iPad Apps I’m Using in 2025
It's that time of year where I take a look at the apps that I'm going to be using, well, going into the new year. The iPad is my main computer. I do everything from it, from admin work to creative tasks to personal stuff. So I use a lot of apps. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Let's get into it.
Let's start off by talking about my favorite category, productivity. I've been a big Things and Fantastic Cal user for years, but I recently just switched over to Reminders and Calendar. Now I did a full video walkthrough on how I'm using Reminders and Calendars for task management, project management, events, and stuff like that. It's either out right now or it'll be out in the next couple of days.
What made me switch was the fact that I needed a task manager that could be a flexible project manager as well. And Things, while it's a very good task manager, it doesn't have a lot of the project management features that Reminders does have. Also really wanted a calendar view as well. And with iOS and iPadOS 18, tasks from Reminders now actually show up in the Calendar app. Now a task manager for me has always been a big pillar of my workflow. Reminders is at a place where it can handle being that for me.
Now Reminders has most of what I need. I do miss the ability in Things, you're able to actually set a start date for something. So you're able to set, hey, start working on this date, and then you're able to set a separate due date.
I love this feature. Reminders is also really clunky at adding metadata to the task. There's a lot of taps it takes to go in and add something like a flag or a note. Whereas Things, everything was just kind of right there and it's very simple to do. That stuff aside, I'm really enjoying using Reminders.
The collaboration features are good with my girlfriend. We have a shared grocery list and a home projects list. I have some smart lists for filtering tasks and Reminders has really good shortcut support. An app I'm using alongside Reminders is Remind Me Faster. This app allows you to use natural language to add tasks to Reminders.
Technically, Reminders does have natural language input for tasks, but I found it to be really buggy to the point where it often tries to add the wrong time if you add a due date. Remind Me Faster can be added to Control Center so you can quickly add a task from anywhere in the OS and move on. You can swipe right just above the keyboard to switch lists or just click on the list name if you want. I've found this to be the fastest way to add a task into Reminders that has a due date and time. Now, I also have a shortcut called Task Cut. This is one that I've been using for years and it's been modified over this time.
I just use this for dumping tasks with no metadata into the inbox. Now, I do prefer Remind Me Faster, but this shortcut works with my Apple Watch, which I add a surprisingly high number of tasks to Reminders from my Apple Watch. Sometimes I just need to get something out of my head quickly and into Reminders so I can move on to whatever work task or personal task I'm doing.
Alongside task management, note-taking would be the other pillar of my workflow. It's kind of my secret weapon. Having really detailed and organized notes is how I'm able to make in-depth videos about any given subject. For me, my note-taking app of choice is Obsidian. What I like about it is it's just a bunch of text files that the app accesses. This means I can take my work with me if I ever choose to leave the app.
I don't have to export some weird OPML file or try and figure out how to reverse engineer importing into another app. It's just text files. And because it's just text files, it's really easy to automate against with apps like Shortcuts.
Obsidian is really flexible with a ton of support for plugins, theming, and customization. I did a full, really in-depth video about how I set up Obsidian. I'll put links to that and everything else I mentioned in the description below.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what note-taking app or task management app you use. Find something that works for you. And for me right now, Obsidian and Reminders is that for me. That's what works for me.
Undercut is another shortcut that I've been using for a long time, but again, it's been modified over the years. The current version is built around using Obsidian. This quickly lets me write a note and saves it into my Quick Notes folder. If I have a Safari page open, it will attach a link in the note as well. Again, this is another shortcut that's all about like, "Hey, something popped into my head or I saw something on my iPad. I need to quickly just get that into my note-taking app so I can just move on with my day."
I typically go back and go through like my inbox and Reminders or this Quick Notes folder in Obsidian once or twice a day. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Surfshark is a VPN service that not only protects you, but your privacy.
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Numbers is one of those overlooked apps. There's Excel and Sheets, which are vastly more popular. But if you're needing to do a lot with spreadsheets and you appreciate a good native app experience, Numbers is fantastic. Plus, it's built right into the system. Going into the new year, I'm using Numbers to keep track of all my business books, money that's coming in, tax write-offs, that sort of thing.
