The Paperless Field Guide



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I’m so pleased to announce the release of the all new Paperless Field Guide. The Paperless Field Guide takes the mystery (and fear) out of going paperless with your Apple technology. The video course includes 95 videos with nearly seven hours of content to turn you into a paperless ninja. The material is accessible to beginners and power users alike, with a thorough explanation of all the hardware, software, and workflows necessary to finally conquer paper.

The course is available now with an introductory price of $24 (the normal price will be $29). I can’t do upgrade pricing on this one because the prior Paperless Field Guide was on a different platform, so I am making it $5 off for everyone. 



Get the Paperless Field Guide

The Paperless Field Guide, by the numbers:

  • Paperless geekery deciphered

  • Nearly seven hours

  • 95 videos

  • Nearly 7G of video files

  • PDF and ePub transcripts

  • Downloadable scripts and shortcuts

  • Fully captioned

  • Combined videos for easier download

This course covers all of the critical components of a successful paperless system on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Capture
Discover how you can capture paper and other digital information with the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. This chapter also demystifies optical character recognition and explains how you can put it to work for you.

Process
Learn how to reliably name, index, and store your paperless documents with various systems and options.

Edit
Now that you have created a paperless workflow, learn how to access, edit, and sign your paperless documents from anywhere on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Sharing
One of the advantages of keeping digital documents is the ease of sharing them. Learn how in this course.

The Paperless Field Guide is broken down into 19 sections and 95 videos. It covers all of the major topics on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac independently, so you can learn to go paperless on your platform of choice or combine the best tools on each platform to build the paperless workflow that’s right for you.

All videos are captioned, and there is an additional ePub and PDF with transcripts of all of the videos. I’m really happy with how the Paperless Field Guide came out. There is a 45 minute sample on the sales page. I hope you dig it.

The WaterField Hitch Bag


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I live in a two-story house and, given the state of the world today, I am moving around the house trying to change context and keep working while simultaneously being stuck in the same 1,500 feet with three other humans and a dog. For years I’ve had a bag that I used to carry stuff as I moved around the house. My kids call it my “upstairs/downstairs” bag. But in reality, it is my “upstairs/downstairs/kitchen/bedroom/back yard/everywhere” bag. The bag I used for this purpose wore out, and I needed a new one.

When WaterField offered to send me their new Hitch Crossbody laptop bag, I thought this might be just the bag for me. Since the pandemic began, I’ve been walking around my house like a vagabond with the Hitch Crossbody as my new upstairs/downstairs bag.

The Hitch Crossbody is a vertical briefcase. You drop your laptop and bits in on their side and can carry them around with you easily. Mine is a larger one, holding up to a 16” MacBook Pro, iPad, notebook, and pen, along with the other bits I use when getting work done, no matter where I land.

It’s a WaterField bag and immediately recognizable as one. It’s made of ballistic nylon or waxed canvas. The inside is lined with that gold liner that WaterField uses in all of its bags. Using a light color interior fabric is such an obvious improvement over the ways people have been making bags with dark fabric inside, making it harder to see your stuff. The zippers are reliable. My oldest WaterField bag is over ten years old, and I’ve never had a problem with their zippers.

The interior pocket has a large lined pocket for your laptop and a smaller pocket for an iPad. There are also smaller pockets to hold chargers, pens, and additional bits. Once zipped up, you have convenient handles to keep the bag vertically. There are also hooks and a strap so you can wear it across your body or on a shoulder. On the front is an additional zippered pocket and on the back is an open pocket and a luggage handle pass-through slip.

The Hitch Crossbody bag is the first vertical bag I’ve used in a long time, and I forgot how much I like them. It’s easy to get into your stuff but doesn’t take a lot of room on the floor or next to you in a chair. Because of the bag’s size and convenience, it’s so much more than my traditional upstairs/downstarirs bag. In times of pandemic, it’s become my mobile office. Once I can go out in public again, this bag will be a great companion.

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Mac Power Users 565: The 2020 Holiday Gift Guide



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If you’re shopping for a nerd in your life, Stephen I are here to help, on this episode of Mac Power Users.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.

  • Woven: The calendar with the most powerful scheduling tools. Try it free for 21 days.

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

  • Sync Up, a OneDrive podcast: Takes you behind the scenes of OneDrive.

Automators 64: QuicKeys and Automation Fun with Merlin Mann



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In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I are joined by the magical Merlin Mann to talk about his automation journey and problems. From The Simpsons to Synology and Shortcuts, there’s plenty to hear about.

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

  • FastScripts: Powerful script management utility. Instant access to your scripts, by keyboard shortcut or menubar. Get 20% off for a limited time only.

  • TextExpander, from Smile: Recall your best words. Instantly, repeatedly. Get 20% off your first year.

  • Setapp: More than 200 powerful apps for your Mac. Try it free for a week.

  • The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team.

The Informational Touch Bar with BetterTouchTool (Sponsor)

Do you have a MacBook with a Touch Bar that you are ignoring? You could fix that today with this week’s sponsor, BetterTouchTool. My Touch Bar gives me the current date and time, the current temperature (and daily high and low), and a list of my upcoming appointments. I like to think of it as my “Informational Touch Bar” and it was easy to set up with BetterTouchTool. Here’s a picture of my Touch Bar.


