Apple Spaceship Video

It’s been a lot of fun watching the monthly drone footage of Apples new campus. They’re planting trees now so they must be getting close. When the time comes, I’m going to pester all of my Apple friends to get me in for a visit.

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MPU: Workflows with Ian Byrd

Ian Byrd is a former teacher, a professional speaker, and a friend. Ian joined us this week to share his workflows and tips for giving full-day lectures and workshops, writing, video production, and more.

Sponsors include:

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How to Fight Calendar Spam

I wrote a few days ago about the increasing amount of calendar spam. I’m not alone as I received a lot of email asking how to fix this. I woke up to these little beauties this morning and decided it was time to take action.

A Little More About Calendar Spam

Most of the calendar spam I’ve seen has originated from China. Somebody has a big list of email addresses and sends out calendar invites with spammy links embedded. By default, the Mac looks at these invites and gives them to you via the calendar app along with a notification.

Historically, I’ve really liked this feature. My family uses multiple calendars and we routinely send each other invites. If I need to drive my daughter to a particular event, she sets the event in her calendar and sends me an invite. (We also have a shared family calendar but that includes everyone and in this case it would just be me and my daughter.)

This is what makes me so pissed about calendar spam. It’s taking something I use often and corrupting it. My guess is this is only going to get worse and I really hope Apple intervenes. In the meantime, there are a few steps you can take.

Step 1 – Never Accept OR Decline

While it seems like pressing the “Decline” button is your way of giving the finger to these calendar spammers, all you are doing is confirming that there is a human at the other end of that email and encouraging them to send even more.

Step 2 – Move and Delete

This stack exchange thread has a good idea. Move the offending invites into a separate calendar. (I named mine “Spam”. ) Then delete the newly created calendar with the calendar spam in it. Make sure to select the “Delete and Don’t Notify” when doing so. The crappy part of this is that you’ll need to repeat this process if this becomes a thing, which it will.

Step 3 – Move to Email Notifications

If the problem continues, the best solution is to go into the Calendar screen of your iCloud.com account and throw the lever to move calendar invitations from the calendar app to email. Then you can delete emails before these things ever hit your calendar. The below gallery walks you through the steps to do so.

The crappy part about this is that the next time my daughter sends me an invite to drive her somewhere, I won’t see it until I get to email. Like I said, Apple needs to give us a better way to deal with this.

If you’re looking for more resources on this, I’d recommend this Apple Support thread, this Stack Exchange thread, this piece by Aaron Douglas, and Gabe Weatherhead weighed in too.

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Cyber Monday Deals

It’s that time of year and my email inbox has been burning up with press releases about Cyber Monday sales. Between the App stores and Amazon, I’ve come across several discounts from apps and products that I use and enjoy.

iOS Apps

Alto’s Adventure

$2.99 reduced to $0.99

One of the few games I’d recommend. It’s beautiful, fun, and strangely relaxing. I’ve written about it before.

Deliveries

$4.99 reduced to $2.99

This is my favorite package tracking app. I bought several competitors earlier this year with the idea of writing up a comparison only to fined Deliveries is still the best.

DEVONthink To Go

$14.99 reduced to $10.99

We’re planning a future MPU episode on DEVONthink. The iOS app has made a lot of progress and is on sale.

Dispatch

$6.99 reduced to $2.99

While I still primarily use Apple Mail, Dispatch is on my home screen for certain email tasks.

Due

$4.99 reduced to $2.99

Due is a reminder app that specializes in being an absolute pain in the neck when you fail to take out there garbage cans by 6pm on Thursday.

Fantastical 2 for iOS

My favorite iOS calendar app is on sale. The iPad version is reduced from $9.99 to $4.99 and the iPhone version is reduced from $4.99 to $2.99.

Hydra

$4.99 reduced to $2.99

Hydra can merge 60 frames to make a single high-quality picture. This is a camera app that’s definitely worth adding to your collection for low light shots without too much action in them, like a Christmas tree in a dark room.

PDFpen 2

$19.99 reduced to $9.99

I like working with PDFs on my iPad better than on my Mac and PDFpen is my favorite tool for the job.

PDF Expert

$9.99 reduced to $4.99

PDF Expert is another great iOS PDF app and it’s on sale too.

Pixelmator

$4.99 reduced to $1.99

Pixelmator is my favorite third party photo editing app and on sale.

Scanner Pro

$3.99 reduced to $2.99

Need to take a picture of a receipt and send it to Dropbox with minimum fuss. Try this app.

Scrivener

$19.99 reduced to $14.99

This year I’m thankful for my beloved Scrivener making its way to iPad and iPhone. Get $5.00 off for the next few days.

TextGrabber

$4.99 reduced to $0.99

ABBYY makes some of the best OCR tools on the market and

TextTool is one of the best-of-breed on iOS. As an added bonus, it can translate foreign languages.

Mac Apps

Due

$9.99 reduced to $4.99

Here’s the Mac companion for the Due iOS app covered above.

Hydra

$59.99 reduced to $39.99

Hydra is one of the best available HDR apps for the Mac and for the next few days, it’s $20 off. While I already own most of the apps in the post, I just bought this one.

Patterns

$2.99 reduced to $0.99

I’ve been working on my regular expressions chops lately in my free time and Patterns is a great Mac App to help out.

Prizmo 3

$49.99 reduced to $29.99

Prizmo’s another great scanning app, this time for the Mac. (The iOS version is on sale as well.)