It can also be a great place for building a budget and tracking your spending if you want. Now, I'm no Numbers power user. I've seen some people do some wild stuff with it.
But for me, I just need it to keep a list of all the items that are going to be tax write-offs or all the money that's come in, add all that stuff up and give me a total. An app I'm returning to in this new year is called Focused OS. I have used this in the past and I thought I didn't need it anymore. Oh boy, was I wrong. There are two core functions to this app. First, there is the ability to play background noises.
I don't use this. I have a couple other apps I'm going to talk about in a bit that I prefer for background noises. But the other feature, and this is what's key for me, is you can use Focused OS to block certain apps and websites at any given time. The way this works is you set up an environment with the apps and websites you want to block.
Then you just turn this on. I use this to block all the distracting apps when I'm writing or editing. I love to distract myself and just go down rabbit holes, but this helps me stay on task. For years now, I've talked about time tracking and it's one of those things that I usually talk about and then I put an asterisk on it of, "You probably don't need to do this unless you're self-employed or do a lot of client work." I stopped doing all time tracking this year.
I realized I wasn't using the reports and I just didn't think it was doing anything for me. A few weeks ago, I caught myself just really distracting myself. I was working, but I was doing all the work that I shouldn't be focused on at that time. I had much more important stuff I needed to be doing, but I kept putting it off.
I've been experimenting with time tracking again with the caveat of, "I don't care about the reports." I redownloaded Timery. What I did is I set up a few high-level projects, like video projects, admin work, comfort zone, just high-level stuff. I'm not even focused on tags or anything like that. What I did is I took Timery's timer widget and put it right on my home screen. This way, when I'm working on my external monitor, I have the timer widget off to the side on my iPad home screen and all my work on my big external monitor.
This worked really well because I could see the timer off to the side and I could see what I needed to be focused on. It was a way to trick my brain into staying focused on whatever subject was selected in the time tracking app. Worked perfectly, just keeping me on track. Now, instead of manually starting Focused OS and time tracking and stuff every time I was sitting down to work, I overhauled my Mode Cut shortcut and my Reset Focus shortcut.
This shortcut is all about setting up my device for different focus modes I use. I use focus modes to heavily filter notifications when I'm working. Now when I run the shortcut, it not only picks a focus mode, but it automatically picks a project in Timery and starts time tracking based on the menu item. And for a handful of focus modes, it will also start my Focus OS environment.
The Reset Focus shortcut just turns all of this off and goes back to my default focus state. One of my favorite app releases in 2024 is Nintendo Music. This is a streaming service for, well, Nintendo Music. Now this does require the Nintendo Online Membership. It's the same one that works with your Switch. So if you already have this, it's just kind of a bonus feature.
I love using this app when I'm writing or editing. I set up background music to help me focus. The Animal Crossing and Zelda options are particularly amazing for this kind of work. Now this is just an iPhone app, so there is no iPad version. But because of Stage Manager, it just runs as kind of like a tall, skinny app window. If you don't have Stage Manager, it's going to do the classic thing where it takes up the full screen, but you just get a skinny window.
But you can just start playing your music and close it after that. The killer feature of this app isn't just playing music. There's a feature in here to extend the music that is playing. So a lot of tracks have this option, not all, but a lot, to extend up to 60 minutes. Perfect for when I'm working.
I just put on my headphones or even play it through the speakers of my device. It adds a nice background noise to my working day. Now my only complaint is that you can't select a bunch of tracks and have them all extend to 60 minutes. You have to do it one at a time. Not the end of the world, but it would be a nice fix. Now another background noise app I use is Dark Noise.
This has been one of my favorite apps for years. You have access to all the normal background sounds you would expect out of any background noise app. White noise, rain, campfire, river, etc. But there's also options for things like coffee shop, spaceship, lawnmower, that sort of thing. Now the power of Dark Noise comes in the ability to build your own custom scenes.
This allows you to combine different noises, so rain, thunder sounds, campfire, whatever you want. Set them at different volumes and then you can just play it back and it's a whole soundscape. This way you're not just playing generic rain sounds all day long. Safari is my web browser of choice. Now outside of the EU, all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS are required to use WebKit, which basically means any browser on the iPhone or iPad is just a reskin version of Safari.
