Jazz Friday: Ruby, My Dear

That's right. Monk even looked cool in a red wagon. — That’s right. Monk even looked cool in a red wagon.

Thelonious Monk composed Ruby, My Dear for his first love, Rubie Richardson. I first heard the song when I about twelve. At that point I was listening to jazz, but nothing like this. Monk’s complex chords and melodies floored me. This song was where I discovered Monk. There are a lot of recordings of Ruby, My Dear but my favorite is this one, with Monk and John Coltrane together. Coltrane’s forceful melody with Monk’s introspective chords are sublime.

If you’d like to hear me play Ruby, My Dear, today’s your lucky day. I recorded this in Garage Band with my Yamaha MIDI keyboard. I didn’t get cute and fix any notes. I just pressed the red button and started playing. It’s not particularly good but was played with a lot of love for this song and Monk.

Home Screens: Tim Stringer

This week features my pal Tim Stringer (Website)(Twitter). Tim is a productivity consultant at Technically Simple and just launched his own website on teaching OmniFocus called, appropriately Learn OmniFocus. Okay Tim, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

OmniFocus 2

OmniFocus 2 has a proud place on my dock. I find it’s an elegant and convenient app for referencing and updating my projects and actions on the go.

Drafts

I’m also a big fan of Drafts. It’s my go-to app when I need to capture something and don’t have time to worry about where it belongs.

Fantastical 2

I’ve evaluated other calendar apps and keep coming back to Fantastical. It strikes a near perfect balance between style and functionality.

Soulver

Another gem is Soulver. I use it regularly for quick calculations on both my Macs and iOS devices and like how my data is seamlessly synced between my devices via iCloud.

Day One

Day One is the georgeous app that has helped motivate me to journal on a regular basis. I sometimes write Day One entries on my iPad and Macs and appreciate the convenience of accessing my virtual journal from anywhere.

Habit List

Habit List is another beautifully crafted app. I’ve been using it regularly since January 1, 2013 and this app has been instrumental in helping me cultivate some constructive new habits.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Instacast

I admitted to being a bit of a podcast junkie when I shared my home screens a couple of years back. Not much has changed on that front, except that Instacast is now my podcast app of choice. I was drawn to the visual design of this app as well as its ability to sync with Instacast for Mac.

What is the app you are still missing?

I’m still waiting for an app that lets me point my iPhone’s camera at something, such as a tree or an exotic sports car I see parked on the street, and get detailed information on whatever it is that’s grabbing my attention. Though, I’d just rather that this app not be tied to a database of people. I like to get to know folks the old fashioned way.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

It really depends on my circumstances. I tend to refer to my iPhone quite frequently when I’m out and about here in Vancouver or traveling the world, but my treasured device often lies relatively dormant when I’m at home, where I tend to favor my Macs and iPad.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone?

I appreciate having a good quality camera in my pocket. I’m planning to upgrade my iPhone 5 when Apple releases the next generation of iPhones and can only imagine what improvements Apple will make to the camera.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I would add the option to store dictation libraries on iOS devices, to allow people to dictate text even when they’re not connected to the Internet. While I’m at it, I would have words appear on screen as they’re spoken. I’ve gotten use to having these features in Mac OS 10.9 “Mavericks” and know many people who would gladly give up some storage space on their iOS devices for this functionality.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

I use a simple, grey grid pattern for my wallpaper. This graphic matches my iPhone 5’s black frame nicely and keeps the focus on the beautiful app icons that designers worked hard to create.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I have a total of three home screens. The first contains the apps that I use most frequently and consists of 12 apps right on the home screen and four folders: “News/Read”, “On the Move”, “Social” and “More…”. The contents of these folders varies somewhat depending on my circumstances. For example, if I were jetting across the Great White North, I might have the “Air Canada” or “WestJet” apps in my “On the Move” folder and if I were enjoying some time at Macworld/iWorld I would temporarily add the “Macworld/iWorld” event app to my “More…” folder for easy access. The second home screen contains my less frequently used apps grouped into folders, that I most often launch the iOS search feature, and the third home screen houses the App Store app as well as any apps that I’m currently evaluating.

Thanks Tim.

Eating a Little Crow with iWork Collaboration

I wrote a few weeks ago about my less-than-impressive experiments using iCloud collaboration to work on a Pages document with a client. Following that post, I received a few emails from readers explaining that I was doing it wrong. In order to make collaboration work, I needed to not be using the Mac Pages client but instead we both needed to be working directly in the web browser.

Today I was on the phone with that same Mac-savvy client and we decided to try the experiment again. I started a file in Pages and sent him an iCloud link. However, this time I then closed down the Pages application and logged into my own iCloud.com account and accessed the web version of Pages. We both got logged in and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that collaboration, when both parties are in the web version, works pretty great. We were both typing as we were talking, changing font sizes, and otherwise mucking about in our document and it was showing up on both screens in real time. So Pages collaboration does work so long as you don’t use the native app.

This is good news. Now you can collaborate on documents without Google Docs. I’m going to be exploring this further but there is promise. It is kind of wonky that I can’t use the native Mac app but in fairness, I don’t use Google Docs out of a native app either. I can understand how adding that extra layer of getting this data out of the web and into the native app can gum up the works.

For giggles, I also tried collaborating from the native Pages app on the iPad with the other person on the web and that didn’t work any better than when I was in the native Mac version of Pages. I got the same delays and messages asking me to approve changes that took place two minutes earlier.

While my initial post was correct for anyone using a native app version of Pages, collaboration can work through iCloud so long as everyone is sitting at a browser window.

John Oliver Teaches Net Neutrality

Give this video 13 minutes and you’ll understand why net neutrality is a big deal.

