Free Agents episode 4 published today. Deciding where to get your work done can be a difficult challenge for an independent worker. There are a lot of options and in this episode we cover them all.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Agenda Minder (website)(App Store).

I’m not alone in hating meetings. So often I walk out of a meeting desperately wishing I had that hour back. Occasionally, however, I leave a meeting feeling like work actually got done and with newfound respect for some person that drove that meeting with the efficiency of the Swiss railway.

This week’s sponsor can make you that person. Agenda Minder is a Mac app that gives you meeting organization super-powers. Your team will know how organized and responsive you are when you simply copy email requests into Agenda Minder and cover the topic at your next meeting. They’ll be surprised when they get your beautiful Agenda Minder agenda out ahead of the meeting.

Agenda Minder stays out of your way with simple controls and a clean look. Quickly add meetings and agenda items capturing the objective and any preparation notes you need. Just doing this as a quick preparation can make your meetings better.

You can also quickly find the right meeting by sorting meeting name or date. Filter the meetings you have today, this week, or next.

My thanks to Agenda Minder for sponsoring MacSparky. Go check Agenda Minder out for yourself. A meeting is only as good as the agenda.

There are so many smart people generating interesting content on the Internet. One of those that I recently came across is Michael Kummer (Website) (Twitter). Michael writes about a variety of topics but I particularly enjoy his posts about technology and photography. So Michael, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Some of my favorite apps include: 1Password, Mail, Messages, FaceTime, OmniFocus, Tweetbot, Workflow and Camera.

• I have been using 1Password for years and it contains every password for every account I have (~850 entries). I have seen the consequences of weak or repeating passwords among friends and family and I can only encourage everyone to use a good password manager.
• Apple’s native Mail app is still my favorite, even after having tried several alternatives on both iOS and macOS, including Outlook. In the past, I was missing swipe actions to quickly and efficiently process emails in my inbox. Apple added those in iOS 9 and in iOS 10 they have gotten even better by including a “swipe to move” action.
• FaceTime and iMessages are important parts of my communications strategy, especially with our spread out family (who live in Austria and Costa Rica). I’m thrilled that Apple finally added per-conversation read receipts to Messages in iOS 10. They had announced that feature at WWDC a year ago but it never materialized until now.
• I have to thank MacSparky for doing such as great job on the OmniFocus Field Guide because that triggered my interest in OmniFocus. Now I don’t know how I would live without it. It’s such a great productivity tool that makes it easy to get stuff done.
• Tweetbot is my favorite Twitter client on both iOS and macOS. I especially like how it keeps my timeline in sync across multiple devices.
• I open the Workflow app directly but use it often enough through Today View. I created several workflows that would allow me to quickly enter certain health data from devices that aren’t compatible with HealthKit. So every morning my weight and most evenings my blood pressure find its way into the Health app through a workflow I setup using the Workflow app.
• I used to own several Nikon cameras and expensive lenses but retired them as the iPhone’s camera got better and better. You know the saying: “The best camera is the one you have on you” – and I didn’t have my Nikon on me nearly as often as I would liked have. The Camera app is the perfect companion to the iPhone’s excellent hardware. Rarely do I need to adjust exposure settings (aperture, ISO or shutter speed) manually but if I do, I rely on an app called Slow Shutter.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

I wanted to say Tweetbot but in reality it’s the WordPress app. I don’t use the WordPress app to write content for my blog but I regularly check how well my posts are doing in terms of visitor count. It never seizes to amaze me how certain posts keep engaging visitors for months in a row. My post on an “out of memory” issue in OS X Mavericks is still in the top 10 every day. That makes me wonder why so many people still run such an old version of OS X.

What app makes you most productive?

On the iPhone it’s definitely the Mail app, as processing emails is what I do most on my iPhone from a productivity standpoint. I guess you could say that I still feel most productive on a Mac and not on an iOS device.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Drafts, for sure. I put it on my home screen and moved Notes to the second screen for exactly that reason. I know it’s a great app with a ton of features but I have yet to use it to the fullest of its capabilities.

What is the app you are still missing?

There isn’t an app I’m missing but rather infrastructure that I wished Apple had provided a long time ago. iCloud sharing à la Dropbox for example. Apple is finally moving in the right direction with Notes sharing in iOS 10 and macOS 10.12, I just hope they add the same capabilities to iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library etc soon as well.

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

Before I got an Apple Watch, I used to unlock my iPhone countless times a day. Don’t get me wrong, I still use my iOS devices plenty of times but the Apple Watch definitely reduced the amount of time I’m on my iPhone/iPad. Also, while I’m in front of my Mac, I don’t really need my iPhone either. I can make and receive calls thanks to Wi-Fi Calling (which is still buggy), get notifications and do pretty much everything else I could do on my iPhone. The situation changes dramatically of course when I’m on the go and out of the house or office.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

I use Today View a lot and typically do so to either get a glimpse of important information (Calendar, pending tasks…) or to perform quick tasks through Workflow.

My current Today View contains the following widgets:

• Up Next: The next appointment in my calendar
• Omnifocus: Tasks due or pending
• Drafts: Yet another incentive to use it more often
• Workflow: Workflows to enter my weight and blood pressure without having to fire up the app
• Apple News
• Personal Capital (Holdings): To see how my investments are doing
• Dark Sky: Weather forecast for the next hour
• Siri App Suggestions: I don’t use that very often but Siri gets it right enough to warrant its spot in the widget list
• Maps Destinations: I’ll probably get rid of this because the information it shows is already presented in the “Up Next” widget. Plus, when I get into the car I get a notification with traffic information, that if clicked, opens Maps.
• Stocks: Details on how my investments are doing
• Find Friends: I use this a lot to see where family members are before calling them. That way, I reduce the chance of interrupting in whatever they may be doing, such as working.
• Personal Capital (Recent Transactions)
• Amazon: To see upcoming deliveries

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

The iPhone’s camera and TouchID on both the iPhone and iPad.

