When a web browser is all you need
🌎 Life in a web browser
I love desktop software, but every so often I entertain the idea of doing everything in a web browser. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing (mostly) that.
What prompted this change was a series of sync issues between my 2 Macs. Whenever I switched computers, I’d have to do stuff in order for everything to work. Or I’d have to be careful to remember to close a document on one machine before switching to the other. It was tedious.
Web apps don’t suffer these kinds of issues. I can pick up any machine with a working web browser, log in to whichever apps I need, and I’m off and running. There’s nothing to install, and everything is always right there in a browser tab.
The things I’ve migrated.
From OmniFocus to Nirvana for tasks. I tested TickTick, and Todoist, but I think I prefer Nirvana. It’s like a web-based cross between OmniFocus and Things. So far it’s working fine.
From Apple Mail to Fastmail Web for email. I’m still on Fastmail, but now I’m using their web client instead of Apple Mail. I like the calendar and contact integrations.
From NetNewsWire (and Elfeed) to Inoreader for RSS. I asked for recommendations for a good web-based RSS reader, and everyone responded Feedbin. I tried it. It’s fine, but when I tried Inoreader I felt immediately comfortable, so that’s what I’m using.
From Org mode to Roam Research for notes. Opening my old Roam graph came with a rush of nostalgia. I signed up for Roam in 2019 and used it pretty heavily until 2021. Roam was the original node-based linking and backlinking tool, and it still does some of that better than the things that copied it. And I love an outliner.
From Goodlinks to Linkding for read later links. Linkding is very much like the original Pinboard.in, which I’d used for years. I spun up an instance via PikaPods, added a bookmarklet to Safari, and my read later and link storage system is settled.
From Hugo to Ghost for blogging. Since the previous issue of WITWIJ, I’ve switched blogging platforms like three times, but I’ve landed on Ghost. It’s nice, fast, and has a great editor.
It’s nice that a few pinned tabs now contain most of my important notes, tasks, research, etc. It’s all available everywhere. I don’t worry about sync, or configuration or updates. That said, I get twitchy having my stuff “out there”. I’m sure I’ll miss certain things about my previous tools, so I may drift back to apps running locally, but for now, I feel like I’ve solved at least one problem.
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