Nows and Forevers

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with apps.
I’m glad I’ve got some of my favorites – Day One and Drafts chief among them — within easy reach, whether it’s on my iPhone, my iPad or MacBook. (Yes, I’ve been Apple-only for at least a decade.) I love to write on Scrivener and Byword. I like being able to watch streaming video services, and even YouTube, wherever I am. And I can scan PDFs and take pictures in archives, which is a lifesaver as I work on my book.
The iPad is also pretty purpose fit for reading, although I still like my Kindle.
But I’ve gone through dozens, maybe hundreds of apps since I got my first iPhone 15 years ago, then added an iMac and iPad more than a decade ago. For a while, it felt like the very app I needed was just within reach. Like Kindle books, most just ended up piling up.
I should say that I don’t have a lot of games. For some reason, and I don’t know why, I don’t have the gene for gaming. It’s not a way I like to spend my time, other than when the kids were young. I might have a half-dozen games, all discarded long ago. The only one I enjoyed really was a retread from the ’90s and early 2000s, “You Don’t Know Jack.” And those aren’t even on iOS anymore. Oh, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
No, my problem is that I am sometimes obsessed by productivity tools, always eager to try a new writing app (I’m not gonna call it word processing), and whether I was interested in aviation, meteorology, or the Welsh language, well, there’s an app for that. And I’ve been looking into a new wave of apps as I try to store and harness the thousands upon thousands of articles, notes and PDFs for this book project. That’s another story.
But I don’t use most of them, or long since ditched them. While I’d like to have that money back, it is what it is. But I hate moving back and forth between iPhone screens, even with folders. So I committed myself to cutting back on apps, moving them out when they’re done (like a hotel or airline app after the trip). So I only keep two pages on the iPhone, with separate folders for Productivity and Entertainment.
I prune the apps regularly. I have even fewer on the iPad.
It’s a little more difficult on the Mac. I’ve never found an elegant solution for the apps other than the list, which stretches to two pages on its own. I move those in and out, too. And since I started working with Obsidian and upgraded Aeon Timeline, I’ve added one or two.
I’m resigned to adding a few right now. But I’m not sure.