Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010; maker of the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps.
loved
There are a multitude of ways to automate things on your Mac, but Keyboard Maestro is an S-tier player in this space and I use it for everything I can.
A guest post he wrote for The Sweet Setup, running through the apps he considers essential to his work. Bylined 'by Matt Birchler' and written throughout in the first person.
Thai software engineer; writes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
uses
Keyboard Maestro - Launch apps with Hyper Key
His public /uses page, an inventory of the software and gear he uses plus a "Previously used" section explaining what he dropped; the page stamps itself Updated 20240929.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.