My pal, and fellow co-host on Focused, has a new podcast called the Intentional Family. This is a show made by Mike and his wife Rachel, and it is all about raising your family in a crazy world. Mike and Rachel have five children and a lot of good ideas.
In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I are joined by Scotty Jackson to talk about his Shortcuts-based automations which cross into the web and beyond.
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In March we lost another jazz great, pianist McCoy Tyner (Wikipedia). McCoy first entered my orbit as the pianist in the John Coltrane quartet during its best years. McCoy played piano on some famous Coltrane recordings, including My Favorite Things (Wikipedia(Apple Music) and one of my all-time favorite albums, Ballads0 (Wikipedia(Apple Music). As John Coltrane’s music became more atonal, McCoy left the band in the mid-60s and continued to record as a solo artist and group leader for the rest of his life.
I’ve been doing a deep dive on McCoy Tyner in Apple Music all week. The album I keep coming back to is a big band he led. My favorite track is High Priest. I particularly dig the McCoy piano solo at the top. We’ll all miss you, McCoy.
Yesterday Apple unveiled a new online store hub that makes it a lot easier to get at services that traditionally required a trek to an Apple Store. Not only does this help out while we endure the pandemic, this service is going to be great for those Apple device owners that don’t live close to an Apple Store (or, like me, live close but still don’t want to go to the mall). I’m glad Apple built this. I hope they keep it up after the pandemic is over and the stores re-open.
Speaking of Craig Federighi, he also appeared on the most recent episode of AppStories. Great work by Federico and gang on this interview.
I keep finding myself linking to Matt Panzarino here because he just keeps delivering the goods, particularly with iPad coverage. Matt got to interview Apple Software Chief Craig Federighi about the new iPad cursor implementation and wrote it up at Tech Crunch. It was by far my favorite read this week. I continue to believe that delight is one of my primary reasons for using the iPad and the new cursor implementation brings that whimsy.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.
Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.
When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I thought it was silly and just another way of pushing today’s problems until tomorrow. However, I was wrong. Deferring email is actually a very powerful tool that takes almost no time and I’ve now been using it for years. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system (which takes time) but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.
With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.
This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. Morning is when I am most productive so I don’t deal with many emails directly in that morning sweep. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email. I’ve thought about getting rid of this deferred email box several times but I don’t. It is just too useful.
I only give a certain amount of time to email every day. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.
Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.
Automators take note. Pushcut has received several updates over the past few months, improving the ability to trigger automation on iOS in creative ways. The original idea behind the app was to give folks the ability to trigger iOS automation beyond those limits Apple provides with Siri Shortcuts. With Pushcut, you can use things like webhooks and iBeacon devices as automation triggers. This is pretty impressive. We interviewed Pushcut’s developer, Simon Leeb, on the Automators a few months ago.
Since that time, Pushcut has got even more interesting with the ability to set up an iOS device as a server, and most recently, integration with IFTTT. This could allow you to trigger a shortcut from Alexa or set a HomeKit scene from Google home.
I love how third-party developers keep pushing the iOS automation envelope by giving Shortcuts even more external tools. I’ll be updating the Shortcuts Field Guide with some video examples of Pushcut, but in the meantime, I encourage you to check it out.
Apple announced today the online WWDC will start on June 22.
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“On June 22, WWDC20 takes off. Get ready for the first global, all-online WWDC by downloading the Apple Developer app to stay notified on all the latest news, with updates for events and sessions. And there’s a lot more to come — starting with the first-ever Swift Student Challenge.”
One of my big questions revolves around the scope of changes to the Apple operating systems this year. I suspect this will be a year focused more on bug fixes than ambitious new features. I admittedly usually lean too heavily on the side of new features but given the global pandemic and the fact that most likely all of the engineers are working from home while also taking care of their kids and pets and dealing with all of this, I expect this be a Snow Leopard-type year.
Today Apple announced the release of the latest iteration of the 13″ MacBook Pro. The new version doesn’t grow the screen to 14“, as the rumor mill predicted. It does, however, get a processor bump on the higher-end models. Perhaps most importantly, it adds the same scissor-switch keyboard we now have on the 16” MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iPad Magic Keyboard. The butterfly keyboard is no longer for sale on new Apple laptops. While I didn’t have a particular problem with the feel of the butterfly keyboard, I had a big problem with its reliability. The part of this story that I can’t get over is how long it took to replace the butterfly keyboard once it became clear it was a dud. The really feels like Apple’s own second arrow.
