MPU 310: One Year Indie with Jason Snell

This week’s episode of Mac Power Users is live and it’s a good one. Jason Snell joins us and the two of us reflect on what we’ve both learned after being self employed for a year. 

Also, there are some hiccups with the feed for Mac Power Users for some of our long-time subscribers. If you don’t see this episode in your feed. 

To fix things, you need to delete the old feed and resubscribe to the current feed. Here are links that will help you do that:

For step-by-step instructions, click here. Thanks.

∞

MPU Chicago “Meet Up” March 16

Katie and I really tried but between March Madness and some local ritual called “St. Patrick’s Day”, we couldn’t get a venue for a Mac Power Users meetup in Chicago this coming week. All that said, on March 16 at around 5:30 p.m. I’ll be fresh off a plane and I will need a beverage or two and there is a nice little bar in the Chicago Hilton called Kitty O’Sheas. If you happen to be there at the same time, Katie and I wouldn’t mind that one bit. Be warned that it may be crowded and we have no reservation. The password is “Steve sent me.”

A Tale of Two iOS Developers

Watching Google and Microsoft develop applications for iOS over the last few years has been interesting. Microsoft under Steve Ballmer took a pretty soft approach to preparing applications for the iPhone and iPad. Microsoft Office was reserved for Apple operating systems and hardware and those Microsoft apps that did come to iOS left a lot to be desired. On the flipside, Google seem to get the idea of apps on the iPhone from day one.

Somewhere along the line, however, things flipped. These days Microsoft’s iPad apps are arguably better than their Mac apps. I’m particularly impressed with Microsoft Word on the iPad Pro, which I’m using just about every day. Google, on the other hand, has declined.

Google Documents has always been the preferred platform for heavy document collaboration. As a word processor, it’s not particularly good but it is rocksolid in the collaboration department. Nevertheless, there has been a definite slowdown in engineering talent thrown at the Google iOS applications. Google Documents on the iPad just got iPad Pro keyboard support this week. This new update, however, still does not add iPad multitasking. Apple announced multitasking last June at WWDC. We are now approaching nine months and Google’s iPad apps still don’t support this feature. At this point I’m seriously looking at alternatives to Google Docs.

As far as I can tell, Google has not said anything publicly about why app development slowed down for the iPad and iPhone. Maybe they just don’t care and, like the Microsoft of a few years ago, want to put their best stuff on their own hardware. Either way, if a few years ago you had asked me to pick which of Microsoft or Google will suck at creating iPad apps, I never would’ve guessed Google.

Mac Ransomware and Backing Up

We had some sad news in the Mac community this week when the first Mac-based ransomeware was found in the wild. The bad guys hijacked the popular bit torrent client, Transmission, and managed to inject a malicious version of the app into the developer’s web site. Unwitting users downloaded and installed the malicious code and the ransomware, called “KeRanger”, promptly encrypted the user’s drive, demanding 1 bitcoin (about $400) to unlock it.

I’ve had a few legal clients on the PC side get caught in this trap over the last several years. I guess it was only a matter of time until this found its way to the Mac.

There really is no solution for people caught in the ransomeware trap. Even if you pay the criminals, who the heck knows if they will actually unlock it or, if they do, what else they will leave on your hard drive. The only real solution is to nuke and pave your hard drive.

When we first started the Mac Power Users, we spent a lot of time talking about backup. In fact we talked about it so much that we started getting complaints. Nevertheless, job one on any computer should be making certain you have a reliable backup system in place. One backup isn’t enough. It should be redundant.

I think one of the easiest ways to do this on your Mac is to get yourself an Apple Time Capsule, which makes incremental backups of your hard drive. If you add to that a copy of SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, you can make your own manual mirror image-style copies of your data on separate hard drives, which can then be put in a drawer and, more importantly, disconnected from the Internet. There’s a lot more I do and perhaps one day I will write it up in detail. It’s been several years since the last time I described my full backup regimen (Ack! 8 years!) and it has changed since then. (For instance, I no longer use FireWire 800. Grin.)

Either way, if you get yourself an external drive with a clone backup plus a Time Capsule, you’re probably in pretty good shape. More importantly, if you ever get caught with one of these ransomeware clowns, you can tell them to shove it, then delete your hard drive and restore from backup.

MPU 308: Workflows with Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson runs a successful publishing business from Asia largely using Apple technology. This week he joined us on the Mac Power Users to talk about how business strategy impacts technology, living and working in Asia and global views on the mobile market, and the upcoming March 2016 Apple event.

