I know my main browser, Safari, finally gained Profile features in macOS Sonoma that cater to these use cases. But they’re a little hard to find and still suffer from the same ‘forest for the trees’ problem that Bumpr and Choosy have: They’re too granular, making the user do too much work to get rolling.

I have to list individual URLs, including their short-URL alts, just to catch everything. See the example in my screenshot above: A YouTube link won’t trigger my alt browser if it’s a (barely shortened) youtu.be link, so I need to manually add both. In each utility I’ve used. And there is no mechanism to import and export existing lists.

I wish these utilities offered a collection of pre-built, one-click rule templates for major companies and use cases. I can’t be the only customer of these features trying to compartmentalize my browsing habits through the lens of privacy. I’d love a blanket ‘Google’ rule, maybe just a box I can click, that opens everything that leads back to Google in my alternate browser or Safari profile. Same with Facebook and other serious violators.

Anyway, if you’re unfamiliar with these utilities and how they can help your workflow on the Mac, I definitely recommend them. Bumpr (free) is good and I used it for years but have since switched to Choosy ($10 one-time) since it’s more flexible and feature-full for my needs. Safari Profiles might even float yer boat, no third-party apps needed (screenshot below). Simply go to Safari > Preferences > Profiles and create one, perhaps for work or a privacy scenario (I named my privacy profile Undesirables). Then go to the Websites panel > Open Links with Profile section and start adding URLs.

Bloomberg’s headline calls it “dramatic.” 9to5 quotes a snippet of “the biggest revamp since iOS 7,” which is quite the tall order.

I’d like to go on record that I actually liked the iOS 7 redesign, or at least what it eventually turned into. The previous skeuomorphic language was cute and all, but I found it annoying when trying to figure out which playful bits of an app I could tap. A lot of non-techy folks I’ve worked with over the years found it flat-out frustrating. I also felt large bits of fake leather and notebook binding rings to simply be a waste of space. But I digress.

Apple has a lot of spinning plates in the air, and some of them have already slipped. Arguably the most important features of Apple Intelligence—the cornerstone of this year’s product upgrade and the pitch all over billboards and TV ads to buy an iPhone 16—was just delayed last Friday into Apple’s next product cycle, which likely starts around June with WWDC, if not later.

Remember ‘the next generation of CarPlay’ that we saw in 2022? That was supposed to debut in 2024? It quietly no-showed and it took Apple almost a month to publicly comment on it.

I could talk about what feels like a freshly souring sentiment I’ve seen across large Apple communities like r/Apple, r/iOS, and r/iPad. Maybe you could point out they are barely a drop in Apple’s billion-user bucket.

And maybe the timing of this ‘leak’ about Apple massively redesigning its three major platforms—right after a disastrous weekend news cycle about a high-profile failure to deliver a tentpole product feature—is just a coincidence.

Indie apps are just the best. They’re usually built by people who care about the problem they’re solving. They’re also often the first to adopt the great new OS features that make our devices easier, faster, and more delightful to use.

I’d like to shout out a bunch of indie apps I use on any sort of regular basis. Instead of turning this into some kind of series, I decided to try a speedrun of the ones that have earned their keep on my devices. No particular order, but you should definitely download and buy or subscribe to all their things. Or at least some of them, please. Let me know if you’d like me to delve further into how I use any of ’em.

Disclaimer: No, I have not rigorously vetted the financials or company structure of every app on this list. Maybe one or two are quietly owned by Microsoft or some sort of… app hedge fund? Are those a thing? Whatever. To the best of my knowledge, these all seem to be from indie crews and, in some cases, individual developers.

