GoodNotes Releases Collaboration Update

I’ve been noodling a lot lately with digital journaling tools. In doing so GoodNotes quickly rose to the top for me in the “draw words on an iPad” category. The app is reliable, has an excellent ink engine, and, most of all, the developer has thought through the digital writing workflow better than any other app I tried (including Apple Notes).

With GoodNotes, it’s easy to mix drawing and writing. It’s also easy to write in a magnified view while the words simultaneously appear in a normal size on the page behind it.

And with yesterday’s version 5.5 update, GoodNotes is now also able to collaborate. While I’ve often used online collaboration tools with text in apps like Google Docs and Apple Notes, it had never occurred to collaborate with GoodNotes. The new feature works just as if you and a friend share a piece of paper across a desk. The pen strokes don’t show up in real-time but instead with a delay that, in my tests, were as fast as 20 seconds and as slow as 40 seconds. That’s not bad, considering what is happening. Think of this more as a shared note than a shared whiteboard.

What I like best about this feature is that it falls more in the category of “in addition” than “essential feature”. I use GoodNotes because it is so good at what it does. Now, also, I can collaborate.

Teaching Effectively with Zoom



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A friend of mine, Dan Levy, is a Harvard professor and a pretty swell guy. Dan is passionate about teaching and recently released a new book called Teaching Effectively with Zoom (Amazon link). I read the book over the weekend and found it useful, not only for teachers but anyone trying to convey information over Zoom these days. I’m doing a Keyboard Maestro webinar later this week (still room left!), and I’ve already incorporated several of Dan’s ideas into the presentation.  

Mac Power Users 550: The World of RSS



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RSS can bring news, blog posts, and even podcasts to you, without needing to visit a bunch of different websites. This week on Mac Power Users, Stephen and I talk about the rise of numerous RSS services, the apps we’ve seen over the last few years, and share how this web technology makes our lives better.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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Ulysses, A Remarkable Writing Tool (Sponsor)


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For years now, I’ve been using Ulysses for all of my serious writing projects, and I’m pleased to have Ulysses back as this week’s sponsor. One of the things I like about Ulysses is that despite its many years of development (they recently released version 20), the Ulysses team is always looking for ways to make it better and willing to “go big” with changes if they can help their users with the hard work of writing.

A great example of this is the recent changes they’ve made to the outline navigation tools. It has been relocated to the Mac’s dashboard, and it’s entirely new on iPhone and iPad.

It’s now one view that combines your outline, bookmarks, annotations, and links. I just wrote a lengthy legal document using these tools, and they are a marked improvement over the prior system. You can learn more about this feature over at the Ulysses blog. I’d add that you may want to keep up with the Ulysses blog since they not only advise on using Ulysses but also offer some great general advice to help make writing easier.

I’m invested in Ulysses. It just makes writing easier. For so many years, I wrote in apps that were about word processing, not writing. Ulysses is a writing app in every sense of the word. Go check out Ulysses today and start using an app that can help you make your words better. They’ve even got a special offer for MacSparky Readers.

Maker, Manager, Consumer

I’ve been thinking lately about my journaling workflows. I’m increasingly using digital tools for daily journaling and questioning a lot of assumptions. One of those is about the purpose of journaling my day. Am I doing it to figure out what I was doing at 2:00 p.m. on a given day, or something else? The more I think about it, for me, the answer is something else.

Now I’m looking at my days not in terms of what I was doing at a specific time, but instead what I was doing with my time. I’m usually wearing one of three hats: maker, manager, or consumer.

The Maker

Whenever I’m adding something, I’m making. I interpret this broadly. Making Field Guides, writing blog posts, doing client work, and making music are examples of things I make. While a lot of the things I make are shared with the world, others aren’t. Whether it’s for others or for me, I’m still making.

The Manager

For Maker Sparky to produce, Manager Sparky needs to wrangle everything else. This is both an essential support role and an easy trap to fall into.

The Consumer

When I’m not making or managing, I’m consuming. This ranges from watching Star Wars to reading scholarly articles. It’s all-consuming. This isn’t bad. It’s one of the best ways I come up with ideas for Maker Sparky.

My purpose in journaling is tracking how I’m spending my time in these roles. I don’t view any of them as inherently good or bad. The magic is in the balance. While making is most important to me, both managing and consuming enable making. I want to spend more time making than consuming. I need to spend time managing, but not go down the management/productivity rabbit hole so far that I don’t make anything.

So with this in mind, I’ve been focusing my journaling lately not so much on what I had for lunch, but what I make, manage, and consume. Using tags, I can then see it on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis. If I look at my week and realize I spent most of my time sharpening pencils and sorting tasks (manager) and not enough time producing content (maker), I know I need to make changes. You can get similar information by tracking your time, but I think there is something more concrete looking at a list of things you’ve made, managed, and consumed over a period of time.

Implementing this isn’t difficult. You could create a text file and start making a list. You can do the same thing with a pad of paper and a pencil, or, if you’re using a digital journal like Day One, add tags for #maker, #manager, and #consumer. The real benefit of this comes in planning and review. If you’re going to track yourself as a maker, manager, and consumer, you should have some expectations and a feedback mechanism for living up to them.

Setapp Now Includes iOS Apps

Setapp, the app subscription service for Mac Apps, is no longer just for Mac Apps. Last week Setapp announced that it has added seven iOS apps to the service including Ulysses, Paste, Gemini Photos, Taskheal, SQLPro Studio, Mind Node, and PDF Search with more to come in the future.

I have several developer friends with Apps in Setapp and I never hear the usual grumbling from them about not getting enough revenue share from the service. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. So it’s good knowing they are taking care fo the developers and as a user, I dig the service because they just keep finding more apps that I like and would never have found otherwise. 

Waking Up and Sleeping

I was recently reading Benjamin Hardy’s article about waking up early. He makes many good points, but I can’t help think he is missing a huge caveat. While waking up early can help you, not getting enough sleep will wreck you.

Not getting enough sleep messes with your body in so many ways. Memory issues, trouble concentrating, mood changes, weight gain, and balance issues are just the start of the list. Not getting enough sleep also lowers your libido. We’re talking less sex, people! Seriously, a doctor friend once explained it to me simply: “Not getting enough sleep is like operating the human body while intoxicated.”

I’m all for playing with your schedule. If you need to get up at 3:00 a.m. to be the best you, then absolutely do it. But if you think you can do that without getting enough sleep, you’re kidding yourself.