Get Focussed with Middle Davids Candles (Sponsor)


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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Middle Davids Artisan Candles. Middle Davids understand the use of rituals to help with productivity. Have you considered using the scent of a candle? It works.

I burn candles while I work and I always feel that the ritual of lighting the candle is a way to help me focus in on my project. After I’ve worked a few hours, I blow out the candle and take a break. When I come back and light the candle again, the focus comes back. It’s kind of magical and don’t worry about using up matches, Middle Davids gives you those too. 


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You’ll be surprised how well this works. This month I’m burning through my favorite Green Tea candle from Middle Davids while I work on my next book. The vast majority of people who try a Middle Davids subscription stick with it. In a world full of technology, this provides a fantastic analog motivational tool. You can literally see the progress of my current side project as the candle burns down in this photo.

With the holidays approaching, you may not just want a candle subscription for yourself. You can gift a subscription so your friends or family get a reminder in the mail every month or two that you care. (They have gift options for one, two, three, four, six and twelve months so every budget is covered.) I love they way they send a hand-written note with something inspirational to all subscription customers.

Dan, the proprietor, is a candle geek (and also a Mac Geek!) and obsesses on candles like I do productivity apps. The candles are 100% botanical soy wax, not paraffin (which is a petrochemical) and the wicks are cotton woven (no metals).

Middle Davids has a subscription plan that gets you two candles a month with 40 hours of burn time. You also get a box of wooden matches, and a sample of the next month’s scent. Give it a try. Best of all, they are giving their biggest discount ever to MacSparky readers. Use the offer code “SPARKY10” (in recognition of 10 years of MacSparky) and get $10 for any new customer or gift subscription. Whether you purchasing for yourself or as a gift, you can’t go wrong.

Gabe Weatherhead’s iPad Experiment

I enjoyed reading Gabe Weatherhead’s thoughts following his attempts to do more on his iPad. Although I have to admit that I could never see Gabe going into the iPad-only crowd, at least not in the foreseeable future. Gabe is far too clever in the way he uses his Mac. Indeed, Gabe never was looking to replace his Mac. While that is possible, and even preferable, for some, I still think for most of us the question should not be about whether one platform can replace another so much as us users figuring out which platforms work for us best under which circumstances, which is exactly what Gabe did.

The Increasingly Rare iPad Deal Killers

Jason Snell wrote an excellent piece today about how he uses his iPad for a lot of his work. The post references a recent quote from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella that implies the iPad is not a real computer and a recent iPad ad that makes its point nicely.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing and podcasting about the iPad as a potential laptop replacement. In the early days, I went iPad only while writing the book, iPad at Work. Back then it was rough. The hardware, operating system, and software were all in need of improvement. Things did, however, get better. iPad hardware these days benchmarks alongside currently shipping Macs very respectively.

iOS also is a lot more powerful than it used to be. Last year I gave my laptop to my daughter and used my iPad as a laptop for about six months before buying a replacement laptop. That was during iOS 10, and the reasons that I ultimately bought a laptop rested largely on the operating system. Before iOS 11, managing multiple files and email attachments felt masochistic. iOS 11 fixes that. Now with iOS 11 and the Files App, I’m able to manage files nearly as fast on iPad as I am on Mac. If I had 35 years experience using a tablet like I do the mouse and keyboard, I’d probably be just as fast. 

All that said I still find times where I need the laptop. The interesting bit for me is that while Apple has improved the hardware and the operating system, I’ve got some lingering problems with third-party software. 

Two such roadblocks that immediately come to mind are Microsoft Word and Googe Docs. I spend a lot of time in both these apps doing day-job legal work. In many ways, Microsoft Word on iPad is superior to its Mac counterpart, but it has one glaring omission, the inability to modify style preference. If I want to change a style format or line spacing, it’s simply not possible in Microsoft Word for iPad. I’ve used styles in Word forever. If you know what you are doing, they dramatically improve document editing and tricky legal paragraph numbering. Likewise, Google Docs has a change tracking feature that works fine on the Mac but has never been properly implemented on the iPad app. I’ve found ways around these problems, but they are workarounds and get in the way of productively using my iPad.

It didn’t hit me until reading Jason’s piece tonight, but with each step forward, the iPad’s limitations get narrower. The hardware and operating system problems are, for the most part, solved for me. Likewise, there are alternatives for my software problems. There are iPad word processors that support styles. Google’s passive-aggressive approach to the iPad leaves them ripe for disruption by some other company that wants to make a Google Docs-like experience for iPad without second-class iPad software. I’d honestly be surprised if these problems (along with two or three other on my particular list) don’t get solved in the next year. 

But getting back to the original point, if you are asking yourself whether or not the iPad is a “real” computer, the fact that I’ve got to go to Microsoft Word style formatting for distinction should tell you that the question was already answered a long time ago.

OmniGraffle, My Secret Weapon for Graphics (Sponsor)


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This week MacSparky is sponsored by the app that I use as my own personal graphics toolbox, OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle was created as a diagramming tool but it is so much more. I don’t need to use a graphics app every day but I do have plenty of use for one. My early attempts at using graphics tools were always failures because so often the software was too obtuse. OmniGraffle, however, is not. Using OmniGraffle’s powerful, but easily understandable tools, I am able to not only make diagrams but also maps, flow charts, court exhibits, garden plans, countless school projects, and even the family Christmas card. If I’m doing something that involves moving pixels around the screen, OmniGraffle delivers.