Annotable

website
Solid utility for marking up images with arrows, shapes, redacted boxes, and more. Annotable has an editing extension that appears in Photos, which is probably 95% of the way I interact with it. iPhone, iPad

Play

website
A ‘watch it later’ app for YouTube, Vimeo, and many other services. It has lots of handy stuff like tags, a quick-access app extension, a Mac version, and an Apple TV version, which is where I actually watch stuff. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV

Tripsy

website
A personal, collaborative, and private travel app that feels more focused on vacations than other services, most of which seem business-first to me. You can add a wide variety of vacation-y activities (a concert, national park, tour, etc.) to an itinerary, view them as a rolling schedule, plot them all on a map, and collaborate on trips with other people. iPhone, iPad, Mac

Mematic

website
Nice, straightforward app for creating memes. It has a meme-specific search engine for templates, or you can use your own photos. iPhone, iPad

Ivory

website
A spiritual successor to the exceptional Tweetbot, built by the same devs. A great Mastodon app with nearly all the features I want (though I wish I could browse and interact with other public servers). iPhone, iPad, Mac

Callsheet

website
A full alternative to the IMDB, Callsheet finds info on films, TV shows, actors, and such. It also has clever features like the option to hide character names, episode titles, and even thumbnails in order to avoid spoilers. iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision

Darkroom

website
Not a camera, but a powerful way to edit and organize your photos and videos that basically sits on top of your Photos library. Delete a few shots in Darkroom, they’re gone from Photos. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage

Sofa

website
A “downtime organizer” to collect and track things you want to watch, play, and read. Better than a simple notes app or bookmark tool, it automatically grabs stuff like trailers, release dates, and links to stream or buy the thing. You can even create custom categories to track whatever you want, like bike paths or recipes. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision

Drafts

website
“Where text starts.” Drafts is a fast, powerful way to get ideas out of your head and onto digital paper, then do something with them later—edit, publish, or send to another app. One of my favorite features is the Watch app can be set to launch directly into dictation mode, which is probably the primary way I use it. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch

MusicMatch

website
Find music on your preferred service. Someone shares a Shopify link to an album? MusicMatch will take you to it on Apple Music, or YouTube, or Pandora, etc. iPhone, iPad, Mac

SongShift

website
Copy and share playlists to different music services. Want to share a playlist with a friend who uses a different service? Are you switching form Spotify to YouTube, or Tidal to Apple Music? SongShift makes the dream happen. iPhone, iPad

Raindrop

website
Feature-packed bookmarking service that supports tags, folders and collections, automation, and saving a PDF copy of every link and article. It supports IFTTT too, so sky’s the limit. iPhone, iPad, and Mac via browser extension + web app

Carrot Weather

website
Beautiful, flexible, and optionally malicious weather app. It has a fake bot personality that can be as murderous or light-hearted as you choose. Its app layout and Apple Watch complications are exhaustively customizable, so you can dial in exactly the info you need, complete with multiple layouts. iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision

GIFWrapped

website
Clever app for searching and collecting a library of GIFs. It has a Messages app for quick responses. I wish its UI was a little more useful when it comes time to grab something to paste into apps other than Messages, but it’s still good at what it does. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage

Ulysses

website
Excellent Markdown writing app whether you want to journal, run a blog, write a book, or produce client work. Ulysses is quite flexible and packed with clever features. I’ve written the majority of Finer Things in Tech in it. iPhone, iPad, Mac

Keep It

website
A notes app packed with quite a few features, though my favorite is that it supports Document Providers in iOS and iPadOS. This means it can appear as a source alongside iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox in the Files app and anywhere you can up/download files. iPhone, iPad, Mac is a separate purchase

Things 3

website
A pinnacle of elegant, useful task and project management. Things 3 is beautiful and clever throughout. While I have my complaints—I really wish we could create headings in Areas, which are basically a place to organize projects—it splits my task needs with Apple Reminders. It’s a separate purchase for iPhone, iPad, Mac

Halide

website
A powerful camera with a simple design to control everything when taking photos—white balance, exposure, focus, etc. It has an optional, handy beginner’s email course if you’re new to taking the reigns of your photography, and a new “Process Zero” mode that can remove as much of Apple’s automatic processing as possible. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

Tailor

website
A single-serving utility that automatically stitches together multiple screenshots of long, scrolled content. Not just for chat threads, it can stitch together webpages, articles, a long list of tasks, a ‘tall’ screen in an app, just about anything I’ve thrown at it. iPhone only, though I wish there was an iPad version

Honorable Mentions

This is the category of “I own and like these apps but do not yet use them as often as I wish I did.”

