Email Field Guide Version 1.2




Speaking of email, I’ve been hard at work updating the Email Field Guide to version 1.2. It’s now live in the iBooks Store. There are a lot of changes:

  • Added additional Gmail backup solution, Backupify
  • Added Google Takeout to archiving chapter
  • Added new section on Apple Mail Drop
  • Added new section and screencast on the Apple Mail Markup Extension.
  • Added new section and screencast on minimizing draft messages on iPad and iPhone.
  • Updated section on Swipe Options based on iOS 8 improvements
  • Added an explanation of Apple Mail Handoff
  • Added a new section for VIP Threads in Apple Mail
  • Added KeyRocket for Gmail Chrome extension
  • Added bacn remover Unroll.me
  • Updated for Microsoft Outlook 2014

I love that I can update content for my readers. If you’ve already bought the book in the iBooks Store, you should see the update badge light up. I’m finalizing the PDF version and will have that up by the weekend. Also, did you know that the Email book has 99 reviews? That is just one shy of 100. I’m just making an observation here. No pressure.

Alpha Efficiency Article

This month I contributed an article to the Alpha Efficiency magazine in their feature on habits and rituals. There is some great content in the magazine and I firmly believe ritualizing productivity is one of the best ways to pull yourself out of the doldrums.

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Sponsor: Drafts, Capture and Share


This week I am pleased to welcome Drafts as a sponsor of MacSparky.com. Drafts is one of the most innovative apps to show up on iOS. The idea is simple: make it dead simple for people to capture text on their iPhone or iPad and then make that text dance for them. Drafts executes on this, flawlessly. When you first open the application, there is a blank screen and a keyboard. There is no need to monkey with opening new files, Drafts does it for you. Indeed, you can set it so it does this happens every time you open the application. 

Once you’ve put some text in Drafts, you can then send it somewhere else on your iOS device. There are simple built-in solutions like sending it to a new email message or an application, like OmniFocus but you can also customize it. For example, I’ve got a custom task that sends a text message to my wife and two daughters. The workflow is so simple. I open drafts, dictate a short message, and push a button and the message goes out to those three. Drafts’ developer keeps adding new features like deep control over Dropbox, Evernote, and now coming iCloud. I reviewed Drafts awhile back. Learning to automate text with your mobile devices is a game changer and if you haven’t tried Drafts yet, shame on you. Go check it out and let them know you heard about it here.

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MPU 223: It’s So Choice

Got some downtime this weekend? MPU 223 is out. In it Mike Rohde joins us to talk about his new book, the Sketchnote Workbook. We also discuss my fancy new iMac, academic workflows, goal setting, security, and share listener tips and answer questions.

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iPhone JD Likes Word for iPhone

My congratulations go to Microsoft for embracing iOS this year with versions of Office for iPad and iPhone. If there is anyone you’d want to see review Microsoft Word on the iPhone, it’d be a lawyer and nobody is better at these stress tests than Jeff Richardson. Jeff’s conclusion are two thumbs up. I have a feeling that in my day job, using Word on my phone is one of those things that will make me wish I kept the big phone.

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iCloud Drive Stumbles

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a post it in development concerning iCloud Drive and document syncing. Through the beta process for both Yosemite and iOS, I had varying degrees of success with synchronizing documents through the iCloud drive, by which I mean it rarely worked. 

Apple made a lot of changes under the hood with these most recent releases and I understood that this was going to be difficult for awhile and I was going to face the host of evils that come with running beta software. However, I also expected that when these products shipped, everything would be sorted out.

I am under no illusions that Apple can magically become the masters of cloud sync overnight, especially when they’ve been behind competitors like Google for so long. I was prepared for a few rough patches as the software released but I was not prepared for the problems I faced when Yosemite finally hit the streets and iCloud Drive was a real thing and no longer a beta thing.

Originally, my ability to sync through iCloud Drive was crippled. My iPhone, iPad, and Mac all had different versions of documents on them despite numerous attempts to reset the system, including logging out of iCloud entirely, switching my .Mac identity to an “iCloud” identity, and even nuking my iPad entirely and starting again from scratch were all fruitless. The most frustrating part is that these failures were not only with third parties using iCloud drive, they were happening with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote as well. How are people at Apple not seeing these problems with their own apps?

For a few weeks, it just didn’t work for me. Sometimes I could get one device to sync with the other temporarily but then a few hours later it would stop. I spent way too much time trying to troubleshoot it and ultimately concluded the problem was probably something server-based or software-based and entirely out of my control. I was like a tribesmen trying to forestall a solar eclipse by looking at chicken bones. I knew at some level that all of my attempts to sort things out was pointless yet I couldn’t stop myself because I needed these documents to synchronize for my work. That whole thing I’ve always felt about my Apple products just working for me and letting me get on with my work went out the window and it drove me nuts.

The version of this post that I wrote a week ago, was a lot less generous than the one I am now posting. The reason for that is about a week ago things started to sort out for the iWork apps. At first, things would start syncing but just take a long time to do so. I’ve got a 20 MB numbers file. It took about 10 minutes to synchronize between my iPad and my Mac. They didn’t allow for simultaneous work but at least I knew I had the data available to me when I needed it. Since then the speed has increased even more. We’ve had a few updates to the iWork apps that have significantly improved iCloud synchronizing speeds as well. It still takes longer than it should to synchronize documents and I expect this is largely server-based. Also, it still is not perfect. I updated a Numbers spreadsheet last night on my Mac and then started working on it this morning on my iPad but realized, about 5 minutes in, that I didn’t have the changes synced from the Mac so I now had two inconsistent versions of the same document. Ugh.

On third party apps, things are still a mess. There was apparently a problem with 8.1 that makes iCloud Drive document sync cause apps using the service to hang up and, generally, break. Several of my favorite third party apps that use iCloud Drive are practically unusable at this point. I’m told the impending 8.1.1 update fixes this but I have to wonder how it got this far. 

I don’t know what to think about Apple and the cloud at this point. I think this is really important to Apple’s success (and my ability to get the most out of their products). Nevertheless, they keep stumbling. I know what they are doing at this massive scale is hard. However, Apple’s secretive nature combined with these obvious problems makes it appear they just don’t care, which I don’t think is true but nonetheless frustrating when it interrupts my flow. I suspect the truth is that the iCloud team is pedaling like mad and don’t want to publicly acknowledge these problems but instead just fix them. I sure hope they do. I’ll be reporting back on iCloud Drive and hope things get better. For now, you can hold on to your Dropbox account.