There's nothing different on the backend. Since Safari is the first party native web browser on iOS and iPadOS, it does have a few advantages, like web extensions. Now I only use a couple of them, but the ones I do use, I just find invaluable. The first one I use is called Xsearch. This creates shortcuts for you to quickly search specific websites.
For example, if I type A, it will search Amazon for whatever I type after that A. I have some for searching Reddit, YouTube, and even doing chat GPT queries. Xsearch has a built-in gallery with a ton of different options for searching these different websites.
You can just quickly install them. You don't have to manually set these up at all. The newest extension I have been using is the Obsidian Web Clipper.
This quickly saves websites and text snippets to a new Obsidian note. It also saves all the metadata, like author and publication date. The way this works is it will turn the whole web page into plain text. It will then save it as a new note in Obsidian in a folder called Clippings. If you don't want to save the whole web page, you can highlight just what you want from that page to save it.
This could be a couple of sentences or a few paragraphs. Doesn't matter. Then just select the extension and it'll save the text and metadata. I've been using this as a part of my research process a lot, especially with hardware reviews. This has been invaluable for that.
Final Cut Pro for the iPad is where I edit all of my videos. Since the app was released, all but I believe two have been completely edited in this app. I even edit my podcast Comfort Zone in Final Cut Pro because it has a video component. While it's not as full featured as its Mac counterpart, it gets the job done for me. Final Cut Pro for the iPad has great performance. It can handle a ton of different streams of 4K H.265 video.
And since my iPad is my main computer, it means I don't have to have a separate Mac just for video editing. I don't have to offload just that process. Now the big complaint from a lot of people about Final Cut Pro for the iPad is it doesn't have plug-in support. While this was a feature that was announced that would be coming soon, I guess coming soon can be two plus years, to Final Cut Pro for the iPad on announcement day, it's still not here. We haven't heard any updates or anything.
I'm just hoping it's still coming. But the one thing I will say is the lack of plug-ins has forced me to become a much more creative video editor. I'm not necessarily saying this is a good thing.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it has forced me to be a lot more creative with the way I edit my videos. For me, I do have a handful of wishlist items. I think the big one for me is when you put a clip in a timeline and add a bunch of effects to it, there is no keyboard shortcuts for copying those effects and then pasting them onto another clip. That is probably the thing that slows me down the most because I have to go through the menu to do that every single time.
I would also love to be able to stabilize clips that are already in the timeline. The only stabilization that's built into Final Cut Pro for the iPad is if you're capturing video using the built in video capture feature. And then the last big one would be user created presets. I have a whole document in Obsidian about taking effects that are in Final Cut and tweaking them to the way that I want. I'd love just to be able to save those so I can just drag them onto clips whenever I need to.
I will say in all fairness, even though I have some complaints, Apple has been doing a great job at constantly updating this app. Ever since it was released almost two years ago, it's received quite a few updates. Now all that being said about Final Cut Pro for the iPad, there is another really big important editor on the iPad, and that's DaVinci Resolve.
One of my big goals for 2025 is to teach myself DaVinci Resolve. Now any video editor out there will know Resolve is very, very different from other non-linear editors. Resolve is broken up into tabs like editing and color grading, etc. Not all the tabs that are on the Mac version of DaVinci Resolve are on the iPad, though technically you can use a shortcut to get to those tabs. They're just not supported on the iPad yet, so they can be a little buggy.
Now with DaVinci Resolve, you're not getting the performance you would get with Final Cut Pro. It's definitely a much slower editing process. But there are effects and there's features that are built into DaVinci Resolve that are incredibly powerful, especially their color grading tools.
I don't know if I'm going to fully switch away from Final Cut Pro for the iPad, but I definitely want to teach myself Resolve so I have that option. A really handy video editing tool I have been using is called UnSqueeze. This takes video and can upsample it all the way up to 8K. It works with a whole host of video file types and uses metal so it works incredibly fast on Apple Silicon. Now I often get clips sent from sponsors that are 1080p.