The Informational Touch Bar – Click to enlarge.

The Time

I know you can also display the time and date in the menu bar, but I often work in full screen when I’m on a laptop so putting it in the Touch Bar is useful.

The Time Widget is customizable. You can set your own formatting using the Unicode standard. Here is the code I’m using for the pictured setup.

E MMM d H:mm


The time widget setup – Click to enlarge.

The Temperature

This widget is seasonal for me. Once it gets warm, I don’t need to know the exact temperature, but it helps me out during colder periods. My setup is a little odd because I put the current temperature but also the high-low in parenthesis. I don’t bother with the Fahrenheit designation on the high-low to save space. Here is the BTT code for my temperature widget.

{temp} {unit} {icon} ({apparentTemperatureLow} - {apparentTemperatureHigh})


The weather widget setup – Click to enlarge.

Upcoming Events

This is my favorite BTT widget. I block nearly all of my time through the day and having a display on my Touch Bar (it scrolls!) comes in super handy when I am not sure where I’m going/doing next. Here is my syntax for this display:

{eventTitle}
{attendanceStatus}{all-day}{startTime} {-} {endTime} {@} {location}


The event widget setup – Click to enlarge.

It takes almost no time to set simple widgets like this up with BetterTouchTool and dramatically increase your Touch Bar’s value. BetterTouchTool can also do a lot more with your mouse, touchpad, and just about any other Mac input device you can throw at it. To learn more, head over to the BetterTouchTool website. My thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacSparky and helping me get more out of the Touch Bar.

Looking at Obsidian and the Craft App

I’ve heard from a lot of listeners/readers about the new Craft app and I’ve spent the last few days taking a closer look at it. Craft is one of the growing crop of intelligent notes/thinking apps. It has the ability to make notes both atomic-sized and large. Craft also uses a block text formatting making it easy to move individual blocks around (or even group them). Craft is a competitor in my life with Obsidian. Although the apps are very different.

  • Obsidian is just text. Craft can hold multi-media.

  • Obsidian is just a group of markdown files and entirely in my control. Craft is a closed system (with an export feature) where you must use Craft’s sync back end. (Although Craft has many export features.)

  • Obsidian gives you 100% control over your markdown files and their security. Craft data is stored on Craft servers and not end-to-end encrypted.

  • Craft is a native app. It has the beautiful look of a native app and it runs like a native app. Craft has many additional features that I doubt will ever go to Obsidian. Obsidian is not a native Mac app but instead an electron app. It doesn’t have a lot of the usual Mac niceties and it uses more RAM than a native app would. (That said, Obsidian is the nicest electron app I’ve ever used.)

  • Craft runs on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and your data is available easily on all platforms. Obsidian is a Mac-only app. You can access via iPad using third-party apps, but it is pretty rough.

  • Craft displays in rich text by default while at the same time supporting markdown. Obsidian works in a markdown (but can display rendered rich text easily enough.)

  • Obsidian has a friendly and passionate collection of users and developers behind it. Having spent just a few days in the Craft Slack channel, it appears Craft does too.

My takeaway is that both of these apps are very capable and on the right track. There are real differences between these apps and a good case could be made for either of them. I can see Craft’s appeal, particularly when I want to access and modify data on iPhone or iPad. Another Craft benefit for me would be the ability to embed images without having to link out to an external file. That said, I think Craft’s lack of end-to-end encryption is probably a deal-breaker for me. I say that now, but this is all very much a moving target right now with both apps iterating nearly daily. Fun times for us nerds.

A Step in the Right Direction of Restoring the Proxy Icon to Its Rightful Place of Glory

I’ve written before about my biggest gripe with Big Sur being the unnecessary cuteness of hiding the proxy icon and requiring a delayed mouse hover to get it back. Holding down the shift key makes the proxy icon appear immediately when you hover near, which is an improvement. Herman van Boejen (via Brett Terpstra) has figured a way to remove that initial delay so the icon animates in as soon as you get near the document name. Here it is:

  1. Open Terminal App

  2. Paste this: defaults write com.apple.Finder NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

  3. Press Enter

  4. Type: killall Finder

  5. Press Enter.

This solution is an improvement, but what I’d really like is for the proxy icon to just be there.

DIY Touch Bar

Stephen Hacket has been upping his game on his Touch Bar using BetterTouchTool along with Keyboard Maestro to run setups on his laptop. This all grew out of a similar workflow he’s been using on his Mac Pro following some gentle encouragement from me that he buy a Stream Deck.

The Touch Bar is something a lot of folks love to hate but I don’t see it that way. I think Apple’s biggest mistake with the Touch Bar is shipping it with the Siri button right over the top of the delete button. As a result, it’s easily triggered and this makes people hate the Touch Bar. The good news is that you can customize it (and even remove the Siri button). I also use BetterTouchTool with my Touch Bar but rather than triggering Keyboard Maestro snippets, I’ve been using it to display information, like the date, weather, and upcoming calendar events. I’ll do a separate post in the future outlining my tweaks but in the meantime, if you have a Mac with a Touch Bar, you’ll want to check out BetterTouchTool for making the Touch Bar work for you.