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.
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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.
On this week’s episode of the Mac Power Users, I was lamenting the fact that my wireless AirPod case wouldn’t charge on my vertical wireless iPhone charger. Listener Christy, who is smarter than me, discovered that turning your AirPod case upside down in the charger gets the charging coil just close enough to trigger wireless charging. The trick worked for me. Thanks, Christy.
At the heart of the macOS experience is Finder, which Stephen and I are talking about on the latest episode of Mac Power Users. It’s part file manager, part search tool and a whole lot more. Its smiling blue icon boasts many features, and third-party developers have written tools to make it even more powerful for those users who need more.
While my music features on Friday typically revolve around jazz, I also enjoy soundtracks. This YouTube video shows the collaboration between John Williams and Steven Spielberg while working on one of my very favorite soundtracks, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. There is an excellent remix of that soundtrack, by the way, on the iTunes Store.
We got the news today that Peter Mayhew, the actor behind Chewbacca, passed away. Peter’s passing really touched me. I’m enough of a Star Wars nerd that I’ve attended the Celebration Expo several times and, of all the original cast, Peter always seemed one of the happiest guys in the room. When he got the Chewbacca gig, he was a hospital orderly and I think he never lost sight of how fortunate he was to play such a big role. That being said, it wasn’t all luck. Putting a guy in a six foot dog costume and asking him to follow Harrison Ford around in a potentially campy 70’s sci-fi film could have gone horribly wrong. Peter brought something to the table though. He gave Chewie heart and a lot of us, myself included, certainly connected. Chewbacca never would have become what he is without Peter. As Mark Hamill tweeted, “I’m a better man for just having known him.” There was a lot of sadness from fans of the original trilogy that we never got that scene in the new movies with Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie together. Having now lost both Peter Mayhew and Carrie Fischer, that’s even more true.
When I visit Disneyland (frequently), I have the option to get my picture taken with a variety of characters from Star Wars. The thing is, I always go for Chewbacca. There are probably 100 pictures of me and Chewbacca in my Apple Photos library. There is nothing quite like hugging a Wookiee to set you right. Thanks Peter.
