David Shayer delivers another gem, this one about when he was asked to work on a secret government project to make a “special” iPod that he speculates was used as a Geiger counter by James Bond types. I can’t help but wonder that if the government came knocking on the door of 2020 Apple, whether they’d so quickly let them into their software.
Brett Terpstra returns Mac Power Users, and on this episode he’s talking about the Touch Bar, regular expressions, Markdown, and what Apple silicon Macs will mean for macOS applications and utilities.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
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Strap in gang! Rosemary and I are digging in on document automation on this episode of Automators. Whether you assemble your words with text, the Web, or Microsoft Word, we have ideas and automations. We are also tackling stacking shortcuts in iOS, email automation, and scripting OmniFocus.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
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For some time now I’ve been trying to increasingly work with my technology in terms of contexts, not apps. I don’t want to open the Mail App to check email. Instead, I want to open the mail app to look at my legal inbox and nothing else. I don’t want to open Safari to a home page. Instead, I want to open Safari to the specific page on my learn.macsparky platform that lets me manage customer support issues. Staying in context means avoiding getting sidetracked. It means checking the email in one account and not crashing into my email from every account. It means fixing a customer support problem without getting trapped by surfing dogs. (Yes. There are surfing dogs, and I love them.)
This idea started for me on the iPhone and quickly found its way to the iPad, using Shortcuts. Over the last few months, I’ve implemented this context-based computing on my Mac and it’s glorious. I’m pulling it all off with Keyboard Maestro. There are three areas in my life: Personal, MacSparky, and the legal practice. With just a few keyboard shortcuts I can perform all of my most common tasks in each area of my life in context using Keyboard Maestro.
Best of all, I’m going to share how I’m pulling this off in a free webinar on August 27. You can sign up now. It will be a fun event full of Keyboard Maestro scripts and tips. It will be the first Field Guide webinar and I’m putting a lot of effort into it. I hope to see you on August 27.
If you’d like to see the webinar but can’t make it on August 27, go ahead and sign up. I’ll be sending out a link to watch a recording of the webinar afterward.
Allison Sheridan and Bart Busschots did a series on Allison’s podcast about using the Mac Terminal. I remember thinking at the time how brave they were to talk about something so technical in the audio format, but Allison and Bart got it just right. Now they have released the series as a free eBook on the Apple Book Store, or if you’re interested in other formats like PDF, HTML, or Kindle, you can find it at podfeet.com/tttbook. If you would like some help getting started with Terminal, this is a great resource (and weekend project).
I spent several hours putting together a super-nerdy Keyboard Maestro script that saves an Apple Mail message as a PDF and then uses some AppleScript to pull data out of the message and use it in the file name. I’ve already added the video, the Keyboard Maestro Script, and the AppleScript to the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide. Below you can watch the video and download the AppleScript here.
Today Flexibits announced Fantastical Premium for Families. With it, you can get up to 5 family members in Fantastical for $7.99 a month. If you’ve got more than a few members of your family on Fantastical, that’s a nice discount. It’s also an excellent excuse to put the rest of your family on Fantastical. With Fantastical’s power features, it runs circles around the built-in calendar app. Want to learn more about Fantastical? There is a free Field Guide for that.
For the last few months, I have been playing with an Oculus Quest. I never really had any experience with virtual reality (VR) before, and I decided that there was no better time to look for a little escape than amid the pandemic.
The technology is impressive, yet I don’t find myself spending more than a few hours a week in virtual space. Of course, there is a Star Wars game and, of course, that is where I spend the most time.
However, I recently tried out a new Oculus app that is intriguing. The app is called Immersed, and it is quite a trip. With the app on your Oculus Quest and the host software loaded on your Mac, you can have your Mac’s monitor appear in virtual space. They have a lot of options ranging from an alpine cabin, to a “productivity cave”, to a starship. I am currently orbiting the planet Earth on a starship while I compose this blog post. We just flew over Mexico.
If you have never played with a VR device before, they are something else. The resolution is not as high as a retina screen, but the overall impression is that you are someplace else. It is easy to lose track of your actual surroundings while in VR. The above screenshot does not do it justice. It is entirely readable. The surprising thing about Immersed is that it works. I am able to write this post (and several others) with no noticeable lag in typing, and part of me actually thinks I am on a starship. There are, of course, a few downsides:
The screen resolution isn’t nearly as good as my standard monitor. Also, I had to set my monitor display to its largest size to really make this work. That said, I can read and interact with the entire screen with little or no eye strain.
Unlike the keyboard, my wireless mouse can get laggy. Not always, but sometimes. It’s fine for text editing, but lousy for gaming.
You really need to be a touch typist to make this work. You can’t see your keyboard or mouse at all because you are in space, or a cabin, or on top of a mountain, or a creepy cave that is supposed to make you productive.
Facebook! That company that I don’t like makes this thing I have strapped on my head. You can have an account without signing into Facebook, but in order to get this screenshot exported, I had to log in to Facebook for the first time in years. I can only guess what it is going to take for me to unring that bell. Talk about taking one for the team.
Weight and battery life. This app and the connection seems to be burning up my Oculus battery at a rate of 30% per hour. Also, the Oculus itself gets heavy on your head after a while.
After spending a few hours in virtual space, I felt a bit fatigued. I don’t know if it was the screen resolution, the motion of my starship, or the weight of the device on my head, but I was ready to return to Earth. I don’t think I could do this for more than a few hours at a time.
This is really just a first step. I could see myself working in a virtual zen garden or on the planet Endor for extended periods of time once these VR devices get lighter and better. I’m having a great time writing several posts for this week in a spaceship. I may go down to my alpine cabin next for an OmniFocus review session. Seriously, this is fun for a productivity nerd like me. I will report back in a month to tell you if I am still using it or if the shininess wore off. In the meantime, I just passed over Saudi Arabia.
Having built a lot of LEGO sets over the years, I had given very little thought to their user experience (UX) design until I read this by George Cave. Regardless of your feelings about LEGO panels, this article will teach you a lot more about UX than you may expect (via Kottke).
From jotting quick notes to writing for the web, Markdown has become a very popular choice for formatting plain text. Its syntax is human-readable and easy to learn. On this week’s episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I teach Markdown 101, covering the more complex things the language can do.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
