MPU 328: iOS Email

I’ve spent the last several months running six different email clients on my iPad and iPhone. This week’s MPU episode is my full debrief on what works (and doesn’t work) in the most popular iOS email applications.

Sponsors include:

  • Casper: Because everyone deserves a great night sleep. Get $50 off with the code ‘MPU’
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. 
  • The Omni Group We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad. 
  • Fujitsu ScanSnap ScanSnap Helps You Live a More Productive, Efficient, Paperless Life.

Sponsor: SaneBox – Tame Your Email

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by SaneBox. I’ve been using SaneBox for years and at this point I can’t imagine email without it. There are so many great benefits to Sanebox. It filters my mail so I don’t wake up to an inbox bursting with irrelevant email. It allows me to defer email messages so they get out of the way while I am doing other things. It also lets me set reminders for outgoing emails. One of the nice things about SaneBox is that it lets me manage less important email without having to incorporate the email into my task management system. This makes my system tighter and saves me a lot of time. 

I’ve been using a lot of different iOS email applications the last few months and I really appreciate the way SaneBox does its magic from the server-side, so I can use it with any email application and jump between them at will without losing any email in proprietary single-app systems. 

I love using SaneBox. I’ve talked to the team at SaneBox and they are getting ridiculously high conversion rates from MacSparky readers and Mac Power Users listeners. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. Use this link to get $10 off. It’s a win-win. Also, below is a cool video SaneBox recently made showing you how it all works.

 

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Home Screen: Matt Teresi


This week’s home screen feature Matt Teresi (Twitter), the entrepreneur behind The Easel iPad stand. I had the privilege of meeting Matt recently and he’s a stand up guy. So Matt, show us your home screen.


HOW MANY TIMES A DAY DO YOU USE YOUR IPHONE/IPAD?

Over the past couple months, I have converted almost all of my workflow to iOS. However, the fact that these devices can be anything at anytime can be dangerous. Those who are familiar with CGP Grey and Cortex will recognize a lot of my workflow. Like him, I try to be very intentional about how I work and how I am using technology.

I have three iOS devices that serve separate primary purposes: Capture (iPhone), Consumption (9.7“ iPad Pro), Creation (12.9” iPad Pro). The home screens shown have apps on the desktop that point me in the direction of what I should be using the device for.

The iPhone has apps that allow for quick capture of ideas, encourage focused work, and remind me to improve health. The 3D Touch actions on Launch Center Pro are great for capture as well, and I have made actions New Fantastical Event, New Scanbot, New PCalc, and Snapchat.

The 9.7″ iPad Pro is a multi purpose consumption device for me. It’s blank because I launch everything with spotlight, and honestly, couldn’t settle on a series of apps that made sense. What I use here the most are: Tweetbot (The only place I use this), Unread, Instapaper, and Paprika to name a few.


The 12.9″ iPad Pro has only apps I use for focused work. There is no potential for distraction here from social apps and this is almost always on do not disturb, with no badges turned on. I use Goodnotes, Excel, Soulver, Spark, and Word the most. This iPad lives on my Easel, and I do 95% of my work here using the software keyboard and Apple Pencil.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE APPS?

Notes Like most people, I could count the number of notes I had in Apple Notes on the fingers on my two hands before iOS 9. Now, even though I have weekly review set up to purge and act on notes from the week, I find myself above the Macsparky note count. A couple features I had hoped would be included at WWDC: Support for editing two notes simultaneously in split screen and better organization capabilities on iPad.

Goodnotes I have drawers full of Field Notes notebooks. They are great and one of my favorite products, but I could never find a way to quickly reference information recorded. Every project lived in these notebooks, with brainstorming, outlining, notes, thoughts, and planning all done here. Then the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro happened. I tested all kinds of apps to replicate and improve this workflow using this new technology, and I settled on Goodnotes. It is not perfect, and there are some definite UI problems that drive me nuts, but my single favorite work task to do now is planning my day/week/month/year and projects using this app, the 12.9″ iPad Pro, and Easel. This is illustrated in the photo below.


