This week I’m pleased to welcome back Middle Davids Artisan Candles as a MacSparky sponsor. Dan and his team at Middle Davids understand the use of rituals to help with productivity. Have you considered using the scent of a candle? It works.

I burn candles while I work and I always feel that the ritual of lighting the candle is a way to tell myself “it is on” and get to work. After I’ve worked a few hours, I blow out the candle and take a break. You’ll be surprised how well this works. This month I’m burning through a Green Tea candle from Middle Davids. The vast majority of people who try a Middle Davids subscription stick with it. In a world full of technology, this provides a fantastic analog motivational tool. 

With the holidays approaching, you may not just want a candle subscription for yourself. You can gift a subscription so your friends or family get a reminder in the mail every month or two that you care. (They have gift options for one, two, three, four, six and twelve months so every budget is covered.)

Dan, the proprietor, is a candle geek and obsesses on candles like I do productivity apps. The candles are 100% botanical soy wax, not paraffin (which is a petrochemical) and the wicks are cotton woven (no metals).

Middle Davids has a subscription plan that gets you two candles a month with 40 hours of burn time. You also get a box of wooden matches, and a sample of the next month’s scent. Give it a try. You’ll surprise yourself. Use the code “Balsam” (which happens to be my favorite scent) for $5 off. Also, check out their video, below.

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There’s a new bundle out today worthy of consideration. This one drew my eye because it is loaded with apps I’ve paid for and use every day. For just $39.99, you get:

PDFpen 7 ($74.95 Value): 

PDFpen is a powerful Mac PDF editor with fetures like signatures, text, images, form filling, and OCR all baked right in. Here are some screencasts I made all about it.

Drive Genius 4 ($99 Value)

I’ve used this app in the past and when you are experience drive problems, it can be truly magical. The award-winning DrivePulse feature alerts you to hard drive issues before they become major problems. Top features like Defrag and DriveSlim will help keep your Mac running fast. BootWell lets you create a special bootable secondary drive to Defrag or Repair your main hard drive.”

BusyContacts ($49.99 Value): 

BusyContacts is like Apple Contacts pro. Great app.

Prizmo 3 ($49.95 Value):

Prizmo is a powerful app that lets you scan, edit, and perform OCR on any type of document or image.

Drop zone 3 ($10 Value): 

This is another one I use every day. If you ever work in full or split screen modes on your Mac, there’s a place in your life for Dropzone 3

DaisyDisk ($9.99 Value):

This has been my disk storage manager for years. It’s fast, efficient, and beautiful.

AfterShot Pro 2 ($79.99 Value): 

This is fast RAW photo-editing software. It includes tools for the entire post shot workflow.

Mixtape Pro ($69.99 Value): 

Mixtape is a simple, beautiful and easy to learn application for making beat matched mixes.

MacX DVD Ripper Pro ($59.95 Value): 

With 350+ preset profiles, MacX DVD Ripper Pro makes it hassle-free to rip any DVDs including encrypted DVDs for Mac, iTunes, QuickTime, iPhone, iPad, Android, Apple TV, etc. bypass all copy protections (DVD CSS, region code, RCE, Sony ArccOS, UOPs, Disney X-project DRM, etc).

MotionComposer ($29 Value): 

Create amazing animations and interactive content, and run it on any computer, smartphone or tablet with MotionComposer.

If you’re interested, use the links in this post and I get a few bucks for the pizza fund. Thanks!

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There is a lot of talk lately about the contrasting positions taken by Apple and Microsoft over operating system convergence. Microsoft, which was early to mobile operating systems but then apparently slept while everything evolved, now makes the argument through its OS and hardware that there should be one operating system to rule them all. Initially, this was pretty ugly but Microsoft continues work on this, most recently with the Surface Book, which I actually find pretty interesting if you prefer Windows.

Apple is taking the opposite approach, arguing Macs and iOS devices are so fundamentally different that they require separate operating systems. Mice and touch interfaces are too far apart and putting both interfaces in one operating system leads to software that is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

This entire debate could be summarized that Microsoft believes convergence gives users the best of both worlds while Apple believes it gives users the worst. Two contrary technology paradigms are getting bashed against each other by two massive technology companies. Good times.

I can’t help but think that some of the reason for these contrary positions is software. The tables have turned and Apple has millions of apps on iOS and Microsoft is struggling far behind. Microsoft finds itself pushing a mobile operating system with little software while at the same time maintaining a desktop operating system with an abundance of software. Through convergence, Microsoft gets to leverage that desktop software on to its struggling mobile platform. It’s a bit of bootstrapping and doesn’t really work unless App developers also address the touch interface but from Microsoft’s position it makes sense. Apple on the other hand has the software advantage and no motivation to Frankenstien Mac OS onto iOS.

To me, the interesting bit of all of this is the long game. What happens when we imagine the state of these positions in five or ten years. In the case of Windows, I think it will get better. All of those legacy Windows developers are eventually going to have to evolve their software for the touch interface or go the way of the Dodo bird. As that happens, the desktop legacy stuff will matter less, as will Windows. The interesting question is what all that will mean for Microsoft, where Windows is such an important part of the bottom line. 

Looking to the future with Apple, I don’t think they are looking at this as convergence so much as consumption. iOS and iOS hardware is going to get increasingly powerful. (I’m typing this article right now on an iPad.) There’s still plenty of work to be done but iOS will grow up a lot in the next years and replacing a Mac with an iOS device will get easier. I think Apple sees the Mac’s relevance as substantially less in 10 years than it is today and iOS as substantially more. I don’t think that means there is a whiteboard in Cupertino with the day of the Mac’s death written on it. If I had to bet, I’d say the Mac is around for many years to come. However, I think its overall importance will dwindle and iOS will grow into something else that combines additional power and flexibility with its existing ease of use. That is why I don’t think Apple is interested in convergence.

This week the popular iPhone JD blog turns seven and Jeff Richardson, its proprietor, has a great post to mark the occasion. Despite its name, the site isn’t just for lawyers but instead anyone trying to get productive with the iPhone and iPad. To me, during this past seven years Jeff’s writing has transformed from “just another guy on the Internet” to a trusted voice. Congratulations Jeff and iPhone JD.

This week TechCrunch broke the story about Apple’s improvements to App Store search.

I’ve often thought App Store search was pretty embarrassing for Apple. My own particular canary-in-a-coal-mine on this issue is Tweetbot. When I needed to rebuild my new iPhone a few months ago. I searched “Tweetbot” in the App Store and the results came up empty. This is one of the most popular Twitter clients in the App Store and yet searching its explicit name did not find it.  Searching “Twitter”, gave me a long list of Twitter-related applications but despite scrolling for a long time, Tweetbot did not show up. I finally gave up and left the App Store. Ultimately, I found the application by going to the developer website and clicking the app store link from there. Crazy.

As a test, this morning I went into the App Store and again searched “Tweetbot”. The application immediately showed up. Even better, the more generic search term, “twitter” returns Tweetbot as the fourth entry, right above Twitterrific, another popular third-party Twitter client. These are good signs for the new App Store search.