The Sparks family uses Find Friends all the time. With my kids off at events, jobs, and school, we often check up on each other. I like to think of it as a nerdy version of the Weasley family clock. We’re not creepy. Really.
The one piece of this I don’t understand though is why Apple hasn’t found a way to put Find Friends on the Mac. (It’s also not a part of iCloud.com.) I would guess this is an issue of engineering resources but now that we have Maps on the Mac, I hope Find Friends is not far behind.
Yesterday BusyMac released BusyContacts. This is one I’ve been waiting for. In the same way that BusyCal improves upon the built-in Apple calendar, BusyContacts improves upon the Contacts application. There is so much to like about this application.
Multiple view – You can display your data in multiple or single column list views.
Tags – Group and filter contacts easily.
BusyCal integration — BusyContacts integrates with BusyCal by linking contacts to events in your calendar.
Email Integration – Click on a contact and see recent emails right in Busy Contacts. The same goes for messages and social media network posts.
Syncing – It all syncs with the built-in Contacts app so you are not silo-ing your data
I’m a fan of the team of Busy Mac and took this opportunity to talk with John Chaffee, one of the company founders.
Q. BusyMac is now known for BusyCal and BusyContacts, but you guys have been working on Mac calendar software for even longer than that. When did you first get started?
A. In the early 1990s Dave Riggle and I teamed up at the original Now Software to create Now Up-to-Date, which became the best selling calendar app on the Mac. That was over 20 years ago – when System 7 was shiny and new, and long before OS X or iCal existed.
In 2007, Dave and I returned to our roots and formed BusyMac to once again build the best calendar app for the Mac, BusyCal. 🙂
Q. Why BusyContacts now?
Nearly everyone is frustrated with the shortcomings of OS X Contacts. From our first demo of BusyCal, people have been begging us to build a contact manager app. Not only is BusyContacts a powerful replacement for OS X Contacts, it’s a great CRM solution when paired with BusyCal.
Q. What was the greatest challenge you faced in bringing BusyContacts to life?
A. Time was our biggest challenge. We are a small company and are careful not to spread ourselves too thin. It took us five years of building and refining BusyCal before we reached a point where we felt we could afford to invest in a second product. We have now spent 1.5 years building BusyContacts and are fortunate in that we were able to leverage much of the syncing technology in BusyCal.
That treasure trove of technology and experience saved us years of development time and has resulted in a very robust product. BusyContacts 1.0 actually exceeded our expectations.
Q. What feature are you personally most excited about with BusyContacts?
A. There’s a lot to like in BusyContacts – List View, Tags, Smart Filters, Social Network Integration, BusyCal Integration, Sharing – but I think the feature that users find most exciting is the Activity List. It provides a history of interactions with each of your contacts through rich integration with BusyCal, Mail, Messages, and social networks.
In addition to other super powers, Kourosh rocks a fedora.
This week’s home screen features Kourosh Dini (website)(Twitter). Kourosh is the classic triple threat: psychiatrist, musician, geek. Most recently Kourosh released a second edition of his fantastic book, Creating Flow with OmniFocus. To me, a trip to Chicago is not complete until I’ve broken bread with my pal Kourosh. So Kourosh, show us your home screen.
What are some of your favorite apps?
OmniFocus remains my main application and has the easiest reach at the bottom right corner.
The Phone and Drafts apps are also on the lower bar. Other communications apps are embedded in a folder on the lower bar. The default Mail app and Tweetbot are actually on the second page of that folder to minimize my propensity to check either reflexively.
Timers
Across the top are Settings and three timers.
Wind-up is useful for simple timing. I use it for meditation and making tea. I like the windup action.
Due is good for setting up a time to begin closing a session of work. I love how it can ding every minute.
When an alert or reminder just rings once, it can be disruptive as I must either:
Stop present work abruptly and move on to the next thing,
Turn off the ringer and hope I remember to move on soon, or
Leave the ringer on and irritate me while work.
Each of these options leaves something to be desired.
Due’s minute reminder is not so intrusive that I can’t work but is present just enough to tell me it’s time to wrap up my present work. If I would like to continue with present work, then I can purposely make that decision and deliberately reset the clock.
Alarm Clock is useful as a regular alarm and as a time display. Combined with a kickstand (using an Aduro case), I might set it near my computer while I work with some OS X application in full screen mode. (The kickstand is also nice for Face Time sessions or watching a show on the fly.)
Listening
For music, I use the default Music app as well as Spotify.
Instacast is great for podcasts as I do not need to store the sound files on the phone and can, instead, stream them.
