My New Apps, Services, and Games of 2024 (Premium)

2024 was another year of great change, driven in part by the sudden viability and desirability of Windows 11 on Arm. But it’s not just that: After an incredibly disruptive 2023, I surprised myself by making a similar number of changes to the apps, services, and games I use this past year too.

Windows

This year, I adopted several new apps on Windows.

Typora. I spent much of 2024 moving back and forth between different writing apps, most notably Typora, a long-time favorite I’d paid for years ago, IA Writer, which is dramatically better on the Mac than is the case on Windows, and even Microsoft Word, in part to test various de-enshittification configurations. But in the end, Typora won me over–again–and I’ve grown to really like how much more efficient it is than other apps. (For example, to turn a text selection into a hyperlink in Word, you type Ctrl + K, then Ctrl + V to paste in the URL, and then press Enter. In Typora, you type Ctrl + K. That’s it. You’re done.) What I found was that I missed Typora when I wasn’t using Typora. And so here we are: I now use Typora for all non-book writing, and I use Markdown for all my writing. (I use Visual Studio Code for books.)

Proton Pass. In the process of testing various password managers this past year, I landed on Proton Pass and … that was that. Like Typora and Notion, I miss it when it’s gone, and while Dashlane and 1Password are both great too, Proton Pass nails the experience with seamless, error-free authentication and portable passkey support. This one is on all my PCs and all my mobile devices. And the experience is so good, I’ve been experimenting with Proton VPN, Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive too. Maybe one or more of those will stick in 2025.

Clipchamp Premium. Clipchamp saved the day for me in mid-2023 and I’ve been using it ever since. This past year, I started paying for Clipchamp Premium, which costs $12 per month and adds 4K exports, more stock media, filters, and effects, and, most important to me, content backup/sync to the cloud, so I can move from PC to PC and not worry about having all my assets locally on each device. I keep wondering about using a more “professional” video editor, but Clipchamp does exactly what I need and it’s easy to use.

Affinity. In March, I paid for an Affinity V2 Universal License, giving me a perpetual license to use Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher version 2.x across Windows, Mac, and iPad. I use Affinity Photo 2 every single day and love it–and you can try it for yourself, for free–and will never go back to Adobe full-time. But I am surprised to say I’ve also been using Affinity Publisher 2 a lot over the past two months, tied to some book work (for both Eternal Spring and the Window 11 Field Guide). More on that soon.

Notion. I use Notion every day and for all kinds of things. And I’ve written about how good this app is. And how I don’t understand why they don’t charge me to use it. That day will come. And unless they really screw it up, Sonos-style, I’ll be happy to do so.

Web browsers. I am a vocal proponent for Brave because it’s secure and private out of the box and automatically, and because it’s a minimalist experience, and what little fluff is there is easily removed. But I spent a lot of time with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Arc in Windows this past year as well and each can be adequately secured, from what I can tell, and each has its charms. My job pretty much requires me to move around like this, but I’m OK with each of these browsers for the most part. I experiment similarly on mobile (iPad, iPhone, Pixel).

Beyond these changes, much of my day-to-day work occurs with the same tools as before. The Windows Package Manager (winget) for bulk-installing (and updating) apps. Slack for work communications, which I loathe and will always loathe. Notepad and Paint, daily. Visual Studio Community 2022, always updated to the latest bits, and with Git via the Terminal app. Google Drive, though I spent about six months of 2024 back on OneDrive until Google supported Windows 11 on Arm. That’s most of it, certainly the most important of it.

Online services

These things bridge mobile and desktop, I guess, typically via the web in the latter case.

Substack. My wife and I moved Eternal Spring from WordPress to Substack this past year and we couldn’t be happier. In fact, I see me expanding my use of Substack in the coming year, though I continue to research alternatives, including services like Ghost and Beehiiv. More on this soon.

Apple One Premier. As part of an unexpected and broad shift to Apple products and services for personal use this past year–something I may write about separately, though I have navel-gazed on this topic a few times already–I ended up subscribing to Apple One Premier, which costs a whopping $37.95 per month but provides 2 TB of iCloud+ storage, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, and Apple Arcade, and not just for me but for my two iPhone-using kids too. This one was a basic math problem: Thanks to device backups alone, we were constantly exceeding the storage space we got through the iCloud+ 200 GB plan I was previously paying for ($2.99 per month), and I was already paying for Apple TV+ ($9.99 per month), and the next iCloud+ storage tier (with 2 TB of storage) was $10.99 per month. I was curious about moving to Apple Music because of the aforementioned shift ($16.99 per month), but my son, who is deaf, mentioned that he was also thinking about that service because of some new accessibility features. And that sold it. My goal now is to get my wife and daughter off Spotify (which costs $16.95 per month for the Basic Family plan we’re on) and onto Apple Music too.

Social media. Like many, I would like to limit my exposure to Twitter (X), but there are no truly viable alternatives, at least from an audience size perspective. I have a big following on Twitter (X). But this past year, I resolved to approach each of the major social media networks equally, so I now cross-post everything to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads too. So you’re free to follow me anywhere, and you won’t miss out. (I tried to get into LinkedIn this past year, too, but it’s a cesspool and I will no engage there.)

Instapaper. After using Pocket for years–decades?–I finally switched to Instapaper for my “real later” needs. It works just like Pocket in that I can share articles to the service using a web browser extension (or, on mobile, system share via the mobile app), and then I can read these articles in a clean, ad-free experience. I usually do so on mobile, using the app. The advantage is that Instapaper isn’t bogged down by Pocket’s Mozilla-based authentication requirements, which are tedious.

Mobile

There weren’t as many changes to my mobile apps, though I continue to ping-pong back and forth between the iPhone (now a 16 Pro Max) and Pixel (now a 9 Pro XL).

Feeeed (iPhone and iPad only). I started the year ecstatic to have found the Artifact AI-based news app, and then suffered through its closure, its sale to Yahoo, and its reemergence as Yahoo News. But while that was all happening, I found an even better news app, Feeeed, which is unfortunately only available on Apple devices. Despite the silly name, Feeeed has a simple UI and it displays news posts in a clean, ad-free reading mode that I really like. I wish I could get it on Android.

Aside from that, just some small changes. Instapaper, as noted above. Various web browsers. Nomad and Airalo for data e-SIMs in Mexico (the former is cheaper, but the latter uses Telcel and that works better in our neighborhood in Mexico City). We still pay for Super Duolingo and use it every day. Nothing major.

Games

I guess I am officially a PC gamer now. Again. I last used my Xbox Series S in March 2023, and I resolved to get over my Call of Duty addiction, play videogames less often, and have a healthier relationship with gaming. And … it worked. I play games exclusively on the PC, and thanks to advances in PC components, I can do so on mainstream laptops based on recent-generation AMD and Intel chips. (And, to a lesser degree, on Snapdragon X. For example, the recently released Half-Life 2 20th anniversary update runs flawlessly on my Surface Laptop 7.)

But I am still an Xbox gamer, in the sense that I subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and take advantage of its incredible library of PC games. Xbox, after all, isn’t just about consoles anymore. According to Xbox, my top-played games this past year were Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which I test on every laptop I get now, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, DOOM Eternal, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl. But I also have big libraries of games at Epic Games, GOG.com, and Steam.

One nice change: I’ve been taking advantage of all the free games that Amazon gives away each month via Prime Gaming. (They’re often added to Epic Games, GOG, and Steam, go figure, though many are added to your Prime Gaming library too.) If you game on the PC, you need to look at this.

I think it’s time for more Half-Life 2.