The latest episode of the Free Agents is up. John Voorhees of MacStories is a brand-new free agent, a lawyer who left his job in Chicago to set out on his own as a writer and app developer. He tells us how he decided to leave the legal profession and go full time as an independent worker.
With all the news coming out on the iMac Pro, Jason Snell wrote a thoughtful piece over at Macworld about the pluses and minuses of the new machine. If my email inbox is any indication, this question is on a lot of people’s mind. Jason’s article explains some of the usage cases where the iMac Pro makes the most sense. The article also explains you may want it just because you want the biggest, baddest iMac out there. If that’s you, I get that. I’ve blown money on far dumber things than a kick-ass iMac.
One point I would make, however, is that if you just need raw power and you can afford to wait to see what Apple does with the new Mac Pro (presumably sometime in 2018), you probably should. My guess is that the new Mac Pro will have more processor speed and be more upgradeable than the iMac Pro, but also be more expensive and require you to buy a separate monitor.
As for me, I’m not tempted. My existing 5K iMac is chugging along quite nicely. The hardest thing I make this computer do is render iBooks and screencast videos and the standard iMac is very much up to that task.
The Apple iMac Pro website has a lot more details about what this sexy looking iMac can do. The whole thing is pretty crazy. Up to 18 cores, 4TB SSD, 42MB Cache, Radeon Pro Graphics, and 128GB Ram.
Marques Brownlee has had one for a week and made a video about it. It’s going to be fascinating to see how much a fully loaded iMac Pro goes for. We’ll find out in a few days.
9to5 Mac reports a discovered zero-day Home Kit vulnerability that allowed bad guys to open automated locks and garage doors. They’ve reported it to Apple and Apple has closed the door server-side with a further update expected next week.
If Craig Federighi wasn’t a drinking man a few weeks ago, I’m guessing he is one now.
For years, I’ve been using defer dates to manage the flow of work in OmniFocus. I’ll often push projects out days, weeks, or even months so they disappear from the radar until a later time. Using this method, I’ve generally been able to keep my daily task list to something manageable while at the same time knowing all that other stuff is managed.
With lots of little projects, managing those defer dates can get tedious. It’s the end of the year, so I’m doing lots of small corporate compliance-type projects for legal clients. As a result, I realized I’m spending more time than usual managing defer dates in OmniFocus.
So I decided to a little experiment where I’d stop using defer dates for awhile. Over the last few weeks, my list of available tasks in OmniFocus has swelled to hundreds of items. For this experiment, I’m accepting that I’m not going to finish that long list any particular day. Instead, I’m simply flagging the priority items as they show up. (I’m trying to keep that to 3-5 tasks a day.) Once I knock out the flagged tasks – hopefully before lunch – I’m then just working contexts, projects and the other ways OmniFocus can slice and dice my task list until the end of the day.
This experiment has been interesting. On the plus side, I don’t feel compelled to spend as much time managing defer dates. I still use defer dates but now only where they make sense. For instance if I’m going through the big list and see something about paying a bill next month, I’ll defer that task to next month. Before this experiment, going through that general finance project, I’d defer everything except for those items I intended to finish that particular day. Another advantage is that you don’t feel lousy at the end of the day if your task list looks untouched. Micro-managing defer dates, as I’ve historically done, can make you feel miserable if you set up your tasks carefully in the morning only to get none (or very few) of them done during the day. With this alternative system, it doesn’t work that way. I’d argue a third benefit is that this system is a little more forgiving for flow and energy. My prior system of limiting the daily list to just a few items can at times be artificial and the projects that you ear-mark in the morning may turn out to be the wrong projects for you 6 hours later. Being able to snipe through my big list at will can feel more productive and more consistent with how I’m feeling at the moment.
While you may think this new method takes less time to manage (since you aren’t constantly juggling start dates), I’m not sure that’s true. You still need to manage your tasks. This requires you to be double sure nothing important gets lost in the noise. If I don’t flag or set a deadline for a task, it can easily get lost among its hundreds of brethren. Taking the time to properly read through what is out there is important. I think working this way also makes having a reliable project review practice important. Additionally, with this big list system, you lose that ability to see a list of 15 just things in the morning and the satisfaction of knocking them all down by the end of the day.
I’m only a few weeks into this experiment but it nice to mix things up every once in awhile and I can report at this point that the experiment isn’t an abject failure. I’m finding things I like about this method and other things I don’t. At this point, I’m extending the OmniFocus experiment until the new year to see how things go. I’ll report back then.
