Welcome to 2018! Want to get things better this year? A great way to start would be by discovering where you’re spending your time on your Mac.
This week’s sponsor, Timing, is a tool to help you get rolling. I realized several months ago I was increasingly under water with my own productivity. So I started drilling in on Timing, and it’s beautiful reports showing me where I was spending time. Timing is a timer app that doesn’t require you to manually start an stop timers. Instead, it pays super-close attention to everything you do on your Mac and then reports back to you.
Timings reports are always enlightening and sometimes brutally honest. Reading my own reports, I found that I was sinking a lot of time into some work-related tasks that could easily be off-loaded to someone else. So I did that and got back to work. After a few weeks, I had newer-fresher Timing data that helped me further get rid of unwanted work and identify my own personal time sucks.
The folks at Timing are serious about productivity. They even write about it on their blog with this post with some solid advice for New Year’s productivity and habits.
Timing doesn’t put your data in the cloud. 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.
Try the free 14-day trial and get 10% off until for a limited time using this link. Let Timing help you get 2018 started right.
In the latest episode of Mac Power Users, as we wrap up 2017 we take a look back at the workflows that worked for us in 2017 including paperless practice, writing workflows, cloud storage, hiring help and more. We also discuss the practices we intend to change in 2018, and gaze into the crystal ball and look at what we may expect from Apple in the year to come.
While I’ve never written a comic book, I’ve used a lot of the ComicBookFonts fonts for things like presentations, diagrams, and even legal presentations. Every year they have a massive sale on January 1 where pretty much everything is a penny per year, making everything this year $20.18. This is a significant savings with some of the fonts costing in the hundreds. If you’re looking for something to get started, I’d recommend Hedge Backwards or ComicCrazy
I’m currently on a family trip and as I was packing I stumbled across my camera bin. It’s a pretty big plastic bin in which I’ve kept spare lenses, caps, tripod mounting points, cleaning kits, and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam from my various cameras over the years. There was a lot of stuff in there that I’d forgot I owned. The last few years, I’ve been doing my photography exclusively with iPhone. Although I didn’t need anything from the box, I do still have a small camera kit for when I want to get fancy shoot pictures with my iPhone and I thought I’d share it here.
Click to enlarge all pictures in this post.
The Bag
This is a small sized packing cube that I bought with this set. I keep it in a handy place and it’s always ready to go with me, loaded with iPhone photo accessories.
Mounting Gear
The Glif
This is the latest iteration of the Glif tripod mounting point for the iPhone and by far, in my opinion, the best. With the new, easy ratchet feature I can attach any iPhone, regardless of whether any case is attached.
The Glif Handle
There is also a combo kit that includes a Glif and this turned piece of wood with a mounting screw on the top. I use it most often for shooting video. Combining this big handle with the iPhone’s software motion smoothing gets some really clean video.
The Joby Micro Tripod
This is the smallest tripod I’ve ever seen. It folds up to easily fits in the coin pocket of a pair of jeans. Indeed, it’s so small that I’ve misplaced one somewhere in my house and now I’ve got a second one. I like using this tripod for taking family pictures or even, in a jam, getting a long exposure of something interesting. I can’t tell you the number of pictures I’ve taken with the micro tripod holding my Glif-equipped iPhone while sitting on a table or even trash can.
The Joby Magnetic Tripod
This tripod is the most recent addition to my gear. It uses those Joby interlocking points to give it flexible, trappable legs and it also has magnets at the bottom of each foot giving you one more way to lock your camera down. I haven’t had the guts to hang it upside down for a photo using the magnets yet, but I’m tempted. I’m looking forward to trying this new tripod out on the trip.
Lenses
DxO One
The DxO One is a 20MB sensor that attaches to your iPhone via the Lightning port. It’s a replacement camera lens and sensor for your iPhone with a much bigger sensor than the one in your iPhone and capable of taking some nice pictures. I’ve had this several years now and while the battery is starting to show its age, I still find this lens useful. At this point, I only use the DxO for still images. In my opinion, the iPhone X takes better video than the DxO. It will be interesting to see how many more years before iPhone computational photography can advance to a point that I stop carrying the DxO, but we’re not there yet.
Moment Lenses
While I’ve always liked the idea of bolt-on lenses for iPhone, the mounting systems always make me weary. We’ve been talking about this on Mac Power Users and Moment sent me a few of theirlenses to try out on my trip. Moment lenses use a proprietary case that is the best solution I’ve seen yet. The case looks nice and has mounting points over the built-in iPhone lenses that let you screw the lenses onto the case. If you get a new iPhone with a different design, all you have to do is buy the new appropriate case and the lenses will work with it. This makes a solid, secure connection that you can remove in seconds. I can’t wait to take pictures with these lenses and report back. Pictured is their Fisheye and Wide lenses.
