This week, our original workflow guest, Merlin Mann, returns to the show to share how he’s getting so much work done on the iPad these days and the other bits of technology that make him happy.
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Sonos is a great speaker system. After much badgering from Mac Power Users listeners, I started investing in them several years ago, and now I have a collection of them throughout my house. However, where Sonos failed to keep up was voice control. As Amazon, Google, and now Apple all start releasing their speaker-in-a-can products with voice assistants built-in, consumers are finding it easier to use their voice to play their music rather than fiddle with an application on the phone.
I have several friends who swear by playing music through their Amazon Echo devices because it’s so easy. That has never been me. I love the sound of my Sonos system, and I can’t imagine playing Miles Davis through the crappy little speaker of my Amazon Echo. Actually, I did try it once while I was making waffles. It was terrible, so I washed my hands and played it properly through the Sonos system. I’m picky about these things. I’m not even sure the Apple HomePod is going to be Miles-worthy.
Nevertheless, the rest of the world is moving forward with voice-based audio systems, and Sonos is behind in the game. This past week they attempted to solve that problem in a few ways.
First, they partnered with Amazon to build the Amazon Echo into the new Sonos One speaker. This gives you the convenience of the Amazon Echo combined with the quality of the Sonos speakers. Moreover, just having one of these in your Sonos system should let you drive everything using your voice.
I have received a lot of emails asking if I’m going to buy one of these. I’m not. While I have an Amazon Echo in my house, I’m increasingly pushing toward Siri with HomeKit devices, and I would ideally like to have just one ecosystem.
The real sticking point for me is that I’m a happy Apple Music subscriber. My entire family, including the non-geeks, has a complete understanding of how to find and play music on Apple Music and they love it. I’ve got some killer playlists, and I like the integration with Siri. Since I am all in with Apple gear, using their music streaming service makes a lot of sense.
Whether the issue is Apple or Amazon (or both), I don’t know, but for whatever reason, Apple Music does not play through the Amazon Echo. To have a streaming service on your Amazon Echo, you need either Spotify or Amazon’s music streaming service. So even though Alexa can now talk to my Sonos, Alexa doesn’t have my Apple Music library, which in hindsight is one of the primary reasons I’m not so keen on adding more Echoes to my home.
That is, however, not the end of the story for Apple Music subscribers. Sonos also announced they’re going to be incorporating AirPlay 2 next year. This is a new technology announced by Apple back in June at WWDC. This next iteration of AirPlay should allow you to easily drive your audio to any compatible speaker system. It is, however, a lot more than that. It also allows you to cache music and control sending the music via Siri. Dave Hamilton wrote an extensive piece on the uses of AirPlay 2 over at the Mac Observer.
It is my sincere hope that when all of this gets sorted out, I will be able to control my Sonos system with my voice through Siri, playing my Apple Music playlists. In theory, this wouldn’t require me to buy any new speakers either. However, at this point, it is not an actual feature but instead a promise of a future feature. I hope Apple and Sonos can make that happen. In the meantime, if I want I want to play some music on my Sonos system, I have to take my phone out of my pocket and tap a few buttons, like an animal.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by the Omni Group, makers of some of the finest productivity software for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The Omni Group always jumps in with both feet for new operating system updates, and they didn’t disappoint this year.
All of their iPad and iPhone apps got updates for iOS 11. My favorites are, of course, OmniFocus, which now supports drag-and-drop both in-application and from third-party applications. Dragging an email from Apple Mail over to OmniFocus is a game-changer. You can also now add tasks to OmniFocus with Siri. Activate Siri and say, “In OmniFocus add take out the garbage” and you’ll get a new task, “Take out the Garbage” in OmniFocus with no further trouble. Drag and drop is equally useful in OmniGraffle.
Of course, The Omni Group has also updated its Mac apps to be fully compliant with High Sierra.
The Omni Group apps are a key to my own productivity. Every day I keep up with all of my obligation in large part because of the hard work being done at the Omni Group. They’ve got free trials for all of their applications, and if you’d like a hand, you should give the Omni Group a chance.
Joey Alexander, the jazz piano prodigy that continues to surprise me, released a new album, Joey. Monk. Live!, (iTunes)(Apple Music) where he played music from Thelonious Monk. I’ve written it before but I can’t get over how Joey plays with so much fire. I’ve heard a lot of prodigies that are technically excellent but yet their music still lacks soul. That’s not the case with Joey. This is a great album for the weekend.
This week I’m featuring my own iOS 11 iPad home screen, partly because it’s so weird. Here it is. (Click to enlarge.)
For a long time, I’ve kept all my apps on the home screen with everything not on the screen located in four folders. I’ve given those folders verb names, Make, Learn, Fix, and Play. Traditionally I opened apps from the home screen or one of those folders. I still do that on my iPhone.
To say I flipped out when Apple announced iOS 11 is an understatement. I installed beta 1 like a crazy man. One of my first observations about iOS 11 was that the dock is now much more important. It is prime real estate for apps, particularly if you like to use split screen multitasking. Unless you have your iPad connected to a keyboard, getting to apps to split the screen takes too many steps. At first I filled the dock with as many icons as it would accept but then they got too small and I use enough apps that I still didn’t have everything I regularly needed.
About halfway through the iOS 11 beta, I got the idea of putting all my apps on the dock. It started out as a sort-of joke so I could share screenshots of my iPad looking more like a Mac. The thing is though … it worked for me. So now my home screen is empty and my dock has a few essentials, but also my Make, Learn, Fix, and Play folders. Opening the folder to get to a split screen app feels silly but is still way faster than getting to an app on the home screen.
