This might sound hyperbolic but as a .NET developer JetBrains Rider is a real joy to use IMHO. I think being paired with an M1 Mac is probably part of what makes the experience great for me.
That IDE/hardware combo beats anything I've ever developed on in my career. By a long way.
Shameless plug but I mention it and a few of my other favourite software tools here:
The other "sparks joy" software I use regularly are Sketch - which after a lifetime of using Adobe products felt like a breath of fresh air when I switched to it - and Proxyman which is hands down the best HTTP interception/proxy software I've used on the Mac (and iOS).
What's insane to me is that Kagi is so good for the relatively little funding they have. Maybe when they have the subscriber numbers of Netflix they can reduce their monthly fee (not that I even personally think they need to), but for now I'm quite happy to pay them for a good service.
I'm increasingly a big fan of very direct revenue models. I pay for the product. I am *not the product*.
It's not just search either, their summariser tool is great, their Mac browser Orion is really impressive, and their attitude in general - eg. promoting signal over noise in everything they do (see Kagi Small Web), is just extremely refreshing.
> I highly recommend reading Private Eye's special report
Agreed. For those more audio inclined, I linked to these in another comment but I originally discovered their reporting on this via their "Page 94" podcast:
I think if you enjoy the process and the result is useful to you, then it's definitely worth trying again!
I don't know about you, but I always learn a hell of a lot through my personal projects too. They've almost always been a good investment of time for me.
Evernote originally inspired me (back in the day) as to the value of having some sort of personal knowledge management tool.
More recently Obsidian inspired me in terms of showing me what a non-enshittified, open/portable format note-taking experience could be like. And the beauty of simple Markdown notes!
Through the Obsidian community I discovered the concepts of Zettelkasten / Second Brain etc. and was further convinced of the usefulness of regular note taking and storing/synthesising of reference knowledge.
But I found Obsidian slightly mismatched with my requirements. Primarily because there was certain functionality I needed which can only be achieved with plugins, but I didn't consider their plugin security model to be sufficient enough for storing my most confidential data - even with everything being local files. (That and the lack of open source was enough to make me nervous).
My app is written in pure Javascript, heavy use of web components, running in Electron. No Node.js (apart from what Electron is precompiled with) - so no third-party dependencies as part of my code, and Electron is heavily locked down. I have a lightweight build step using Esbuild (a single rust binary).
Being 100% native JS - no frameworks - and quite lightweight, the app is indistinguishable from a native macOS app in terms of responsiveness! Knowing that may not always be the case, I'm also eyeing up Tauri as a potential alternative GUI "wrapper".
As a .NET developer by day I would have liked to have built it in MAUI but found that to be quite lacking for my purposes.
I've started to write a blog article about it with some screenshots - I"ll eventually get around to publishing it!!
How about you? What did you write your backend in and did that escalate into the front-end too?
The CalDav idea is very interesting... you've got me thinking about that.
> But when you write your own software, you have a map of everything in your head, and you don't have to guess what exactly a button does, how it does it or where you need to go to do that.
Absolutely! It's quite a unique experience. When I started out it felt like I might just be wasting time and reinventing the wheel but in retrospect it was absolutely a good time investment!
> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else.
100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use.
Have you written more about your personal project anywhere?
One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvious and inconsequential on the face of it, but how many pieces of software do you use where you can say with 100% certainty that you know every single thing about it?
Every feature, every shortcut, how it all works internally...
It's only when you use something self-crafted that you realise what this actually means. If it's a tool that you use for work or productivity - you can become exceptionally productive with it due to this from-day-one "total mastery".
This compounds if you iterate. Using the tool daily and feeding back in little fixes and optimisations as you go. The tool grows with you and molds to your use of it over time.
It's obvious that the tool is going to be well suited to your needs if you built it - but it was less obvious to me ahead of time what benefits the side effect of "total mastery" would also bring.
For me, my notes app is now used as my personal knowledge base, project management tool, todo list, daily planning tool and for journalling. Because I built it, I'm extremely effective at using it - and it's lean and fast - only with the features that I know I need.
In addition to being a very fulfilling project - it has created a degree of leverage and efficiency that I didn't expect!
My conclusion is that we should all experiment more with creating our own tools.
Great list. I second these recommendations!!
Special mentions for: Alfred, Bartender, Daisy Disk and ColorSlurp