Force Touch on the iPhone

I have not said much about a force touch for iPhone. However, recent news leaks make it seem inevitable. It looks very much like the next iPhone will have a force touch screen. I enjoyed this 9 to 5 Mac coverage about force touch on the iPhone a few days ago. All of this got me thinking about exactly how big a deal force touch will be on the iPhone.

At the beginning, at least, I expect it won’t be much of a deal at all. The feature will only be available on the newest iPhones so developers will know a majority of their users won’t even have force touch. Moreover, by its very nature, force touch feels like a feature for power users are much more than for everyday users. I even see this with my wife and her Apple Watch. Rarely does she think of using a force touch the screen when she’s trying to figure out how to make a feature work.

I think it will be the same on the iPhone, only more so. People are used to seeing icons that are tied to functions in their applications. Force touch features are hidden behind a hard press on the screen and a lot of people will never think about force touching when looking for a missing feature. I think application developers that start burying key features behind force touch will do so at their own peril.

Instead, I think for the first few years force touch is going to be very much a power user feature. It will let you do things faster but I think rarely will it allow you to do exclusive things that can’t be accomplished some other way. The example in the 9 to 5 Mac article about how force touching an application icon brings it to a particular screen is a perfect example of this. Alternatively, you could manually open the application and manually navigate to the screen but being able to do both of those steps with one force touch will be much nicer. It will be an improvement on the experience for those people who want to invest the time to figure it out and set their applications accordingly. That’s not everyone by a long stretch.

Maybe in a few years when this interface function is available on all iPhones it will become a bigger deal but my expectation is that initially us nerds will love force touch and a lot of other people won’t even realize it exists.

MPU 272: Mac-Based Small Business

This week’s Mac Power Users features me talking about the steps I took to set up a small business when I left “the firm” to open my sole practitioner law practice. The last several months have been some of the most exhilarating of my life and I’ve picked up quite a few nerd tricks along the way.

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Pay What You Want Mac Power Users Bundle

I don’t know who Stack Social has putting these bundles together but that person is earning his or her keep. The newest bundle, that expires in 4 days, has a nice assortment of apps, several of which I use regularly. Pricing on these “Pay What You Want” bundles only requires you to beat the average of what people are currently paying for the bundle. (Currently $6.09.) I recommend you pay more than that. These are some great apps including:

Scapple ($14.99):

A freeform text editor that allows you to make notes anywhere on the page and to connect them using straight dotted lines or arrows. This app is by the same team that makes Scrivener. I need say no more.

RapidWeaver 6 ($89.99):

The all-in-one web design software for Mac that enables you to build the website you’ve always wanted.

StuffIt Deluxe 16 For Mac ($49.99):

Easily and safely shrink your photos, music, and other documents without reducing quality.

CrossOver 14 Mac ($59.95):

Run Windows software on your Mac the simple way. We just talked about this app on the most recent Mac Power Users Live.

BusyCal ($49.99):

An alternative to the built-in Calendar app on OS X that provides powerful time-saving features in a friendly, easy-to-use package.

WinZip 4 Mac ($29.95):

WinZip Mac 4 makes it easy to zip and protect your files, and new sharing options let you seamlessly connect to cloud services.

WALTR ($29.95):

Take the ‘SUCK’ out of copying music & video onto your iPhone/iPad.

RoboForm Everywhere: 1-Yr Subscription: ($19.95)

Unlimited password management

There are two more that haven’t unlocked yet:

Find Any File ($7.99):

Find every file on any of your disks, including those usually hidden—fast and precisely.

Screens ($29.99):

A beautiful, yet powerful screen sharing and VNC client that lets you connect back to your Mac anywhere in the world.

Mac Power Users: Christina Warren and MPU Live

This week we’ve got twice the fun over at the Mac Power Users.

MPU 270: Workflows with Christina Warren

We’ve wanted Christina for a long time and it was really nice finally talking with her about her work as an Apple journalist and Apple Music. We use the backdrop of the Apple Earnings Call to discuss her workflows.

MPU 271: MPU Live – What’s the Worse Thing That Could Happen?

We talk with Kent Newsome about working in a “locked down” office, we also discuss Amazon’s Echo, listener travel tips, two factor authentication apps, OmniFocus workflows, sharing tasks, referenced photo libraries and answer listener questions on a variety of topics.

