In the six months or so since I first approached the idea of “App Zero,” I’ve stumbled a few times.
Here’s the thing: I don’t need another app. I don’t think anyone does. I sure as hell don’t need to be PAYING for any of them. But I like seeing what independent app developers create and publish on places like GitHub. They are often little side projects or a very specific thing that they created to solve a problem wholly unique to them.
More often than not, they move on from these apps. They may be public and open source, but eventually everyone gets tired of keeping things up to date enough for the internet. A tool is only as good as you use it.
Things that did happen:
- Moved everything from OneDrive to GoogleDrive, which serves as my first point of backup for pretty much everything I create. I also have an auto-backup that initiates every few nights so that everything from all of the drives exists on a separate server. As someone who has lost a LOT of data over the years from cooked drives, lost passwords, and stolen computers, I’m fine with keeping backups redundant.
- Notes: for how I think, Capacities has been the best bet. I’m still tooling around ways to work this sort of structure into something like a GoogleDrive setup, but watching Capacities grow as an app is fascinating to watch, and having the “day of” page is outstandingly useful. And it’s one of the few apps out there being designed for the individual user while everyone else is offering enterprise packages for big-ticket clients.
- A single calendar – wasn’t hard to do. Transitioning from having two calendars across two Google instances wasn’t a hard sell. Next, I’d like to have the calendar be the sole means of letting those “outside the circle” get in touch with me.
Stuff I’m still working on:
- Divorcing myself from algorithmic music. Spotify is still in the mix. I attempted to make the jump to YouTubeMusic (since I pay for YT Premium) so artists would get a bit more cash from my streams, but the interface has a lot to be desired.
- I did recently reboot my old iPod Classic (6th Gen) so it now hosts RockBox- that at least lightens my need for iTunes/ iTunes library. The flow of this is still a bit sticky, which might be the point.
- Project management/ Approaching Deadlines/ Ongoing Projects – This shouldn’t be so difficult, but it is. Trying to work up something in Capacities, but the app is a little sticky when it comes to notifications or speaking to other apps (because that is literally the point of Capacities, for now).
- Inboxes. I’d like a way to get the Substack stuff I’m subscribed to funneled into email. There may be a significant cleanup involved here. I hate going into the Substack app/ website – too many things going on (Notes AND Forums AND posts, I get lost too easily).
- Photos – Getting things INTO Google Photos is easy – straight from the phone, no problem! Data cards are also ported right over to GDrive. But getting things FROM Gphotos so I can use them? For some reason that always reaquires 9 steps.
- Email Marketing/ distribution – Still sitting on Mailerlite for the moment. Not thrilled with it. Then again, I’m not really doing anything with it. When I get OutWord refigured I’ll give this another shot.
Notebooks
- Not an app. Or, maybe the original app? There isn’t anything I have going on right now that couldn’t be handled with a calendar and a to-do list. We’re presented with a world of apps that promise to let us keep control over more of our life. But maybe we just need less….life? Fewer appointments and meetings and things to keep up with?
- I found a little calendar notebook for the pocket. Each spread is a week and should be more than enough to keep notes on where I’ve been, where I need to be, etc.
- I still have a mess of notebooks around my home. I don’t think that will ever change. And I keep thinking that there should be a process where I digitize pages when I’m done with them, let the robots figure out my handwriting and start indexing stuff. But that might be 100% against the point of working in a notebook.