Love for tiny utility programs

These days, while I’m having more and more difficulties appreciating software in general, I’m getting a lot more joy and delight from tiny apps and little utility programs that offer very few features.

In the past couple of days alone, I’ve discovered — or rediscovered in some cases — a few of these that I thought would be worth your time.

The first one is History Book, from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur’s fame) that I use as my new read-later app. The twist is that it is not really a read-later app.

The app’s purpose is actually to be an alternative to Safari’s browsing history. It vastly improves on it by making the content of the pages visited searchable as well, and not only the title of the page as it is mostly the case with browsers’ browsing history logs.

By default, the app will save only pages where an article is found, but it can also be set up to save all pages automatically, whether after a few seconds or after a waiting period. There is a third way to save URLs in this app: by clicking a button the old-fashioned way. This is what I do, and, despite a few bugs, I adopted the app very gladly.

You see, I love an app like GoodLinks, but somehow, I find it quite difficult to manage, and maybe over-complicated for my humble needs? Between the read/unread status and the different tag folders, I end up being lost on what I’ve read, what I want to keep, what I need to archive, and what I can delete. In History Book there are just folders, and that’s it. Barely any other setting is available, and I love this purposefulness in an app.

Also, and you must have seen this coming if you’re a regular reader, it’s superfast and light (only 2.9 MB).

I just wish it had a few comfort updates:

• The ability to assign a specific folder to the extension button, separate from the background history saving if enabled
• Extra metadata on saved articles (not just the time it was saved, but the publication date for instance, author, reading time, etc.)
• A proper export system, just in case. The current solution documented is a bit messy
• Extra Mac functionalities like the ability to hide the toolbar, a status bar to preview URLs, better default keyboard shortcut support like Cmd + F for search, etc.*1

Great icon, though.

The second app I want to recommend is also from Zhenyi Tan. If this app is harder to recommend, even harder to find a good use case for it, Lucky Notes is probably my favourite app of the year.

For starters, this has to be the cutest app for the Apple ecosystem: the icon alone makes it worth keeping the app in the dock, but the overall vintage Mac look is delightful.

Zhenyi Tan describes Lucky Notes as an app to save text snippets, and the app is actually a companion app to the Lucky Safari extension, which greatly improves Google Search result pages. Indeed, notes in Lucky Notes are only searchable via the companion extension. The app on its own is more than bare-bones, it’s lacking a lot of basics, even a settings window. But I don’t seem to mind, that’s the crazy part.

I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to find a reason to add this app into my setup because it really is an app crush: I want to use it. I’m currently using it as a separate note collection from the ones I store on my Mac via BBEdit, and the ones I keep in Apple Notes as an easy way to have them shareable and synced between my devices.

If this app had the following features, I’d consider committing to put all my notes in this:

• a search box without the need for the Lucky extension
• a text size/line length setting
• a better resolution system for syncing conflicting versions of a note
• an option to only use windows instead of tabs (which would feel even more classic Mac-ish).
• a proper export/backup system.

Hard to write a post about tiny utility programs without mentioning one of Sindre Sorhus’s apps; the third and final app I want to recommend is Plain Text Editor.*2

I’ve recently added this editor to my Mac setup because if there is one thing that’s missing from BBEdit, it’s a proper full-screen distraction-free mode. Plain Text Editor provides me with that, and, most importantly, just that. I’ve liked this app for a while now, but if it’s limited as a main writing app, it’s brilliant as a companion app for first drafts. I used it to draft this very post.

The only thing that’s missing is a line-height setting. The app could also use a few fixes when it comes to tiny visual bugs. That’s it: I think any extra feature more would make this program too complex and probably would disqualify it for this “tiny app” category.

These three apps, History Book, Lucky Notes, and Plain Text Editor made me realise that I have a soft spot for simple, bare-bones apps. Piezo, Yoink, Tot also come to mind. What I like the most in these apps is the minimal number of things to configure. Coming from a new BBEdit aficionado, this may sound strange, but this feels like plug and play, for apps. Download, launch, enjoy. Despite my strong enjoyment of digging into settings, this is very refreshing and somehow reassuring: reinstalling each of these apps on a new computer is be a breeze.

What about you, dear reader? I’m very curious to know which tiny little program you’re found of, which are the ones you recommend and why. Please let me know which is your latest tiny app crush.