The Steve Jobs Mythos

Since Steve Jobs’ death, he’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and two motion pictures. It seems to me he is increasingly being painted in one dimension. People are eager to give him credit for everything that came out of Apple while at the same time boiling his personality down to nothing more than his worst traits. I never met Steve Jobs but I’ve known several people that did and the story I get from his friends and co-workers is that everything about Steve was the exact opposite of one-dimensional. 

I think part of the problem is that Apple is so secretive that much about Steve at Apple won’t really see the light of day for years to come and outside of Apple, he was very private. Either way, I do hope that at some point we’ll all back away from the caricature that has emerged over the years since his death.

Sponsor: Curbi Parental Controls




The holidays are over and you may know of some little ones with shiny new iOS and Android devices. That’s great. Kids should be using technology. However, they should also be subject to rational limitations. That, however, is easier said than done. Enter curbi. 

Curbi lets kids enjoy the Internet while at the same time protecting them from the nefarious parts. One of the great things about Curbi is that it protects kids not only your local WiFi network, but also through a cellular connection or at a friend’s house. curbi solves this problem, giving you amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You can easily block specific types of content or add a specific site list. curbi tracks (and can block) websites through Safari or any other iOS app that has a web browser. Perhaps even more importantly, the curbi blocks will work no matter how they access the Internet, even using their pal’s home WiFi on the other side of town.

curbi also lets you set boundaries. For example, you could block social networks from 3pm to 6pm and the entire Internet from 9pm to 8am. For just $6.99 a month, you can protect all of the iOS devices in your home. curbi is the only service I’ve ever seen that can protect your kids, no matter where they are. Learn more here.

ios-03.png

ios-01-iphone5.png

ios-04.png

web-02.PNG

web-03.PNG

web-04.PNG

web-05.PNG


The Apple Watch Nightstand

9to5 Mac recently had a nice post with some Apple Watch tips. For me, the winner is nightstand mode. It’s not as well known as it should be but if you put your Apple Watch on its side on your night stand and connect the charging cable, the watch turns into a handy night stand. I’ve never liked bed stand clocks that light up the room at night and the Apple Watch kindly turns itself off. If you need to check the time, just touch the screen and it lights up for you long enough to tell the time and then goes dark again so you can go back to sleep. I also prefer the alarm sounds of the Apple Watch over the iPhone.

 

The Year that Phone Contracts Died

One of the significant developments of 2015 in the United States was the general implosion of some very traditional phone purchasing models. For years, we’ve been signing contracts and counting days until those contracts are over so we could get a new phone and sign up for yet another contract to start the process all over again.

Not anymore.

I was genuinely surprised how quickly that all fell apart this year. Recently AT&T announced that starting early next year they are killing contracts entirely. Verizon hasn’t made any such announcement but they are pushing non-contract plans and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them punt on contracts too.

It’s still unclear whether this will truly be better for us consumers over time but it is clear we at least now have more options about where we buy our phones. This year I bought a phone on a payment plan from Apple. It didn’t involve giving blood to AT&T and that felt pretty great.

Also still up in the air is the question of what impact these changes will have on consumers’ upgrade plans. Removing the arbitrary contract date may mean some people get off the 2-year upgrade cycle. Apple’s own payment plan makes yearly upgrades pretty convenient and I wouldn’t be surprised if this results in Apple selling more phones, not less.

Either way, we can remember 2015 as the year that cellular phone carrier contracts were put down. 

Now only if I could write a similar post next year about cable companies …

Using Apple Notes

Like a lot of people, I like having a place to keep piles of text notes. For years I’ve solved this problem with nvALT and a rotating group of iOS apps that work with Dropbox-based text files. About a year ago, I decided to start looking at other options. This was not out of some dissatisfaction with nvALT but instead but my insatiable nerd-curiosity. So I went on a notes spirit quest for several months including tours of duty in SimpleNote, Evernote, and several other options that ultimately led me back to nvALT. The funny thing about that experiment is that one app I never considered as a potential replacement was Apple Notes and all of its Marker Felt glory. Then WWDC rolled around and one of Apple’s big new announcements was an all new Notes app. I was in the betas. I had just finished one notes app experiment so I figured … “why not?”. I started using Notes in August and we are now sneaking up on January and I find myself still using Notes. Trust me; I’m as surprised as you are. So here’s a few notes on … well … Notes.

Things I Like About Notes

Syncing Works

Syncing in the old version of Notes always felt like a crap shoot. It used an IMAP protocol and felt (and acted) like a bit of a hack. With the new version, syncing is much improved. I’ve currently got over 300 notes and the list is growing. Some of them are a few lines of text. Others are full of pictures, files, and links. It’s also fast. Out of curiosity, while writing this I got out my iPad Air, which has spent the last week on a shelf, and fired up Notes. It was up to date in seconds. It’s sad that I need to even mention this but I’ve had no syncing errors and lost no Notes despite now running the app on four devices.