Lume Cube
I bought this a few years ago. It’s an LED-based external flash that can either sync to a specific iPhone app or just blast a backlight. I often use this to put a light behind or to the side of a subject for shots in the dark. LumeCube Kick-Started a new version that’s even smaller last year and I backed it. I can’t wait to have a second for even better non-flash lighting.
So that’s it. A small collection of gear put together over the years that help me take better pictures with my iPhone. One of the nice things about iPhone photography is that most times you don’t need a bag. I’ll normally pick and choose from this kit based on what I intend to shoot that day and usually, everything fits in my pockets.
In the latest episode of the Free Agents, we wrap up the year with a discussion of navigating holidays and vacations, my thoughts about getting projects to completion in the new year, Jason’s update to his Not-To-Do List, setting the bar high for taking on new clients, end-of-year appreciation gifts for clients, and holiday seasonality.
Last week Gabe Weatherhead wrote a post explaining how, for him, cloud syncing has become a non-issue. We discussed this recently on the Mac Power Users. It is remarkable how far we’ve come in the last five years concerning syncing data between multiple devices. At this point, I’m using two Macs, two iPads, and an iPhone and I spend very little time thinking about how or why my data is always in sync. As I am heading out the door, I will make my decision between an iPad and a Mac on a whim and no matter what I device I leave with I’ve got access to all the data I need provided there is an Internet connection.
It didn’t use to be that way. Just a few years ago, it required a lot of forethought before leaving and maybe running an application or two to manually sync data across devices. While Dropbox is the usual reason why this stuff works out so well, I’ve been using iCloud since the IOS 11 beta and had mostly the same results.
If there are any rough edges around syncing between multiple devices the days, it is application based. For example, I do a lot of work in iBooks Author, which is an application designed with little thought for synchronizing between multiple devices. While I store the iBooks Author file on iCloud storage, opening it up in two different instances on two different devices can lead to shenanigans. While users need to be aware of these edge cases, in large part the hardware and Internet backbone synchronization is all in place.
To me the obvious next step for technology companies after mastering synchronization is collaboration. Google is the front-runner in this space. Google documents and Google sheets synchronize flawlessly. Several elements of my MacSparky business are based on collaborative Google documents and Google Sheets, and it’s a service that I rely on every day. Apple is trying to up their collaboration game with iWork and Microsoft is doing the same with Office, but nobody has nailed this down as well as Google.
So one of the questions in my mind is whether or not collaboration is also something that will in the not so distant future become a solved problem. The necessary first step for all that is a reliable backbone synchronization engine. We have that. The next step is for software developers to take this problem seriously and give it the appropriate attention to make synchronization something that we can do without relying on the web-based applications. We’ve seen some steps in that direction, but I feel like we still have a long way to go.
Merry Christmas everybody. I hope you and your family are enjoying a great holiday. This year I shared my Yule jazz playlist, and its got lots of subscribers. I’ve heard from listeners that are using it for everything from cooking Christmas dinner to playing in the background while they perform surgery (that’s true!).
The new year is just around the corner, and maybe you’re thinking about a big project or two you want to get off the ground. That may take some quality Mac software and this week’s sponsor, the Winter Festival of Artisanal Software will get you sorted out.
WinterFest is a collection of some of the premier Mac developers all putting their software on sale at a significant discount. Get 25% off Tinderbox, Nisus Writer Pro, DEVONthink, Panorama X, TaskPaper, Scapple, PDFpen, HoudahSpot, and more. It’s like a greatest hits list from Mac Power Users, and they’re all on sale. There isn’t a single app on this list that I wouldn’t recommend.
So go check out WinterFest and get the tools you need to go on the attack in 2018.
In this episode, we break down all the ways to use your technology for the holidays including smart decorations, streaming audio (and David’s Yule playlist), managing parties with tech, recommended family-friendly Apple TV games, David’s holiday card production workflow and Katie’s envelope hacks, tracking gift giving, and setting up your network for visiting relatives and friends.
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When working on a laptop, especially the tiny MacBook, I use a lot of full-screen apps and then the macOS Spaces feature is a big help. You just three-finger swipe up on the trackpad, and you get something that looks like this. (Click to enlarge)
You can also three-finger swipe sideways between Spaces. I guess Apple’s data shows that a lot of people go sideways and few people go up to pick a particular app. I’m an outlier. Because I’ll often have ten or more apps running as I get work done this way, swiping sideways is tedious and feels more like playing a slot machine than getting work done. It’s much more efficient for me to swipe up and tap on the desired app.
The problem with macOS Spaces, however, is that by default, macOS re-arranges the Spaces automatically based on recent use. The idea is that you should be able to get the most recent apps the easiest. Again, I’m apparently an outlier. Just because I haven’t opened OmniFocus for a few hours doesn’t mean I want it to move down to the end of the line. This preference scrambles my apps every time I swipe up causing further unnecessary delay. Fortunately, you can turn the preference off.
With this turned off I manually set apps where I want them and then long sessions of switching between full-screen apps is quick and painless.
