MPU Plus: A Christmas Wish

We just published a feedback show at the Mac Power Users.Topics include direct attached storage, auto-mounting volumes, iPad mini vs. Pro, recording Keynote presentations, using WeMo and MyQ with HomeKit and feedback on managing subscriptions, gift ideas and the new MacBook Pro.

Sponsors include:

  • The Omni Group We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad. 
  • MindNode MindNode makes mind maping easy.
  • Casper: Because everyone deserves a great night sleep. Get $50 off with the code ‘MPU’

Google PhotoScan

Google has released a clever new application, PhotoScan, that lets you digitize snap shots. The clever part is the way it assists you in moving the camera around the picture in order to remove glare. I’ve never seen this technique where the user moves the camera around the glare but it absolutely works. I tested it with some old family photos and it works great, particularly old photos with not-so-great resolution to begin with.

Once the photos are scanned in, you can save them to Google Photos (of course) or your Photos library. Below are a few screenshots from my tests.

While Photo Scan Works

While Photo Scan Works

You move the empty circle over each of the solid circles, giving the camera different looks at the photo which results in …

A Captured Snapshot without Glare

A Captured Snapshot without Glare

While Photo Scan Works
A Captured Snapshot without Glare

Ulysses 2.7

Today Ulysses got a significant update to version 2.7. The new version adds several useful features.


Touch Bar Support

This new version fully supports the Touch Bar. It is interesting to note how some developers are using the Touch Bar to replace keyboard shortcut functions and others are using it to add new and different functionality. It is still early days and, since I am already pretty handy with keyboard shortcuts, I prefer the new functionality model. Ulysses’ update includes a little bit of both. It’s obvious that conscientious app developers are struggling with how best to take advantage of the Touch Bar and I expect the design language around the Touch Bar is going to evolve quite a bit in the next year.

Sierra Tabs

The Sierra update made it easy to add tabs to any application. This makes a ton of sense in an application like Ulysses and now it supports it.

There is More

Additionally, the new version supports storing images in external folders and Evernote import. Is it just me or does it seem like a lot of developers are finding ways to accommodate unhappy Evernote users?

This is a nice update for Ulysses and I’m happy to see the continued development and support. You can read more about the Ulysses update on their blog.

MPU: Setting Up Your New Mac

On this week’s Mac Power Users episode, Katie and I walk through all the steps necessary to set up your brand-new Macintosh.

Sponsors include:

  • Squarespace: Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • Pearl RearVision: The wireless backup camera redefined.
  • PDFpen from Smile With powerful PDF editing tools, available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, PDFpen from Smile makes you a Mac Power User.
  • Making Light Get (or give!) a candle subscription and make some new habits. Use offer code “MPU”.

Sponsor: Track Your Time Automatically with Timing




I’m pleased to welcome back Timing as this week’s MacSparky sponsor. Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but the ability to know how you’re spending your time on your Mac is a great way to find holes in your productivity. I’m a believer in time trackers but manual time trackers suck. They are a distraction and I always forget to use them. 

This is where Timing comes in. Instead of making you do all the work, Timing automatically tracks how you spend your time. It logs which apps you use, which websites you visit, and which documents you edit. You can easily categorize activities into projects.

With Timing you can look back at the end of the day or week and see where you got work done and where you got lost. You can also reconstruct how many hours you spent working on a specific client project. 

Timing does the job and gets out of your way. It’s a one-time purchase (no subscription) of $39, but with the coupon code MACSPARKY, it drops to $29. That’s right … I twisted their arm to give you $10 off, though only until the end of the week. So give it a try and see if you can’t fine tune your own productivity heading into 2017.

∞
 



The Dangers of Knock-Off Power Adapters

Chartered Trading Standards Institute, a UK-based consumer safety company tested 400 chargers they purchased online and found that just 3 of them had adequate insulation. This issue is increasingly coming to light as we discover that many devices sold by Amazon and other online retailers are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Wondering if you have a dangerous charger? Trading Standards, via the BBC, has some pointers:

How to spot a dangerous fake charger

  1. Plug pins – Plug the charger into a socket, but don’t switch it on or connect to a device. If the charger does not fit easily, the pins may be the wrong size. There should be at least 9.5mm (0.3in) between the edge of the pins and the edge of the charger
  2. Markings – Look for a manufacturers’ brand name or logo, model and batch number. Check for the “CE” safety mark, but be aware it can be easily forged
  3. Warnings and instructions – User instructions should include conditions and limitations of use, how to operate the charger safely, basic electric safety guidance and details of safe disposal

The problem with all of this is that these shoddy manufacturers are shameless. They’ll forge all the CE markings and overall do a good job of making their power adapters look like the real thing on the outside while on the inside they are dangerous junk. At this point, there is no way I’d buy a charger for any Apple product from anyone other than Apple. I fully expect in 2017 we’ll start discovering how many online venders are also selling crappy USB-C adapters and cables as well. Be careful out there.

