In order of usage frequency:

1. Arc 🎨 - A creative new take on the web browser
2. Thunderbird 🐦 - Lightweight, configurable email client - free and open-source from Mozilla
3. BitWarden 🔐 - Modern, cross-platform and open-source password/secrets manager
4. Bear 🐻 - Note taking and documentation writing markdown App
5. Zed 🔳 - Open source high performance GPU accelerated collaborative code editor
6. Suite 🚀 - Mounted cloud storage at lightning speeds
7. Parallels ‼️ - Local VMs and cross platform integrations on your mac
8. Signal 🛜 - WhatsApp substitute - letting me get away from meta in 2025
9. MASV 🛸 - Lightweight, well designed file share platform for sending massive files (slack integration ++)
10. Spacedrive 🪐 - A promising cross-platform file manager that packs a huge punch

Honorable mentions:

• Compressor 🗜️ - Apple’s Media Encoder - allowed me to leave adobe in 2024
• Pixelmator Pro 🖌️ - Photoshop/Illustrator replacement - also let me leave adobe in 2024
• ChatGPT 🤖 - LLM AI who’s lovely to talk to - but the app needs much more love
• DaVinci Resolve 🖲️ - Not new to most people - but this also allowed me to leave adobe in 2024 - deserves a mention just for that
• DaisyDisk 🌼 - Awesome graphical disk space utility for Mac (late to the game on sunburst diagrams)

Simple and fun way to access decades worth of techno dev from Apple and Pixar:

Export a model or animation out of Maya with the USD plugin. Can drag and drop into Apple’s “Reality Converter” if you’d like to tweak. And that’s it, you should have a file that’s openable in AR.

This post outlines a neat and exciting way to use a Tidbyt device in production for VFX.

I'm excited to share a cool integration I put together. Here's the documentation for creating a Tidbyt status monitor using Python and a strange mysterious language called Starlark. Tidbyts are these small, wall-powered displays that can be used to show information on your desk or anywhere else you want to keep track of cool stuff.

🤖Find the REPO here on GitHub🟪