Get them while they are hot.

TJ Luoma on the 12″ Retina MacBook

TJ Luoma went in to the Apple Store to buy a new MacBook Pro and ended up walking out with a 12″ Retina MacBook. He loves it. One of the most interesting parts is that he prefers the MacBook’s low-travel keyboard. I think keyboards are a personal thing, like the firmness of a mattress. I’ve grown accustomed to my MacBook’s keyboard and don’t think about it much. However, I still prefer the more conventional keyboard on my iMac. Otherwise, I’d agree with TJ across the board. The 12″ MacBook is powerful enough for what I do and when you have a computer this light, you can easily take it about anywhere.

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Game Recommendation: Prune

I’ve got somewhat quirky tastes when it comes to iOS games. My favorites games aren’t too stressful or necessarily too fast. Maybe it’s because I’ll play a game to unwind, but Alto’s Adventure, Zen Bound, and Monument Valley are right up my alley.

I was noodling around in the App Store a few days ago and discovered Prune. In Prune you grow a tree and the object is to prune the tree in a way which allows the right limbs find sunlight and bloom flowers. I love this game. The levels get increasingly more difficult but nothing (so far) is overwhelming. If you get hung up on a level, after a certain number of tries the game just offers to go on. I’ve even saved one of my trees as my lock screen on my iPad. I also like the pricing model. I paid $4 for the game and there are no nagging in-app purchase requests. Two thumbs up.

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Add an Hour to Your Mac’s Battery Life with Safari

Battery Box ran the numbers comparing Chrome to Safari on their MacBooks and found using Safari adds over an hour to your battery life. We had the same experience in my house when my wife was having trouble with her 13″ MacBook Pro’s battery. I switched her to Safari and the problems went away. (In fairness, she also stopped using Flash.) I know that Chrome has some whizzy features that aren’t in Safari, but the increased battery life plus the deep iCloud integration make Safari my browser of choice.

Clearly, preserving battery life on all of its devices is a high priority for Apple. I’d venture to say that because Apple is the hardware vendor, preserving battery life always will be higher on Apple’s list than Google’s. (via Daring Fireball.)

Home Screens: Jaco Muller

This week’s home screen post features Jaco Muller (Twitter). Jaco is a MacSparky reader and Mac Power Users listener. Jaco is also the guy that wrote this script to use my TextExpander script in Outlook. So Jaco, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Overcast must be one of my current favorites. I subscribe to 9 podcasts, most of which have episodes longer than 80 minutes. Before Overcast I couldn’t get through all the podcasts in a week’s commute time, but now it’s a breeze. I also use Mail, Omnifocus, Evernote, 1Password and Whatsapp many times during the day.

I also think Wunderlist is absolutely fantastic. It does one thing only – managing list(s) – but does it very well. My wife and I use it for a shared shopping list and it does the job much better than Evernote. The key is that each entry on a list is being synced as a separate item, as opposed to an entire list being synced. The result is that individual entries made from different devices are updated immediately without sync errors.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, but they’re not on my home screen because they are distracting and time consuming. I also check into Meerkat and Periscope from time to time, because I believe they can possibly evolve into apps that can change how breaking news spreads in future.

What app makes you most productive?

I use Omnifocus mainly to view the current list of tasks and to tick them off once completed. However, the simple process of adding a task into Omnifocus means that I can ‘forget’ about it and focus on the task at hand. This simple ability to add something ‘on the go’ and trust the system behind it is probably the single item that adds most to my productivity. I rarely use it for more complex purposes like reviews, adding context or details etc. to tasks.

Drafts is a close second. The ability to open it and start typing immediately works well in real life situations where one’s focus is supposed to be on something else, i.e. during a conversation or on a phone call etc.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Workflow. I know it has the potential to eliminate a lot of mundane tasks, but I haven’t sat down and spent time with it to understand it well enough. Perhaps some basic documentation or an FAQ would help – i.e. I have some unanswered questions about how variables are passed on during a workflow.

What is the app you are still missing?