Home Screens – Todd Peterson


Lately I’ve struck up an email friendship with Todd Peterson, the Director of Project-Based Learning and Professor of English at Southern Utah University. Not surprisingly, Todd is an articulate guy and pretty passionate about his new iPhone 7. Thankfully, he’s agreed to share his home screen with us. So Todd, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

Flic

This app helps me review and delete pictures I don’t want to keep. It’s step one of my developing photo organization workflow. My old process was untenable. This app gets me going in the right direction.

Scannable

Evernote is my digital filing cabinet. I love the OCR, searchability, and relational algorithms in it. Evernote helps me find cool associations in the menagerie of things I capture and store. Because of iPhone scanning, I now keep a large piece of black poster board by my desk, which makes a great contrasting background for auto-edge detection.

Drafts

This is my workhorse application. It’s helped me eliminate the stacks of scraps paper. The prepend and append functions are amazing. When I’m waiting for a meeting (or bored in one) I will process captured bits of text. It’s very satisfying to have all that material in the cloud and findable. 

Ulysses

I love this application. I’m currently revising a novel for an agent using this application. The sync is spot on, and the iPhone 7 Plus is big enough, I’ve found I can actually write and edit a little on it in a pinch.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Instagram. I’ve been working on curating a pretty good list of friends and strangers. I love peeking into their lives and seeing various bits of the world throughout the day. I also love to capture my own moments (a lot of my kids) and post them. My wife and high school-age-daughter are both on Instagram and they say the photographs really capture our family. It’s a delightful, politics-free way to interact with others.

What app makes you most productive? 

Slack. There are so many reasons why this has been a break through for me as a college professor. I can’t even start into it, or this post would be 10,000 words long.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

OmniFocus. It’s such an important application for me, and I know I’m only using about 30% of it. I could do so much more with time estimates, views, perspectives, and geofencing. I need to take a day with the Mac Sparky OmniFocus Field Guide and play around.

What is the app you are still missing?

Drafts for desktop. Drafts has so fundamentally changed my idea of how to capture and process ideas, that I feel shackled on a desktop. When an idea hits while I’m working on my MacBook Pro, I’ll often go to my phone to capture and process it.

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

Since I have Apple Watch, my iPhone use has gone down. I’ve filtered and sorted notifications so I can focus. As a college professor, a lot of my work is headdown thinking, reading, writing, planning, and grading. Distractions kill my momentum. I’ve also recently pulled all social media apps from my iPhone except Instagram, so I’ve only got my head in my phone a couple of times an hour. Before these changes, it was ridiculous with how often I checked my phone.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Up Next

I’m always forgetting about meetings I’ve scheduled. It was worse when other people were scheduling for me. It’s better, actually, now that I schedule myself, but I need to keep those promises right up in front.

Kindle

I have so many books in the cloud, this widget reminds me of what I’m currently reading, and I love how it shows progress. Instead of grazing social media when I have a spare moment, I swipe into notifications, tap, and read. 

Dark Sky

I love this app so much, and I like being able to quickly tell my kids why they can’t leave the house without a jacket even though it seems fine right now.

Stocard

My key ring was getting shaggy with all those dumb-but-necessary bar code cards. I’ve moved them to Stocard, and I love that they are available right off the lock screen. There’s a watch app, but it’s too many taps.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I really like the “hard press.” In my mind, I’m always begging developers to reduce the number of steps to do something. Drafts is the pinnacle of this for me: tap, write, tap, and it’s done. On the flip side, playing any music on iTunes is: tap, tap, tap, scroll, tap, play (or worse). Drives me crazy. 

I haven’t had the iPhone 7 Plus for very long, and I’m still finding places where there are hard press opportunities.

In general, though, my favorite feature of the iPhone is the fact that it sits at the core of my workflow. It’s not just part of an ecosystem, or attached to it, like an Android phone would be. I’m not lying when I say the camera qualities of the Google Pixel camera are enticing, but my iPhone is a window into my entire workflow, it’s a dashboard, input device, quick reference and retrieval tool. A Google phone would be outside of all that and would seriously mess with my mojo.