Spectre

website
From the Halide folks, Spectre is a long-exposure app for taking unique photos you can’t get any other way. It can blur a waterfall, make lights linger and dance, or on the other end of this spectrum, make a crowd disappear from a busy tourist spot. I’m taking a vacation with my wife soon, I really want to try that last idea at a couple landmarks. iPhone only

Nebula

website
A creator-owned video platform that is mostly the smart, interesting stuff from YouTube without the ads—video essays, culture analysis, podcasts, and some original series now too. I think you can find most of this stuff cross-posted to YouTube for obvious reasons. But creators also post exclusive stuff here and, as I think I heard somewhere, get a larger cut of sub revenue. iPhone, iPad, Apple TV

Streaks

website
A habit tracker I recently dusted off with a refreshingly simple UI. I’m bad at creating and keeping habits, so here goes nothing. One feature I like about it is the option of a sort of ‘anti-habit’ to track things you want to stop doing, like biting your nails. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, Vision

Hashtag lists

These are solid. You can exclude tags, watch just your local instance, and limit results to media. I had a couple hashtag lists set up in the web UI to watch for stuff like video game conversations, photography, and announcements from apps I care about. It’ll be nice to have those in Ivory now, where I spend 99% of my Mastodon time. Although, technically, that last list is just a regular list of accounts like @Iconfactory, @CARROT, and @drafts.

Share sheet

This redesign is quite welcome, but it seems like they dropped the feature that helped with hashtags. It had wonky behavior before, like resetting the keyboard’s display when starting a tag, so I don’t blame them. Would be nice if they can bring it back with more polish later, though.

Go get Ivory

It’s free to try, though I forget where the paywalls start. Plans are:

• $1.99/month for iPhone + iPad
• $14.99/year for iPhone + iPad
• $24.99/year for iPhone + iPad + Mac

I’ve had the + Mac plan since they launched and been quite happy. Ivory’s a great app. Go get it.

Ivory 2.0 for Mastodon what’s new

• Hashtag Lists! You can now add up to 4 hashtags to a list to create custom hashtag-based timelines.
• Redesigned Hashtags Tab. Better organization so it’s easier to find what you are looking for.
• Brand new Share Sheet Extension! We know it wasn’t a very high bar to improve it.
• New media view in post details.
• New Behavior to change context menu order. You know those menus that pop up in reverse order depending on where the button is on screen? Well now you can set it the way you prefer and can stop yelling at us in frustration!
• Added subtle shadow to media overlay buttons for better visibility on light images.
• Added option (hold down on link) to force open URL in Ivory if you know it is an ActivityPub URL, but Ivory can’t detect it.
• Fixed the disappearing drafts bug (we hope!)
• Fixed the issue with uploading vertical video.
• Improvements to video uploads.
• Fixed the bug where searching for certain strings would cause a crash.
• Bug fixes related to opening links in Ivory or in Safari instead.
• Various other bug fixes

When Safari detects content on a page in a language other than your default, it will offer a translation option. Click it, and the page will reload with the content translated.

• Mac: The translation button appears in the Smart Search field
• iPhone and iPad: The translation button appears in the menu on the left of the Smart Search field
  

The Mac’s menu allows you to mange preferred languages for translation. I can’t find this option in Safari on the iPhone and iPad, and it doesn’t seem to be in Settings either. According to Apple’s support doc, the available languages vary by country and region.

Step 1: Hide alerts

In any group iMessage chat, tap the top icon, then the (i) info button. Scroll down, then enable Hide Alerts. This prevents push notifications for every ‘lol’ and side conversations that don’t involve you.

Step 2: Use mentions

Yep, iMessage supports mentions now. You don’t even need an @. Just type the first name of someone in the group chat, and iMessage will turn it gray. Tap their name, confirm the person you want to mention, and they’ll get a notification. Next, simply convince all your friends to get on board.