MarsEdit, one of the premier Mac blogging applications got updated today to version 4. This new version has seven years of development behind it and a lot of new features including a new look, additional WordpPress support, additional editor improvements and automatic preview template generation. There’s a lot to this.
I used MarsEdit extensively back when MacSparky was on WordPress and it was a great solution. These days I’m on SquareSpace, which doesn’t play nice with third-party editors, but if you are blogging on anything other than SquareSpace, I’d recommend downloading the new MarsEdit and giving the free trial a spin.
For a long time, Apple’s built-in text replacement system has been unreliable at best. A few months ago Brian Stucki went deep on the problems with Apple Text Replacement, and it got a lot of attention on the Internet. In my mind, the inability to synchronize text expansion snippets was one of iCloud’s biggest black eyes … for years.
Anyway, all this attention appears to have led to Apple letting John Gruber know that they were aware of the problem and in the process of fixing the underlying iCloud sync for text replacements and promising that things would get better soon.
They did.
As of this morning, Text Replacement syncing is working immediately across my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. This has never worked reliably for me in the past. In the past, I’ve reset (and even nuked) my devices trying to get this feature to work to now avail. I had to grin a bit as I was looking at the now-syncing text snippets as so many previously lost snippets were resurrected. There about ten separate “test” snippets as I’d tried over the years to get this to work. Also, I had one snippet that refused to die. It was the phone number I had for my old law firm. I haven’t worked there for over two years, and the snippet would still fire off despite my best efforts to kill it. Today I deleted it, and it vanished from all devices instantly.
You may ask now that we have working text replacement from Apple, do you still need something like TextExpander. I certainly do. Take this as you will since TextExpander sometimes sponsors my podcast, but TextExpander still runs circles around native text replacement. Autofill, date and time tokens, Tab keys, rich text, and images are just a few of the reasons why I still use TextExpander for most of this stuff. Nevertheless, it is nice that Apple finally got this sorted out.
In this week’s episode of Mac Power Users, game developer and all-around-geek Shahid Kamal Ahmad joins us to talk about Apple hardware, software, and workflows.
This week for Jazz Friday, I’m featuring the Bill Evans’ cover of Santa Claus is Coming to Town from 1964. This is a weird track. It’s the only Christmas tune buried on Evans’ Trio 64 album released in January 1964. I’m guessing it is a live recording from the holiday season of 1963. They probably played it for giggles and then decided to put it on the album because what musician isn’t at least a little interested in holiday music residuals?
Anyway, to continue the weirdness, the song starts with this odd, loping, off meter melody. Go ahead and tap your foot to the beginning of this song. I dare you. Then it gets a more straight ahead feel, including a most excellent bass solo by Gary Peacock. The whole thing is quintessential Bill Evans. It’s so easy to cover traditional holiday music. I like it when musicians decide to mix it up a bit and this track does that.
I’m going to cover some more holiday jazz through December but if you’d like to cut to the end, here’s my Jazz Yule Apple Music playlist. Enjoy
Many years ago, I spent something like $30 to purchase Pixelmator for my Mac. For years now, that application has served as that little bit extra for me when Photos isn’t up to the task. This week Pixelmator released Pixelmator Pro, I significant upgrade to the original. There’s a whole list of additional tools and an excellent video showing you the basics of Pixelmator Pro.
There is a lot to the new Pixelmator including improved layout tools, way better painting support, photo adjustments of seemingly every kind and nature, easy application of nondestructive effects, and more. Having only used the app a few days, I’m really digging the new repair tool.
As with the original, Pixelmator Pro is entirely a Mac app and takes advantage of every dirty trick Apple lets developers use including Metal 2, Core Image, use of the graphics chip for processing, and machine learning-enhanced editing features.
At $60, this is a significant investment but it is also a significant upgrade in the image and vector tools available in the original. Pixelmator seems to be holding the line about not going to a subscription model and it is nice that you pay once and you’re done. Likewise, the Pixelmator team issued a lot of updates to the original Pixelmator over the years and I fully expect them to do the same with Pixelmator Pro. I guess what I’m trying to do here is justify the fact that I spent $60 on the new Pixelmator but I expect I won’t have any regrets.
If you’re looking to get some better image and vector tools, go check out Pixelmator Pro.
