MPU 366: Brett Terpstra Returns

Brett Terpstra (“DRINK”) is one of my favorite MPU guests. Brett joined us this week and doesn’t disappoint.

Screencast – Making a Meme with Pixelmator

Why not have a little fun at someone else’s expense? Here’s how you make a meme with Pixelmator.

OmniOutliner Essentials

This week Ken Case of the Omni Group announced the upcoming OmniOutliner Essentials. It is a focused version of OmniOutliner that doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles you get from OmniOutliner Pro but still a wicked useful outlining application. The best part is that they are going to sell this for just $9.99. There is also a price reduction on OmniOutliner Pro. As they work towards the release of OmniOutliner 5, OmniOutliner Essentials is available for public test.

The first version of OmniOutliner I purchased was in a box at a computer store. Those stores are all gone but OmniOutliner continues to evolve.

The 10.5 inch iPad

Today the rumor sites are abuzz with the “delay” of the new iPads. I always find it funny how the press reports something is “delayed” which has never been publicly announced.

Nevertheless, Apple finds itself in that place once again with the rumored 10.5 inch iPad Pro. I’ve not written anything about this new iPad yet but there are many rumors at this point that it’s probably a real thing. This hypothetical iPad gets rid of the bezel and manages to get a 10.5 inch edge-to-edge screen on a 9.7 inch iPad-sized device. I think it’s a great idea.

An edge-to-edge screen makes the standard size iPad all that much more useful for making things in addition to consuming things. It may offer users the best of both worlds with a large screen and portability.

I’ve currently got both sizes of the iPad Pro and find myself using the larger screen for very particular projects–like reading sheet music, editing PDFs, or working on a detailed document in Microsoft Word–while I use the smaller iPad for most of the day-to-day tasks–like managing OmniFocus, answering email, and the like. I’d be curious to see if a 10.5 inch screen is good enough for everything. Either way, if the rumors are right, were not going to hear about this until May or June.

Looking at Tags … Again

Lately I’ve been thinking about making another run at file tagging. It’s kind of funny how these tech issues percolate up. It all started with some receipts that I wanted to save to both client folders and tax folders. I found myself creating duplicates to have them in two places at once, which rubs me, someone who used to save computer data onto a cassette tape, as fundamentally wrong.

Tags would solve that problem. I could barf tags all over the file and then find it easily enough later with any index. Spotlight is good for this. Houdahspot is even better.

Then I had another problem with a backlog of unfiled documents. I’ve got Hazle trained to auto-sort a lot of documents that come my way but between my various careers I also get a lot of oddball one-timer documents that don’t really lend themselves to Hazel rule creation. However, if tagged, Hazel could easily land those documents in the various big bucket folders in my system.

So I’m looking at a hybrid tagging system that will still work with folders at some level but also rely on tags to help sort, store, and find files. There still are a lot of downsides to tagging. It takes extra time and it has very shaky support on iOS. I’m making a list of problems as I go.

I’m only a few days into this new experiment so I’m not going to share results until I dive deeper but I will say early results are promissing. I’ll report back on this next month.

Free Agents 15 – Getting Paid

There’s a new episode of the Free Agents podcast. In this episode we discuss why the sign of a true professional is ensuring that they’re being compensated. Why is getting paid so hard? How do we handle billing? When you’re on your own, you’re the one who has to make sure that the money is flowing in. If you don’t get paid, you won’t be an independent worker for very long.

Too Busy with Brett Terpstra

This week I guested on Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast where I talked about being too busy.

MPU 365 – Maps and More

It took us 365 episodes but Katie and I finally got to an indepth look at at the available mapping and navigation options for your Apple gear.

This episode is sponsored by:

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