Tools
What I reach for, what I keep around, what I outgrew, and what I walked away from.
The best there is in this space
Great agentic development tool with excellent integrations and model selection
Native macOS design tool with bring-your-own-agent MCP support
21st Century Flash
All the Illustrators and happy accidents
Improves MidJourney generation consistency
Where I design and ship now — the free tier outclasses Figma’s
Where my git goes, and where I find new hotness
Excellent CI/CD and hosting but more than I need most of the time
Google’s answer to MS Word
Google’s answer to MS Excel
How I keep and sync my files
The one that started it all
Still better than Gemini within Google
I use it because it’s essentially Google now
Amazing what a hardware company can give away. It’s all the great things in the space
Apple’s acquired flagship DAW
The most well-rounded DAW
Paid Audacity alternative designers can tolerate using
Complex audio routing solution with excellent UI
Podcasting Swiss Army knife
A dope little variable-based calculator
My secondary IDE
First foray into CI/CD for my projects, and still my daily driver
Pocket Max Martin for my poetry and lyrics
The definitive Mac font design tool.
The gold standard for modern pixel pushing
A reluctant fan of Affinity since they launched in 2014
Peace of mind, and system health
A great clipboard manager
Helps me navigate the terminal, and great at fixing project errors
Now Figma Weave, Weavy will replace Adobe flagships and production teams
Copy text from anywhere on your screen
Superior screenshot management than macOS default
Fixing drag and drop experience on modern Macs
I loved this and all the secret chords that pleased me back in the 90s.
I loved this and all the secret chords that pleased me back in the 90s.
Adobe’s last demonstration of excellence. Ideal DTP to this day
A long mourned node-based video compositing powerhouse
Agentic Design tool, that helps Figma’s valuation a little every day
Design System first agentic front end design and development
A bloated toy come a weak industry standard for NLEs
Photoshop with a timeline, meh
The word processing standard for better or worse
The world’s most popular calculator
The OG of meh presentations