The video below is a helpful comparison of the current state of personal digital voice assistants. Siri came in a respectable second place, but since Siri was first out of the gate, I don’t feel particularly happy about it. One takeaway for me is that none of these assistants are where they need to be yet. It will be interesting to see to what extent Apple addresses Siri later this month at WWDC.
Yesterday we got the official word that iBooks Author, Apple’s app for creating and publishing their proprietary iBooks ebook format, is shutting down. As someone with a lot of experience with iBooks Author and its eBooks, I’ve known this day was coming, and it still makes me just a little sad.
When Apple announced iBooks Author, they pushed it as a textbook tool. At the time, I’d half-written an electronic book about going paperless, and I was in misery as I was testing methods to embed video and rich media in a PDF and the then-existing ebook formats, all of which were absolute garbage for multi-media. During the iBooks Author Keynote, I immediately began thinking about it not as a platform for a biology book but instead my nerdy Field Guides. As soon as the app was available for download, I installed and started testing it as a platform for my Paperless Field Guide. The rest is history. The platform was exactly what I needed. I was able to make a book I was proud of and embed two hours of video training.
I released the Paperless Field Guide and it did better than I could have imagined. In 2012, Apple named it among the best books in the iBookstore. I had my platform and continued with additional Field Guides built in iBooks Author for several years.
The problem was a failure to iterate. Throughout this process, the iBooks Author app never evolved. Indeed it started to feel creeky and never quite got to the level you’d expect for an app to build books. I’ll always believe there was a significant memory leak (though friends at Apple still argue with me about this). As my books neared completion, every time the app would slow to grind and I’d catch myself saving after changing a single word in fear of crashes. During those years, I learned all of iBooks Author’s quirks and got very good at building quality ebooks in a rickety app.
Moreover, I was continually banging my head into the size limits. iBooks Author books are capped at 2GB. That number was the bane of my publishing workflow. Over the years I had to cut so many topics and videos just because they wouldn’t fit under that 2GB cap. The lack of evolution for the platform and the 2GB limit were wearing me down.
With the iPhone Field Guide I hit the wall. After that book published, I started asking people in the know about the future of iBooks Author. Specifically, was Apple going to fix the app, and were they going to lift that 2GB limit? Nobody really knew, and it was that lack of certainty that led me to leave the platform.
I vividly remember sitting in the back of a Lyft as I returned from Cupertino thinking, “Okay. What’s next?” That led me on a journey that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Learn.MacSparky platform. As is often the case, I chose the new platform in direct response to the problems with the old platform. With my new platform, there are no caps for Field Guide sizes. The 2GB limit is no longer in my way. (As an example, the Photos FG has over 9GB of video.) Also, the move allowed me to take complete ownership of my product. Now, if a customer has a problem, I can usually fix it, rather than giving them an Apple email address and praying. The switch to my own store has also been more lucrative. I no longer have to give 30% of every sale to Apple.
Overall, my publishing journey has been a good one, and I’m thrilled to be exactly where I am now with the Learn.MacSparky platform. Nevertheless, I still can’t help but feel bittersweet about the demise of iBooks Author. The original team behind iBooks Author got it. When first released, there were no acceptable ebook publishing tools, and they made a powerful one. There is no way I could have published the Paperless Field Guide in 2012 without iBooks Author, and I will always be thankful for that. If I have any regret, it is that Apple didn’t continue to keep the gas down on iBooks Author. I’m sure they good reasons, and they certainly had other priorities, but, as an early believer and user, I’ll always wonder where we’d be if Apple used its super-powers of iteration in ebook publishing the way they’ve done in so many other areas of tech.
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A Note to iBooks Customers
If you purchased any of my iBooks based Field Guides, your books are not going away. While Apple is killing the tool, they will continue to publish the iBooks Author books, and the ones you’ve purchased will continue to work. All of my future Field Guides (Paperless, Second Edition is next!) will be published through Learn.MacSparky.
I recently had the opportunity to guest on the MacVoices podcast to talk with Chuck Joiner about Keyboard Maestro and Photos.
A lot of folks are waking up to the fact that accurate time tracking can make a huge difference in your ability to get your most important priorities done and not waste a bunch of your time. The trick, however, comes with that word *accuracy*. For time tracking to work, the data must be accurate, and systems that require you to manually throw a switch every time you context shift are just not going to give you the data you need.
Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use — without start/stop timers. See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing. It’s like Screen Time on steroids.
Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead. Timing also offers a web app to track time from anywhere, not to mention the ability to seamlessly sync data across all your Macs.
The Timing team even offers a set of Siri shortcuts to start and stop timers as quickly as possible. And if you spend a lot of time in meetings, you will be delighted by Timing’s ability to record time for calendar events with a single click. There’s even a third-party app, Zeit, for iPhone that can update your Timing data from your phone.
Once you know precisely how you’re spending your time, first, you’ll be surprised, and then you’ll start making changes to be more productive. Timing helps you get started.
Check out the videos I made on timing to help you get started and go download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year!
This week, Mark Gurman posted that Apple will announce a transition to ARM-based Macs at WWDC later this month. It is interesting how those of us on the outside have slowly arrived at the term “inevitable” concerning Apple putting a variant of the chip it makes for its phones and tablets in its computers. I think it will be an easy case to make to Apple customers.
By making their own chips, Apple cuts out a middle man, giving them more flexibility on price and raising their profit per unit. Moreover, no longer does Apple (or its customers) have to wait for Intel manufacturing delays to get sorted out before Apple can ship new Macs.
The most significant benefit, however, will be battery life. With a decent-sized battery and a power-efficient A-series chip, Apple could easily double (or triple) laptop battery life. I hope Apple looks at this as an opportunity to dramatically increase battery life and not dramatically decrease weight (by keeping existing battery life and just removing more of the battery).
It is interesting that while the existing Apple A-series chips are powerful, they’ve got nothing in a class that could power the iMac Pro or Mac Pro. Will Apple scale up the A-series for their more power-hungry Macs or stick with Intel for those. My money’s on former and not the later.
If you run Windows on your Mac, this probably isn’t good news. In your shoes, I’d buy one of the last Intel-based Macs and spec it up, so you’ve got several years of use in the tank.
Either way, I sure hope the rumors are true, and we get some news in a few weeks at WWDC. An ARM transition for the Mac is the kind of thing that pushes all my nerd buttons. If you’d like to learn more about this, former Apple engineer David Shayer wrote up a detailed breakdown of the hypothetical ARM transition over at TidBITS.
Sean McCabe is back on the latest episode of Focused to talk about sabbaticals—and to convince David to take one of his own.
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Apple is a year in with its voice to text system. I’ve been using it since release, but also continue to use Dragon for Mac which, while no longer supported, continues to work. This video demonstrates the differences and where Apple still has some catching up to do.
I have finally roped Stephen into talking about email on the latest episode of Mac Power Users. Topics include email services, apps, and strategies. Later in the show, we are joined by Rosemary Orchard and Myke Hurley to hear about two specific apps they use every day.
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If you’ve been reading my Jazz Friday posts over the years, you’ll know that the majority of featured jazz artists are Black Americans. That isn’t a coincidence. Black America is the reason that jazz (and nearly every other pop music of the last 100 years) exists. Jazz is just one of the many things for which America is indebted to its black citizens.
Racism and bigotry are not only abhorrent, they also deny American of its greatest asset, multiculturalism. Adam Neely posted an excellent video about Black America and jazz that sums it up.
In this episode of Automators, Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group, joins Rosemary and me to talk about adding automation in the form of Shortcuts and JavaScript scripting to the Omni Group apps, as well as his first and favorite automations.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
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