∞

Ulysses Version 2.5


Ulysses isn’t a text editor or a word processor. It is a writing tool. It lets you collect bits of text together and organize them, reorganize them, hide them, delete them, write them over again, and generally carry you through all the angst that comes with large writing projects. I currently have 2 books half-written in Ulysses and several long legal briefs and letters. Ulysses released version 2.5 today and it’s a doozy.

iPad Pro Support

The new version looks gorgeous on the iPad Pro. They’ve added native iPad Pro keyboard support and full support for iOS multitasking. Now you can have Safari on half of your iPad and Ulysses on the other and get some serious writing done.

iPhone Support

Ulysses now has an iPhone application. You may be wondering, “Why on earth would he care about an iPhone app if he’s using this to write books?” That is, at least, what I initially thought but I was wrong. I carry the jumbo iPhone and quite often I do find myself stuck someplace for 15 or 30 minutes. Being able to open Ulysses on my iPhone and jump into my most recent book to do a little editing or even a little writing (using voice dictation of course) is something I find myself doing every day.

Historically, I’ve done most of this writing in Scrivener. It’s a great tool on the Mac. Unfortunately, it is just on the Mac. Because Ulysses allows me to platform hop, it has become my default big writing tool. Ulysses is less fiddly than Scrivener which could be a plus or minus depending on how you use those extra tools in Scrivener. Ulysses also does not handle research as well as Scrivener does. Using Scrivener for my legal stuff, I would often throw word documents, PDFs, and all sorts of other research into the actual Scrivener file. I could then use the split screen mode to have my research available on the left side of the screen as I wrote on the right side of the screen.

Ulysses doesn’t have that ability to track research so easily and, frankly, I don’t think it quite fits in the philosophy and feel of the app anyway. For my tech writing, it doesn’t bother me because most of my “research” is in my head anyway. For the legal writing, I do miss the ability to have extensive research right in the writing file.

Ulysses uses iCloud for its synchronization engine. There is no Dropbox option. I’ve heard rumblings that people are against the application on that grounds alone. I’ve been using Ulysses nearly every day now for over a year–including this beta now for several months–and I’ve not lost any data through iCloud synchronization.

However, I’m drifting. The big point for me is that I can now work on large writing projects on any of my Apple devices and I love it. I really appreciate the hard work that the Ulysses team put into bringing this application to the iPad Pro with panache. Despite all the new wizz-bang, version 2.5 is a free update. There’s a lot to like about the new Ulysses. For an in-depth review go over to David Chartier’s review at MacStories.

Intuit Sells Quicken

Long before I knew of the existence of Intuit, I was well aware of Quicken. Quicken was the first personal financial management software that really made sense. Everybody used it and that’s what made their slow abandonment of the Apple platform so tragic. I know they still sell products for the Mac but it has been years since Quicken has been a top-notch Mac application. With this new acquisition by H.I.G. Capital, hopefully that will change. However, part of me wonders if it’s not already too late.

∞

Sponsor: Billings Pro




This week MacSparky is sponsored by Marketcircle, the makers of Billings Pro – a time-tracking & invoicing app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone & Apple Watch. It’s great for freelancers and small businesses such as consultants, lawyers, designers, photographers, that need an easy way to keep track of time spent on client work and a fast way to produce professional looking invoices.

Billings Pro syncs all your devices across all your team members, so you can track time for a project while out on your iPhone while a team member tracks time on their Mac at the office. It supports 3D touch, making it quick and easy for you to start a new timer or jump to a recent one, and includes a handy widget that lets you manage your Billings Pro timers within the Notification Centre. Easily add comments to your slips so you remember all the details of the work you did during that time. 

After the work is done, Billings Pro makes it really quick and simple to invoice–whether you’re creating the invoice from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You just select the time slips, pick an invoice template, and send. You can also add expenses or bill by flat rate. Comments jotted down on your time slips can be added to the invoice so your client has a clear understanding of the work you did – which means you get paid faster, with fewer questions. Billings Pro customers really like the invoice templates because they are clear and professional looking – and you can further customize invoices to fit your own brand. Marketcircle is full of smart developers and designers that love the Mac an iOS and if you try this app, you’ll see their attention to detail everywhere.

Read about other Mac users using Billings Pro here or experience Billings Pro for yourself with a free 30 day trial.

Craig Federighi on Security

In an op/ed piece for the Washington Post, Apple’s king of all software, Craig Federighi, explains:

data-animation-override>
“Great software has seemingly limitless potential to solve human problems — and it can spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Malicious code moves just as quickly, and when software is created for the wrong reason, it has a huge and growing capacity to harm millions of people.”

I remember the first time I saw Craig Federighi on stage for Apple and he was shaking like a leaf.  I’m sure he has always been a top notch engineer but in the last few years he has also developed into an eloquent spokesperson for Apple. The guy just stinks of credibility and I hope Apple continues to put him in the limelight.

∞