I think this is a great balance for hiding alerts for every message, but still getting notified when it’s important.

Just in case you don’t want even these alerts, you can disable them for all conversations in Settings > Messages. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to do this per-conversation.

Step 3 (Optional): Use threads

Threads also arrived in iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur. Visually, they look and work a little differently than Slack’s implementation. But they’re still a good way to have a cohesive side conversation in a group chat, or simply create a connected trail.

To start a thread in a group chat, tap or click and hold on a message as if you wanted to add a reaction or copy it. One of the options is to reply. Tap that and the rest of the conversation blurs out, presenting just that message and a text box.

Once you tap send, your reply appears inline for everyone to see, but with a visual line and small preview of the original message. Tap that, and you can see the full thread.

In macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple added easy toggles for working in Split View and for the new Sidecar feature that uses an iPad as a second display.

To see these toggles, simply hover over the green window button. The bottom three options here will place the current window into Split View or move it to your nearby iPad.

Check out the gallery below to get the idea.

To enable this Split View behavior, to go Mail’s Preferences > General pane and toggle Prefer opening messages in Split View when in full screen. I know, the name doesn’t exactly roll off the keyboard. But it’s a handy option that I’d like to see in more Mac apps.

I could be stretching, but I hope that these multiple hiccups this close to a major event next week means that iCloud will finally get some attention. It’s a solid bet that new iPads and maybe even new Macs appear next week. But iCloud is long overdue for things like storage upgrades, some performance improvements, and surely some additions for industries Apple is trying to compete in, like education.

One can hope.

Every time I get back to my iPad, where I do most of my work and play these days, I remember how much more fun and interesting it is to me.

It’s a strange cadence, but oddly satisfying, in a way. Like periodically rediscovering a favorite food dish.

iPad

On any connected hardware keyboard, hold the Command (⌘) key and wait a beat. A cheat sheet of available features and their shortcuts should appear, and it might even have extra pages.

Note that this cheat sheet is contextual. For example: in Mail, different features will appear when you’re managing your inbox versus drafting a new message. Also be aware that not all iPad apps support shortcuts, though anecdotally, that seems to be steadily improving.

Mac

In any app, press Command + Shift + ? (⌘⇧?). This will open the Help menu for that app and place the cursor in its Search field. This is a Spotlight-ish tool provided by macOS that can search the names of all features with menu options in that app.

Type a couple letters, use up/down arrows to navigate results, and press Return to use the feature.

Photo by Hannah Joshua on Unsplash

This separation of Slack rooms into islands unto themselves makes sense for Slack from a business perspective. Some rooms want or need stringent data retention and security policies, so Slack offers paid options on a per-room basis. But many other Slack rooms are just people hanging out in the spiritual descendent of an IRC chat room.

This system creates an increasingly tedious burden for users who join multiple communities. Even if you use a password manager, you still have to manually log into each room. Slack tried to ease this friction by sending authenticated emails that will automatically log you into every Slack room tied to that particular address. But this is problematic on a couple of levels.

The most important is that it’s a duct-taped solution that creates clutter and friction. Have some communities spun down, but still lumber on? Did you leave some communities which weren’t useful anymore (but not delete your account, because how do we even do that)? Too bad, Slack’s email will still automatically log you back into every one.

I get why Slack’s business model is designed this way, but I don’t expect it to change any time soon. This makes me wish more casual communities would consider Discord as an alternative. It started with a focus on the gaming community, but has since expanded its features for a broader audience. For starters, you create a single account, then use it to join multiple rooms. Adding and DMing friends is also room-agnostic. Think of it like Facebook, where you can join multiple groups with a single account, though you do have the option to customize your profile details on a per-room basis.

Discord has many of the same features as Slack, including free standard accounts, strong mobile apps, file and media sharing, separate channels, account permissions, and integrations with 3rd party services. It also adds free, low-latency voice and video channels that support multiple people.

