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.

Mac Power Users 399: Workflows with Merlin Mann

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.

Sonos and Apple Music

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.

The Omni Group is Ready for iOS 11 and High Sierra (Sponsor)

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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.

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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.