Figma has become my top tool for UI design, prototyping, and design collaboration. It’s the first design tool where properly sharing a design system feels possible and well-supported.

Nova (from Panic) recently replaced my long-time development tool of choice (Coda, also from Panic). Panic sweats the details, and it shows throughout the app.

Ulysses is my preferred app for both long-form writing and collecting notes. And I use Drafts for writing drafts and shorter pieces, though I need to dig in and learn more about all the extra things it can do.

Sketch is still my preferred app for vector illustration and icon design, particularly for personal projects. I still prefer some aspects of how it organizes layers for creating more detailed art.

Affinity Photo is what I’m currently experimenting with as a Photoshop replacement since I cancelled my Adobe Creative Cloud account.

xScope is like a handy Swiss Army knife for design, with tools for measuring, checking colors, looking at pixels up close, manipulating text, and even mirroring my screen to my iOS devices.

ImageOptim is how I compress every single image I post on the web anywhere. It’s super fast and easy — just drag and drop the images onto it and it compresses them.

GIPHY Capture is my preferred tool for recording simple screen interactions and animations, or just making funny gifs from videos. (I’m still trying to figure out what tool to replace Photoshop for editing gifs.)

Things is where all my work to be done gets catalogued. I keep work tasks, ideas for blog posts, features for current projects, future product ideas, and household chores here.

Alfred opens my apps, finds my files, and runs quick calculations. It can do so much more, and one of these days I’m going to dive into the advanced features.

1Password stores nearly all of my passwords and a bunch of other sensitive data. I’ve started using it as my two-factor authentication tool of choice as well.

Dropbox is where I keep files that I want to sync between different devices regularly for now. That may change to iCloud some day, but it’s Dropbox for now.

Fantastical is a much better interface to my calendar than either the built-in Mac calendar OR Outlook. I also use this on my iPhone and iPad. Flexibits (the makers of Fantastical) also make a great app for managing and viewing contacts called Cardhop that’s quite lovely and nice, too.

Rocket is a better way to find and paste emoji than the built-in keyboard tool that has to be enabled from your system preferences. It works similarly to the emoji completion in Slack where you type a colon and the emoji name.