Rich Text and Attachments

If I just wanted to have plain text notes, nvALT is probably still the winner. However, one of the reasons I started looking for alternatives was because I’m finding I’d like to do a bit more and Apple Notes does that. I’m increasingly finding excuses to put pictures in notes. I’m also throwing word processing documents and other files. Everything is syncing just fine. I also really like the checklists and bullets. They’re easy to add, attractive, and useful.

Adding a little formatting is nice. That does, however, come at a price. My nvALT text notes are timeless. I’m certain my grandchildren’s grandchildren will be able to open a text file. I’m not so certain they’ll be able to get at my Apple Notes data. I’ve been conscious of this as I’ve been adding new notes to the database. Anything that I want to be really long-term, I’m addressing differently or at least exporting as a plain text when appropriate. There’s also an app linked below that can mass-export your Notes to text files.

Notes as an Everything Bucket

While comparisons to Evernote are obvious, the applications are very different. Evernote definitely has more features and better sharing as an everything bucket but it hardly feels native to the Mac and iOS. Evernote, and its desire to be everything to everyone, gets a little rough around the edges. I think the more appropriate comparison for Notes is to Yojimbo. Notes is a native Mac and iOS app that also syncs its data on the cloud. That was something that we never quite got out of Yojimbo. Apple Notes is cleaner and, in my opinion, generally a better experience overall for Mac and iOS users. Moreover, because it’s an Apple product, it’s got hooks all over the Mac and IOS operating systems making it seriously easy to put data inside it.

Sketches

Now that I’ve got an iPad pro, I also find myself adding sketches to notes. That’s something I haven’t done for a long time and it’s really useful.

Things I don’t Like About Notes

That Ridiculously Small Mac Font

It’s completely nuts to me how they shipped the Mac app with both that tiny default font and no way to change it to something larger. You can increase the font size in individual notes but nothing across the board. It’s like someone at Apple thought, “I’m 24 years old and I can read the tiny font just fine. If anyone else can’t, screw em’.” I was hoping that by now they’d have shipped an update that lets me fix this but no luck. Strangely, this is not an issue on the iPad or iPhone where the default font size is larger and entirely readable.

Duplicating Notes

There is no way to easily duplicate a note. Quite often I will use an existing note as a jumping off point for a new one. The only way to do that now is to physically copy the contents of the note, create a new note, and then paste those content. Not exactly convenient.

Note Organization

The Notes application will sort your notes any way you like, so long as you only like them sorted by modification date with the most recently modified note always at the top. This generally is the best way to sort notes and my preferred method. However, once in a while I would like to sort them in different ways, like alphabetically. That’s not possible here. Searching your Notes (Option-Command-F on the Mac) helps but still I wish we could decide for ourselves how Notes organizes its data.

A Few Hacks I’ve Picked Up Along the Way

Text Formatting Shortcuts

There is a series of keyboard shortcuts for text formatting. Once you get them under your fingers, they speed up text formatting on the Mac nicely:

Shift-Command-T – Title

Shift-Command-H – Heading

Shift-Command-B – Body

Shift-Command-L – Checklist

Tags

Notes supports folders, which is a convenient one-dimensional form of organization. It has no support, however, for tags. With the inclusion of tags in iOS last year, I was hoping that would become a “thing”. However, my hopes appear to be dashed. We saw very little support for tags in iOS 9. Notes was a golden opportunity for Apple to jump on their own tagging bandwagon but, alas, they did not. If you’re going to tag notes, you’ll have to make homegrown tags. I suggest using the hashtag (e.g., #grocery) and putting them in at the bottom of your notes. The searching feature will sniff them out for you.

Moving in from Evernote

If you’ve got a lot of notes in Evernote that you’d like to put in Notes, use Larry Salibra’s script. I’ve moved great big piles of text out of Evernote into Notes this way with no trouble at all.

Yanking Text out of Notes

You can always block and copy individual notes into a text file but if you’d like to copy all of your Notes out into individual text files, there’s a Mac app for that called Notes Exporter.

Am I Sticking With It?

So throughout this test drive I’ve been putting off deciding whether or not I’ll stick with Notes or not. However, after six months I’ve come to realize that the decision has already been made. The fact that I haven’t abandoned Notes after this long answers the question. I’m sticking with Notes.

Sponsor: Tinderbox and WinterFest Sale

Tinderbox is back as this week’s sponsor. Tinderbox lets you collect and organize your notes and then helps you intelligently analyze and work with that data. You can link different notes together and display them back in different formats. There are outline, map, and chart views that you can easily jump between, letting both the right and left sides of your brain have a look. There is also a built-in timeline tool that can create an interactive timeline among dated notes. Tinderbox can also collect and report on data it accumulates from i ts own file. It works with other applications like DEVONthink Office Pro, Delicious Library, and even your calendar.


Right now you can get Tinderbox for 25% off as part of the 2015 Winter Festival of Artisanal Software. There are a lot of great apps in there for sale, many of which have been covered here and on the Mac Power Users. Tinderbox is a serious tool and getting a 25% discount may be exactly the kick in the pants you need to get started with it as we head into the new year.

So head over the WinterFest sale page to pick up your copy of Tinderbox and then take a look at the Tinderbox website to learn more about this powerful tool.


∞