Home Screens: Brady Bhalla


I’ve met so many interesting people through MacSparky. One of those is young Brady Bhalla. Brady and I have emailed each other several times and he is so articulate I couldn’t help asking him to do a home screen post from our youngest contributor yet. So Brady, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

One of my favorite apps on my iPhone is Overcast because I love listening to podcasts. My favorite podcasts are Mac Power Users, Clockwise, Upgrade, ATP, Liftoff, and Connected. Another app that I like is the News app because I can stay up to date about what is happening in the world. I also really like WeMo and IFTTT. If my WeMo Motion in my room detects motion it will turn on the other lights in my room. If I long press my WeMo light switch, the lamp on my side table turns off or on. One other app that I like is Slack. My family and extended family have a channel that we use like a private Facebook.

Which apps are your guilty pleasure?

The games I play the most are Crossy Road, The Blockheads, and Plants vs. Zombies 2. My parents have restrictions on how much time I can play games, so I can’t play them as much as I want.

What app makes you most productive?

One app that makes me productive is 1Password. I have a shared vault with my dad so he can also see my passwords. Some other apps that make me productive are the ones I use for school. These apps are Google Docs, Google Classroom (to check any new assignments), Documents (I scan in my finished homework papers with Scanner Pro and save them in Documents), and StudentVUE (to check my grades). I also sometimes use Notes to plan a big project if I have one. One other app that makes me productive is OmniFocus. I don’t usually use it but sometimes I need to make a packing list before a trip and I use OmniFocus for that.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

I usually use my iPhone about five times on a school day, but more on a weekend. I use it so little on a school day because we aren’t allowed to use it during school hours. The things I use my iPhone for the most are weather, news, games (if I’m allowed to), and listening to podcasts.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone?

There are many features that I really like to use on my iPhone 6s, but if I had to choose one I would probably choose 3D Touch. The things I use it most for are switching apps back and forth and using Peek and Pop to look at my emails and Messages.

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

I don’t have an Apple Watch, but my parents got me a Pebble Time for Christmas. I use the Simplicity face which just tells me the date and time. I love being able to get texts and other notifications without getting my phone out. I also use my Pebble to track my steps and how much sleep I’m getting.

Thanks Brady!

Chicago Bound

As I write this, I’m waiting to board my flight to Chicago and the American Bar Association’s annual TechShow, where I have the privilege of sharing some nerdy goodness with other lawyers. The best part about attending these conferences is meeting new people so if you are in attendance, please stop me and say “hello”. If you are not attending but in the Chicago area, there is a certain bar I may happen to be at later today. 

Setting Precedent

There’s some interesting bits on this issue. John Oliver sums it up nicely.

I’ve always wondered how badly the FBI really needs Apple to build the requested super-key. Setting aside how bad it would be if such a key got into the wild–it would–why doesn’t the FBI just go to the NSA? Former national security official Richard Clarke has the same question:

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“Every expert I know believes that NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that the government can compel a computer device manufacturer to allow the government in.”
— Richard Clarke

 

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.

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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.

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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.