Overcast Playlists are huge for me, but Smart Speed is a feature that makes listening to podcasts elsewhere a form of torture. Marco the developer is a great guy as well, so start listening to MPU here.

Drafts Emails, thoughts, tasks, reminders, journals. As time goes on, more and more starts here. David’s tutorial introduced me to this great app.

Paper by Fifty Three My design concepts for Easel were all done here using Apple Pencil.

WHAT TODAY VIEW WIDGETS ARE YOU USING AND WHY?

Notification Center I use the Fantastical calendar widget in today view, but what I love about this pull down screen overlay is Notification Center. It took me along time to figure this out, and a commitment to use it this way, but once I began using this as my inbox, instead of opening app after app to see what was new, I felt this realization that this has to be what the guys and gals in Cupertino had in mind when designing iOS. I put all the apps where stuff from the world comes in into one folder on my iPhone home screen called Inbox. This is the only place where I will find a red circle on my home screen, and when I see it, I swipe down Notification Center to see what’s going on. I know this is not groundbreaking, but it has been so effective in how I handle stuff on iPhone.

WHAT APP MAKES YOU MOST PRODUCTIVE?

Omnifocus I live in here and David’s tutorial increased my efficiency here exponentially.

WHAT APP DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE UNDERUTILIZING?

Workflow I have a couple dozen set up, but I know there is so much more out there. I have never done any scripting on Mac, but I love building these and am constantly looking where I can automate tasks.

IF YOU WERE IN CHARGE OF APPLE, WHAT WOULD YOU ADD OR CHANGE?

I was disappointed by the lack of iPad specific iOS features at WWDC. I understand here has been a lot of innovation here I the past year, but the heavy iOS usage for the past couple months has led to some noticeable gaps where improvements would be great. These are:

More gesture based support. Drag and drop. Select multiple files/photos and act on them. Multiple window support for Notes, other apps (Use both sides of multitasking screen). Improved multi tasking selection.

WHAT APPS ARE YOU MISSING?

More than whole Apps, there are features within the apps I love that would improve the experience. More iPad actions for Launch Center Pro, and more robust professional Apps especially CAD and Adobe programs.

DO YOU HAVE AN APPLE WATCH?


I use the modular face. Interesting parts here:

In the bottom right is timers, which I use to track a lot, but most important is units worked, like David does with his candles. I then enter units worked into a custom workflow I created in the Workflow app, in the bottom left of the watch face. The center is Waterminder, where I keep track of oz of water drank through the day. Only other stuff I use is an app called Reminders Nano and Now Playing glance. I have high hopes that this experience will improve dramatically with the newly announced watchOS 3.

Thanks Matt.

watchOS 3 Brings Apple Watch 2

Last week while at WWDC, I loaded the iOS 10 beta onto one of my iPads. It’s been a lot more stable than I expected it to be and this experience led me to do something a little crazy. I loaded the iOS beta on my iPhone. Usually (well …maybe always) it’s a bad idea to load the first iteration of a beta operating system on that thing that you use every day to make money and pay your bills. However buoyed by the success on the iPad, I threw caution to the wind and did it anyway. This reckless act wasn’t so much a result of any particular new feature I wanted on the phone so much as my desire to find out if the improvements to the Apple Watch are for real. So I did and they are.

For almost a week now, I’ve had my watch running watch OS 3.0. It’s faster, more responsive, and I suddenly find myself using third-party applications again. I can attest that the improvements are not merely hypothetical but, if you give it a chance, can drastically change the way you use your Apple Watch.

I’ve now set up several watch faces that are task oriented. I have one for work, one for fitness, and one for home. The complications on each face are different and switching between them is a simple matter of swiping left or right on the current watch face. From these three watch faces I can get easy access to just about anything I need.

