After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so long as you don’t convince yourself that you’re just one more App Store download away from a previously unimaginable level of personal satisfaction and joy.

I like exploring new tools because onboarding is fascinating: I get to see where I stub my toe so many times I forget the toe even exists. Most of these experiments end in failure, and I’ll probably write about those someday. For now, though, I want to talk about three tools I’ve used every day for the past week—tools I enjoy enough to justify the effort of adding metadata to a 10-minute voice memo recorded while walking Lucy to the butcher.

1. NetNewsWire
   I started using NetNewsWire knowing only two things: it’s very old, and it’s maintained by a guy named Brent, whose blog I loved back when I was cosplaying as an iOS developer. Also, it’s responsible for at least one incident in Buttondown's history, thanks to some unfortunate thundering herd tendencies. NetNewsWire sounds like the kind of app people might optimistically call “vintage,” but it’s not. It’s simply an excellent RSS reader. It feels exactly like a native iOS or macOS RSS reader should. I can’t think of a higher or more succinct compliment.

2. Sol
   Here’s a dirty secret: I’m a Spotlight guy. I know Raycast is the trendy answer, and most people who nerd out about this stuff use either Raycast or Alfred. I’ve tried both, but neither felt consistent or harmonious enough to justify giving them so much real estate in my workflow. Not that I liked Spotlight—on the contrary, I found it egregiously annoying, slow, and full of jank. Sol, to its credit, doesn’t aspire to much. It’s a very fast, open-source launcher with a couple of Swiss Army knife features, and that’s it. No startup, no cottage industry of automations—just a really fast launcher. I installed it on a lark and haven’t once been tempted to switch back.

3. Helium
   Helium is the CostCo to Chrome's Walmart, a comparison which I mean to be a compliment that will nonetheless probably draw the ire of everyone involved with the project. What I mean is: it’s a faster, more performant version of Chrome, minus all the awful and annoying stuff. (A fun fact: I discovered Helium by spelunking around for alternatives after discovering that Chrome now ships a 10gb LLM model to your hard drive and immediately crashes all of your local data if you try to delete it.)