software

Under-appreciated

True excellence is hard, because when you do something really well, people so easily start taking you for granted. That is why I want to give a shoutout to all the wonderful people pouring their time and energy into building software that makes my life easier and more joyful.

Davor Tomic

— 3 min read
An illustration of a trophy.

True excellence is hard, because when you do something really well, people so easily start taking you for granted. That is why I want to give a shoutout to all the wonderful people pouring their time and energy into building software that makes my life easier and more joyful.

Being so dependent on software all the time, I learned to appreciate it when it works as expected. I have special appreciation for teams behind these softwares who keep listening to their user base, and enriching their respective products with handy new features all the time. And I’m not thinking big releases. On the contrary, I’ve experienced smaller, so called “quality of life” improvements to be way more rewarding for me as a user, and a sign that users are being appreciated.

Below are some of the apps I use all time, and that either go unrecognized, or even worse, only get criticized.

I’ll keep adding to this list as I remember some new examples, so not a terrible idea to check back here in a while, perhaps :)

Figma

Figma is a tool I spend by far the most time with, and it pretty much works as expected. All. The. Time. Figma can do so much, and it does it without hiccups. The team behind it keeps adding concrete, helpful features and enhances existing ones, pretty much every month or so.

Figma: The Collaborative Interface Design Tool
Figma is the leading collaborative design tool for building meaningful products. Seamlessly design, prototype, develop, and collect feedback in a single platform.
Figma


Granted, the elephant in the room is real — sometimes the billing feels like an evil black box — but that should soon be fixed. Beyond that, I firmly believe that the 15-20 USD or EUR/month, depending on your locale, is more than a fair price for all the value, quality, and flexibility we’re getting out of it.

Webstudio

💡
All the links to Webstudio in the text below are so-called "affiliate links." If you decide to sign up for Webstudio after clicking one of these links, it might earn me a few bucks, while making absolutely no difference to what you’ll end up paying. Thanks in advance!

2024 was the year of Webstudio’s rise to becoming a true Webflow competitor. The absolutely amazing Webstudio team gathered around themselves a passionate fanbase of early adopters and lifetime-supporters, of which I am one, too. I’ve never witnessed a product team work so beautifully with their community, so that they keep lifting each other up on the way to success.

Webstudio — Advanced Open Source Website Builder
Webstudio supports all CSS properties, connects to any headless CMS, and can be hosted anywhere, including with us.
Webstudio

This year, Webstudio grew into a truly viable competitor, with only a few smaller shortcomings remaining, when compared to Webflow. The most obvious example - web animations. While they are perfectly possible to do with Webstudio, by using GSAP, there still isn’t a dedicated UI for it in the product. Not that anybody outside of the “award-winning designers” niche even cares.
At the same time, the number of Webstudio’s advantages over Webflow is staggering! Pricing, openness of the platform, flexibility, performance, stability… it’s all next-level, and a true testament to a fundamentally sound approach to building software for the long run.

Some more apps I'll cover soon are:

  • Linear
  • Eagle
  • Arc

Read more