The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What are your five favourite apps?

My work life and my hobbies are both so based on computers that my own mother once said, “If there was no more electricity, you’d be unemployable.”

Yeah, ok.

So let’s talk favourite applications, past and present (four out of five are not phone apps. Sorry, or not sorry.).

My number one favourite application, past or present, is pre-cloud Adobe Photoshop. I’m nursing an eleven-year-old iMac just so I can keep using this old version of Photoshop. I love working in it, love blending layers, filters and effects to discover new looks.

If you want to see some examples of my work, I design my own book covers (no AI anywhere near this). Here’s a few of my favourite covers:

I think you can see that I’m influenced a lot by typography.

I used to have another favourite graphics application, Fractal Design’s Painter. It came in a paint can, containing the manual and about 10 or twelve floppy discs to install it all. And it was brilliant. I had a Wacom drawing tablet and a flatbed scanner. I wasn’t yet a good enough (nor traveled enough) photographer to have the deep portfolio I have now, but if I had, I’m sure I could’ve created some stunning art with that tablet and Painter.

And my third favourite application is another one that’s dead: Aldus Pagemaker. The very first desktop publishing program that I used (starting in the late 1980s), this program leveled the playing field between big time publishers and creative people such as myself. I loved that application to death. When it disappeared, I learned QuarkXpress and eventually Adobe InDesign, but my heart will always be with PageMaker.

As a writer, I appreciate the heck out of Scrivener. I don’t know I’d call it love so much as relief that it exists. It’s an application for writers that can be used fairly simply, or used with a lot of depth, depending upon your writing style. As a “Pantser” (A writer who does not write from a planned out plot, and does not always write the first scene first and the last scene last, but writes bits and pieces all over the place), Scrivener’s system of chapters and scenes allows me to work much more confidently and consistently within my story’s workflow as it evolves.

My favourite app on my phone? That’s easy. It’s the camera. Of the four covers I posted above, two are built from photos I took on my current phone. Here’s a couple of photos I took earlier today of kittens that we’ve rescued and are trying to get adopted.

Is there any other app on my phone that I’m in love with? I can’t think of one. Sorry, I’m of an older generation. I don’t live on my phone as much as many members of the younger generations do.