Apple Watch 7 Initial Reviews and Thoughts

Yesterday all the early reviews dropped on the Apple Watch Series 7. My favorites were from TechCrunch, John Gruber, and Marques Brownlee. One theme that seems to run throughout is that the Apple Watch Hardware is to a point where the changes are more iterative than revolutionary, which is probably good news. I’ll be upgrading my Series 5 to a Series 7, so I’m invested. I like the additional pixels and the brighter always-on display. To be honest, I am most looking forward to having a watch with a fresh battery. I wear my Apple Watch every day and use it aggressively. I’m now to the point I often need a mid-day charge to get to the end of the day.

To me, the obvious next step for the Apple Watch is more and better watch faces. I seem to repeatedly bounce between watch faces, none of which I am particularly excited about. At this point Apple has put way more creativity into watch bands than watch faces. I don’t need a new industrial design for the Apple Watch, but I sure would like some more face options.

The Focused 2022 Calendar

It’s that time of year again and the Focused Podcast is once again selling the Focused Year planning calendar in collaboration with the amazing folks at NeuYear. This is the third iteration of the Focused calendar and this one is the best yet.

The idea behind the Focused calendar is to give you the big picture at a glance. I’ve had one of these on my wall now for a few years and despite my love of gadgets, there is nothing like the clarity you get from having the year’s big obligations and projects staring back at me every day.

We’ve made further improvements this year as well. We’ve improved the customizable habit tracking bubbles and the calendar is laminated for dry erase markers. Also, starting this year you can get the calendar in either portrait or landscape mode, just flip it over.

I should have mine in a week and I can’t wait to get it on the wall. You may want to get one for yourself.

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Focused 136: Social Focus, with Taylor Jacobson

Taylor Jacobson joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about groundedness, vulnerability, and accountability on his journey to founding Focusmate.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

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Unleashed

Today Apple announced its “Unleashed” event for next week on October 18 at 10AM Pacific. This is a rare Monday event. The artwork looks like it was shot from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. I’ll be shocked if this not the M1X MacBook Pro event. With the M1 MacBooks, we got to see the Apple Silicon tuned for battery life. With the M1X, I’d expect to see the Apple Silicon tuned for performance. In other words, “unleashed”.

If the rumors are to be believed, we’ll be getting 14” and 16” MacBooks Pro and (possibly) a performance Mac mini with the larger iMacs to come next year. Although I’d love to see Apple prove those rumor guys wrong and give us iMacs too.

The Fastmail Switcheroo

Years ago, when I first set up the domain for MacSparky, I made the decision to forego Gmail in exchange for my own IMAP email service. So I trudged along with Hover’s reliable, yet basic, IMAP service for over ten years. For some time now, I’ve been meaning to upgrade to something with more features so last month I got serious and started a research project that eventually led me to Fastmail. Moreover, less than a week after I decided to switch to Fastmail, they announced a collaboration with 1Password which allows you to create 1-time emails for web sign-ups (called masked email) right inside 1Password further sealing the deal.

Once the decision was made, I waited for the initial hubbub over the DEVONthink Field Guide to die down before making the switch, and last night at midnight I went into the Hover DNS records to point the necessary bits to Fastmail. The transition took an hour, and now I’ve got all of my email along with the other team member emails set up in Fastmail, along with all the alias emails and other bits. Once everything was connected, I also initiated moving archives and sent messages from the Hover account to the new Fastmail account in Apple Mail and I went to bed. I woke up this morning to find everything working. It’s funny how you can put off projects that seem overwhelming, but when you finally get down to it, take less time than it takes to go out to lunch.

I haven’t dug in yet on Fastmail’s power features. The server-based rule system is impressive, though not as powerful as Google server rules, and getting it working with my team was trivial. After I get more time under the hood, I’ll report in.

Mac Power Users 609: Sir, Get Out of My E-Waste

In this feedback episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I discuss recent updates to iWork, more on various editions of DEVONthink, and go through some listener feedback.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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Automators 86: Micro-Automations

Micro-automations! They’re those tiny little automations that can make your life easy. We’ve been building them, and today we’re sharing them on this episode of Automators.

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

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The Relay St. Jude Fund Raiser

This year the Relay Network raised over $700,000 for the fight against childhood cancer. I only get the slightest peek at all the work Stephen Hackett and gang do behind the scenes for this every year and it is remarkable. My congratulations and thanks to everyone that contributed, donated, and got behind this.

Celebrating Steve

Apple made an inspirational video commemorating the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. Over the years I’ve talked to several people that had direct experience working with Steve while at Apple and the one thing they all tell me is that the popular narrative, that he was a jackass, gets it wrong. Like all humans, he had many sides and this simplification, focused on his worst traits doesn’t come close to representing the man he was.