This month marks ten years of the Mac Power Users. It is hard to believe it’s been that long because it seems like it was just yesterday that I was on the phone with Katie hashing out show concepts and planning.
The show started independent, then went on one network, then on to another network. We have now had three hosts, a lot of guests, and many good times. As I write this, we’ve released 482 episodes (483 is already in the can). That is something like 723 hours of nerdy podcasting. If you listened to the back catalog non-stop, it would take you 30 days.
Time flies. Since the show premiered, the iPhone became a big thing, and the iPad became a thing. Apple changed, for the better in some ways and for the worse in other ways.
One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is how much I enjoy coming up with ideas for the show, putting shows together, working with guests, and, most of all, sitting behind that mic once a week. I love making the Mac Power Users. Thanks to everyone for all of your support.
inShort is an advanced diagramming and planning tool that lets you specify processes, resources, and how they all fit together. All of this is built around a unique interface that enables you to drill down into the details of a project or move back up to the overview and see the project in its entirety. The interface is brilliant.
Since the last time I featured inShort on this website, there have been several significant updates. The application now works with layers (for pro subscribers), which add a new dimension to your diagrams, successfully combining related schemes in a common space.
If your project works in cycles, there’s new logic available in the application that lets you take into account several schedules for one object. One of the most interesting new features to me is the introduction of failed tasks. You can map out what happens if the task fails in your project planning. This lets you log and analyze how what happens if things break, and it even updates the Gantt chart to display the failure.
Other improvements include the ability to customize your chart presentation style, a dark theme, and several other minor improvements.
If you’d like to bring some powerful tools to your planning, check out inShort.
I have heard from several MacSparky Field Guide students that they would like certificates of completion for the learn.macsparky courses. Your wish is my command. Now when you complete a course, You’ll get a certificate.
Mike and I are interview professional saxophonist Bob Reynolds on the latest episode of Focused. We talk about the importance of productivity when creating art.
Join Stephen and me on the latest episode of Mac Power Users. We share our confessions about the iPad Pro, then we discuss managing client data before doing some wishcasting for WWDC.
1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
MOO: Custom business printing and design. Use promo code PRINT15 for 15% off.
In the latest episode of Automators, Rosemary and I get Tim “The Drafts Man” Nahumck to talk about how he uses Drafts, sharing actions, tips and tricks.
We discuss user data and privacy a lot around here. Here is a Kickstarter project that will actually respect user privacy. Instead of collecting and mining your user data to sell you creepily specific targeted ads, Tim Smith is building Bokeh to be a private, secure, and user-funded social network. For instance, when you post your photos, you get to choose who sees them. Bokeh won’t show who follows you or who you follow. You don’t have to worry about friends of friends seeing your photos. If one of these “friends” has requested to follow you three times and you said no, Bokeh will prompt you to block them.
It’s intended to be a user funded project. No creepy ad-crawling. I sincerely hope this works.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniFocus, the application I use to capture, manage, and complete my tasks and projects. One of my favorite reasons to Use OmniFocus is its powerful review tools.
Specifically, with OmniFocus you can assign a specific review frequency to each project. For some active projects, I may set the frequency to once a week. For other less active projects, it may be just once every six months. Regardless, this system builds in an easy way for me to stay on top of projects that may otherwise fall through the cracks. The trick is, at least once a week I take a look at all of the projects that are due for review.
Once I take a look at the projects, I often find things that I can update, revise, or even kill. Think of it as Game of Thrones, but for projects. Every week something must die. I love having these powerful review tools in my task manager, and it has saved my bacon more than once. Over the years, the team at the Omni Group has made this feature even more powerful, and it is easy to use on all of the various platforms including Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
My weapon of choice for review continues to be my fancy iPad with a cup of tea somewhere away from my desk. For some reason, I find it easier to kill projects when I’m not sitting at my desk. Maybe a psychiatrist could explain that to me one day.
Either way, if you’ve got OmniFocus installed, start using the review process now. You’ll be surprised at how powerful it is and how much better you feel once you have a regular review practice. If you don’t have OmniFocus, download the free trial and see what I mean. The Omni Group sweats the details, and this is just one of many features that you’ll love.
John Williams wrote a new score for the Disneyland Galaxy’s Edge expansion. I’ll write more on Galaxy’s Edge later but for now, why don’t you check this out on Apple Music?
> “But we don’t want to use you as our product. And we just have a fundamental issue with doing that. And we’ve always thought that the building of a detailed profile about your life could result in tragic things.”
The contrast Apple is trying to draw is with other Silicon Valley giants whose business model is grounded on user data (and advertising)—namely Facebook and Google.
The question gets interesting when you realize there are tradeoffs. Privacy protects users, but access to mountains of user data helps make better, faster, more responsive cloud services, which also benefits users.
If Apple intends to protect user data, are they going to fall behind on the better/faster end of the equation? Probably. But how much?
Those who follow Apple closely have known about their position on user privacy for years. But lately, Apple is more vocal about their preference to protect user privacy. Nearly every time someone puts a microphone in front of Tim Cook, he raises this point.
When these lines were first drawn years ago, there was a lot more digital ink being spilled on the wisdom of Apple’s position. You don’t hear as much about it lately.
So how is Apple doing? From my experience, Apple still is lagging, but not as much as I worried it might.
One way to evaluate this is Photo search in Apple Photos versus Google Photos. Google pioneered the ability to search for contents of photos with words. They have a massive database of photos to work with, and their algorithms can easily find a “dog” in the “snow” from your library of 42,000 photos. Apple added this feature a few years ago, but the difference is that Apple built its models on purchased photo libraries, not looking at all of its users’ photos. Moreover, Apple does the machine learning for these searches not on their cloud servers but instead on your devices. You too can now find a “dog” in the “snow” with Apple Photos. I am pretty confident the search terms don’t update as quickly in Apple Photos as they do in Google Photos, but that is the cost of that privacy thing.
Photos is just one measure, and I am sure if I thought about it long enough, I could find other examples that are both better and worse in comparison. For me, at least, when comparing privacy versus cloud services, I would rather err on the side of privacy. So long as the Apple cloud services are viable, I’m okay if they aren’t the best if in exchange I’m getting a higher degree of privacy.
At first, I tried to quantify it. How close does Apple have to be to Google for me to be happy? 50%? 75%? For me, it is more a question of whether the cloud service is: 1) something I’d use often and; 2) functional. In my case, functionality, even if slower and not quite as good, is good enough. I think Apple gets off easy with my calculus, but everybody gets to set their own threshold, and everyone isn’t as paranoid as I am when it comes to privacy.
One thing everyone can agree on is that this story isn’t over yet.
