Greg Morris

On Defaults

I love a good blogging trend, me. I don’t always join in with them, but this time around it has even brought Andy Nicolaides out of retirement. So I thought about sharing mine. Deciding against it in the end because I don’t have much to share, but as I said yesterday, I have embraced the fact that I have to have a good think about why first.

This trend is sharing the default apps we are using. Nothing more. It asks very little of a person, but we all know that it says a lot about us instead. I’ve seen some replies similar to “what an Apple fanboy” but in the general sense, we are all searching for that special needle in a haystack “Ah Hah” moment of finding something new.

We are constantly told that technology improvements are not exciting any more. I would disagree, particularly currently, due to augmented reality and AI promising a different computer interaction paradigm. There is some admission though that most new products don’t scratch the itch they used to. The days of massive improvement when a new OS came out, or my Android faithful will remember waiting for a new ROM release was enough excitement to keep you up at night.

Now, particularly in the apps space, everything seems like the last one that went before it and very little improvement to be found. Unless, of course, you can dig through the recommendations of those with a similar use cases to you and find out what they are using. I have avoided such a process, and read very few of them because I know I will find an app, and be off down a rabbit hole and spend more time moving things around.

As such, I tend to stick to default apps unless I hit a ceiling. Apps like Fantastical sit in place of Apple calendar because it displays information better for working and time blocking. Todoist manages my tasks because it is easer to get them in and schedule them around. Take away my working life, and none of these types of apps make sense for me to use. The only shout-out I could possibly give is for Matter - but again, it is very niche and expensive if you’re not into saving lots of content.

I apologise for being boring, I wish you all the best in finding new and exciting things. Don’t spend too much money but enjoy yourselves!

Reply via:
I like these things, you might too