Home Screens – Shirantha Beddage

Last month we interviewed Apple Distinguished Educator, musician, and music teacher Shirantha Beddage (website) (Twitter) on Mac Power Users. Shirantha has released three jazz albums and is an excellent candidate for a Jazz Friday post here at MacSparky. Besides that, Shirantha’s enthusiasm for his music, his students, and using technology is infections. So Shirantha, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Oh, so many! On iPhone 7, I’m most frequently using Calendar, Maps (love the Apple Watch integration here!), Podcasts and Scanner Pro. Calendar and Maps are great for their clean interfaces and Watch integration. Scanner Pro has become an invaluable asset for capturing receipts on the go. As a small business owner (ie. musician), organization has always been a big challenge for me. I love the “workflow creator” in Scanner Pro, which helps me to capture my receipts as PDFs and send them into a Dropbox folder. These PDFs are then moved by Hazel into a Taxes folder on my home NAS server, which allows me to have everything in one place during tax season. Tempo Advance is my go-to metronome in a pinch, whether I’m dealing with simple music or complex polyrhythms. And I’m always firing up the Podcasts app, to stay up on my U.S. politics, true crime, and of course Mac Power Users.

I use my 12.9’’ iPad Pro for teaching and practicing exclusively. I don’t have email or calendars set up on it, as this device was provided by my school. For teaching, GoodNotes has become my PowerPoint replacement for classroom presentations. The handwriting recognition is remarkable, and the TV-out features help to eliminate distractions on-screen. For practicing, I use ForScore quite often. It’s a great all-in-one tool for reading PDF sheet music. I’ve been using it on live gigs as well, in situations where I’m more comfortable with my own mark-ups on the scores than the blank printed copies provided by the bandleader.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

At the moment, I’m having a lot of fun with Clips. It’s great on my 12.9’’ iPad Pro. This past summer, my Apple Distinguished Educator colleagues showed me how to use Instagram filters, so I’ve been playing around with those a bit, too. In case you’re wondering, I look great as a koala bear.

What app makes you most productive?

OmniFocus is the big winner here. On iPhone I use it for reference, or for inputting tasks via Siri, but I do the heavy lifting on my Mac. AirMail takes a close second prize. I love the snoozes, delayed replies, and integrations with other apps. AirMail helps me to stay fairly close to the coveted “zero inbox” (sweet bliss!).

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

The Camera app. Probably Workflow, too.

What is the app you are still missing?

I’m not sure I have a desire for any new apps at this point; I’m mostly thankful for the tools I have, and I’m trying to use them as best as I can. On the other hand, if there’s an app that could do the dishes…

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

I limit my iPad Pro to teaching and music practice, so my use varies from day to day. My iPhone is most frequently used as an music / podcast player, and I try to limit my use of e-mail apps to 2-3 times daily. Even then, I try to do most of my e-mailing on my Mac, because of the screen real estate, TextExpander snippets, etc. My texts and phone calls are usually handled on my Apple Watch. I check in with social media, briefly, once a day, maybe twice on my phone.

By nature, I think I’m an easily distracted person, so I have to constantly take steps to cultivate my focus in order to stay present in many facets of my life. The iPhone is a both a blessing and a curse for productivity, so I try and use it only as often as I need to. I turn off most notifications on my devices, and I take pleasure in powering down my phone or using Do Not Disturb mode when I can. I encourage my students to do the same, unless it’s absolutely necessary.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Calendar, Weather, OmniFocus, and Workflow, though I don’t use the Today view very much at all. 3D Touch seems to cover me most of the time.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

Apple’s stance on privacy. The iPhone and iPad provide a great mix of utility and usability, while protecting the privacy of the customer. I realize that it must be an enormous challenge to tread this fine line, especially since privacy and security issues are evolving at such a rapid pace.

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

I have no complaints whatsoever, and I’m excited to see the new surprises that Apple has in store for us in the coming months and years, but I’m the kind of person that enjoys “diving in” and spending the time to learn new technologies as they evolve. I’m also aware that not everyone feels the same way.

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

Yes! I use the Apple Watch more as a productivity / reminder aid than as an activity tracker. For that reason, I really like the Utility face on busy days; I can see the date, my next event, weather, Drafts, and Omnifocus. When I’m not so busy, I flip over to Timelapse face to avoid information overload.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

Stock images mostly. I like simple wallpapers with minimal busyness. Sand, calm waters, mountains, that sort of thing. Less distracting.

Anything else you’d like to share?

This was fun. Thank you!

Thank you Shirantha. Keep the jazz coming.

Star Wars Augmented Reality Promotion

Reuters is reporting that September 1-3 we are going to get augmented reality Star Wars characters on our iPhones at certain retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and … yes … Apple.

