As one of its first big television content deals, Apple has announced it’s going to be working with Steven Spielberg to produce a new series of Amazing Stories. I was all in the first time Spielberg made the Amazing Stories television series. That was some great TV. (If you’re looking for a good episode to get started, check out season 1, episode 5, “The Mission”.) As a child of the 70s and 80s, I personally can’t wait to see the new Amazing Stories, and I’m glad that Apple is spending some of its truckloads of money on content other than Carpool Karaoke.
Timing Makes Time-Tracking Easy (Sponsor)
This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing, my tool for tracking time on my Mac. Knowing how you spend your time is one of the most useful bits of knowledge you can have when deciding on new (and old) commitments. I’ve gone deep down the rabbit hole of time tracking as I try to figure things out for my own sanity and this week’s sponsor, Timing, has been an essential tool for me.
Time tracking is hard. Having to throw a switch somewhere every time you change tasks or projects never works and is super-distracting. As a result, you end up with bad data.
Timing fixes that. Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use — without start/stop timers.
- See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing.
- Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead!
- Timing also understands that your time tracking data is super sensitive, so Timing keeps it safe on your Mac.
In short, with Timing you get detailed information about how you spend your time on your Mac with zero work on your behalf. Try it yourself with the free 14-day trial and get 10% off if you buy in the next two weeks.
Unrelated but cool – The developers of Timing have also recently released Faviconographer, a free utility that adds Favicons to your Safari tabs. If you ever found yourself wanting those icons on your tabs for easier navigation, check it out!
App Camp 2020
App Camp is an outstanding program working to fix the gender imbalance in technology and giving the campers (and volunteers) a lifetime of memories. My wife and I helped out with the recent App Camp in Orange County, and we’re thrilled to see them expanding. They have a big fundraiser going on right now, and every little bit helps. It doesn’t take long to make a contribution. They even take Apple Pay.
BBEdit 12
Today marks the release of BBEdit 12.0. There is a long list of new and improved features. There are plenty of minimal text editors out there but only one BBEdit power tool. Using BBEdit, you can do nearly anything to a text file. This app is so powerful that I know web developers that have switched to the Mac for the sole purpose of using BBEdit.
I use BBEdit when I need its power. For example I used it recently on a complicated search and replace to a big pile of text using regular expressions. That simply wan’t possible with every other text editor in my arsenal but it was laughably easy for BBEdit. Jason Snell writes in BBEdit every day. His comments on the new version are excellent.
Home Screens – Peter Lewis
This week’s home screen feature Peter Lewis, maker of Keyboard Maestro, which recently got a nice update, one of my favorite productivity apps on the Mac. Peter not only shared his home screen but also some of his favorite apps on both iOS and Mac. So Peter, show us your home screen.
What are some of your favorite apps?
BBEdit (forever!), PCalc and NetNewsWire 3 are always running, and Acorn and Interarchy are also mainstays. Mail and Xcode are always running too, but I wouldn’t call either if them “favorites”.
Which app is your guilty pleasure?
Really Bad Chess on the iPad. That and chesstempo.com.
What app makes you most productive?
Keyboard Maestro. Self-serving comment, sure, but other than Xcode, nothing is more important to my productivity.
What app do you know you’re underutilizing?
Script Debugger. I’m not a particularly competent AppleScripter. I’m hopeful that Script Debugger will help improve that, but so far I’ve failed to get the most out of it.
What is the app you are still missing?
Not so much an app, but the whole home automation space seems almost entirely untapped in terms of potential. That said, I really don’t understand people putting Internet connected microphones and cameras in their living rooms (or heaven forbid, their bedrooms!). But I’d definitely like to see some massive improvements in this space, and an iPad’s size is probably a perfect fit for the controller.
How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?
iPad at night to play games. I use my iPhone sporadically but not for much, just for boring “Smart Phone” stuff like phone calls, Messages, and Maps.
What Today View widgets are you using and why?
I use Workflow, but only for a few trivial tasks, mostly just emailing myself notes. None of my iPhone widgets really get much use — since I work from home on my Mac, I generally have access to my Mac whenever I want to do something, and so I don’t need to try to shoehorn myself into a 4″ screen.
What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?
My favorite new feature is the “remember where I parked”, although I’m looking forward to speed limits and lane guidance when it eventually comes to Australia.