Scapple

$14.99 reduced to $10.99

This App is made by the same team that makes Scrivener. It’s an excellent tool for organizing thoughts on big projects, particularly writers.

Snapheal

$9.99 reduced to $4.99

Want to remove a bit from the background of your photo, Snapheal does the job. It just does one thing, but it does it really well.

Unclutter

$5.99 reduced to $2.99

Unclutter adds a drawer to the top of your Mac’s screen where you can keep your clipboard, files, and bits of text. Useful.

Amazon Deals

Amazon Echo
$179.99 reduced to $139.99

I’ve been using the Echo for a year and like it. Hopefully Apple is working on something similar.

Anker Batteries

All of the Anker Batteries are on sale. I’ve already bought a few as stocking stuffers.

PowerCore 10,000

$49.99 reduced to $23.99

PowerCore 20,100

$79.99 reduced to $39.99

PowerCore 26800

$99.99 reduced to $55.99

PowerCore Slim 5000

$49.99 reduced to $22.99

Anker USB Wall Charger

$29.99 reduced to $12.49

EERO 3 Pack

$499.99 reduced to $399.99

Apple’s out of the of the router business. EERO’s pretty great.

Sonos Play 1

$199.99 reduced to $149.99

Be warned with this one. The Sonos Play 1 was my gateway drug into all things Son
os.

Tardis Ornament

$16.50 reduced to $8.49

I bought one of these and love it on my tree.

Jazz Friday: Jacob Collier

Last Jazz Friday I wrote about prodigy Joey Alexander and received a lot of feedback from readers that are now Joey Alexander fans. So this time I thought I’d cover another prodigy, Jacob Collier. Jacob’s parents are both musicians with the Royal Academy of Music in London and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

In addition to the ability to play the keyboard and just about any stringed instrument, Jacob has a 4-octave voice. In 2011 he went viral with his YouTube video rendition of Pure Imagination. My favorite, although, is Fascinating Rhythm. Jacob is ridiculously talented and at just 22, understands harmony in ways that I’ll never figure out in my lifetime. He’s now working with Quincy Jones and I expect we’ll be hearing more from Jacob in the future.

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USB-C MagSafe Adapters

If you own a USB-C MacBook or MacBook Pro and are missing the MagSafe power cord, there’s the Griffen BreakSafe with an integrated USB-C cable and there’s a new Kickstarter project called Snapnator, that works with an existing USB-C cable.

Calendar Spam

Here’s a new one. The last week I’ve started getting occasional spam-based calendar invites. Be careful out there.

2016 Holiday Gift Recommendations

Happy Thanksgiving fellow nerds! If you’re looking for a geek-related gift for yourself or others, I’ve got a few recommendations. Most of these were covered in this week’s Mac Power Users episode but not everyone listens to the podcast so here you go …

Bose QuietComfort 35s

Everyone keeps telling me how putting on Bose noise-canceling headphones on an airplane is like putting a pillow over the face of everyone on the plane. With these headphones, that is delightfully true. I bought a pair of these while traveling and can’t believe I waited so long. The 35s are the new Bluetooth version and they work better than expected.

eero Home WiFi

I bought a set of eeros earlier this year and then they sent me a few more when they sponsored the podcast. Sprinkle a few EERO devices around your house and it’s like wrapping up in a warm blanket of WiFi. I used to have dead space problems in my house, particularly near my teenage daughters’ rooms. They’d not notice (or not care) and end up on LTE, burning through our wireless allowance. With eero, no more.

Waterfield Bags

I bought a few more products from Waterfield this year. Whether you’ve got the smallest iPad or rocking the latest MacBook Pro, Waterfield has a bag/case/sleeve/backpack that will look great and last a long time.

Sonos

I’m officially a Sonos weirdo now with them sprinkled all over my house. That means that when I want music, I get it … everywhere. And loud. This year they added Apple Music integration which makes it even more awesome for Apple device owners. Start with just one piece and grow it slowly.

Anker Batteries

Anker expanded its line of external batteries this year so they have something at every size and price point. I’ve bought several of these over the last few years. I keep them in my bag and love knowing I’ve got a little extra juice … justin case.

Apple Air Pods

I like Apple’s new Air Pods. They were supposed to be out by the end of October but got delayed. Some rumors say we’ll have them available before Christmas. Hope springs eternal.

ARM Macs

The Internet is abuzz today in response to Jason Snell’s Macworld article arguing that Apple probably will not convert the Mac to an ARM processor. ARM processors are currently being designed by Apple for use in the iPhone and iPad and their custom chips are one of the reasons they are so far ahead of the competition on mobile processors.

Lately, the Mac has been taking heat for the slow upgrade cycle, Part of the blame (but not all of it) falls on Apple’s current Mac chip manufacturer, Intel, for missing deadlines. Jason makes the argument that Apple will, in all likelihood, stay with Intel because the Mac doesn’t earn enough money for Apple to justify the substantial cost of time and money to make a transition to a new processor.

I can’t help but think that Apple’s tendency to want to control everything would probably be enough for them to commit resources to switching to ARM. If Apple designs their own silicon, they’ll never rely on Intel again. Also, with the ever increasing race for better battery life, I’d expect Apple could make a MacBook that runs a very long time on an ARM-based chip. Jason Snell’s a pretty smart guy and been around this racket much longer than I but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple does bring ARM to the Mac at some point, even if it is just the lower-powered, super-long battery MacBooks.