I still have the Shazam and SoundHound apps, even though I know Siri can do this automatically. Siri, unfortunately, does not understand me. I believe she is too polite to tell me that I mumble.
Travel
Google Maps is great for getting around town on public transportation. Most of my travel is by foot, train, and bus.
Transit stop is useful for knowing when the next bus is arriving.
Art Institute Membership – I love having membership cards in my phone. It’s one less thing to carry.
Business:
Square register for credit card transactions. It used to be a magical thing to be able to process a credit card transaction, an action left to the major retailers. That we can do this as small business entities highlights a neat societal shift.
I also have a Date Wheel date calculator, which is useful for calculating something like when 90 days from now lands on the calendar.
PDFPen Scan + and JotNot Pro are useful as scanners. I haven’t settled with one or the other yet. Combining either with an online faxing service, I can scan a piece of paper and fax it quickly. (Yes, I still fax.)
Mindnode is an elegant mind mapping application that strikes a nice compromise of mapping features and simplicity. I use this more on OS X than on iOS due to the screen real estate, but it’s nice to have on iOS, too.
inShort stays at the front page beckoning to me to learn it. It seems to have a complexity that requires a certain threshold of knowledge to work through before finding a stride. However, I have yet to make that effort. Maybe if I get the OS X version, I’ll get into it.
Duolingo is a neat language learning experience. While it does not replace actual practiced conversation, it is always nice to have around for a quick lesson.
Remotes
Remote and Roku remotes are useful for my Apple TV and Roku devices, respectively.
I’ve also been experimenting with the new Alfred remote. I like being able to quickly jump around the system settings using the app. I’m not sure how else I’ll use it yet, but it looks like there are some interesting possibilities.
Guitar:
Clear tune for tuning the guitar and Tabs to taunt the kids with poorly practiced renditions of “Let it Go”.
Multi-Measures is a nice measuring kit. Though for me it is more for silly fun. I like to use it to measure the
ambient noise level when walking around town. Watching the ambient noise level shift and change as I move from one environment to another gives the whole walk a story-like feel. Visiting the L train , I’ve seen it range into the 90 dBs. Quieter places are in the low 30s.
Apps like this also just go to show how much the smart phone has become a present day swiss army knife.
Writing:
Byword is connected to a single folder in Dropbox where I store the majority of my text files.
Drafts is very useful, too, to just get some thoughts down, especially if I don’t know what I’m doing with them yet.
Alien Blue is an application that interfaces with Reddit. The community there is at once endearing and enraging. It also helps me keep up to date with what is interesting in the community at large.
OmniOutliner for iPhone. I like to use OmniOutliner for templates of tasks – morning routines and the like. While I don’t always consult them, they are nice to have handy. I store these in an OmniPresence linked folder so I can get to them from iPad or OSX. However, I have the iPhone handy much more frequently. (Stay tuned on this one Kourosh. -D)
OmniFocus is listed next. I do hope that The Omni Group allows for customizing which perspective appears up top. Presently, it is only for Due tasks. I would love to be able to use one of my Dashboard settings (a combination of “Filter by Status: Due or Flagged” with “Filter by Availability: Available” and “Sort actions by: Due”). That way I could see all the tasks I’ve set for today.
Next up is the Calendar. As much of my work is based on sessions with individual clients, my calendar is extremely important.
Then I’ve got the Kindle. I really like how I can open directly to any of the last three read books from this view.
What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?
Its portability. For instance, I use OmniFocus on the iPhone much more than with the iPad despite the greater feature count of the iPad version. Its direct accessibility and ease of typing both contribute to its use.
If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?
I can’t wait for internal links to work when exporting from Pages again. With my last book, I had to manually create all the internal links using Adobe Acrobat for the PDF.
What’s your wallpaper and why?
I like the default watery wallpaper. Setting the icons above the water line makes me happy for unknown reasons.
Mark Gurman, who is known for landing Apple scoops, is reporting at 9 to 5 Mac that iOS 9 is going to be light on new features and heavy on bug fixes.
data-animation-override> “For 2015, iOS 9, which is codenamed Monarch, is going to include a collection of under-the-hood improvements. Sources tell us that iOS 9 engineers are putting a “huge” focus on fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance for the new operating system, rather than solely focusing on delivering major new feature additions. ”
There’s been a lot written about iOS 8 and Yosemite and how they seem to be just above (or below, depending on who you ask) the acceptability line. I’ve written before that I consider the iOS 8 / Yosemite releases to be a special case. The community at large, myself included, wanted for so long for our Macs and iOS devices to talk better amongst themselves. Also, how many home screen posts have I put up here where the subject concluded that if they were in charge at Apple, they’d make it easier for iPhone and iPad apps to share information.
