The Monday Brief (MacSparky Labs)

I hope everyone is enjoying a happy holiday season and getting some time off. As I write this, we are finding ourselves in the week between Christmas and New Year. That is the time in the United States when all the weight loss companies blow their entire advertising budget. There’s a reason for that. There’s something about “January 1” that we can’t help but feel a sense of renewal and fresh starts…

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Mac Power Users 672: Tech That Worked in 2022

Stephen and I reflect on the apps and services we’ve relied on for the past year on this episode of Mac Power Users, and one of us makes a rash vow about new Macs.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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Happy Birthday PCalc

Today PCalc turned 30, and in celebration, it’s 30% off. There are two things to know when you use PCalc:

  1. It Is the Most Actively Developed Calculator App in the History of Calculator Apps

James Thomson, the developer, is one of the best in the business. As I understand things, he had a lot to do with the Dock at the bottom of your Mac’s screen during a tour of duty at Apple. Now he spends his time obsessing over and improving PCalc, and he’s been doing that for 30 years.

  1. When You Use PCalc, You Are Supporting One of the Good Guys

PCalc doesn’t have a “team.” PCalc is just James. And James is one of the nicest, cleverest gents you’ll ever meet.

PCalc is my calculator of choice. You should check it out today and get 30% off.

Pixelmator Pro’s Debanding Update

Color banding (or posterization) is a common type of image artifact especially noticeable in low-quality photos featuring gradients or large areas of solid color. I see this all the time in wallpapers and landscapes.

Instead of smoothly blending together, colors jump abruptly from one shade to the next, forming distinct bands of color. The latest Pixelmator Pro release takes all the work out of debanding with its “Deband” button. Push the button. The bands go away. It’s that simple. Behind the scenes it is using machine learning to pull this off.

I purchased Pixelmator Pro when it first launched and continue to find value in the purchase as they continue to solve annoying photo problems for me.

Tinderbox: Notes and So Much More (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Tinderbox, the Tool for Notes. Tinderbox is a workbench for your ideas, projects, and plans. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.

The thing I dig about Tinderbox is the way the canvas adapts to what you need. You can build text and graphical maps of your ideas and data that grow with your understanding.

Build relationships by arranging notes, organizing them with shape and color, and linking them. Whether you need maps, timelines, charts, or outlines Tinderbox has you covered. It lets you record ideas quickly and keep them where you’ll find them again when you need them.

Everyone’s excited about the infinite canvas app, but Tinderbox has been doing it for decades.
The Tinderbox team calls it information gardening and it’s brilliant.

And that is just the beginning. Tinderbox agents scan your notes continuously, searching for notes that meet your criteria. Tinderbox’s timeline view creates wonderful, interactive diagrams to reconstruct events and plan projects.

Best of all, with Tinderbox, your data is yours. Tinderbox files are XML, and Tinderbox can create HTML, XML, RSS, OPML, and more. Tinderbox shares notes with Simplenote, Notes, Evernote and DEVONthink.

People are doing amazing things with Tinderbox. Maybe you should too.

The Algorithm and You

The Wall Street Journal did an interesting study, as reported in 9to5Mac, where it attempted to decrypt the TikTok algorithm and came up with some disturbing results.

TikTok looks at the videos you linger on and rewatch in particular, then starts feeding you more similar content. The effect snowballs. (According to TikTok, it also looks at what you share, like, and follow.)

In the case of the Wall Street Journal experiment, they created an account that started leaning into sadness. After 224 videos (36 minutes of total watch time), 93% of the videos fed to the account were about sadness or depression. For someone who is already struggling, this will just pull them further down.

Companies like TikTok and YouTube design these algorithms to get you to watch more. The money comes from the ads. The more you watch, the more ads they feed you. It’s a simple business model, and there is no room in the algorithm to teach you something useful and certainly not to help you.
Why would you turn that agency over to a glorified ad firm?

One of my pet projects heading into next year is pushing all these content consumption algorithms out of my life. No longer will I let companies like TikTok and YouTube decide what gets poured into my brain. There are tools out there to help you curate your own list of content that is not designed to send you down the rabbit hole of emotions and lost time but instead to help you. I’ll share more on this as I figure out the workflows, but if you’re currently letting the algorithms pick your media, stop.