Ask HN: What kind of personal software improved your life?
Wonder what kind of software do you use that has proven to improve your life for the better. Any price range counts.
I'll go first:
- Bitwarden - password manager ($10+ bucks a year and free for basic use) - pretty much a no-brainer
- Google photos - my iCloud gets full so I sync and cleanup my storage by pushing all my photos to store and maintain (approx. $30 a year)
- Apple One (music, arcade, icloud, tv) - shared with my wife, we are not bit on TV but having all of this in one plan is a great value ($25/month)
- Alpha progression - my go to generated workout app, flexible, easy and has all the customization for various equipment. The founders are nice and also giving out free trials and extension ($100/year)
- Macrofactor - my calorie counter with evaluations on my diet plans. This is MyFitness pal on steroids that actually doesn't care about your burn, but takes in facts about your weight and adjusts macros with various goals. Allows for your own recipes etc. I am down -14kg this year before my wedding thanks to this app ($6/month)
- The way - go to for meditation. Most apps are kind of bloated and not clear where to start, where to progress. This app gives you one trail to follow which is straightforward from one of the Zen masters - Henry Shukman (still on free tier, but $100/year thereafter I believe)
- Cursor - I am still a newbie and learning so this has been obviously a great helper in a toolkit. Last night I learned about securing webhooks from Stripe thanks to this tool's suggestion. ($20/month)
- Raycast - love this command bar with various utility functionality. I use it mostly for quick access to my 2FAs, finder, tailwind docs etc. There is a PRO tier with AI addition to get access to all popular models within a really nice interface. I recently went back to ChatGPT due to some extra interface features (search).
- Obsidian - for notes, scribbles, learning and storing articles in MD. (Catalyst supporter $50 one-off)
- ChatGPT - goes without saying
My general gripe is that there are many products offering access to models with a specific feature set. I've been oscillating between ChatGPT and Raycast PRO + AI but find the generic access to just API is not really enough these days. I can just go ahead and talk to Cursor about non-coding stuff as well (provided the limitation is query limits).
EDIT: Formatting