Home Screens – Kent Sutherland

This week’s home screen features Kent Sutherland (website)(Twitter). Kent is part of the Flexibits team and a pretty busy guy. Now that Kent has shipped the latest update to Fantastical and a brand new contact app, Cardhop, I asked Ken to share his home screen. So Ken, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Reeder is one of my favorite apps that also gets used all the time. I’m one of those weird people that still loves RSS feeds and uses them all the time. I also enjoy Words With Friends because it lets me distract myself occasionally and keep in touch with friends that I wouldn’t otherwise talk to as often. Pinner is used frequently so I can pull up saved recipies when I’m at the grocery store or when I’m cooking. For built-in apps, the Podcasts app gets used a lot although I’m not a fan of what happened to it with iOS 11 (it might be time to explore alternatives). Finally, it’s not on my home screen, but I don’t know how I’d type on my phone without Gboard.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Reddit, because it lets me look at stupid images and videos while I’m waiting for a bus or in line somewhere.

What app makes you most productive?

I’ve found my phone doesn’t really help make me productive, as getting real work done requires my Mac. Slack at least helps me keep track of our build system and any issues that might come up when I’m away from a computer though. Judging from my home screen, my phone is frequently used for communication (Viber, Facebook Messenger, Messages, Slack, and Words With Friends are all used for text messaging).

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

I should probably be using Pocket more often. I’d be a bit more efficient if I deferred reading for later, but I’ve gotten out of the habit.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

Who knows, but probably more than I’d expect. To try to minimize that number I often keep my phone on do not disturb while I’m at my computer, which helps to reduce the chance that I’ll get distracted by push notifications.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Fantastical in the expanded month view and Weather Underground. I’m pretty light on widgets, but I get regular use out of both of those. There’s only really room to see a couple of widgets at once, and I found I never used the others if I had to scroll down to get to them.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

My favorite little feature on the iPhone is the 3D Touch gesture to switch apps. I was distraught when they removed it from iOS 11, and I was very happy with they said it was coming back.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

In terms of iOS, I’d make iOS faster to use. The iPhone and iPad are fast computers now, but that speed is often locked behind all of the animations and gestures. For example, switching between two apps takes a second or two for the app switcher animation, then another to tap on another app and wait for it to appear. In my perfect world there would be an option to disable all of the unlock and app transition animations. I’ve used iOS enough to know exactly where on the screen everything is going to appear, and if I could tap without delay the time savings would add up quickly.

Do you have an Apple Watch? Show us your watch face tell us about it.

My watch it spends most of its life on the charger, as I’m not much of a watch person. It does get used to test Fantastical’s watch app and complications, and the timer occasionally comes in handy when I’m doing laundry.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

My wallpaper is one of the cloud and star pictures from a previous version of iOS that has long since been removed. My lock screen is a picture of a jellyfish that I took in a zoo. I set it a long time ago and it seems to have just stuck.

Thanks Kent … and great work with Cardhop!

MacVoices Appearance

My pal Brett Terpstra and I guested recently on MacVoices. We talked to Chuck Joiner about 60 Mac Tips, Volume 2, eBook distribution, and nerdy technology stuff in general.

Dropbox Professional

This week Dropbox announced a new individual tier, Dropbox Professional. For $20 a month you get 1 TB of storage, which is the same amount of storage with the Dropbox Plus plan at $10 a month. However, there are some additional features like smart sync, which lets you access all of your Dropbox-stored files without necessarily keeping them on your device and full-text search, which lets you search the contents of your files stored on Dropbox.

The sharing and collaboration tools also include some additional features including shared link controls which lets you manage access and visibility of shared documents.

At this point, I have largely divested myself of Dropbox except for some of its sharing features as I’ve been continuing my iCloud experiment. If iCloud didn’t exist, I probably would upgrade to the professional plan. The additional features are useful, mainly if you’re running on a laptop with limited storage. I do wish however that for $20/month they provided more storage than the same amount you get for the $10 tier. Dropbox has a page outlining the differences between the various individual plans.

Mac Power Users 401 – Big Questions

It’s time to clear out the big questions list again. In this episode, we cover strategy for buying an iPhone X, where we stand with AppleCare, the status of our dongles, iPhone storage options, presenting, the best voice-in-a-can solutions, and how we’re using social media.

Perfect Six with Brett

A few week ago I guested on Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast. You would probably think I did that to hawk the new book I wrote with Brett. In that case, you would be right … but only for a few minutes. We quickly moved on to picking some of our favorite things, and the intended 20 minute recording turned into 60 minutes in the blink of an eye.

Mac Power Users 400 – 4 Things

It seems like we just recorded our first show of the Mac Power Users a few days ago yet this week we released episode 400. Crazy. This episode is all about four things. Katie and I picked four of our favorite things in multiple tech categories of hardware and software. There are some gems in there. Also, since we hit episode 400, we went back to our roots with the theme music and it sounds great.

Home Screens – Chuck Joiner

Chuck Joiner’s with his Mac Voices podcast (website)(Twitter) is the James Lipton of our Mac community. He’s been delivering great content for years and today he agreed to share his home screen. Okay Chuck, show us your home screen.

What are Some of Your Favorite Apps?