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

Bluetooth makes me crazy, especially for audio. I like the idea of it, but in practice I’m forever connecting and disconnecting speakers. I have a nice Tivoli PAL^BT radio that sits on my desk and a Bose SL III in the kitchen. They always seem to tangle each other up. If I could connect and disconnect Bluetooth devices using Siri, then we’d be off to the races.

I would also try to hire Greg Pierce, the man behind Agile Tortoise or the people at Realmac, who make the delightful list-making app, Clear, to dive into the UI of iTunes. I think these people have a good sense for how to reduce friction points in a user interface. Things are a little better for iTunes in iOS 10, but in my opinion iTunes is the least of Apple’s achievements.

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

I love my Apple Watch. Its primary function is to keep me from always checking my phone, and it works. I have the notifications finely tuned, and I only get messages and information that really matter: Slack messages from key people on my team, texts from my wife and kids, emails from my dean. Otherwise, these potential distractions are sequestered in the phone.

I love analog watches, and that was a significant concern for me in going to a smart watch. The hands on a watch or clock are cool because they don’t just tell you what time it is, they also tell you what time it has been and what time it’s going to be. I feel like an analog face always keeps time in context for me.

I have two customized faces.

Regular


Complications: Fantastical, Day/Date, Temp, Activity. All of this is information I check and re-check throughout the day. Having my next calendar item on the watch face has had a very positive effect on my tendency to forget to check appointments.

Travel


Complications: Date, Breathe, United/Delta, World Clock. When I travel I check very trip-specific information, so I’ve built a face that has all of that stuff. It’s based around displaying my destination time using the World Clock, and then my airline’s apps, and the Breathe app, which helps me mellow out in stupid TSA lines.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

A black nylon pattern. I’m really distractable visually, and I like low-clutter minimalistic backgrounds but not a flat tone or color. Given all the visual complexity on a home screen already, adding a picture would be too much. I have a great close up picture of a Batman action figure on my lock screen. It is delightful everytime I see him scowling at me.

Anything else you’d like to share?


The apps are one thing, but how I actually manipulate the phone is a big deal, too. The Loopy Case is a game changer for me. The iPhone 7 Plus tests the reach of my thumb, and I always feel like the thing is going to fly out of my hands. A developer friend of mine put me on to this case. He says he can’t fathom using a iPhone without it, and neither can I.

Thanks Todd.

 

Aqua and Bondi

My friend Stephen Hackett’s written another book. This one, called Aqua and Bondi, is all about the the original iMac and the transition of NeXT’s technologies to Mac OS X. If you are at all interested in Apple history and how Apple worked in those days following Steve Jobs’s return, this one is for you.

Tasks vs. Calendar Events

I get a lot of emails from readers asking me exactly how I distinguish between tasks and calendar items. In a perfect world, a task is an item you need to do and a calendar item represents a place you need to be. However, the way I work makes things a little muddier. 

For example, I like to schedule appointments with myself. This helps me manage big projects. I will often schedule a block of time on the calendar for a big project. Something like, Thursday 10 AM-12 PM, ACME contract review.

So now that calendar event shows up in my calendar but I’ve also got a collection of tasks related to that contract review in OmniFocus. So how do I resolve that? It really isn’t that hard. I will go into the project view in OmniFocus and select all related tasks to the contract review and set their deferred date to Thursday at 10 AM. Then the tasks disappear from my active OmniFocus list until that time and I don’t think about them anymore.

The trick to all of this is being honest with yourself. If you set these appointments with yourself to manage big projects but don’t keep them, you lose faith in your system and the wheels start falling off. Treat those task-related appointments just as sacredly as you would an appointment with your boss. If something comes up that requires you to move that appointment, go ahead and move it but follow all the necessary steps. Reset the appointment in your calendar and move the tasks in your task manager.

Another advantage of setting aside blocks of time for big projects is that it gives you a more realistic view of how much you can actually get done in the day. If suddenly you see yourself completely blocked and there are still significant tasks left on your list, that should be a warning sign that you’ve got a problem.

So to answer the question, I generally am a purist and keep tasks in my task list and calendar events in my calendar. When I do use the calendar to block time for an extensive set of tasks, I will simultaneously move all of those tasks to the designated time and date.