In my experience, Discord seems to be much more popular almost everywhere outside of tech. For example, many communities and creators on Patreon, YouTube, and Kickstarter will offer access to a private Discord room.

However, Discord’s business model is focused on the individual, not rooms. Rooms are free to spin up (you can even create them from an iPhone or iPad), and you can join as many as you want. If you—the individual, not a room admin—want to score a few extra perks and support Discord, you can pay for Discord Nitro. It adds things like a higher upload size, an animated avatar, and the ability to use custom/animated emoji across all rooms (a perk that makes way more sense than manually uploading them to multiple Slack rooms).

Slack is great and possibly a better fit for some companies that must adhere to industry regulations. But I would love to see more tech communities give Discord a try.

You can use QuickTime on a Mac to record content playing on an Apple TV.

• Create a new Movie Recording with QuickTime (under the File menu)
• Next to the record button, click the menu to choose camera and audio sources
• Your Apple TV(s) should appear as a source in both options
• Select it, and QuickTime will present a random code to authorize your Mac to record it
• Content from your Apple TV should start streaming into QuickTime, ready for recording

Content with DRM (like iTunes movies) seems to error out, but ungracefully (for me, QuickTime just throws a ‘could not connect’ error). YouTube works fine though.

Anecdotally, I’ve struck up conversations with a few strangers in cafes and lounges, and they’ve had positive, unique perspectives on it. Generally they like it, they don’t miss the F keys since they “barely” or “never” used them, and they have fun discovering the new or previously hard-to-access features that apps place in the Touch Bar.

But there are also plenty of happy experiences and positive anecdotes to be found. Here’s a brief selection of links I’ve been collecting:

• The Touch Bar makes the Mac more accessible to me – by Steven Aquino
• I really love the Touch Bar as an online grad student – by Reddit user Gigantic_John_Stamos
• I love my 2016 13″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar – Beardo01
• A tip from Dave Murdock about Safari, the Touch Bar, and Picture-in-Picture mode

I hope these can help some people see how the Touch Bar is an improvement for good portion of users.

Ulysses for iPad, iPhone, and Mac has a straightforward Favorites mechanism. You can mark any sheet (document) a favorite, no matter how many groups (folders) and sub-groups you have. Favorites then appear in a dedicated, top-level Favorites section near the top of the Sidebar. It’s a great way to keep easy access to work-in-progress sheets across multiple projects.

As it turns out, the app received a major paid upgrade since I last used it. The bad news is that I can’t find a download for the previous version for which I have a serial number. Now I need to spend $40 if I want to use this app again. Hooray?

By comparison, I re-downloaded a subscription app from the Mac App Store. I started it up, and it found my App Store receipt/account whatever and started working right away. No serial numbers. No $40 dead-stop paywall. No digging through email. No contacting support. It Just Worked.

I’m not trying to make a grand blanket statement about one business model or another. This is a large, complex discussion, and there is no One Business Model to Rule Them All.

But in this particular instance, I need to spend $40 I wasn’t planning on spending if I want to get back to work. From a user perspective, this sucks.

Group iMessage conversations can get pretty notification-y, what with all the GIFs and LOLs and thumbs ups. It may be tempting to shut off notifications altogether, but then you might miss actually important messages, including those meant for you.

I think a strong solution to this problem is part technical, part cultural.

The technical part

Apple has a partial feature solution in place. But it isn’t applied evenly across macOS and iOS, and I would argue it isn’t very discoverable.

In short: Messages on macOS has a feature in Preferences > General awkwardly called Notify me when my name is mentioned. This means that, if you’re in a busy group conversation, you can click Details in the upper right, then turn on Do Not Disturb and ask people to include your first name in any messages you really need to see.

It’s like @ mentions in Slack or Discord, except you don’t need the @ in Messages. In the screenshots with this post, my brother’s message triggered the alert.

The ‘uneven’ problem comes in with iOS. While you can enable Do Not Disturb on your iPhone and iPad (although it’s strangely called ‘Hide Alerts,’ which is a separate problem), there is no “Notify me when my name is mentioned” feature. All messages, even those including your name, will arrive silently on iOS.

