The MacCast Amigos

I joined Adam Christianson, Victor Cajiao, and Ken Ray on the MacCast podcast to discuss Apple’s music and media content strategy, how we think Apple did in 2016 and what we hope to see from Apple in 2017, and the future for Apple’s Siri technology in the next version of iOS. Plus we each talked about some of our favorite technology.

Home Screens – Dan Fenner


Dan Fenner pays for his shoes as a data specialist. At night, he teaches English to adult immigrants. Dan is pretty passionate about travel and blogs about it at MuchoSpanish.com. Throughout it all, Dan’s relies on his trusty iPhone and iPad. He even uses his iPad as his primary computer. So Dan, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

iPhone: 

Overcast Podcast Player, Audible, Music, OperaVPN, Kindle.

iPad:

Pixelmator and Procreate: I use these for my Instagram images. I bought Pixelmator the day it came out. I just started using Procreate, since I just bought my Baby Pro in October 2016.

PDF Expert: This is my main PDF annotation app, mostly because of its Focus presentation feature. When I trace a box around a section of a document, everything outside the box darkens about 50%, which helps the focus on exactly the part I want them, too. Settings says PDF Expert is using 3.9 GBS of iCloud space.

Coda: I can make CSS changes to different websites that I run. I also like using Coda as my FTP app. I even designed a custom WordPress them in Coda.

Pages: I can design the lessons for my night class very easily and they look great.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

I love spending time in Instagram and YouTube. Sometimes I search photos from places we’ll be traveling to.

What app makes you most productive?

Notes, since I can refer to it for everything in my life, especially now that we can lock them. I store SFTP info and website security questions, I keep to do lists here because I can write notes about the to-do item or take a photo and add it to the note, allowing me to get my head back into the task much more quickly. I love that I can use Siri to remind me about Notes.

What is the app you are still missing?

I don’t feel I’m missing out on any Mac apps, but I wish a lot of these iPad apps were more-fully functional.

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

I’m on my iPad all day long. My iPad is now my main computer at work. I love it because it’s so light and portable. I can put it down anywhere and start getting some work done.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Outlook (there are some work emails and meetings I can’t miss), Maps Destinations (so easy to get the best route to/from work), Calendar. I’ve also found that Siri App Suggestions has become very good at know what I want at specific times of the day.

What is your favorite feature of the iPad?

My favorite feature is the Pencil.

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

I would focus on making the iPad a more productive device. Split screen and keyboard shortcuts were a great addition. I look forward to seeing new productivity features this spring.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

Currently, I have an artistic rendition of my beautiful wife that I created on my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

Thanks Dan.

Setapp: Subscription-Based Macintosh Apps


There’s a new subscription-based app service for the Mac called Setapp. We’ve seen the subscription-based pricing gaining ground with some of the bigger players (like Microsoft and Adobe) but Setapp makes it possible for smaller developers.

With Setapp, you pay $9.99 a month and for that you get a folder of apps. Currently it’s 61 apps but the number keeps climbing up as more developers get on board. A lot of the apps included are really good, like Ulysses, CleanMyMac, Gemini, Marked, iStat Menus, Screens and Timing. Upgrades are also free as long as you stay a subscriber.

This looks like a good way for a lot of users to discover (and use) some of the software gems of the independent developer community while giving the developers a way to earn a few bucks and keep the lights on. I really hope this works.

 

Sponsor – OmniPlan: Power and Simplicity


Project planning is the stuff of legend. Go to any big company and you will find somebody in a room somwhere responsible for project planning that spends weeks at a time in seminars trying to learn to use their Byzantine project planning software.

It doesn’t have to be that way. This week’s sponsor, OmniPlan is the exception. The fact that it’s easy to pick up OmniPlan shouldn’t surprise you. The Omni Group group has been making Difficult software easy since they first started. OmniPlan has a clean, simple interface giving you everything you need with just a few clicks.

At the same time, OmniPlan also delivers power. OmniPlan includes powerful project planning tools like filtering, violation resolution, leveling, earned value analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations allowing it to match even its most difficult-to-use competitors.

I use OmniPlan for project planning on the legal side. Clients love the nice, clean reports generated by OmniPlan showing my plans for their legal problems. Your clients will love it too.

Most recently, OmniPlan got touch bar support so if you’ve got one of those fancy new MacBook Pros, OmniPlan is that much easier to use. If you’re curious, I recommend downloading the free trial. You’ll be surprised at how powerful and easy to use OmniPlan is. note

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.