It is hard to believe December is already upon us. I’ve been refining my jazz holiday Apple Music playlist, appropriately called “Yule”. If you want some holiday cheer and you subscribe to Apple Music, here you go. In my opinion, this playlist is best listened to on shuffle.

Today people are starting to think about holiday gifts but why don’t you give yourself a gift this year. The gift of automation. One of the easiest ways to get started with automation is by getting TextExpander installed on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool and so much more. With TextExpander, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.

Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, “2019-11-29 08:12”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “November 29, 2019”.

But TextExpander goes much deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members. 

I’ve done so much with TextExpander over the years that I even have a page of snippets I’ve created that you can download ranging from movie to reviews to conference calls. To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.

I’ve stumbled across several Black Friday deals that I think MacSparky readers may like:

• The Sweet Setup has discounted a package of all their tech courses.

• MacStock passes will be $100 Off on cyber Monday with this link.

• There are several good deals on Bridge Keybaords.

• You can get Chronosync for just $10.

• DaisyDisk for just under $5.

• Lots of deals on some of my favorite accessories at TwelveSouth.

• $30 Off a LaMetric Clock with code “1TIME”.

There is a lot more out there but these are the ones that stood out to me.

Happy Thanksgiving to my geek family. In the United States, we all like to take a moment on this day (between eating turkey and taking naps) to reflect on things we are thankful for. My friends in this community are very high on my list. I wish you and yours the best today.

Dave Nanian, of Shirt Pocket Software recently announced that his well-respected backup utility, SuperDuper, is good-to-go on Catalina. I always appreciate Dave’s blog posts concerning updates. He has a new post concerning this update and it helps to get the perspective from someone working with the file system updates and Dave always functions as the canary in a coal mine. 

With Catalina, your drive is divided into two separate volumes, a system volume and a data volume. These changes were made for security reasons, but created a ton of work for guys like Dave Nanian. Reading about how much work he put into this new version validates my purchase of his app.

If If you don’t have a way to mirror your drive (you should!), my SuperDuper recommendation remains in effect.

We’re now seeing reports of Apple trying to slow things down in future software releases to avoid the bugs and multiple patches we’ve been getting with iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. This signals a pendulum shift we’ve seen many times before between conservative and aggressive software releases. We need go back only a few years to see that the very stable, but relatively conservative iOS 12 release followed on the more aggressive (and buggy) iOS 11 release the year before. In terms of new features, this year was awesome. I argued earlier that it was just the right amount of awesome but given the number of patches we’ve had, maybe it turns out it was a little too much awesome.

Either way, I expect things will be dialed back a bit next year so they don’t have so many patches. I continue to believe that Apple should be pushing the envelope. As things stand, particularly with iPad, the software has not matched the hardware and there still is plenty of catching up to do.