One of the key first steps to figuring out how to be more efficient is to first figure out where you’re spending your time now. You may think you know, but you probably don’t actually know. I frequently track my time to get an idea where I’m doing good with my time (and where I’m not.)
This week’s sponsor, Timing, is a tool to help you get rolling. Timing automates time tracking so you don’t have to go manually throw a lever every time you change gears. This both makes time tracking easier and gives you more confidence in the accuracy of your data. The app pays super-close attention to everything you do on your Mac and then reports back to you. Timing’s beautiful (and customizable) reports show me exactly where I spend my time on my Mac.
Timing has a new feature they are about to release that lets you sync and view your data across all your Macs so now you’ve got excellent data across your iMac and your laptop. With a little pleading on my behalf, they’ve even agreed to give MacSparky readers early access to this new feature. To do so, sign up here.
Timing has been crucial for me, and I expect it can help you too. Don’t believe me? Download their free trial software and see for yourself. For a limited time, you can get 10% off.
With the recent updates to iWork, we’re going to take a deep dive into iWork on this week’s MPU+ episode. We share the best uses for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. We discuss the pros and cons of the apps, collaboration, and try to tackle the question: Can you get by with iWork alone?
Flexibits released version 1.1 of Cardhop, their clever contact management app. There are lots of new features in the new version:
• Support for French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese (including full text parsing and localized address and phone formats)
• Smart groups: create dynamic smart groups that automatically update based on specific search criteria
• Template preferences to customize fields and labels for new contacts
• Printing support: print customized envelopes, labels, and lists of contacts
• Quick Action for printing: type “print” or use a Quick Action button to quickly print a contact or group
• “Add Notes with Timestamp” option to quickly insert the current date and time into the notes of a contact
• Typing into a related name field now suggests other names in your contacts
My favorite feature continues to be how fast the app is. I can access or add to my contact data with just a few keystrokes. This makes Apple’s Contacts app feel very old and fidgety. Best of all, I made a video for them of the new features.
Longtime web developer, tech executive, start-up co-founder, inspirational speaker, and coach Jaimee Newberry joins us on this week’s episode to discuss her own journey, when to go out on your own, when to walk way from projects, and how to deal with unexpected success.
I have a complicated history with the Apple Airport. For years I’d buy whatever Netgear router was on sale and bumble my way through their web interface to get it set up and semi-configured. Those routers had a unique combination of ugliness, cryptic user interface, and spotty performance to make them a product I’d love to hate. I had notes on how to nuke the router settings and start from scratch, which you needed to do every month. I even had installed a cable hook in the router closet that you could hang the power cord on when you did the obligatory power cycle a few times a week to keep it running.
Then about ten years ago I’d had enough and decided to buy an Airport. It was more expensive, but better in every way. It looked attractive and was easy to configure. Best of all, it worked. For years the Airport and I got along swell, but as my kids grew up and we started putting even more demand on the wireless network, the Airport had trouble keeping up. Apple didn’t seem too interested in updating the device, and I discovered my kids were burning through our cellular data because the WiFi wasn’t getting to their bedrooms.
Then two years ago, we had Clayton Morris on MPU, and he started singing the praises of his mesh network EERO system. I ordered mine a few minutes after we finished recording the show.
For me, the mesh networking EERO was the same caliber upgrade as when we went from Netgear to Airport. EERO’s user interface leapfrogged Apple, and the mesh networked WiFi works way better in my house. (EERO later became an occasional MPU sponsor.)
For the last year, every time I went into an Apple store and saw the Airport on the shelf, I couldn’t help but feel bad for the person who was going to buy that without knowing they could get a much better network with a non-Apple product. I figured Apple was either working on their own mesh solution or they were going to abandon the product entirely. It turns out the latter was true. Last week Apple officially pulled the plug on the Airport. I think they made the right choice. The Airport was a great product in its time, but unless Apple is willing to spend a bunch of time and money, the existing Airport feels antiquated. Moreover, a lot of the mesh network vendors got the memo about making their products reliable, attractive, and easy to use so Apple would no longer be the unique snowflake even if they went all in on a mesh-based Airport.
So what does that mean for you? If you’ve got an Airport and it’s working, you’re fine. No need to upgrade. I’m sure Apple will continue to support the Airport for years. However, if you are looking for a new WiFi network, I recommend getting a mesh network system from a reputable vendor. Jason Snell wrote up several good alternatives. If you are upgrading to mesh, I think you’re in for a nice surprise.
We’re talking about bedroom tech, including what’s on our nightstands and sleep tracking, on the latest MPU+ episode. We also discuss my new backup strategy, Drafts 5, returning a lost iPhone, Apple’s education event, and follow up on Katie’s lightning strike.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.
Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.
When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I mocked it. It seemed like a waste of time. However, I was wrong. I’ve now been postponing email for several years and find it useful. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.
With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.
Afternoon
This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. I try to stay out of that email account in between but inevitably find myself in there for one reason or another. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email.
Tomorrow, 2 Days, 5 Days
I only give a certain amount of time to email every day, primarily in the morning. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.
Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.