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

I would try to stop releasing half-baked features. The sharing features in Numbers, Pages and Keynotes, when launched, were years behind what other companies were offering at the time. Collaboration in Notes (in iOS 10 and macOS 10.12) is great but why release it standalone instead of adding it to the rest of the infrastructure first. I’d say that the need to share files/folders and collaborate on them is far greater than the need to share individual notes. I also would try to fix certain bugs a lot faster than Apple has done in the past. Prime examples include: ever returning keyboard shortcuts or bandwidth management for iCloud services, specifically iCloud Photo Library. Last but not least, I would introduce a better
feedback mechanism for developers and public beta testers. It’s still very hard to get an idea if a submitted bug got any attention from Apple or when it will be fixed.

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

I have an Apple Watch Sport and switch back and forth between two watch faces. The Modular watch face is what I use during the week and the Activity watch face is what I use on weekends. The Modular watch face shows me important information such as date and time, upcoming appointments, temperature, open tasks in OmniFocus and it gives me a shortcut to enable sleep mode using Sleep++.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

I use a non-distracting wallpaper so I can find apps quickly. I used to have photos of family members but found that they easily distract my eyes when looking for apps – as funny and bad as it may sound 🙂

Anything else you’d like to share?

My home screen doesn’t change often but it does change. I regularly revisit what apps deserve this prime spot and I intentionally put apps on my home screen that I would like to use more often. Besides my home screen, I generally revisit all apps I have installed every so often and delete what I don’t use.

Thanks Michael.

There’s something in me that can’t resist poking fun at Monster Cable every time the opportunity presents itself. I’ll grant you that “Monster” is a great name if you’re starting a cable business but I don’t feel like it’s enough to justify their cost or filing lawsuits. 

Monster had a piece of Beats before Apple bought them. They sold their interest and now probably regret it. So they brought a lawsuit that Billboard reports was dismissed on summary judgment.

Apparently, Monster litigates a lot. According to Wikipedia, by 2009, Monster made 190 US Patent and Trademark Office filings and filed 30 lawsuits. Examples include disputes with Discovery Channel for making a show called Monster Garage and a claim against Disney for making a movie called Monsters, Inc.

By far, however, my favorite was the Monster dispute with Blue Jeans Cable. Blue Jeans Cable is an outstanding small supplier of cables. (I’ve purchased several of their HDMI cables over the years.) In 2008, Monster sent a patent infringement letter to Blue Jeans and the CEO (a former litigation attorney) wrote back with the best response to a cease and desist letter I’ve seen in my 23 years of practicing law. I know I’ve linked this before but given today’s news, how could I resist?

You should really read the whole thing but here’s just a taste:

Last week Stephen Levy published an extended article on Backchannel about what’s going on at Apple with machine learning. A lot of us, myself included, have been wondering openly how Apple can compete with companies like Google at making our devices smarter when Apple’s privacy stand prevents them from reading user data. I wrote about this just a few weeks ago and I questioned whether Apple’s respect for user privacy and making the best possible consumer products can coexist.

The Levy article strikes me as Apple’s response to these questions. Apple’s position is that it can deliver excellent services and privacy by processing data on our devices rather than in the cloud. If that’s true, it would be spectacular. It would be like having a private assistant with no memory of actually working for you.

The trouble is that a lot of the artificial intelligence smarts you see from services like Google comes from having the ability to compare all of the users data. I’ve been testing the artificial intelligence and iOS 10’s Photos app and it’s pretty impressive. You can search for faces and objects in photos and the app does the hard work of finding them for you. However, it only learns to the extent Apple allows it to. Apple has pre-populated the application with a series of search terms including things like “mountains”, “dog”, and “baseball”. This has been working since the early betas and I’ll write more about this when iOS 10 releases.

The trouble is it will only search terms that Apple has deemed worthy of a search term. As an example while I can find mountains by searching my Photos library, I cannot find “stormtroopers” or “Yoda”.

Google Images, on the other hand can search both terms. My guess is that Google was keeping track of the searches done on its cloud-based photo storage site and doing some back-end magic to add popular terms and find the appropriate photos. (As an aside, Google thinks the search term “Yoda” should turn up pictures of the Star Wars character and Buddha statues. Maybe they know something.)

In theory, Apple could update its own list of search terms as it perfects the use of Differential Privacy that would anonymize the data as it goes into the Apple servers but I can’t help but feel Apple will never update as aggressively as Google’s server farms will.

I’m not sure exactly how this all plays out. Part of me feels like Apple is getting ready to enter the ring with one hand tied behind its back. Nevertheless, I would prefer slightly less robust machine learning if it allowed me to continue to protect my privacy rights. The real question becomes what consumers do if there’s a significant difference between server-based services with little privacy and device-based services with better privacy. 

Either way, the Stephen Levy article demonstrates that Apple is fully engaged with this question and taking what they believe to be the best course of action. I recommend reading the whole thing if this topic is at all interesting to you. Apple is clearly (and publicly) taking a different path with respect to machine learning and privacy. I’m fascinated to see how this all plays out.

I recently guested on the Command-Control-Power podcast, which is a show focussed on supporting members of the Apple Consultant Network. I was brought in to talk about legal issues facing IT professionals. It’s not the usual stuff I talk about around here but if that’s your thing …