Photo Management and the Mac

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, Photos that 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.

Yosemi-fied Tweetbot

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.

Sonos: Blue Note Edition

Oh boy. This one will be hard to resist.

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MPU 238: 10 Mac Apps. 10 Mac Utilities

Katie and I frequently get asked to share our favorite apps for setting up a new Mac. This week’s Mac Power Users episode answers this question as we explain our 10 favorite apps and 10 favorite utilities. We also take time to stop and explain a tip or two with each pick. Enjoy.

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Condense, OCR on the Fly

Have you ever had an image of some text on your screen that you wanted to quickly turn into actual text? I seem to bump into that issue often and have a complicated workflow involving screenshots, conversion to PDF, and other steps. At least that used to be my workflow. Now I just use Condense. This Mac app makes easy work of yanking text out of a picture of words. You push one button in the app that puts a crosshair on your screen. You drag that over the offending word-picture and Condense pulls out the text.

There are settings to strip out carriage returns, correct for angled text, and set the contrast. You can also have it automatically save the captured text to the clipboard. It will paste anywhere else on your Mac as plain text and in the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve found it remarkably accurate.

I think what I like about Condense most is that this is a problem I encounter often and, for some reason, it never occurred to me that an application to fix this was both possible and so useful. I like that developers can still surprise me. I discovered Condense this week (thanks to @mkhudon) and I’m impressed.

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Productivity App Sale

There are quite a few good iOS and Mac productivity apps on sale right now. Here are the ones I’d buy:

Fantastical 2

For iPad, $9.99 reduced to $4.99

For iPhone, $4.99 reduced to $1.99

For Mac, $19.99 reduced to $9.99

Fantastical is in my dock. This is a great alternative calendar app with its legendary text parsing tools and a really functional user interface. I particularly like the event list view. I’ve tried to replace the built-in iOS calendar multiple times and Fantastical is the only replacement that has stuck. I’ve covered this app before.

Duet Display

For iOS, $15.99 reduced to $7.99

I bought this one today. I’ve tried several of these apps that turn your iPad into a remote display for your Mac over the years. This one is the fastest I’ve used yet.

Workflow

For iOS, $4.99 reduced to $1.99

I have so much to say about Workflow but haven’t had time to give it proper treatment, yet. (Well … here is a little bit.) Stay tuned for more from me on Workflow but for now, just buy it for two bucks.

Byword

For Mac, $9.99 reduced to $5.99

Sweet, sweet Byword. I use it every day.

Dropzone 3

For Mac, $4.99 reduced to $1.99

There are a lot of menubar apps made to hold apps and perform magic on files. I started using Dropzone about six months ago and it’s a keeper. This is another app I use multiple times a day and now it’s just two bucks.

MindNode Pro

For Mac, $19.99 reduced to $9.99

Ready to get serious about mind mapping on your Mac? Look no further.

Apple Watch in April

Today Apple had its financial call where Tim Cook and the gang explained they’d sold 74 million iPhones and earned $18B in profit during the last quarter, which by any generally accepted accounting principle just seems crazy. More interesting to me was this little nugget Tim dropped about the Apple Watch, “Apple Watch will ship in April, right on schedule”. Okay, I’ll accepted that April is early 2015, but just barely. Either way, I think it is interesting that Tim would so casually share this information on an earnings call. I can’t remember Apple ever disclosing something like this on an earnings call before. It all sounded so casual but I find it hard to believe anything said on a financial call wasn’t planned and vetted first. If it truly was off the cuff, you go Tim.

Speaking of the Apple Watch, I’m getting pretty eager to learn more and get one. If you haven’t looked at the Apple site lately, you should go back and check our their Timekeeping page. They added that page a month or two ago and I really like the look of the watch faces (particularly the Utility face) and the little on screen widgets, called complications. While I originally crinkled my nose at that name, complications, upon further research, it appears that is indeed the name given to objects on a watch face. I’ll have much more to say about the watch as further details are disclosed but for now, I’m just looking forward learning more.

MPU 237: Workflows with John Siracusa

In this weeks Mac Power Users episode, John Siracusa joins us to talk about his J-O-B job, his new iPhone and the pesky problem of iTunes.

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Visiting NAMM

Every year the National Association of Music Merchants rolls into Anaheim for a four day party/concert/trade show. The last time I attended was 1985 so when a friend gave me an excuse to head over this year, I jumped on it. NAMM is one of those conferences like Macworld Expo used to be, where it is a gathering of a community and much more than a mere conference.

Walking the show floor you’ll see people in impeccable suits chatting with people in torn jeans and creative piercings. They all love music and just about everyone is insanely talented. I stood at one booth that sold ukulele’s strung with bass strings. That’s right, the U-Bass. While that is an interesting idea for a product, I couldn’t help but laugh as passers by would take a minute, set down their bags, and then shred that U-Bass like they’d been playing it their entire life. While there I also got to bump into several friends and a few MacSparky readers.

Impromptu concerts started just about everywhere. I was chatting with fellow geek (and amazing musician) Sam Montooth, who then joined in with a jam session at a saxophone mouthpiece vendor. In a few minutes there were people arriving from the other side of the hall joining in. So much fun.

While there I also got to look at one of Stevie Wonder’s first synthesizers. Running my fingers over the dials, I could feel the braille printing over the settings. I have to admit, I didn’t have the guts to actually play it.

I also got to take a good look at Yamaha’s new podcaster friendly mixer, which can even run on batteries and connect to my iPad, which may have me upgrading my mic soon. Something tells me I won’t be waiting 30 years to return to NAMM again.

There was one picture of Miles Davis in the building. I found it.