I’d like to thank the OmniGroup for sponsoring MacSparky this week. The OmniFocus team has been hard at work, releasing version 2.6 this week. The new version includes some nice new features, including dark mode, swipe to flag, and push syncing. The new version is great. Don’t believe me? Take a minute and a half to watch the below video and you will. Learn more at the Omni Group.
Today we got updates to the iPod touch after a three-year hiatus. The updated devices are better than I expected. The entry-level device has 16 GB of storage—yes, Apple is still releasing devices with 16 GB of memory—and an A8 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a good-looking screen for just $200. The price scales up for additional storage capping at 128 GB of storage for $399.
Expect for the next week or two lots of posts about whether or not the iPod touch still make sense in 2015. Let me save you a lot of trouble. It does. While I would agree with Apple that the device does not need a yearly update, it does need to stay relatively current.
When the iPad mini first released, I thought that it would be the death knell for the iPod touch. Specifically, so many parents buy these devices for their kids to give them an iOS device without a data plan. The iPad mini is in the same price range and has a bigger screen. However, my market survey (consisting of various kids in my life) demonstrate that their young eyes are quite sharp and they are happy with a smaller device with smaller text and smaller plants and zombies, so long as they—like their parents—can put it in their pocket and have it with them anywhere. Indeed after several years, none of the kids in my friends and family circles have said they’d be willing to trade their iPod touch for an iPad mini.
If anything is going to kill off the iPod touch, it will be competition in the cellular providers to get data plans so cheap that an increasing number of people just get phones instead of an iPod touch. While we’ve seen some progress on that over the last few years, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that time yet.
Stretching this hypothetical exercise even further into the future, it is entirely possible that we will get to a point where we don’t use cellular providers but Wi-Fi is just everywhere. In that case, the iPhone could become a lot more like the iPod touch than a iPod touch like the iPhone.
Either way, I’m glad to see that the iPod touch finally got its update and I will not hold my breath for any further updates for at least two or three years from now. If you are in the market, now’s a good time to buy. One more thing you can count on: Long after the product is retired, people will still refer to it as the “iTouch”.
Somewhat related … wouldn’t it be cool if the iPhone update in a few months got some of those new colors
David Wain joins us this week to talk about how he used his Mac to write and produce the Netflix series, Hot Wet American Summer premiering later this month. We also stopped to talk about some other nerdy topics like photo management and Mac utilities. This is a good one.
Over the past week I’ve been getting messages from a college student trapped on a distant moon. He’s scared and not quite sure what to do. He tells me what’s going on and I’ve been giving him advice on how to stay alive. Sometimes he disappears for awhile when he’s sleeping or working but eventually he comes back with some new problem.
I’m talking about a new game for iPhone called Lifeline and it is quite a bit of fun with several unexpected twists and turns. The game isn’t quite as free ranging as text adventures like Zork but it is a lot of fun and the real time elements give it something special. Since the gameplay is reading text and responding, the Apple Watch app is makes it even more fun. It’s just $2 and I’d pay it again. I discovered the game from my pal Stephen Hackett.
Tomorrow I’ll be talking about Photos at this Orange County Mac User Group at 9AM. I know they welcome visitors so if you’ve got some time tomorrow to hang out with nerds, you’re all set.
Wayne Shorter is one of the few bridges that exist between the 50’s and 60’s bebop movement and the present. Wayne is currently 81 years old and still releasing excellent albums. Wayne is a saxophonist that got his big breaks in the Art Blakey and Miles Davis bands in the 50s and 60s.
In addition to some remarkable sax chops, Wayne Shorter is also a distinguished composer, writing many of the tunes Miles Davis recorded.
Wayne’s playing has evolved over the years and I had a hard time picking a single song to feature but in the end, I picked Witch Hunt from the 1966 album, Speak No Evil. The album featured Herbie Hancock on Piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. All of these gents have had solo careers of their own.
After spending some time recording modal jazz albums, Witch Hunt was Wayne’s return to more traditional chord-change based jazz. Witch Hunt in particular pushes my music nerd buttons because the song is built nearly entirely around perfect fourths. I also dig the smart intro.
It is worth noting that Wayne Shor
ter also later played the saxaphone for one of the pioneering fusion jazz bands, Weather Report.
If you’d like to hear some more from Wayne Shorter I’d recommend JuJu for some of his more modal jazz and Without a Net for some of his more recent stuff.
For Apple Music subscribers, here’s my own Wayne Shorter Playlist. Enjoy.