If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?
A massive increase on the primacy of software quality. There are just too many bugs shipping currently. I’d also like to see a re-focus on the Mac and accept the duality, and free up the iPad/iPhone to be what they are good at instead of making them so complicated that they lose the simplicity advantage they had.
Thanks Peter.
iCloud Text Replacement
There has been a lot of press the last few weeks over iCloud’s lackluster text replacement feature. Brian Stucki wrote an excellent post documenting just how bad the service is.
I have to admit that I forgot iCloud even provided text replacement services. For years I would eagerly test out iCloud text replacement when there was a new version of iOS, but after a while I gave up. I could never get it to work reliably. Indeed, I wasted so much time trying to get it to work that I ultimately gave up and stopped trying.
I left my old job a few years ago, and iCloud text replacement still tries to occasionally drop in that old phone number even though I’ve fixed that entry repeatedly.
I think that is one of the challenges of iCloud. It covers so many different services that it’s easy to lose one or two in the mix, especially when it’s one that doesn’t work reliably. That has certainly been the case with the text replacement feature.
The good news is that Apple is now moving text replacement onto the CloudKit API, which is much more reliable and should, hopefully, solve the problem once and for all. Indeed, Apple representatives told John Gruber that this rollout would happen “in the next month or so“. I sure hope so.
10 Years of MacSparky
This year I’m celebrating 10 years of MacSparky.com.
It’s hard to believe that a decade has gone by with me writing to the internet. In some ways, it feels like much less time. In other ways, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing for this site.
When I was in college, I spent a significant amount of time studying the founding fathers. It seemed everyone had their own newspaper back then. Every kooky political belief had its own platform. In the 1980s, when I was in college, there were, realistically, three big media companies running the whole show. I was jealous of a time where anyone with an interesting idea could easily publish that to the public.
With that in mind, you can see why I gravitated toward the internet. But instead of writing about politics, I wanted to write about my love of getting work done and using Apple products to do so.
Starting this blog was one of the smartest things I’ve done in my lifetime. It’s led to many wonderful friendships, a separate career in the publishing business, and ultimately my escape from a law firm into a lifestyle that works a lot better for me. In short, it saved me.
Thank you all for reading. As long as you keep showing up, I’ll keep writing.
64 and 256
I recently spent some time in the Apple Store looking at the iPhone 8. There’s a lot to like about the new iPhone. It’s substantially better than its predecessor, and the glass back makes more of a difference than I thought it would. It’s silly but one the thing that pleased me is the memory configurations of the new iPhone. By making just two options at 64GB and 256GB, Apple is correcting what I think has been a problem for years. No longer does someone buying an entry-level iPhone get a handicapped device. For so long, Apple was selling the entry-level iPhone at 16GB, which was not enough. Apple raised the entry-level iPhone to 32GB last year, but this new dual option policy where a user can get either 64GB (which is just fine for most people) or 256GB (which is just fine for the power users) makes a lot more sense.
No longer do I have to watch somebody buying a brand new 16GB iPhone in the Apple Store and restrain myself from telling a complete stranger they’re making a mistake. I’m glad Apple has made this right.
The End of the Line for Windows Phone
Microsoft’s head of mobile business, Joe Belviore recently tweeted that Windows Phone will get no new features.
Of course we’ll continue to support the platform.. bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features/hw aren’t the focus. 😟 https://t.co/0CH9TZdIFu
— Joe Belfiore (@joebelfiore) October 8, 2017
Ack.
I actually liked Windows Phone as a different take from the iPhone. It seems to me they were just too late to the market to ever get a foothold.
Regardless, I can’t help but think of the funeral Microsoft threw for the iPhone a few years ago. They had a hearse, pallbearers, and even bagpipes. Bagpipes! Looks like they were wrong about that.
Pixelmator 3.7 Mount Whitney
Pixelmator got its High Sierra update late last week. The new version lets you now launch Pixelmator directly from the Photos App and save edits back to your original image. It’s nice to have this feature back on the Mac. Pixelmator also now supports the new Apple HEIF image format.
There are a bunch more small updates and fixes including fixing an Automator script bug. That little fix is one of the big reasons I am a Pixelmator user. They focus on Apple software and cover their bases on even the most obscure Mac-only features, even Automator.
Version 3.7 is a free update. Learn more directly from Pixelmator.