To me, the obvious technical solution is for Apple to bring feature parity to iOS and, ideally, pick one name.

The cultural part

I’m making an assumption, but I don’t think there is a strong culture in group messaging of “mention my name to alert me for something important.” In most apps I’ve used (Messages, Telegram, Wire, Line, Skype, etc.), you either get alerts for every message, or you don’t.

But if Apple could bring feature parity, and/or if you work mostly on a Mac, it might be worth trying to bring this idea to the table with your regular chatting friends. Group conversations could become more flexible, and we may not have to draw such a hard line between joining, staying in, or Do Not Disturb-ing them.

For a couple years, I did get by. But it can’t keep up anymore, especially since a growing amount of my client work requires more intensive tasks. Thanks to AppleInsider, I found a killer deal on a 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (Space Gray), on which I typed this post.

This thing is amazing. I know the first gen redesign in 2016 had some keyboard problems, but I hear the 2017 model much improved on that issue. Overall, I really like what Apple did here. The 13-inch Pro body dropped at least a full pound with this form factor, which makes it nearly the same weight as a 13-inch Air.

I think I’ll need time to understand the Touch Bar. Coming from an iPad, I’m certainly interested in the potential of a section of my keyboard that can adapt to the task at hand. Already, in a couple apps, I found shortcuts in the Touch Bar for which I didn’t know the keyboard shortcut; that was quite useful.

But then, just now, I wanted to use one of my favorite shortcuts—Command + Mission Control—to shove all windows aside and get something on the desktop. But the Mission Control button wasn’t there, it was a typing suggestion bar. Yes, I can tap the keyboard control on the right side to unfurl that ‘section’ of the Touch Bar to get the Mission Control button and trigger my shortcut. And yes, it’s still faster than manually minimizing or moving everything. But it is a bit of new friction that wasn’t previously there for this somewhat infrequently used shortcut.

Update: Toph Allen on Twitter pointed out that a 4-finger pinch outward can also invoke this command. After a little practice, I’m getting that down pretty well. This might be a good solution for me.

We’ll see how this plays out. I know there are a few ways to customize the Touch Bar’s behavior, so I’ll have to explore those in the coming weeks.

I’m a day into using this, but so far I’m really happy. This new MacBook has the screen space and horsepower I need to work, and I didn’t have to sacrifice too much in size or weight to get it.

for the 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar so far.

Here are a few things that might bring context to the situation.

Intent

Tim Cook recently answered a customer email about the Mac mini. Without offering any details of a forthcoming update, he stated that the Mac mini is “an important part” of the Mac’s future.

Some dismissed it as empty promises, claiming that Cook simply said what any CEO would about a current product. But here’s the rub: it’s a great bet that Tim Cook’s (public) address gets a ton of email. He—or more accurately, Apple’s marketing department—could simply have sent that email to the circular filing bin with so many others. They knew responding to that email would spark media coverage and expectations.

Numbers

As for why Apple hasn’t updated the Mac since December 2014, let’s do some fuzzy math on its sales over the last few years. Starting from a bird’s eye view, Apple sells around one Mac for every 6-10 iOS devices, at least in the low or normal quarters. By itself, the iPhone is a majority of Apple’s revenue.

Among those Mac sales, the various flavors of MacBook take a whopping 85 percent. That means desktops—iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro—are just 15 percent of Mac sales. Apple does not get more granular than notebooks vs desktops, so the mini’s portion of that 15 percent is anyone’s guess. My guess is the iMac takes the lion’s share of that 15 percent, followed distantly by the Mac mini and Pro.

In its most recent quarter (non-holiday, mind you), Apple sold 46.7 million iPhones, 10. Million iPads, and 5.4 million Macs. That means Apple sold, at most, around 810,000 desktops last quarter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac mini sold in the very low six figures, or less.