I’m currently working on a bigger post about switching my family to the iTunes Family Sharing plan for the second time. Things are going much more smoothly this time than the first attempt but there are still some interesting points to discuss. In the meantime, I wanted to share this one bit of information that took some sleuthing to figure out.
With iTunes Family Sharing, every member of the family is his or her own island, but not entirely. Specifically, the five computer limit in iTunes is spread across all of the accounts attached to your Family Sharing plan. Each person doesn’t have the option of connecting five Macs. Instead you have five Macs to be distributed among the whole group. If you’ve got more than five computers and are running into authorization errors, that is probably the reason.
Years ago one of my favorite applications on my iPhone was AppBox Pro (Website)(App Store). This application combines a bunch of little utilities under one roof. If you want something to help you calculate a tip, figure out the difference between two dates, and get the exact details of your iPhone’s battery life, AppBox Pro would deliver.
While it wasn’t particularly spectacular at any task, it really didn’t need to be and I liked that I could do it all from one icon instead of 12. However, development lingered and when iOS 7 showed up, the world moved on but AppBox Pro did not. For months I would open up in hopes that it received the much-needed update and it never did.
I still held a glimmer of hope. Earlier today I was cleaning through folders of applications on my phone and found AppBox Pro buried deeply. Apparently I never got around to deleting it. However, the icon had changed. My eyebrows raised. Could this be the day? Indeed, it was. AppBox Pro has a nice new update that looks great and after using the application for 15 minutes, it seems to do just like before, deliver many little utilities competently.
The features include a date counter, budget tracker, menstrual cycle calendar, currency converter, solar and lunar calendars, unit converters, holiday counter, loan calculator, tip calculator, battery status and device information, magnifier with brightness, and (of course) a random number generator for those dungeon masters out there.
You get all this for two bucks. I’m happy to have it back on my iPhone and iPad.
I’ve talked and written before about deferring email. If you’ve never heard of it before, deferring email is the process of making your email disappear for a certain amount of time (usually days) or until a certain date in the future. Some applications do this by putting it in a hidden or obscure folder. SaneBox does it at the server level so it works in any application. Either way, on the designated day or after the set defer period, the email comes back to you.
I made fun of deferring email when I first heard of it. It seemed dishonest and gimmicky. However when I tried it out, I quickly became a believer. There’s a lot of email that can stand be putting off for a little bit of time but isn’t worth the extra work and baggage that come with adding it to your OmniFocus or other task manager database. In that case, deferring email really works.
When you’ve got a good email deferment system in place, you get used to seeing an empty inbox so when something shows up, you take it seriously. Simply leaving emails in your inbox (or for that matter any other email box box) results in you getting used to having a bunch of unanswered email and, in my case, malaise and despair. I’m much happier putting an email off for two days and getting it out of my sight than having to see it there every time I open my mail client. Maybe this is just psychology, but it works.
I wrote a little bit about deferred email in this week’s ad spot for SaneBox. Several people have written in asking me exactly how I set up my SaneBox defer folders. Here they are:
There is no rocket science involved here. Since going out on my own, Saturdays and Mondays are no longer as significant as they once were. I’m always working. As a result, I set up the defer folders not on specific days of the week but instead length of delay.
I use this one for something that comes in that I need to look at today but can’t look at right now. I use this more than you’d think.
This one is my pressure valve. When I can’t get to it today but it is something I’ll need to deal with soon, it goes here.
This one comes in handy when I’m waiting for something to happen. Quite often someone will ask me a question in an email and its not quite yet time for me to respond. I’m either waiting for another piece of information from someone else or haven’t had time to do whatever is needed to respond. Two days seems like the sweet spot to defer those emails. When it shows back up in a few days I usually have the answer or light a fire to get the answer.
This is the one I use the least. In order for an email to fall into this box it needs to be both of low importance and low urgency. Things that I’m putting off five days usually get their own OmniFocus task but once in a while something falls into that area where it’s not worth an OmniFocus task and I still want to keep it in play.
Like I said earlier, there are apps that can accommodate these deferred emails or you can use a service like SaneBox. If the volume of email is giving you trouble, I’d recommend giving deferred email a try. I use it on my legal, MacSparky, and personal accounts and, at this point, can’t imagine going back. Also, if you’d like to learn more about email, I know of a pretty good book.
In this week’s Mac Power Users, Katie and I take a deep dive in Apple Music to talk about the good, the bad, and the delightful of Apple’s new music offerings.