Likewise the watchOS Dock works swimmingly. I’ve pressed the physical button for the Dock more times in the last week than I did in the prior year when it was the Friends button. The background refresh of Dock-based apps is the killer feature here. I can actually now consider some third party apps that hold time sensitive data without worrying whether or not they’ll be up-to-date.

I’m quite impressed with Apple’s ability to go back to the drawing board and improve the user interface of the Apple Watch. I’m even more impressed, however, that they are squeezing this much better performance out of the exact same pokey hardware I had a week ago. I simply didn’t think it was possible.

I’ve still got the occasional crash to deal with (it is, after all, beta software) but, once the bugs are ironed out and the software ships in the fall, a lot of people are going to be surprised at how perky their Apple Watch becomes.

Hitting the Ground Running

I spent the morning going through my notes following meetings with software developers last week at WWDC. Of note, I did this on an iPad with iOS 10 installed with relatively no problem. Usually, when I install an early beta of an Apple operating system it’s more of a point of entertainment to see just how much everything is broken. This year, however, that is not the case. There are a few problems (the iCloud document picker is currently a mess for instance) but it does not feel at all like the whole thing is held together by chewing gum and duct tape. This earliest beta is remarkably stable.

Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise. iOS is 10 years old now and the yearly iterations feel a lot more like refinements and improvements than boil-the-earth rethinks like they did in years past. I think this is all good.

Getting back to my developer notes, I got this same impression of steady progrres from them. Usually WWDC is where developers learn how the new OS breaks their apps. Often developers leave WWDC with months of work ahead of them just to make sure their apps can still work in when the new OS ships. That didn’t seem to be the case this year. I spoke to many developers last week and they were all generally happy with macOS Sierra and iOS 10. They all were shocked to learn they no longer had to cancel vacation plans or re-write their apps. Instead they were looking forward to spending time polishing their apps and maybe even (dare-I-say) adding a feature or two.

Over the last few years Apple has taken a lot of grief for biting off more than they could chew. Getting macOS and iOS to play nice together certainly wasn’t a walk in the park but I can’t help but feel with this next cycle of Operating System upgrades, we’ll start seeing the benefits of this transition. App developers do not  need to adjust to a new platform or start from scratch with their apps. This year developers get to hit the ground running and I can’t wait to see the results of that.

watchOS 3: Reality is Matching Hype

On Monday’s Keynote Apple showed off a much improved watchOS 3 operating system. When I saw the increased speed on the stage, I had my doubts.  As you may recall, when Apple originally announced the watch, we saw a lot of similar demos about how amazing and fast the watch was and we later discovered that most apps were simply too slow to use on the watch.

According to legend, when Apple first announced the original Macintosh, they had a souped-up version with extra RAM. Part of me wondered if there was some sort of similar magic trick at work on Monday. Then I got to take a look at the new software running on some developer friends’ watches here at WWDC the last few days and I’m relieved to report that the watch improvements are for real. Apps do launch fast and the watch is significantly snappier.

Apple is pulling this off by using some for the watch’s extra memory to keep apps in memory and allow background refreshes. Another reason for this significant improvement is that Apple has loosened up the watch’s battery usage. With the initial launch of the Apple Watch, Apple was very conservative about battery life. They did not want the story to be that their watch ran out of juice at 5pm. As a result, the watch is very stingy about power usage and I often end up with my watch battery only about half-used at the end of the day. With watchOS 3, they’ve loosened up the battery restrictions and push the processor in the watch a little harder.

The end result of all of this is that the existing hardware is much faster and more useful. Amen.

Another promising development is the watch user interface. There are only two buttons on the watch. One of them (the big one) was dedicated to the friends screen, which hardly anybody uses. I can sympathize with why Apple gave this feature such prominence in initial development. In Cupertino, all Apple employees have Apple Watches and this feature makes a lot more sense in those circumstances. That, however, isn’t true for everyone. So instead of doubling down on the friend button they’ve repurposed it as a dock button that lets you flip between apps.