Priorities

Businesses spend time on things that are either important or show strong signs of being important in the future. Retail employees spend time on assigned tasks. Actors focus (mostly) on projects that further their careers. Small business owners like myself spend most or all of their time on things that will help the business and support themselves and/or their families.

When we look at the numbers, and take a guess at what Apple knows about how and how often the Mac mini is used, I don’t fault the company at all for spending its attention elsewhere. Even if we get more speculative and try to look at products which experience big upgrade cycles, I have a hard time believing the Mac mini ranks anywhere significant. It sure seems to me like people swap out their smartphones, notebooks, and even tablets more often than Mac minis.

Sum

Looking at Apple’s numbers, perceived priorities, and statement of intent, I do buy that the company still cares about the Mac mini and plans to update it. If I were a gambling person, I’d bet it would be within the next year, give or take. A mention at WWDC 2018 would be convenient, but so would an addendum to either the iMac Pro event later this year or Mac Pro event early next year.

These days, Google Drive is far from the only game in town. Subjectively, it also isn’t very good anymore, and bugs often stick around for months or years. Remember the “randomly indent parts of paragraphs for nearly two years, even in Chrome” bug? The iOS apps have also steadily deteriorated.

Thankfully, there is a strong selection of alternatives for different audiences. Whether you need a full-featured professional suite or just a scratchpad to jot notes with others, give these a look.

Quip

Quip is perhaps the closest to Google Drive in terms of browser-based simplicity and mobile apps. It has a unique, minimal interface for basic editing. But for simple, collaborative documents, adding notes, and discussion about the document (instead of getting lost in email), Quip is a great choice.Bonus: Quip has partial support for Markdown. If you paste it in, Quip leaves it alone. But if you use Markdown syntax while you write, Quip will turn it into rich text. If you’d rather keep it as markdown, just press Delete once after the auto-conversion.

Office

You heard me. Microsoft Office has improved significantly over the past few years, especially on iOS and macOS. I can’t speak to the depth of its feature set, but it feels more organized, approachable, and usable than ever.

The native apps and web apps also have collaboration now. It doesn’t have a free version like Google, but Microsoft also isn’t mining your documents for advertisers. Paid Office 365 plans start at $5, which include the web apps and hosted domain Exchange email. Compared to Google Drive, the entry level Office plan gives you far better web apps, broader industry file compatibility, collaboration, and more standard, app-friendly domain email for the same price.

Jessi and I share a family Office subscription, which gives both of us access to the native apps on iPad and Mac. I’ve use the email for Chartier.land and my business Bit & Pen domains for about a year now, and I’m happy.

iWork

Considering this crowd, I probably don’t have to say much about iWork. It’s a solid suite for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and Apple recently added collaboration on both the web and native apps. I think it’s also free when you buy a new Apple device now, so financially it’s a win.

Apple Notes

If you just need a simple place to share things that are more note-like than full-on documents, and everyone you want to share with is on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac, Apple Notes is a good choice.

It does basic formatting like headings, lists, bold, and italics. It handles photos and you can add rich media links from Safari. I’ve heard from people who use Apple notes to share family todo lists, idea scratch pads, and even collaborate on blog posts. It’s pretty flexible.

Dropbox Paper

Dropbox recently launched its own basic document collaboration tool. I can’t speak to it much since most of my work is in Quip, Google Drive for some clients, or Ulysses, but I‘ em heard from people who are happy with it.

Zoho

Zoho has its own growing collection of web apps and services that I would put somewhere between Google Apps and Salesforce. At the core, though, are apps for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, sites, wikis, and much more.

You can sign up and use some of the apps for free, and pricing varies based on the collection of apps you want.

Honorable Mention – Texpad

Texpad is another online collaborative document system with native apps. It’s built around LaTeX, a “document preparation” system popular in academia, hence the honorable mention. Its audience is niche, but enough people responded to my original question on Twitter that I wanted to include it.

Any others?

This list is mostly stuff I know about and have used at least a few times. Did I miss any good ones? I’m happy to expand this list, so let me know on Tumblr @chartier, Twitter @chartier, or here.