Downcast for sure. It takes care of keeping all my podcasts downloaded and synced between my iPads, iPhone and Macs so that I can listen or watch to any of them any time, without having to spend time managing what is where. The capability of having custom speeds for each show subscribed to is also important, since some can be consumed easily at 2.5x, while others may only be listenable at 1.5x. My perception is that the algorithm for accelerated listening has improved over time, and the addition of an Apple Watch app puts the audio controls on my wrist if the phone is in my pocket.

Feedly also ranks high because I still use RSS feeds as a major part of my information flow. There are prettier feed-reading apps out there, but Feedly does what I want it to do in a no-nonsense format.

Camera+ is my go-to camera app because of its RAW shooting capabilities, and the best one-touch photo enhancement I’ve seen, though the new Photos in iOS 11 is making me re-think that. Lots of power in this one, but there is a bit of a learning curve to take advantage of all the features.

FiLMiC Pro is a favorite for its versatility and power as a video recording app. If you can’t capture the video you want with this app, then you can’t do it on an iPhone.

What app makes you most productive?

At this point, Apple’s Notes, because it lets my iPhone be an extension of my Mac in making and keeping information, project lists, and other items organized and in sync everywhere. Was using another solution before, but Notes makes it super easy.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Drafts. I know it can do so much, but I tend not to think of it until after the fact. That’s often half the battle with a new or under-used app – remembering what it can do for you and integrating it into your personal workflows.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

iThe Phone is in use almost constantly. Even if I’m at the office, it is out and in sight for incoming messages, alerts, etc. It is also a great second (or third) dedicated screen, even if it is just monitoring Twitter or email. Some might say that’s a distraction, but I see it as keeping what I need or want to know in front of me.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

With iOS 11, I’m just starting to dig in to the productivity features, but really like what I see, especially for the iPad.

3D Touch on the iPhone is another of those features that you have to remember to use. Once you get in the habit, it is amazingly powerful.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I would set up a team to monitor the Mac media and help the product teams prioritize a list of items that need to be addressed – both bug features and feature requests or reinstatements. That would be a huge challenge since every single user thinks their way and their needs should come first. Still, there are often common issues that crop up that should make their way to the top of the list.

Thanks Chuck.

Ulysses Updates to Support Drag and Drop on iOS

Today Ulysses released its iOS 11-friendly update. With this update, the interface follows a lot of the iOS 11 user interface conventions, like big text at the tops of lists. My favorite part of the update, however, is Drag and Drop support. You can now pick up and move individual text buckets and move them around inside Ulysses. This is, for me, the most useful new feature. I am continually moving notes around inside Ulysses, and now it is much easier (and faster). I also feel that, inherently, the Drag and Drop paradigm makes a lot more sense when working on the iPad or iPhone. The Drag and Drop also extend to other applications, letting you drag text passages and images between Ulysses and other application. One more new feature that made it to both the Mac and iOS application is image preview. Now you can see previews of your imported images.

Getting the Most from the Siri Watch Face

I have been using the Siri watch face with watchOS 4 as my primary watch face since iOS 11 shipped. Ordinarily, I am not a digital watch face guy. I grew up looking at analog watches and I’ve been primarily using those on the Apple Watch since it first arrived. Nevertheless, I like the idea of a smart watch face on the Apple Watch giving me more timely information, so I went in with the Siri watch face. Also, I spend a lot of time at the sharp end of the stick when it comes to Siri, so I had to give it a try.

The idea behind the Siri watch face is to contextually give users the information most relevant to them at the time. The face itself is the time with a few complications and a scrolling list of information boxes below that you can move throughout using the Digital Crown. Tapping on any of these boxes brings you into the source application. Tap on an event, for instance, and you go to the calendar app.

There are a lot of Apple applications acting as a data sources for the Siri watch face. Using the Apple Watch face you can get information as to when the sun will rise, the weather forecast, and upcoming appointments. It runs much deeper than that, however. Data sources can also include reminders, alarms, timers, the stopwatch, your wallet, workouts, meditation/breathing reminders, HomeKit notifications, what’s now playing on your media device, photos, and even news.

For the two complications, I use the one on the right to display the current date and the left one for OmniFocus.

There are a lot of applications feeding data into the Siri watch face. One of the first things I did was customize that. If you go into the Apple Watch settings application on your iPhone and tap on your Siri watch face, you get a screen that gives you several options to turn these data sources on or off. I left most of them on but turned off photos, because pictures on that tiny screen don’t make sense to me, and news, which I found to be too much of a distraction.

I have had a few pleasant surprises using the Siri watch face. I like the way it displays upcoming appointments. They are easy-to-read, and they disappear automatically as the day goes on. Rotating the Digital Crown up gives you future Siri chosen events and spinning the opposite direction brings up prior entries and if you’ve played audio recently, the last playing audio. This gives you an easy way to restart podcast or music from your wrist.

I’ve often been tempted to add the timer and alarm complications to my analog faces, but that complication space is so valuable. With the Siri face timers, stopwatch, and alarms only appear when in use so I get them when I need them and only that. Finally, the now playing entries are great for getting back into whatever audio you played last.

Overall, the convenience of the Siri watch face is enough to get me to stick with it despite my preference for analog faces. I’m going to keep using it for the foreseeable future. If you are going to use it, take the time to go into the settings application and customize the data sources to your preference.

My biggest wish for the Siri watch face is to see third-party applications get on that data source list. For instance, why can’t I get upcoming OmniFocus deadlines or Carrot Weather reports? Hopefully, that comes with future iterations.