PDF Troubles

I am receiving a lot of email lately from readers encountering PDF problems on the Mac. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Apparently with the release of macOS Sierra, Apple rewrote many of the PDFKit frameworks used in Preview and several other third party PDF applications. (This is why the Fujitsu ScanSnap took longer to become Sierra-friendly.) 

The underlying problem is that Apple wants to use the same foundational PDF code for both macOS and iOS. Sierra is where they started implementing this. Unfortunately, in doing so, they broke much of the code PDF apps rely upon. It was a good idea hatched too early. Adam Engst did his usual bang-up job talking to developers about this over at TidBITS.

I spend most of my time working with PDFs in PDFpen, which largely does not rely on Apple’s frameworks and works fine. After getting all this email, however, I decided to use Preview for a few days to see how bad it is. It’s a mess. Preview cannot not display (or properly save) some of my form PDFs and seems to be wiping the OCR text layer out of previously OCR’d PDFs.

I fully expect this will get fixed but in the meantime, I’m sticking with PDFpen and I recommend you do the same.

Chris Lattner on Accidental Tech Podcast

This week Chris Lattner, the recently departed Apple employee that pioneered the Swift programming language, guested on the Accidental Tech Podcast. The interview, overall, is very comforting for people worried about the future of Swift and other things Apple. The ATP gang handled the interview with aplomb. Listening to Chris made me want to jump deeper into learning Swift. If only I had a time turner.

I also like the fact that this interview took place on a podcast. 

Apple News – Worth a Second Look

Without thinking too much about it, I’ve switched over to Apple News as nearly my exclusive source for news over the past six months. The iOS 10 Apple News re-design works for me. As a frequent user of the iPad and iPhone I like the way Apple News fits into my workflow. It gives me notifications, but not nearly as many as other news sources. Likewise, when I’m in the lock screen, the Apple News widget gives me just what I need and no more.

Apple News does a good job of finding news interesting to me. However, at the same time I still get important news from other sources. Apple News doesn’t isolate me in my own little self-created bubble. I like that.

One of my favorite things about Apple News is that it is self contained. I can spend 20 minutes in the app and get a pretty good idea what’s going on in the world without falling into the news rabbit-hole, spending 3 hours reading and getting nothing else done.

Talking to some friends, it appears I’m not alone in coming around to Apple News. If you haven’t tried Apple News lately, you should.

MPU 360: Workflows with Charles Perry

This week Charles Perry, one of the organizers of the Release Notes conference, joins us to talk about turning his passion into a business, then a podcast, then a successful conference and the tools and logistics behind all of it.

Sponsors include:

  • Ministry of Supply: Dress smarter. Work smarter. Get a free pair of Smarter Dress Socks with your first purchase.
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Save up to 20% using this link.
  • The Omni Group We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad. 
  • Marketcircle We help small business grow with great Mac, iPhone and iPad apps including Daylight and Billings Pro.

Terminology 4.0 – A Word Tool


I spend a lot of time working with words so I am always looking for apps that can help me out. Terminology (Website) (App Store) is one of those apps. Terminology’s been in active development since 2010 and this week Agile Tortoise, the developer, released Terminology version 4.0. Features include:

Dictionary

There’s a full off-line root word dictionary and semantic reference with concise definitions for common words and phrases. 

Thesaurus

I use this feature often. It shows word relations, including synonyms and antonyms and it runs deeper than most of the other apps I’ve tried. This also works through an extension so you can look for new words from anywhere on iOS.

Reference Tool

You can use the application as a jumping off point for Google searches, Wikipedia, and other web resources. With the Pro version you can even make custom URL-based actions. Terminology is very automation friendly. This shouldn’t surprise you. It’s developed by the same guy that makes Drafts.

Terminology 4 is universal for iPhone and iPad and they have a new model with a free download and a $1.99 Pro unlock to remove ads and enable custom actions and dark mode. Below is a video showing off some of the features.

Sponsor: CardioBot Heart Rate and Activity Monitor



CardioBot Icon.png


Something you may not realize if you are wearing an Apple Watch is that it is checking your heart rate every 4 minutes during the day. (It’s much more frequent when you are working out.) Your heart rate data is really useful to understanding your overall health. Heart rate data helps assess periods of fat burning and high intensity during workouts and even helps you understand your sleep quality.



The problem is finding a way to access and comprehend that data. That’s where CardioBot comes in. CardioBot takes your heart rate data and displays it for you in easy to understand charts and graphs. It tracks your minimum, maximum, and average heart rate during the day. Here’s my data for January 14.

 

Moreover, when you workout there are additional charts showing the highest intensity, fat burning periods. In this workout I started with weights and later got on the treadmill, which really got my ticker going.



CardioBot doesn’t add to your battery drain. It simply takes your heart data and puts it in simple (and attractive!) charts that you can easily understand. 

CardioBot can also help you improve your sleep using detailed sleep analysis. I really like the design of this app and for just $3 it sure is nice to have easy access to my heart rate data. I’m looking forward to dropping this on my doctor at my next checkup. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, this one is absolutely worth it. You can find it today on the App Store.

 

Discounted Productivity Apps and Services

SaneBox has partnered up with several productivity apps and services to offer some nice discounts. There’s no purchase required. It’s just a group of services offering a discount. For example, you can get six months of free 1Password or 30% off TextExpander and Rescue Time. There’s a lot of services on this list to which I already subscribe and a few I’m thinking about trying out.

iOS Automation and Evolution

Sal Soghoian leaving Apple was bad news for those of us interested in automation. If that cloud has a silver lining, however, it’s that we get to hear more of Sal’s thoughts about automation on Apple platforms. Recently, Sal published this piece on MacStories which makes the case that extensions are simply not enough for true automation on iOS. I agree.

It seems that Apple truly believes the future of computing is all about iPad and iPhone, not the Mac. They are probably right. If you look at the way the hardware has advanced on iPad over the last few years, you can clearly see that this is enough computer for most people to get work done.

The hangup at this point is the software. The iOS operating system is not robust enough to get a lot of work done. Before you start emailing me, I understand there are a lot of people getting by with iPad alone. However that involves a lot of workarounds and accommodations that, frankly, we shouldn’t have to make.

If the iPad and iPhone are to take that next step, Apple’s going to have to ease up a bit on its emphasis of simplicity for iOS and add some more advanced features. A logical way for applications to communicate with each other is one way they could do this.

The question is whether or not Apple is committed to doing so. If the final decision out of Cupertino is that the iOS operating system should not get more complex and powerful, I don’t see how it evolves to further replace traditional computers.