For a few years now I’ve been using my iPhone as my camera. While I was never a diehard camera enthusiast, I have owned SLR and Micro Four Thirds cameras in the past. Don’t get me wrong; in many ways those fancier (and more expensive) cameras are way better than an iPhone, but I never could muster up the will to carry those cameras around except in the rarest circumstances. When I realized I was taking 99% of my photos with the iPhone, I decided I should get better at using the iPhone to take photos. I even put together a bag of gear for taking iPhone photography.
An item in that bag that I have never covered properly here are my Moment lenses. Moment makes some really nice third-party glass to give you more options when you take photos with your iPhone. They have an assortment of lenses ranging from zoom to macro, and they all use a clever screw-on mechanism that lets you attach your lenses onto a special iPhone case made by Moment with mounting points. I have really come to enjoy these lenses and want to share some of the details.
The Disneyland Castle with the native iPhone lens. (Click to enlarge.)
Available Lenses
There are several different Moment lenses available.
The Wide Lens
This is my favorite Moment lens. If you get just one Moment lens, this is probably the one for you. It gives your iPhone a wider view (about two times more picture) while still keeping things in your image straight without fisheye.
This lens takes great wide, landscape shots, but it is also useful when your big, crazy family is gathered around the kitchen table. I also found this lens useful when shooting video.
The Disneyland castle with the Moment Wide lens from the same spot. (Click to enlarge.)
The Superfish Lens
If you want a fisheye look, Moment has a lens for that too. I’ve never been a fan of fisheye-style photos, but I tried the Moment Fisheye lens while on vacation with my family and took several photos that I’m really happy with.
The Disneyland Castle from the same spot with the Moment Superfish lens attached. (Click to enlarge.)
The Macro Lens
A macro lens is a pretty specialty item, but they are fun to have in your bag. With this lens, you can take a very detailed photo of objects at a focal length of less than an inch. That is NOT a photo you’ll be able to take with the native iPhone lens system. Here’s an image of the stitching on my WaterField Bag.
The Tele Portrait Lens
This is a 60mm lens that seems like a copy of the zoom lens on all of the two-lens iPhones; however, it really isn’t. I mount this lens on the 1X lens mounting point on my iPhone and use it as a portrait lens. It’s sharp in the center and drops off toward the edges in a way you can only really do with glass.
The Anamorphic
This is Moment’s newest lens. I don’t have one of these … yet; however, I am looking for an excuse to buy one. This lens is primarily for use in video and gives you horizontal lens flares. It’s a cool idea and not something you would expect you can do with an iPhone.
The Mounting System
I really dig Moment’s lens mounting system. People have tried lots of ways to mount third-party lenses on iPhones, and I haven’t been impressed with most of them. Clipped lenses fall off and misalign. Lenses that require you to stick or glue anything to your bare iPhone are just wrong as a matter of principle.
Moment has an iPhone case with mounting points embedded in them. In turn, the Moment lenses have screw threads at their base so you can just screw the appropriate lens into your Moment iPhone case. When you’re done with the shot, you can unscrew the lens and replace it with another or just keep the case on without the lens.
The cases are nice, but nothing amazing. When I was on vacation, I kept the Moment case on my iPhone 24/7 because I was constantly taking shots.
One of the best parts of this is that when Apple comes out with a new phone, you just need to buy the updated case, and your lenses will continue to work. That way, the most expensive parts, the glass, move forward with you to future iPhones. It’s an excellent solution.
Use Under Fire
I’ve been using these lenses now for four months, and I’m really happy with them. The Moment lenses take great photos and open up my options far beyond what I get when just using the native camera on the iPhone. I’m sure this will make some readers cringe, but when I’m going out, I’ll often make sure my iPhone has the Moment case attached, and then I’ll put the lenses in my pocket (the lenses come in little microfiber bags so they’re safe and always close) so I can then get the lens out and on to the phone with little trouble.
Moment doesn’t just make lenses and phone cases, they also have a curated selection of bags, gimbals, filters, and other iPhone camera bits at their website. Check it out
This week I joined Adam Christianson on the MacCast where we reminisced about the history of the iPhone and how it changed so many things. We also compared our first app purchases, which was really fun. Adam and I have been friends for a long time and every time we do one of these podcast geek-out sessions it’s fun and informative.
This week, MacSparky is sponsored by PDFpen 10 for Mac. Smile has released the most recent version of PDFpen, and it includes several new impressive features.
My favorite new feature is batch support for optical character support. Often I’m given piles of PDF documents with no OCR. The trouble is that I need OCR in my day job and rely on it in my digital documents. Before I had a cobbled together AppleScript that didn’t always work. Now I just open PDFpen 10, press the Batch OCR button, select my files and let the app do the rest. When it’s done, I’ve got a whole folder full of scanned and searchable PDFs. It’s golden.
The PDFpen 10 batch OCR dialog box.
PDFpen 10 also now adds watermarks, custom headers, custom footers, and a new precision edit tool. Moreover, with PDFpen 10, you can move images around without increasing the size of your document, you can magnify library items, and you can use an improved color palette.
Smile also offers PDFpen for iPad & iPhone for editing PDFs when you’re on the go. To learn more, head over to the PDFpen website and use this link. Also, make sure to let them know you heard about it here.
