The MacSparky Mailing List

For years I’ve been getting emails from readers asking me to put together a regular newsletter. I’ve decided to commit and start making a monthly newsletter. The newsletter will have some original content and point at other content that I hope is interesting. I’ll be publishing the first such newsletter this week so if that’s your thing, go sign up.

Sponsor: SaneBox and SaneReminders




I’d like to thank SaneBox for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. SaneBox is a kick in the pants for your email. It adds a host of additional features to any email account and works with exchange, Google mail, or IMAP accounts.

There is a lot you can do with SaneBox to tame your email. One feature that a lot of users aren’t aware of is SaneReminders. Often you will send an email to someone and have some sort of expectation about a reply. That creates a pesky problem for you. Do you try and just remember to follow up on it in a week or two? Do you tie a string around your finger? Do you create a task in your task list application to remind you to check on whether or not there’s a reply? There really isn’t a simple, efficient way to handle that problem.

With SaneReminders, when you send an email to someone, you can blind copy it to SaneBox with some designated amount of time like, “1week@sanebox.com”. SaneBox then quietly watches out for a reply to that email. If you don’t get a reply within one week, you get a note from SaneBox reminding you. If you deal with a lot of people, this is a completely friction-free way to track email replies. I use this feature every day.

Learn more about all of the features of SaneBox over at SaneBox.com. If you sign up using the links in this post, you even get a nice discount. Who doesn’t want a nice discount? Thank you SaneBox for supporting MacSparky.com.

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MPU 317: Myke Hurley: Collector of iPads

This week’s episode of Mac Power Users features Myke Hurley, who talks about how he is using his iPad Pro and some of his favorite workflows for the business side of running a podcast network.

There was a problem with the feed (my fault) where some listeners got last week’s episode (MPU 316) instead of the new one. If that’s you, just re-download the episode and you’re fine

Sponsors include:

  • Clean My Mac 3: A simple and powerful application for keeping your Mac clean, maintained, and healthy. For a limited time, Mac Power Users listeners can save 30%.
  • Drobo Created by you. Protected by Drobo. Save $100 off select models using code MPU100.
  • Automatic The connected car company that improves your driving and integrates your car into yoru digital life. Enter code MACPOWER to get 20% off your purchase. 
  • Fracture Bring your photos to life.

Stanford’s Latest iOS Course

Every year Stanford releases a course on iOS application development to iTunes U. It’s always good and this year the materials are updated for iOS 9 and Swift. These courses aren’t beginner level but they certainly aren’t expert level either. If you’re curious about these things, this is a pretty good place to start.

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Speaking at the Release Notes Conference

I’m excited to be named as a speaker at this year’s Release Notes Conference in Indianapolis on September 27–29. The Release Notes Conference is all about independent developers and the challenges they face. Indie developers are some of my favorite people. They are entrepreneurs, geeks, and fearless trailblazers all at once. I can’t wait to talk to them about the perils and thrills of working for yourself.

FotoMagico 5

For years I’ve had the reputation in my friend and family groups as being the “slide show wizard”. If somebody’s getting married, or having an anniversary party, or whatever, they always come to me and ask me to put on their slide show.

I always hedge a bit, explaining that it is very time consuming and that if I’m going to do it, they should at least make sure I get extra cake and ice cream. They always agree to my terms.

What they don’t know is that all this time I’ve simply been taking their pictures and dumping them in FotoMagico with some good music. The app does all the work.

Recently Boinx released version 5 of FotoMagico and now I’ll look even better. They’ve now got features like:

* Resolution independence. Your slide show will play on any projector up to 4K

* Adding video

* New slide transitions and better text animation

One of my tricks for weddings is to always get a shot of the bride and groom’s first kiss and then add it to the end of the slide show for the reception. Everybody loves that. Now FotoMagico makes that job easier with a pre-built snippet for just that purpose.

There’s more, like export functions, synchronization with music beats, and other fancy tricks but to me the real value in this app is how easily it makes a great slideshow. Learn more over at Boinx Software.

Drawing on iPad Word

I don’t know what they’re feeding the Microsoft iOS development team but I wish they’d give some of it to the Mac team too. I’ve been using Word’s latest new feature that lets you annotate Microsoft Word documents on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. It feels super natural and makes a great deal of sense once you get the workflow down. I was going to write it up but Jeff Richardson covered it thoroughly today so I’m just going to point you over there.

At this point I’m beginning to wonder if it’s inevitable that I’ll be moving my Apple Pages template documents over to Word and just go all-in for Word. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Five Weeks

Today Apple announced an update to the MacBook. Overall, the new machine looks pretty solid. Faster SSD. Better processor. More battery life. The shocking thing to me is how little I care. Last week I had to get my laptop out and found a letter open on it that I had started writing … five weeks ago. I knew it had been awhile since I used the laptop. I didn’t realize it was five weeks.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend hours a day using my iMac. But for mobile work, the iPad Pro has largely been getting the job done for me. As iOS further matures, I’m just not so sure I’ll have much need for a laptop. Trust me. I’m as surprised by this realization as anybody else.

Typing on Glass

I’ve made no secret over the years about the fact that I’m not particularly good at typing on glass. Part of the reason is ham-hands and my preference for dictation. Those, however, are just excusees. The real reason is that after a lifetime of touch typing, I’ve never felt particularly good at typing on glass. It felt like productivity molasses.

A few things, however, have swayed me. It started with the iPad Air. On that machine I got quite good at thumb typing in portrait mode. It’s nothing like touch typing but still pretty great to sit on an airplane and thumb my way through an outline or a pile of email.

Speaking of airplanes, I recently took a flight where I was seated right between the window and a big guy that made pulling down the tray and using my iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard cover impossible. I had four hours on that plane and was determined not to thrown in the towel. So I placed the iPad on my lap and started typing. I then went into one of those hypnotic work-states that I often feel on airplanes and before I knew it the pilot announced we were about to land.

I got a lot of work done typing on glass that day and it really opened my eyes. There’s a lot to like about typing on the 12.9″ iPad glass. You can switch keyboards easily. If you’re paying attention, the recommended word selections are pretty good and can speed things up. That eye-opening flight was a month ago and now I find myself typing on glass a lot more than I’ve ever done before. This post was typed on glass (more out of convenience than to prove a point). When you get right down to it I really don’t think there is much a speed loss typing on glass with the big iPad Pro.

Jason Snell’s brought math to this party. He recently ran his own typing tests where he found he only had a 17% loss in speed typing on the 12.9″ iPad pro glass over a keyboard. While I don’t think it is quite that close for me, I don’t think Jason is far off. Moreover, if I spent a little bit more time getting better at this glass keyboard, I’m certain I could close the gap further.

All of that said, there are still definite pain points. Text selection is still far easier for me using a keyboard. Also, typing on glass at least once a day my finger accidentally hits the keyboard switch button which brings my work to a screeching halt. On that note if I were in charge, I’d make the keyboard selection button something where you had to press and hold to switch between keyboards.

I’m not ready to give up my Apple Smart Keyboard cover anytime soon but I can tell you I’m much more receptive to typing on glass now than I’ve ever been before.