Apple delivered on these requests with iOS 8 but making changes this substantial necessarily came with a lot of bugs. I don’t have any of Mark Gurman’s sources but I’m willing to agree publicly right now that iOS 9 will at least feel like the upgrade Mark explains in the above quote. This is true if, for no other reason, because I can’t think of any update to iOS that would be nearly as ambitious in scope as iOS 8 was.
Out of the ashes of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which shut down last week, a group of former TUAW writers have formed Appleworld.today. I’m so glad to see Dave, Kelly, and Steve start their own thing.
This week we released two episodes of the Mac Power Users.
MPU 239 includes a workflow interview with Adam Christianson from the Maccast podcast about his history with Apple, life as a programer, and experiences through the years podcasting and Mac User Groups.
MPU 240 is the February live feedback show. Topics include financial management apps, more on FileVault, antivirus, upgrading your Mac, and we are joined by professor Bonni Stachowiak, who uses screen casting software for student feedback. Katie and I also reveal easy ways to push our buttons.
I’ve heard the stories about MineCraft and I’ve witnessed nephews and nieces obsessing over videos of people playing MineCraft but I’ve never really got it. Part of this is the fact that I am a geek and grew up in an era when all we could think about was getting smaller pixels. 8-bit led to 16-bit led to 32-bit and so on. We were always pushing the envelope for the next leap. So when I first heard of MineCraft and its blocky graphics, I thought it was some weird throwback that would never last.
Boy was I wrong on that front. MineCraft is as much, if not more, of an obsession as anything my childhood could throw down. This past weekend I stumbled upon this video where a group of players decided to build a replica of Westeros from Game of Thrones. The word got out on the Internet, lots of MineCrafters showed up, and they did something truly remarkable. Now I get it.
This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by The Omni Group, one of the premiere productivity software companies for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. If you are looking for serious solutions for serious problems, look no further. The Omni Group’s applications include:
If project management is your game, look no further.
The Omni Group has its own sync solution, OmniPresence, to keep all of these tools working between your Mac and iPad and, most recently, they’ve announced they are putting all of these productivity apps on the iPhone as well.
Check out the Omni Group and let them know you heard about them from MacSparky.com.
For so long, photo management between our Macs and iOS devices has felt like the mythical white whale. We are all taking more pictures than ever and at the same time using multiple devices, making photo management a nightmare. It didn’t help that iPhoto and Aperture lingered, feeling like relics of a bygone era and every independent company that tries to come up with an innovate web-based solution seems to fold up before it gets any momentum.
However, at WWDC in 2014, Apple promised they are taking photos to the cloud and they really get it this time. They even explained they were working on a new photos app for the Mac, called, appropriately, Photosthat would let us seamlessly work between devices.
Then there was silence.
In fact, there was so much silence that I began to wonder if there was a problem. Today, the most recent developer build of Yosemite showed up with the Photos app for Mac, ready for testing. I’m so eager to see this work (and so tired of iPhoto) that I loaded it up and, after making appropriate backups, pressed the button to move my iPhoto library into Photos. I’m not going to go into great detail about it. Others have. I will say however, that the app feels pretty good for a beta and already runs much faster on my Mac than iPhoto ever did with the exact same library.
Am I feeling a glimmer of hope?
There is going to a public beta at some point and nobody outside of Cupertino has tested it enough yet to really render judgment but right now it feels like Apple has a contender for solving the photo problem.
Today Tapbots teased the pending release of Tweetbot 2 for Mac, which will be a free upgrade for existing users. For a long time, Tweetbot was my Twitter app of choice but I spend a significant amount of my Twitter time on the iPad and the application still has that retro, pre-iOS 7 vibe. I know the gang at Tapbots is manic about their UI design and won’t update the app until they can get it right. That’s one of the reasons we love them so much. I just couldn’t wait any longer.
Then I read Federico Viticci’s manifesto on Twitter clients and decided to try the official Twitter app for awhile. I’ve been doing that now for about 6 weeks and I don’t find it terrible, but I also don’t find it particularly efficient for the way I use Twitter. It definitely has not won my heart over the way Tweetbot did several years ago.
I view an update to Tweetbot as a promising sign that Tapbots will give a similar upgrade to Tweetbot for iPad. Alternatively, I’d be just as pleased if Tapbots would just build iPad support into the existing iPhone application. The developer tools make it a lot easier to build an alternate layout for iPad or the larger iPhones. Marco Arment appears to have stumbled into the iPad version of Overcast. Either way, an updated Tweetbot on Mac and long-overdue version on iPad would make my day.