All of my nerd-friends think I’m crazy but I’ve been pretty happy with this setup. I think the tipping point for this is people that use multitasking without a keyboard. If that’s you, give this a try for a week.
The other thing I did was to turn off Suggested and Recent Apps to the right of my dock. I found I wasn’t paying attention to those so a few weeks ago I toggled them off in the Dock preferences tab. I haven’t missed them.
I love so many Apps. For this post, I want to focus on a few that particularly shine in iOS 11:
Gladys
There was a lot of talk prior to iOS 11 about adding a “shelf” to iOS. Federico Viticci did a great job of showing the advantage of such an interface in his iOS 11 concept video. Apple didn’t add a shelf but with the drag and drop tools, they made it possible for third party app developers to, in essence, make a shelf. The idea behind a shelf is a temporary space on your iPad where you can store things for later use, like digital walnuts you’re burying for winter.
There are a lot of developers releasing shelf apps and I’ve been buying and trying these as they release. I don’t know what app will rise to the top of this space but my current favorite is Gladys. With this app, I can drop most kinds of media, text, and links as I collect them on a project and, using slide over, have them available for use elsewhere as I work on my iPad. This is such a key tool for multitasking that I’ve put Gladys in my dock despite how much I dislike the icon.
Fantastical
Of course the Fantastical team was early to drag and drop. Not only can you now drag and drop events and reminders inside Fantastical, you can also pull events out of Fantastical and drop them in other apps. Drag an appointment out of Fantastical into an email and it becomes an ICS file. Drag some text into Fantastical and it creates an event using the dropped text.
OmniFocus
Drag and drop OmniFocus has been a game changer for me. Every day I start out auditing my email on the iPad with Apple Mail on the left and OmniFocus on the right. Much dragging and dropping ensues. One of the nice things is the link-back created in OmniFocus for linked emails works on both Mac and iOS. I’ve already started production on some screencasts around OmniFocus and iOS 11. It will be a free update to the OmniFocus Video Field Guide and I’ll be releasing it in the next month (hopefully a few weeks).
1Password
This is another app that jumped into drag and drop with both feet. The new 1Password lets me drag passwords onto web forms and re-arrange fields internally.
I feel like this drag and drop thing is going to only get better as app developers feed off each other’s ideas.
I’m spending a lot of time in iBooks lately. It’s not debugging one of my own iBooks but instead reading Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. A lot of Star Wars fiction is garbage. This is not.
If I were in charge at Apple, I would continue iterate on multitasking. One small change that I think could help would be to include Finder search at the top of the Control Center/Spaces screen. That’s accessible from a single swipe up from the bottom of the screen and would make it much easier to get to non-dock-based apps when multitasking.
Another advantage of putting everything in the dock is that I can use really nice wallpaper and see it all. Currently I’m using some concept art from the Disneyland Star Wars expansion. I change wallpapers often though.
Episode 31 of Free Agents is up. Relay FM Host and App Launch Map founder Aleen Simms joins us in this episdode to talk about her accidental fall into freelance work and setting high standards for her clients.
Today marks the release of the latest MacSparky Field Guide, 60 Mac Tips, Volume 2.
60 Mac Tips, Volume 2, is a collection of tricks and tips to make you more efficient on your Mac. There are 60 screencasts and two hours of video that explains why each tip or trick is special and how to use it on your Mac. Learn these tips and turn yourself into a Mac power user.
Among these 60 screencasts are tips on macOS, Siri for the Mac, using the keyboard, Spotlight, Automator, Safari, Mail, Apple Notes, Apple Photos, Terminal Tips, and third-party apps. After reading and watching these tips and tricks, you’ll be more efficient on your Mac than ever.
This book is part of the MacSparky Field Guide series, designed to empower Mac users with great information delivered with fun and panache. It was a lot of fun creating this book. I’m quite proud of it and I hope you dig it.
You can get this new book in the iBooks Store for a self-contained, downloadable book including all of the videos embedded for your Mac, iPad or iPhone. The iBooks Store version was created in iBooks Author and includes all of the whiz-bang interactivity that comes with it.
Alternatively, we also offer this book as a streaming/downloadable product from Vimeo. The Vimeo version also includes closed-captioning and higher fidelity video (1080 vs. 720 in the iBook).
It feels really good to release another FIeld Guide. Thank you all for the support. If you’d like to learn more about how we went about making this book, listen to this week’s Mac Power Users episode.
Brett and I have also updated Volume 1 of our 60 Mac Tips book to version 1.2. We’ve gone through and updated and replaced several of the tips in version 1. The update is free if you purchased the first version. Otherwise, you can get it on the iBooks Store or Vimeo Streaming/Download.
One change from the High Sierra macOS update is a slight modification to the command to print to PDF. Years ago I shared a tip about printing to PDF by holding down the Command key and pressing P twice. It’s a great tip and people still use it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in High Sierra. That is because Apple removed the ellipsis from the command. To fix this, go to your keyboard shortcuts and remove the ellipsis, and all will be good again. See the screenshot below and video for help.
Font geeks got our moment in last night’s Saturday Night Live. The punchline is the font used at the end.
This week I guested on the Incomparable podcast where we talked about my guilty pleasure, Star Wars Animation. If you enjoy the Galaxy Far, Far Away, this one’s for you.