Not an app, but a feature that I think may make iOS more user friendly to me, is the ability to ‘auto arrange’ apps, based on usage, time of day, etc. Of course one should be able to pin a few apps to remain static, but at the same time leave a few spaces available for dynamic auto arranging of apps. I’d just like apps that are being used more, to gravitate towards the home screen by themselves.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

I work in an office on a mac, but whenever I get up to walk somewhere, I grab the phone and catch up on social media etc.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

It would be great if Apple could somehow use their purchase power to loosen the grip that content owners have on the distribution and licensing of content outside of the US. For those of us living outside of the US, it makes less and less sense that a movie or series is being released in the US while we only get to see it (legally) much later. In many cases it’s not even available to purchase online at all. For example, a proper online music streaming service like Spotify wasn’t available in South Africa where I live until Apple Music became available with the release of iOS8.4. I’d like to see the same happening with movies and series.

Thanks Jaco

TextExpander Script for Recipient’s Name in Outlook

Awhile back, I wrote this post about how to automatically add a recipient’s name to an email. Reader Jaco Muller (Twitter) liked the idea but uses Outlook. Jaco re-wrote the script to work with Outlook. Okay Outlook users, here you go. Thanks Jaco.

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Microsoft Outlook"
        set theToRecipient to (value of static text of text area 1 of scroll area 1 of splitter group 1 of window 1)
        set theToRecipient to theToRecipient as string
        if (count words of theToRecipient) is greater than 0 then return word 1 of theToRecipient
    end tell
end tell

Apple Music Early Report Card

Every time Apple releases a new cloud-based service, technology journalists and early adopters sit around with bated breath. Apple seriously damaged its reputation a few years back with the MobileMe rollout and it still is accepted wisdom that Apple is lousy at cloud services.

While I’d prefer to not open that particular can of worms today, I would like to report in on my experiences with Apple Music now that we’ve all been using it for awhile.

My family music library was approaching 25,000 tracks. When Apple Music released, I switched my wife and two daughters over to Family Sharing and signed up for the trial period of the Apple Music family plan.

Setting up Family Sharing was easy. Because we previously used a shared account for iTunes purchases, my account still connects to that shared account for purchases and my personal iCloud account for calendars, email, contacts, and similar data. My wife and daughters now use their personal iCloud accounts for both purchases and data. In some ways, their set up is easier than mine. However, we still need that legacy account attached in order for them to get access to all that music, television, and movies we’ve purchased over the years.

The last time I attempted Family Sharing, things went poorly. I chronicled all the problems at the time but in summary, Family Sharing broke app updates and lost data and generally had my family sharpening knives for me. With this new attempt things have been working without complaint. The list of sins in my above linked post seem to be largely resolved.

That’s not to say that Family Sharing isn’t still a pain at times. When my wife and daughters want to download something from the other family accounts they need to go to the “Purchased” button and then switch to the appropriate user and find the media from there. This should be easier. Once everyone understood how to get at each other’s data, however, everything worked.

One interesting bit in relation to music is the convenience of downloading with Apple Music. When we first started this journey, I put all of our iTunes library music on a portable hard drive and explained to my wife and daughters they could copy any files they wanted from our legacy library into their own accounts from the hard drive. Interestingly, after weeks, nobody has taken me up on this. I looked at their iTunes libraries a few days ago and it appears that rather than copy files from the drive, they’ve just re-downloaded much of their music from Apple Music.

They haven’t just stopped at music that was already in my library. My entire family has built out their libraries with a lot of music we don’t own. I’m no different in this regard. I went on a Dexter Gordon binge yesterday that would have cost hundreds of dollars. Conservatively, we’ve downloaded over 2,000 tracks that we didn’t previously have in our library before Apple Music arrived.

One advantage that Apple Music has is it’s integration with they prior library. I’m constantly rating music that is interesting and have built a series of smart playlists around those ratings. With Apple Music I can continue to rate the tracks I’ve added to my library and tie them into existing playlists. I’ve been an iTunes guy for so long that integration with my existing library and smart playlists is a big feature for me. Competing services can’t do that.

I was a Beats subscriber for over a year before the big integration and I enjoy the service now more than ever because it works with my iTunes library. (Beats on the Mac up until last month was a mess. It required a Flash enabled browser. Yuck.)

I know there have been problems but at the Sparks house, Apple Music has been a huge hit. Based on our aggressive downloading of tracks, I expect the $15/month will be a no-brainer.