Unsung

Software craft and qualityFrom Marcin Wichary

Favourite well-made apps and sites

Jan 22, 2026

A week ago I asked on Mastodon and Bluesky:

What are you favourite well-made apps or sites? Phones and computers alike.

Doesn’t have to be “pretty,” but well-made according to whatever definition works for you.

I specifically made it kind of vague, and these are the answers I got. I grouped them into categories and added links. I am excited to dig into these and study them, but wanted to share a raw list as well in case this inspires some of you, too.

Thank you to everyone who participated! (Numbers in circles like ② or ③ mean more than one person nominated a given site or app.)

Info sites:

  • Ian’s Shoelace Site ② “A «does one thing well» site. Great breadth and depth. Information architecture designed to help you discover/find information, not sell you something. Loads fast. Still maintained after decades.”
  • SCELBI Computer Museum. “Useful, tightly curated, organized, loads fast, no BS. A basic bootstrap thing, but there’s something magical about it. Small enough to be digestible in an hour, well set up for either research or just cool vibes . Partly bc subject itself is «small» but seems not only that.”
  • Hyperion Records. “All the liner notes and song texts!”
  • www.gov.uk
  • plaintextsports.com

Interactive explainers:

Personal sites:

Work and tasks:

  • Mimestream ③ “It basically stays out of my way? Which is about as good as it gets these days. Also, it has just enough customization options to handle my sometimes complex number of gmail accounts (personal/work, for various clients, etc.)”
  • Things ② “The fanciest, most attention-to-detail software I know of.”
  • Sup “Pretty niche. I’m thinking specialist interfaces for specialists here. Tools that become an extension of their users’ bodies and disappear in te use”
  • CalendarBridge “<3 <3 <3”
  • MyLifeOrganized
  • Voice memos (iPhone)

Art/Games:

Creative:

Podcasts:

Social:

  • “Telegram is the best messaging app in terms of UI design”
  • “Locket is my fav «novel UX» app and its widget is always on my home screen”
  • Phanpy (the Mastodon client)
  • Reeder
  • BarnOwl

Commerce:

  • McMaster-Carr ④ “The best online catalog.” “Impossibly fast. Still in awe after all these years.” “It supports your cognition, including with contextual material, to find the thing you are looking for (or the thing you didn’t know you were looking for until you started looking). It helps you find the right part because of what they show, the right filters, and especially the contextual information (I think about the little scale they had to explain the different hardnesses of rubber, for example).”
  • Cars&Bids. “Fast, functional, and easy to use. Not stunning, just utilitarian.”
  • DigiKey

Writing and note-taking:

  • iA Writer ② “Simple and effective, using it I always wish to write more but I forget it again.” “Has been consistently great for years.”
  • “I’ve been using Bear ② by Shinyfrog for my notes for well over a decade now. Dependable, works great, no junk ware, and a reasonable price. Pretty to boot. The fact that in the 10+ years I’ve been using it, there’s only been a single major overhaul update is a feature, not a bug to me.”
  • “Notability! Haven’t found anything else that matches the flexibility for handling imported files & photographs, typed notes, hand-drawn diagrams and mark-ups completely seamlessly within a single document. Unbeatable for handling both notes in class (uni) and on site (trade).”
  • “Been using OmniOutliner daily for decades. Simple, focussed and matches the way I think. Lots of ways to make lists and outlines but this one works for me.”
  • WriterDuet

Music:

  • “The radio station WFMU streams online, and also has a website where you can log in to chat with other listeners and interact with the playlist. The degree to which it does what you want it to do is stunning. It doesn’t get in your way or make you learn a new paradigm; it just makes it easy to do what you want to do. It’s a lesson in design for any UI/UX people.”
  • Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music. “This website maps out all the sub-sub-sub-genres of electronic music, with descriptions and samples. I think that the fine-grained classifications are comical, but they do an excellent job of what they’re doing.”
  • “Easy Metronome is a simple elegant loud phone metronome that is super easy to use even for weird time signatures.”
  • “Pro Metronome is also excellent. I’ve used it for over 10 years and it stubbornly refuses to abandon its skeuomorphic leather and big clicky scroll wheel”
  • “I really appreciate the Apple Music Classical app (even though it exists in this odd liminal space beside Apple Music) having spent many years frustrated about how traditional music streaming services handle classical recordings.”

Travel:

  • Flighty ②
  • “I‘m travelling with Deutsche Bahn quite frequently, and while their own App (DB-Navigator) is quite good compared internationally, I prefer to track trains on Bahn Experte for its bare, technical and valid information and performance.”
  • “The Man in Seat 61 is a goldmine for train travellers. At least in Europe, the information is really up to date and if you want to find pictures of the sleeper cars of the Romanian railway or the seat map of Prague - Berlin trains, it’s all there.”
  • Transit
  • Waymo’s app

Food and health:

  • “The kiosks in Costco’s food court aren’t the prettiest to look at but they are S tier for responsiveness. You literally just press a button and immediately the item is added to your cart. You can order a hot dog and soda in under 5 seconds.”
  • Paprika. “Love my recipe management.”
  • Fitness Stats. “Simple, effective, and good looking.”
  • Mela
  • MacroFactor
  • HealthFit
  • The Way

Text editors:

  • “I use Panic’s Nova an awful lot and it just has a really nice feel so I keep paying for it.”
  • Sublime Text
  • vim

Data transfer:

  • “WebWormhole for functionality, encrypted data transfer between your devices or to your friends without installing anything. (There’s also a similar magic wormhole CLI tool.)”
  • PairDrop. “Drop-dead easy file sharing on the local network.”
  • “LocalSend is well made, because until sofar it aleay works, even when AirDrop doesn’t. And it also works on non-Apple environments.”

Other nerdy tools:

  • RegExr. “A web-based tool to create or explain regular expressions.”
  • “The Sway compositor. A keyboard-driven tiling window manager with dynamic tiling layout. I can’t even imagine trying to use a computer with floating, overlapping windows anymore; everything lines up perfectly and adjusting layout is a matter of a few extremely quick keyboard shortcuts. They take a concept—laying out multiple windows on a display without gaps or overlaps—and build a fast, coherent interface around that concept, and it works fantastically.”
  • “The original HP 42S calculator packed a lot of power into a convenient and ergonomic enclosure, and Free42 is a very tasteful recreation and expansion of that device for modern platforms.”
  • Beyond Compare (Linux version)
  • Alfred
  • Genius Scan

I didn’t know where to put these:

  • “The Kanji Study dictionary on Android has a wild amount of polish, I’m consistently impressed by how much effort has been put into it, especially because it’s sold for a (admittedly high) one-time fee.”
  • Sim Daltonism
  • Homey

Meta: