Free Agents 44: Maybe You’ll Get a Real Job, with David Wain

You might not realize it, but creative professionals in the entertainment industry are also free agents. In this episode, we talk to writer/actor/director David Wain of Wet Hot American Summer and The State about his life as a free agent, from hitting MTV right out of college to the lean times that followed. Turns out that juggling a busy schedule, learning to say no, and not being able to plan vacations far in advance are all features of his line of work.

Guest Starring: David Wain

This episode of Free Agents is sponsored by:

Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code FREEAGENTS at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.

Apple is Staffing Up Siri

There’s a lot of news lately about Apple staffing up Siri. First we heard that they are adding something like 100 additional engineers to the product. Now the New Your Times is reporting Apple hired Google’s former artificial intelligence chief, John Gannandrea to oversee Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts. Reportedly, Gannandrea will report directly to Tim Cook.

Speaking at John Gruber’s Daring Fireball party a few years ago, Apple’s Craig Federighi and Phil Schiller both explained that Apple can still make Siri smart without looking at all of its user’s data the way Google does. I don’t remember the exact example, but they said something like they don’t need to look at your pictures of mountains to teach a computer what a mountain looks like. Nevertheless, Siri does lag behind competing virtual assistants. I found their confidence uplifting because I want both to protect my privacy and for Siri to get smarter.

It looks like Apple is going to try and make Siri better by increasing engineering while maintaining its position on user privacy. I hope this makes a difference because Google and Amazon certainly aren’t standing still.

Regardless, don’t expect results immediately. I think Siri improvements will be a gradual thing, over time. I think it’s similar to the way Apple has improved its cloud services. They’ve come a long way with iCloud over the past few years, but that would be easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention.

Repairability vs. Sturdiness

Over the years, Apple Products have become increasingly less repairable. The latest teardown of the new iPad evidences this fact with photos of densely packed electronic components and copious amounts of glue. This led iFixit to give the new iPad a low repairability score.

I get that, but also don’t see it as big of a strike against the iPad as most people make it out to be. For years now, repairing these devices, even without the glue, has been no walk in the park. To make these devices small, they have to be dense, and things are locked together inside, so the contents don’t move around. This also leads to that sense of sturdiness you feel with an iPad in your hand.

I can’t help but feel to make it more repairable you’d lose some of that. I’d also argue that for the vast majority of us, we’re not going to take a screwdriver to our iPad at any time, no matter how repairable it is. As a result, for most of us using less glue, adding more space inside, making the device less sturdy for the sake of repairability is a cost without a benefit.

I don’t envy Apple in having to make that decision between repairability and sturdiness. I understand there is a screwdriver-wielding crowd out there that won’t be happy as Apple increasingly locks these devices down. However, I think they generally make the right decisions when you consider the abundance of Apple Stores and certified repair centers where we can get a professional to fix our devices and the fact that we buy these devices to use them every day, not take them apart.

Daisy Disk 4.5

DaisyDisk is a smart little utility to help you manage your Mac’s drive space. I’ve been DaisyDisk on my Macs for a long time. Recently they updated to version 4.5.

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The initial reason I liked DaisyDisk so much is the user interface. It uses a series of colorful concentric circles representing your drive space which is both pleasing to look at and easy to understand.

Over the years, the application got more and more powerful, making it even more of a natural recommendation. With the most recent update to version 4.5, they’ve gone entirely in with Apple’s new APFS file system. I’ve been using the latest version, and I like it. The DaisyDisk team also put together an interesting article about the top five challenges with APFS and how they solve them.

If you’ve never heard of DaisyDisk, this is a Mac app worth checking out.

Tame Your Email with SaneBox – Sponsor

This week’s sponsor, SaneBox is the solution to so many of my email problems. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you can:

Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.
Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”
Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service.

The SaneBox team has been hard at work lately improving the SaneBox interface and releasing even more new tools. For instance, now you can have SaneBox send an auto-reply when you defer an email. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.

Mac Power Users 424: Workflows with Mike Schmitz

Writer, podcaster, screencaster, and avid bookworm Mike Schmitz joins us to talk about his quest to “push past average”, become more productive, sleep better, read more, and live a well-balanced life.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

TextExpander from Smile: Type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Save up to 20% using this link.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.

1Password for Mac Version 7 Beta

I’ve been running the beta of the new 1Password app for Mac for a while now, and I’d recommend it for any 1Password subscribers.

It’s hard to believe 1Password is up to version 7, but they are, and the new version adds a lot of new features. There’s a better sidebar, and there is now drag-and-drop so you can easily move items between vaults (or even share an item from the sidebar).

Tags also get better with the new ability to nest tags. I’ve started tagging passwords as we worth the family vault and it’s helping. Occasionally you may need to see a 1Password item entry while doing something on your Mac and discover the data gets covered up by other windows. They’ve fixed that now with the ability to pop out a window containing the password field, so it’s always on top.

1Password version 7 also makes changes to the typography. They’ve created their own font and added the ability to use rich text in the application’s text fields. There’s a whole lot more including a lot of under the hood work to make the application faster and more efficient.

I’m usually leery to install the first beta of key software, but I’ve been running this beta now for a week and had no problems. One password has a post that describes all of the new changes and you can download the beta right there if you are feeling brave.

The Missing iCloud Storage Bump

In my post yesterday following Apple’s education event, I mentioned that I felt the increase of free iCloud storage for students from 5GB to 200GB was a good idea, and I hoped Apple would be giving us all more storage at WWDC.

Dan Moren feels the same, but more passionately. I think the single best reason for giving us increased storage is Apple Photos. They’ve built a platform that lets us take, save, and share photos, but it requires nearly all of us to make regular monthly payments so we have enough storage. This is annoying. Our Apple devices are expensive, and Apple is hardly cash-strapped. Moreover, a lot of people (perhaps most people?) refuse to pay for extra storage. I hear from readers and listeners all the time that have a problem with it. I expect the refusal to pay is even more common with non-geeks. They don’t pay. Their photos don’t get backed up.

So let’s take the capitalist approach. Taken to its logical conclusion, paltry free storage results in people losing their photos and being understandably pissed at Apple. Google is well aware of this because nearly every advertisement I’ve seen from them that has any relation to photos always points out they have free storage. These disgruntled consumers see that and move platforms.

I’m not even arguing Apple needs to make it free across the board. Just raise the free tier to something rational. 200GB seems about right.

Power Up with TextExpander – Sponsor

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, 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, “2018-03-28 06:42”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “March 28, 2018”.

But TextExpander can still go 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. One of my personal favorite groups is foreign thanks where you can say thank you to people in most language. Sending an email to a French friend, just type “french thanks” and TextExpander gives you “Merci”. It’s like your own, personal translator.

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.

Moment Lenses for iPhone Filmmakers

The Moment Lens company has a new Kickstarter campaign with a series of products aimed at people that want to shoot movies with their iPhone including a gimble counterweight, filter mount, battery case, and an anamorphic lens. I’m a fan of Moment lenses and own several of them. If you like to shoot video with your iPhone this one is worth considering. Also, I expect Moment will actually hit its ship date since they’re pretty good at making lenses already.