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“The hunt for “Star Wars” characters is scheduled to last three days and will coincide with “Force Friday II,” the day retailers start selling toys and other products tied to “The Last Jedi” with midnight openings around the world.”

— Reuters

Of course, this is something right in my wheelhouse. It may even compel me to go to a store, which I usually try to avoid.

One curiosity for me is that this AR stunt happens before iOS 11 ships so it will not be taking advantage of the remarkable AR support we’ll see in the next version of iOS. It will be interesting to see how well they pull it off without that advantage.

Free Agents 28: My Origin Story

In the latest episode of Free Agents, Jason asks me about my Free Agent origin story. The episode is full of navel-gazing and hippie nonsense, so you’ve been warned.

This week’s Free Agents sponsor is Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.

One More Go at iOS Text Manipulation

Now that my weapon of choice for text manipulation is getting shut down, I’m thinking about a replacement. Jon Voorhees over at MacStories pointed me to Clean Text (website)(App Store), a $2.99 app that has many of the same text cleaning features as TextTool 2 but without the automation. You can, however, create your own Regular Expressions, which isn’t automation but still pretty handy.

One interesting feature is the way Clean Text uses the iCloud back end to work in conjunction with the Clean Text Menu app for Mac.

I’ve downloaded and just started testing Clean Text and, so far, it is working as promised. The app was last updated May 8, 2017. The app already supports multitasking and split view. Hopefully it also goes all in with full support for iOS 11. Drag and drop could make a lot of sense with an app like this.

The Demise of TextTool 2

Yesterday I wrote about a really clever little IOS utility, TextTool 2. Shortly after I posted, the app developer announced he is ceasing development. He explained in his blog post that despite putting significant work into the application, Its total income was a little over $3,100.

I wish he had charged more for the application because it would’ve been worth it. There really isn’t anything else like this on iOS. Regardless, I need to pull back my recommendation of TextTool 2 since it is no longer in development.

iOS Text Transformations with TextTool 2

Longtime Mac users may be familiar with one of my favorite Mac utilities, Text Soap. The application lets you fix text just about every way possible. That’s great so long as you’re sitting at a Mac, but what about iOS?

There’s a solution for that as well. TextTool 2 (website)(App Store) is an iOS app for iPad and iPhone that has 27 built-in text transformations. There’s a lot this application can do to text on your iPhone or iPad.

• Add/Remove List Markers

• Affix Text

• Change Case

• Comment/Uncomment Code

• Dedupe Lines

• Educate/Simplify Text

• Escape/Unescape Metacharacters

• HTML Entities to Text/Text to HTML Entities

• Indent/Outdent Lines

• Join Lines/Split Text

• Remove First/Last Line

• Search/Replace

• Sort Lines

• Spaces to Tabs/Tabs to Spaces

• Trim Whitespace

• URL Encode/Decode

• Wrap Text Cleanly

If that’s not enough, it also has its own scripting engine (using JavaScript) allowing you to write your own text transformations. I am always working with text that has one sort of problem or another. If you work with text on iOS, get this app.

MPU 392 – So Many iOS Utilities

In this week’s episode of Mac Power Users , Katie and I look at our favorite iOS utilities. So many apps in so little time.

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Family Encryption

The Cloak VPN service, now getting renamed to Encrypt.Me, is offering a new family encryption service where you can have VPN services for everyone in your family of five for $12.99/month. I’m already a Cloak subscriber. The app is dead-simple to use and I’m often around public WiFi. It really isn’t that much more to upgrade to the family plan and put everyone on it. The question is, are we at a point where I need to get religion into my family about VPN security?

My initial reaction is that I’m being paranoid and my wife and kids would probably not bother with VPN even if I set them up with something as simple as Cloak. However, when I read the full extent of government and non-government snooping going on out there, I’m sorely tempted to put everyone on VPN. This sounds like fodder for a dinner table conversation.

Jazz Friday – The Kashmere Stage Band

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Recently I was riding in my daughter’s car and she was playing the soundtrack from Baby Driver (iTunes) (Apple Music) and this song came on that blew my mind a little bit. After a little investigation, I discovered it was a jazz band from the late 60’s and early 70’s from Houston Texas known as the Kashmere Stage Band. Further investigation revealed this was not a band formed of seasoned professionals but instead high school kids. Bandleader and teacher Conrad O. Johnson wrote arrangements for his band that were a unique mix of jazz and funk and he got such a sound out of his band. It just makes you want to dance. It’s a crazy story that eventually became the subject of a documentary film, Thunder Soul, (YouTube) produced by Jamie Foxx. You don’t have to go that deep if you don’t want to, however. Just stream or buy their album, Thunder Soul, and prepare yourself for some big band jazz, unlike anything you’ve heard before.