OmniGraffle users range from artists to data mappers to (even) geeky lawyers. The tools are fast and easy to learn and there are versions of OmniGraffle for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I frequently hear from readers that are OmniGraffle-curious. They are interested in the app but not sure whether it is something they need. My answer is always the same. If you have OmniGraffle, you will find uses for it. OmniGraffle makes the creation of graphics and diagrams manageable. Once you lower that bar of entry, you’ll find all sorts of uses for OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle has recent updates on both the Mac and iOS. Everything is cleaner and easier to use and access to Stenciltown (where you can import and use other folks’ artwork in your diagrams) is easier than ever. They’ve got some great demonstration videos (although their choice in screencasting talent is questionable). Best of all, there’s a free trial so you can download and try it risk free. Up your diagram game today with OmniGraffle.


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iPad Sans Bezel


Image by Benjamin Geskin

Image by Benjamin Geskin

Now that I’ve got a bezel-less iPhone in my hands, I’m looking at my iPad(s) a little sideways. Turns out I’m not alone. Benjamin Geskin did some lovely renders of a bezel-less iPad that feels to me like the direction Apple has to be going with this. The trick on iPad will be the swipe up gesture. Currently, there are two separate gestures: short up for dock and long up for the control center. If I was a betting man, I’d say that a bezel-less iPad would switch the long swipe up to match the behavior on the phone and they’d move the control panel to some other gesture.

The Case for RSS

For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It is a great way to read blogs and the backbone of podcast distribution. As social networks took off, a lot of my friends that were previously big RSS fans gave up on the technology and instead relied upon sources like Twitter and Facebook to get their news.

That was never me. The reason I’ve stuck with RSS is the way in which I work. Twitter is the social network that I participate in most and yet sometimes days go by where I don’t load the application. I like to work in focused bursts. If I’m deep into writing a book or a legal client project. I basically ignore everything else. I close my mail application, tell my phone service to take my calls, and I definitely don’t open Twitter. When I finish the job, I can then go back to the Internet. I’ll check in on Twitter, but I won’t be able to get my news from it. That only works if you go into Twitter much more frequently than I do. That’s why RSS is such a great solution for me. If a few days go by, I can open RSS and go through my carefully curated list of websites and get caught back up with the world.

A long time ago, I used Reeder as my primary RSS application. It’s clean, fast, and attractive. Then a few years ago I switched over to Unread, which I found to be slower but a little more delightful. For the last week, I’ve been using Reeder again just for giggles. Their addition of dark mode for iPhone X is great, but ultimately I don’t know where I’ll land between these two great RSS Apps.

If you are thinking about using RSS, I have a little advice. Be wary feed inflation. RSS is so easy to implement that it’s a slippery slope between having RSS feeds for just a few websites and instead of having RSS feeds for hundreds of websites. If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose of using RSS. The trick to using RSS is to be brutal with your subscriptions. I think the key is looking for websites with high signal and low noise. Sites that publish one or two articles a day (or even one to two articles a week) but make them good articles are much more valuable and RSS feed than sites that published 30 articles a day.

The Workflow for iOS Update


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Every time I write that people should still be using Workflow for iOS automation, I get a certain amount of flak. Apple bought Workflow earlier this year, and the reason for the purchase was not so they could keep developing Workflow. With no inside knowledge, I’m guessing the Workflow developers are spending most of their time working on some fancy new automation for integration into the iOS operating system. (Why else would Apple have purchased the company?) However, I don’t think they are spending all of their time on the new project.

Workflow has been steadily getting updates since it went “in-house”. Most recently they released version 1.7.7. It adds iOS 11 drag and drop and iPhone X screen support. It also supports the new Apple HEIF and HEVC image and video formats. The update even adds a few new features, my favorite of which is the ability to save a templated OmniFocus project to a specific folder.

I don’t know how long we’ve got left with Workflow. But isn’t that true about everything in life? I expect the Workflow team will be allowed to continue to nurse the app along until they release their next big thing which, at the very earliest, would be iOS 12 in a little less than a year. Workflow has enough awesome that it’s worth using, even if just for a year.

PDFpen for iOS Tutorial Videos

I recently did a series of seven tutorial videos on how to use PDFpen for iPad and iPhone. They’re now available to watch at the PDFpen website and I think they’re pretty good. Looking back, it’s remarkable just how much my document review workflows have changed with the arrival of the iPad Pro. The combination of that big piece of glass with the Apple Pencil make it easy for me to review and annotate documents digitally. This is superior to my old method of printing it out and using a red pen and highlighter. Now I have way more annotation tools available and because the product is digital, it is easy to save, copy, and share. Another benefit I’ve noticed over time is how much easier it is to hold on to these digital annotations. I recently represented a client on a contract dispute and being able to look at my original annotations when the contract was signed last year was helpful.

Anyway, if you haven’t looked into digital document annotation lately, watch these PDFpen videos. I’ve embedded one of them below.