefox and extensions like Ublock Origin make that possible.

Another dirt-simple application for peering into your hard drive and getting a visual representation of its contents. GrandPerpective is a must-have for Macintosh users who work with a lot of data.

This neat little app solves the problem of needing a way to quickly check your appearance on camera before joining a video meeting or starting a live stream. Hand Mirror is wicked fast and supports multiple cameras.

One of many Swiss Army knife note-taking/database/productivity/personal wiki applications to sweep the world in the last few years, Notion has plugged many holes I had in managing my notes and projects. Instead of using multiple note-taking apps, Google Docs, and task management in an app like Asana, everything gets built into Notion now. I've only scratched the surface of Notion's power. It's been most helpful in organising complicated projects like managing my website and making an overkill watchlist for films and television programmes. Notion has a cult-like following for a reason.

I am an unabashed fan of Panic Inc.'s eclectic library of software. As both a developer of legendary productivity applications for the Mac and publisher of two of my favourite videogames in recent memory, Panic is truly legendary. I've always had difficulty settling on a "code editor" Microsoft killed a favourite: "Atom" as part of their acquisition of GitHub. I dislike Microsoft and their products already, so Visual Studio Code is off the table for me (it is admittedly a bit daunting and advanced for my needs!). That's where Nova comes in, I was a fan of Panic's 'Coda' editor, so when they announced its spiritual replacement Nova, a native Mac code editor, I was immediately interested. It's a great app with good support and the features I need to maintain my tiny empire of one FTP server and some crappy code.

Like Notion, Obsidian is one of those weird, culty applications that serve many broad niches. It is an intelligent text editor on top of a simple database. I can nerd out about how writing in Markdown is amazing and yada yada but distilled down Obsidian is the best way I've found to write and organise mountains of text in a "future resistant" way. The files and file structure it produces are all regular directories and human-readable, so even in 20 years, if Obsidian does not exist, the files will still be usable in whatever future computing environment I might find myself in. It's also the most compatible application with the "zettelkasten" (speaking of cults) system explained in Sönke Ahrens's excellent book How to Take Smart Notes. After some painful setup, it's a dream to use. It offers a comfortable, customisable writing environment and syncs well across devices (I've opted to pay for Obsidian's syncing service, but alternatives exist). My use case is my zettelkasten-light system of taking and organising research notes, primarily for topics I cover in this blog.

James Thomson's PCalc is an incredibly powerful calculator application. It's a calculator. I can't get much more detailed than that. The iOS version, especially on iPad, is incredible. Maths baby! 

Rogue Amoeba is up there with Panic in my pantheon of incredible Mac developers. SoundSource is a daily driver app for me to overcome Apple's heinously limited audio output controls. For example, I use SoundSource to always output system sounds (annoying but sometimes necessary beeps and boops) quietly through my MacBook's built-in speakers while sending all other audio to my fancy speakers and keeping my headset glued to my video meeting applications. It's audio output bliss.

Up top with password managers would be some text expansion software on the must-have applications list. My top pick, TextExpander, takes any word or short phrase and instantly replaces or expands it into your chosen term. Something like "myaddr" can expand our to your complete postal address "@email" to your unwieldy corporate email address (avoiding typing tyler.dickey@mycorporation.co.uk 10,000 times has not only saved me time but added years to my lifespan). There are also pre-made lists of expansions you can enable. One of my favourites is the accented word list. A good olé, touché, or voilà goes a long way in making your day-to-day communications a colourful mélange of delicious language. Another favourite feature is the snippets, like the instantaneous (2023-01-25) and time stamps (19:03 GMT). You can even program it to understand mañana (2023-01-26). Text expansion is a must-have!

If you can't tell from this list already, I spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with text. And in our crazy modern world, sometimes that text is a picture. A typical scenario is your sitting in a Zoom meeting and looking at some information and could use some of the text on screen but can't be asked to re-type all of the corporate jargon word for word. That is where TextSniper comes in. With TextSniper Command+Shift+2 is remapped, and just like taking a screenshot, you copy whatever text is in the area you selected. This is a godsend, mainly if you deal with many screenshots of problems. You can now TextSniper the error and paste it right into the search engine of your choice. Voilà!

Ok, last but not least. Velja solves the problem of hyperlinks opening in the wrong browser (if you aren't a complete dork with three browsers and five user profiles, I may lose you here). I want links from work chat to always open in my "work" Chrome and links from my notes about a project I am working on to open in Firefox. This is great if you also use a personal laptop for some work stuff or vice versa—no more embarrassing private tabs in your "work" browser.

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I'm Tyler Dickey, and this is my newsletter Interoperable. In this space, I celebrate my never-ending love for reliable, available, and maintainable systems like RSS and telephony and write about topics that interest me: art, reading, making things, and technology. Please consider subscribing or following me elsewhere on the internet: Website | Instagram