I want all my stuff to be 4K, so what I'll do is I'll throw it in here and upsample it to 4K. I also use this with Comfort Zone as well. The way we record the show using a service called Riverside, it only outputs up to 1080p. So after I finish the edit, throw it in UnSqueeze and it'll upsample it to 4K.
Now Comfort Zone can be an hour to an hour and a half long, so that one does take a bit. So I have to set it up and kind of just walk away from my iPad for a little while. Lightroom is Adobe's best app on the iPad, period.
So good. No other photo editing app comes close. The results I get out of this are fantastic. The way to think about this is if you took two photo editing apps and put them side by side, they're both going to have a contrast slider. If you take that contrast slider and bump it up to 50 on both of those apps, the results are going to be different.
Now when I started using Lightroom, I bought a bunch of Lightroom presets from a bunch of photographers that I really like. And I just kind of studied those presets to see how they got the look that they got for those. And now I've started building my own presets based off looks that I like. Lightroom has been getting a ton of great features like subject mask or their object removal tool is fantastic. Most of the features on the Mac version are here on the iPad as well. Now with this, you do have to sign up for Adobe subscription, but if you're a professional photographer or wanting to become a professional photographer, it's absolutely worth it.
Now if you're wanting something a bit more casual, you can check out Darkroom or Apple's latest acquisition, Photomator. They just bought the Pixelmator team. Now the way I pay for Lightroom also includes Photoshop on the iPad. While Lightroom might be this great app on the iPad and have almost all of the features that the Mac version of Lightroom has, Photoshop on the iPad is not that.
But what I use Photoshop for, which is mostly just video thumbnails and stuff like that, it covers my needs. Usually what I do for my workflow is I will start in Lightroom and edit the photo. In Lightroom, there's a feature that you can send the image right over to Photoshop. In Photoshop, I usually will go in and like cut out a device's screen and replace it with a screenshot for clarity or add images of app icons. I will occasionally touch up some areas in Photoshop, but for the most part, this is it.
While I would love to see Photoshop get a lot closer to the Mac version of Photoshop, for me right now, this does get the job done. While I don't do a ton of graphic design stuff, I have found the app Pastel to be incredibly useful. This is a color palette app. You can lay out all the colors you're using for a project and it'll save them to a group.
At any time, you can just grab, say, the hex code for it and use it in any other app. This way, whenever I'm working on a project, I know all of my colors are consistent and I'm not just guessing that, "Oh, this looks close enough." I used this when I was designing my drafts in Obsidian theme. I also keep colors I use for title segments and videos and my website redesign here. If you're somebody that does any amount of graphic design and works with very specific colors for a brand or a project or anything like that, check out Pastel.
It's great for just saving that information in there. I have been a big fan of the RSS app Reader for years, but I got this new version this year that's focused on more of a unified timeline, not just from RSS, but from YouTube, podcast, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Reddit, all sorts of different sources. It's not for me anymore.
I went into the wilderness searching for a new RSS app. I've started using the app Lear. It has support for syncing with services like Feedbin, which is what I use for handling all of my RSS, newsletters, and even YouTube subscriptions. It has a great reading view, keyboard shortcuts for the iPad, gestures for jumping between articles, and my favorite feature is you can swap out the built-in favoriting feature for whatever Read It Later app you're using. I'm using Lear to go through all of my news, whether it's articles to YouTube videos. Now, if for some reason I come across something that's a bit of a longer article or maybe a YouTube video I want to watch later or something I just want to check out later, I've used a Read It Later service for that.
Now, for a long time, I used an app called Raindrop.io, and I used a complex system for saving all different kinds of links. It wasn't just articles or YouTube videos. I was saving stuff I wanted to cover in the channel, apps, gear, whatever, any kind of link I wanted to save, I was putting here.
Because of the Obsidian Web Clipper, I've moved a lot of that stuff into Obsidian. What was just left over was articles I wanted to read later and YouTube videos I wanted to watch later. So, I switched over to an app called GoodLinks, which has a heavy focus not just on bookmarking, but more Read It Later. Raindrop.io is good, but GoodLinks is a great native app and has excellent shortcut support. What I like about GoodLinks is it has this reader view right in the app, and it does a great job at pulling the full article.
