ElevationLab is one of my favorite makers of tech gizmos, and I own many of their products. Today I pre-ordered their latest addition, the ElevationHub. It is a small gizmo that plugs into the Apple USB-C laptop chargers and includes a pass-through USB-C, an additional USB-A port, an SD Card Reader, and a bit of velcro that lets you wrap and hold a cable around the charger. It’s all very clever and I’m in.
Today Flexibits released a major update to Fantastical with version 3.1. This is the “working from home” update with a bunch of new features aimed at people surprised to find themselves working from home:
Time-Based Calendar Sets
Calendar sets have always been a cool feature. Now you can have them trigger automatically at a specific time of day.
Better Conference Calling
Fantastical’s Zoom integration is excellent. You can add a zoom call straight from the app. With this update, Fantastical can now auto-detect conference calls with several popular conferencing services, and it adds a one-click “join” button to your calendar (and your menubar) as the event approaches.
And More Improvements
They also added new Mac appearance options customized for both light and dark mode, added iMessage stickers, and made several other improvements and optimizations.
This is a free update for Fantastical subscribers. I made a few videos for Flexibits showing off the new features. Below is one, but you can find several more on Fantastical’s website. I like the way Flexibits has continued to release features of consequence since the app launch. I am using both the new time-based calendar sets and zoom integration daily. Learn more about Fantastical at their website.
If you subscribed to the Fantastical Field Guide, these new videos are also now available in the course for viewing and download.
I have been thrilled with the warm reception for the Photos Field Guide. I didn’t know what to expect, releasing it during a pandemic, but the feedback has been excellent, and customers are writing to tell me how much better they are at taking, organizing, and finding their photos.
Now that all of the transcripts and the ePub are in place, it’s time for the last call on introductory pricing for the Photos Field Guide. The price will go up to $29 later this week. If you want in on the discount price, now is the time.
On this Mac Power Users’ feedback episode, Stephen and I talk more about email and working from home, but also get into what it takes to make a MacSparky Field Guide and some weird problems we’ve recently encountered with our tech.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
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The Photos Field Guide now has all closed-captioning transcripts in place, along with a written transcript of each course located below each video. Hooray!
I am also trying something new with the Photos Field Guide. I have added a PDF and ePub version of the complete transcript. This is not a written Field Guide, but instead a compiled version of the transcripts that you can download and read, if that’s your thing. It’s all available now for existing customers. Log in and go crazy.
There is another Sparks in the podcasting racket. My daughter Sarah has been regularly putting out episodes for her Playwright Repertory Podcast for months. If you have ever been curious about playwriting, or know someone else who may be, check it out.
In this week’s episode of Focused, I committed to Sean McCabe to take an entire week on sabbatical in July. For years I have been trying to figure out how to take time off. Last year I rented a cabin in the mountains for a few days with the idea of taking a short sabbatical, but just days in advance, I canceled … because I am a coward and afraid not to answer the phone for clients.
As I said in the show, I firmly believe that downtime is critical on several levels. With downtime, your brain can bring those things lurking in the background to the foreground. This is where you may identify problems or new opportunities. It is also where you may get to relax or do something different and recharge.
The problem is that I have never been able to practice what I preach. That is what led me to commit, on-air, to Sean. I figured that is the only way I would make that happen.
We recorded that episode a few weeks ago, and now July 13 is looming on my calendar. It is time to plan for my first sabbatical. I’m not talking about planning on what I will do during the sabbatical, but just how I will get to that week and feel comfortable taking a week off. It’s a lot harder to cancel at the last moment since I’ve made this a thing now.
So now I am planning my first sabbatical. I want to succeed at this, so I’m spending some time trying to set myself up for success. Here is the plan so far:
I’ve already moved recording dates and traded with some co-hosts on post-production tasks, so I’ll have no podcasting duties during my sabbatical week. That was easy enough.
Likewise, I am working on some timeless-style posts that I will have in the can. Tumbleweeds will not be rolling through MacSparky.com during my week off. I considered bringing in a guest host for the website as some bloggers do, but that felt more complicated than I needed, at least for this first go around. If I had done it, I would find myself wondering what he/she is posting and not relaxing.
Again, this is not so difficult to plan around. I am turning up the dial a bit during June and early July so I can feel I’m in a good place when I set down the microphone for a week. This may delay the next release slightly, but it’s an easy price to pay.
This is where things start getting harder. I do have someone that helps with common customer support email questions. My workflow has always been that the emails come to me, and I forward them to my helper along with thoughts and instructions. Ideally, I’d like to not be in that loop for the week of my sabbatical. One solution would be to turn my MacSparky email over to my assistant, but I find that extremely difficult. I’m struggling right now to figure out why I am so disinclined to do that. I trust this person, and yet I feel like my email should be my problem.
In the meantime, I am experimenting with some automations to auto-forward certain types of emails to her. If that doesn’t work, I may end up turning over the email to her, but I’m incredibly hesitant to do that.
This is the most difficult challenge of a sabbatical for me. Every week, I have some legal clients that come up with problems that need immediate help. It will be tough for me to say no to that. Likewise, offloading legal email isn’t even an option since that email is subject to the attorney-client privilege. I think, ultimately, for me, a sabbatical will necessarily include keeping up with legal email and perhaps even doing some legal work. The trick will be determining what work is urgent enough to justify breaking the sabbatical and what is not. In reality, there really shouldn’t be much work that urgent, but I am inclined to make all client work urgent. At the same time, nearly all of my clients are very understanding when I tell them I’ll be doing their work a bit later for one reason or another, and I think they would have no problem with me delaying a few days if something truly is not urgent.
Between now and July 13, I plan to write out something for sabbatical-me giving strict instructions about what constitutes sabbatical-breaking legal work. I’m not sure what that is going to say yet, but I will figure it out.
I also intend to do a deep dive on Sean’s Sabbatical.blog website for further advice. Finally, I have to prepare my family for the sabbatical week since they will all most likely be home with me. I have also started a forum thread where listeners are sharing their sabbatical success (and failure) stories.
I’m looking forward to this sabbatical experiment, but before I can pull it off, I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Gus Mueller wrote a post about software predictions with the hypothetical ARM Macs. Gus is a long-time (and smart) developer that has gone through prior Apple processor changes, so I put a lot of stock in his opinions. The whole post is worth reading, but my big take away was that with the possible exception of requiring sandboxed apps (Gus pegs that at 50/50), the underlying frameworks (and therefore the apps) will remain the same. This isn’t Apple’s first rodeo when it comes to processor changes, and if we get an ARM Mac announcement at WWDC, I fully expect the message will be, “Same Macs, same software, longer battery life.”
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.
