I’m currently on a team making software and I spent four years as a middling-designer/not-good-developer, but my whole life I’ve been a software FAN. I follow designers/developers like celebrities/sportsgame players.

This is a thread celebrating a few of my favorites.

First, the OG… The OmniGroup. OmniOutliner might be the software that has had the greatest impact on my life. When you combine the unparalleled utility of an outliner with everything it has inspired and led to, it’s hard to think of a more important app (for me).

And to think at one point OmniOutliner shipped with MacOS! Imagine how different the world would be if more people discovered the value of the outliner…

We’ll find out soon: They’re finally discovering it with RoamResearch.

The original Dropbox team changed the world forever, adding a feature that we always expected from our computers. While it’s difficult to figure out exactly what they’re doing now, it can’t be overstated just how important, and how perfect, Dropbox once was.

This is not a favorite at all but I’ll give credit where due. While I’ve mostly hated everything this company has ever stood for, Microsoft Excel was and will always be the app that enabled the ascendency of personal computing. It’s crazy how much of the world still runs on it.

The team at culturedcode is, to me, the Michael Jordan of interface design. What they’ve done is nothing short of magic: simple, delightful to manipulate with a finger, mouse, or keyboard… impossibly good.

I’ve felt for years that Things should have been acquired by Apple and used as the basis for the future of all Apple operating systems. It is Leica-level interface design: perfect, timeless, the apotheosis of the medium in my opinion.

Then there’s the team behind UlyssesApp. My goodness, what a beautiful and incredible writing app. While I still can’t use it for my work because they won’t support Fountain syntax (👎), I sure hope I can one day.

Things, Ulysses, Leica… What’s with Germans and tool design?

Then there are the lone wolves like Greg Pierce at agiletortoise who created what is simply a perfect (and perfectly necessary) app in draftsapp, the best text capture tool to date. Once you realize you can start in Drafts, it removes an unnecessary step from so many decisions.

Another lone wolf who can’t go without mentioning is Marco Arment. Both his original Instapaper and Overcastfm have been reliable, daily companions for years.

Then there’s Loren Brichter, the designer/developer whose history/portfolio is the most likely to encourage those of us who probably shouldn’t become designer/developers to just move on and do something else with our time.

As much as I’ve been disappointed by Airtable, it’s only because I truly feel they’ve achieved the best web interface that has ever existed. The first time I converted a field to a linked record to a table that didn’t yet exist, I knew that this team was the best in the world.

And Figma… What sorcery is this? No one was even expecting we’d have 10% of this functionality in a web app and now it’s replaced Illustrator (!) for many of us. Not only does it have the functionality but it feels more intuitive, more native(!), and FASTER(?!)…

And even though John Gruber still hasn’t added three lines of CSS so you can read his site on the mobile devices he blogs about (at this point it’s a Bit™ 🙂), his creation of Markdown has changed my life and inspired so many of us to make our own tools to scratch our own itches.

Inspired by Markdown, I began tinkering with a screenwriting variant only to discover John August had already done it with what became Fountain.

John and his team then provided the world with the best screenwriting app and even gave us a Courier that doesn’t suck (🙏🙏🙏).

Lastly, Roam Research, who I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It’s the most friendly, flexible, and powerful tool I’ve ever used, but what excites me most about Roam is the next generation of software fans (like me) it has created.

They’re the ones I’m following now.