If you're subscribed to a subscription newsletter, GoodLinks will even give you the ability to log in and save your login. So that way, whenever you save a newsletter that's behind a paywall, it will pull the actual content of that newsletter and not just some login page. For YouTube videos, I set up GoodLinks so that if I have a long swipe to the right, it opens right up into Safari. I also built a shortcut for quickly saving links to GoodLinks called Save Cut.
This looks to see if the URL has YouTube in the name. If so, it automatically adds the YouTube tag to it. If not, it adds the article tag. It's a pretty straightforward shortcut since these are the only two tags I am using in GoodLinks. Now, I use tags to quickly filter items. Like I said, I really only save two types of things, articles and YouTube videos.
And I do this so I can quickly filter if, say, I'm sitting down to read or if I'm sitting down to watch something. Text Workflow is a really handy app if you work with a lot of plain text. This uses regular expressions to convert text. I use this to strip markdown out of show notes for comfort zone so that all the links are nicely formatted in the YouTube description. There is just an absolute ton you can do with this, including turning text into a list, pulling out all the links from a block of text, create comma separated values.
And of course, you can create your own workflows to do custom actions as well. Working Copy is a Git client. I use this for my website. I can push new posts right from Working Copy.
In fact, Working Copy has excellent shortcut support. I built a couple that grab my latest YouTube video or the latest episode of Comfort Zone. They format them into a blog post with an embedded video up top. Then get the description from YouTube and push it right to my website. I never have to type a word.
Now, I don't do much development. Basically, the only thing that I have that's coming through Git now is my website. But out of all the ways that I could manage my website, I haven't found a better way than Working Copy. Now, if I do ever have to work on my website, say I have to pull one of the configuration files, HTML files, or even a previous post, I use an app called Runestone.
This is a plain text editor that works with the Files app. Working Copy is a files provider, so I can open any document from my site right from files in Runestone. It supports a ton of different syntax highlighting. Doesn't matter if I'm working on a Markdown file or an HTML file. It can handle it all.
After I'm done, I can just go back into Working Copy and commit any changes. The iPad doesn't have a good native solution for installing third-party fonts. Because of this, I've been using an app called Font Case for years now.
In here, you just load up whatever fonts you want to use, install the profile on your device, and they will show up in other apps from Pages to Photoshop to Obsidian. I've been using an app called ShareShot to kind of spice up how I'm sharing screenshots. What this does is it takes your screenshot and puts it in the frame of the device you took it on. You can also change the background from a ton of different presets, then tweak it to be exactly what you want. You can even change the color of the device frame in the settings.
You can also edit the aspect ratio of the screenshot so it fits whatever medium you're sharing it to. Now this is kind of a really specific utility. Really, if you're not doing a ton with screenshots, you might not need this. But if you do a lot with screenshots, this is going to be incredibly valuable.
One of the newer apps I've been using this year is Croissant. No, this is not for ordering French pastries. Croissant is a cross-posting app for posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Blue Sky.
I've been using this to post to all three sites. It works incredibly well. It'll tell you when you're past a character limit.
It'll let you add alt text to the image for all platforms. Plus, you can write out multiple posts and thread them together. This supports multiple accounts per service and then lets you pick what you want to post to.
The last app I'm trying out is OpenVibe. This is a unified timeline app for both Mastodon and Blue Sky. It doesn't support Threads because of Threads' API limitation. I really miss just having one timeline for everything.
What I really like about this is it brings over your custom lists from Blue Sky. It also labels each post as to what service it's from. The big issue is it's not built for the iPad properly, so there's no sidebar or multi-column view. It also doesn't sync your position between devices and always starts you at the top of the feed, not where you left off. When you go to post, you can do cross-posting between the two services and threads, but I just find Croissant works a little bit better for that. It's really nice for having my two main feeds in one app.
I hate having to check multiple apps and see what's going on. So that's it. Those are the apps that I'm using in 2025. I want to hear from you. What apps are you using going into the new year? Let me know in the comments below.
My thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. If you liked the video, hit the thumbs up button, subscribe if you haven't already, and have a great day!
2024-12-26 05:10