So I’ve played with a few watches now using watchOS 3 (although I haven’t installed the beta on my watch … yet), I’m happy to report from WWDC that your Apple Watch is about to get a lot better.

Cashing the Check

I wrote yesterday about how Apple is responding to the question of how they provide interesting and useful services while preserving user privacy. My conclusion was that I like their explanation but in order to make this work, Apple has to not only write the check. They have to cash it too.

It’s still early days but yesterday I installed the iOS 10 beta on my iPad and spent time using iOS 10 on friends’ iPhones. I also tested macOS Sierra on my MacBook. This is just the first beta of a new operating system but I am initially impressed. I’ve been searching indexed photo libraries for pictures of dogs, beaches, buildings, and other objects and the device is finding them. (No luck on zip lines, however.) Overall, this local photo indexing solution is working better than I expected for the first iteration.

The Services Versus Privacy Question

For some time now there has been an open question about Apple’s future. Specifically, with Apple’s interest in protecting user privacy, can they compete with companies like Google and its cloud-based user data whiz-bang features made possible by their storage of and access to user data? In other words, will protecting privacy cripple future Apple services?

Apple responded to this in yesterday’s WWDC Keynote. Multiple times speakers explained how they intend to bring great services and protect user privacy. There are two ways they intend to do this.

On the Silicon

If you had a drinking game where you took a shot every time someone said “on the silicon” yesterday, you’d have probably passed out by the end of the presentation. The best example of this was in the discussion of Photos. Apple Photos will now do face detection and search out other objects in your photos to create an index of images and their contents. In theory, I could search for any pictures of john that also has a cantaloupe in it and my iPad, iPhone, or Mac would find it for me. This is what Google is already doing on their servers. 

Will this work? I’m not sure yet. My guess is that my iPhone will pull this off but not as fast or as accurately as you’d get with the combined power of Google’s fully operational server farms. I’m not sure it has to work as good though.

Differential Privacy

The second component of Apple’s answer is “Differential Privacy”. This is a technology that allows Apple to anonymize user data as it passes through the Apple servers. Differential privacy parses a large data-set, using statistical science to learn about the sum total of the data without learning anything about an individual user. It sounds a little bit like voodoo but I spent an hour this morning reading articles about it and it seems like a real thing. Using differential privacy, Apple can learn from the sum total of our data but still not have any details on anyone. Because Apple doesn’t have user specific data, hackers and intelligence agencies also wouldn’t be able to access it. It inherently has limitations and I’m sure if they skipped all the differential privacy, they’d have better data, but this solution gives Apple something to work with while respecting user privacy.

Making Choices

After spending some time researching and thinking about all of this, I like Apple’s answer to the question of how they’ll continue to respect user privacy and move the ball forward. I don’t think their solution will match what Google is doing right now but as microprocessors continue to march forward, I think doing these tasks “on the silicon” is a real option. Right now all we have is words and we’ll need to see if Apple can actually cash the check they wrote yesterday morning but if they do, I’d be satisfied. For me, I think it comes down to a choice. I’d rather have 80% of Google’s features along with 100% of Apple’s interest in protecting my privacy than 100% of Google’s features with 0% of that privacy protection.

Sponsor: OmniGraffle

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniGraffle, the best tool for creating precise, beautiful graphics. I use this application to create diagrams, logos, flowcharts, and everything in between. OmniGraffle is both powerful and easy to use. Using OmniGraffle’s built-in stencils, you can build diagrams without a lick of artistic talent. If you don’t find the stencil you want, you can download more in Stenciltown. Stenciltown is a curated collection of OmniGraffle assets made by people much more talented than me. Whenever I’m making a cute little image or diagram for a presentation or video, Stenciltown always bails me out.

OmniGraffle is designed by the OmniGroup’s crack team of programmers and UI designers so you don’t get lost in menubars. When you are done, you can export your graphic to numerous formats. Check out OmniGraffle for Mac and iPad today.


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