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Apple’s Third Act

“The ways Apple is opening up app access to iOS in particular will change the experience for users more than any single OS feature. And it will happen in unexpected ways, because those developers are very, very clever, and tend to think of approaches that nobody—not even the people at Apple who enable them—has anticipated.”

-Jason Snell

Jason Snell is one of the most insightful people writing about Apple anywhere. When I first heard of his promotion at IDG, I worried that he’d be so busy managing, we’d not hear his voice as much. In fact, things are better because he now gets to write more introspective pieces like this one.

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New Bronson Watermarker

I guess I was out of it because when I first bought Bronson Watermarker, it was because it was the best/easiest watermarking app I could find in the App store. It was only later that I discovered John August (the Big Fish writer) was behind it. (John later appeared on the Mac Power Users.)

Bronson Watermarker remains the best watermarking app I’ve used and now they have released the upgraded version 2 and it’s 50% off for just a few more days. If you have need of watermarking just about anything, go get it.

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Thoughts on the WWDC Keynote

The Internet is full of people evaluating, scoring, and critiquing Apple’s WWDC presentation today. At this point anything I’d say has already been said somewhere else. Well, that’s never stopped me before. Here are a few of my random thoughts:

Apple’s advantage has always been the way your Apple devices work together. The new sharing features between iOS and the Mac is a big deal. Having a half finished email jump between your iPad and Mac or answering an iPhone call on your Mac is going to be a great advantage for Apple users. I’m really pleased to see them leveraging this with iOS 8/Yosemite. The more of this, the better.
The photo management and storage problem has been reaching critical mass lately. I’ve always felt that Apple needs to solve this problem. I watched the WWDC section on photos in iCloud twice and it’s still not absolutely clear what’s going on but it appears they’ll store all your photos (or at least all the photos you take with iOS devices) in the cloud and use/edit/view them from any device. Maybe this will solve the photo problem. My fingers are crossed. I wish I didn’t have to wait until next year to see the Mac software though.
Extensibility is the most often requested feature in my home screen features. Everyone wants it. Apple’s finally done it. This is another one where we don’t have all the details yet but looks to be really useful. I wonder how deep this will run. I’m sure I’ll be able to do things like send a web page to Pocket or Instapaper but will I be able to send an email to OmniFocus?
Touch ID + 1Password login = win.
The Siri updates look interesting. You can now activate it without holding down the button by saying “Hey, Siri”. That will be nice if you use it while driving. It also will display words as you dictate them in Siri. I don’t believe it works that way with plain dictation yet. I still have hope that the next iPhone/iPad chip will make on-device dictation possible.
Did you notice how whenever they showed third party storage services they showed Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and no Dropbox. Dropbox didn’t get mentioned once. The iCloud drive seems aimed right at Dropbox. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill. I’m looking forward to seeing this play out.
HomeKit is a great idea. I’ll be a great beta tester for HomeKit since I seem to have bought one devices from every home automation vendor and now have an entire folder full of controller apps.
I wonder how many people have tried to call that number they posted for Dr. Dre.
Craig Federighi is really turning into a polished presenter. I never would have believed it when he first started talking at these events and his hands shook like a nervous groom.
Every time Tim says “Customer Sat”, an angel gets its wings.
I’m pretty sure that is black carpet on the stage. I’ve spoken at Moscone in the past and I never got carpet. Apple is classy.

WWDC 2014

If you are anywhere near a computer today, it will be a great day to blow a few hours and watch the spectacle that is an Apple Keynote. The WWDC announcement will definitely show us a preview of iOS 8 and the next iteration of Mac OS X, which is rumored to look quite different. Whether we get new hardware or not, I have no idea but I’m guessing it will be a fun ride. Tops on my personal wish list are Siri support on the Mac and voice recognition on the iPhone without requiring an Internet connection (though I suspect that second would require a new phone, which we won’t hear about tomorrow). Seeing the rumored Retina 12 inch MacBook might be kind of fun too but that is another one we may have to wait for. You can watch the presentation at Apple.

Home Screens: Darrin Carlson

Last year, while attending the World Domination Summit, I met Darrin Carlson. (Twitter). Darrin is a swell guy that has decided to dent the universe by teaching men to learn how to cook at his site The Guy Can Cook, when he’s not too busy trying to learn how to surf the San Diego waves. Okay Darrin, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Everything on my home screen is an MVP for one reason or the other, but these are the real cornerstones that I can’t live without.

Omnifocus

The older I get, the less I’m able to just go with the flow in life and still manage to get everything done. Like most of my favorite apps, Omnifocus acts like an upgrade to my brain. As long as I make capturing actions, creating projects, and doing regular reviews a regular part of my life, this task manager ensures I don’t forget about anything important and pushes me to take the actions necessary to meet my goals.

Day One

The social network for introverts. I’m a recent convert to journaling, and Day One is my app of choice, because it is cross platform and supports Markdown. Using TextExpander snippets, I do daily and weekly reviews that allow me to more naturally be proactive and analytical with my day-to-day life. Using the app on my iPhone, I can also easily capture any ideas or take any photos throughout the day that I think might be useful as well.

Byword

I write a lot, and though I prefer doing so on my Mac, there are plenty of times where I just want to squeeze in five minutes here and there. Using my phone in landscape orientation and typing with my thumbs has been a lot easier than I’d thought, and I really like Byword for its simple presentation, Markdown support, and TextExpander support.

Evernote

Evernote seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it app, but I put myself in the former category for a couple of reasons. I love its web clipper feature, which I use to create a “personalized search engine” of stuff I think I might want to reference in the future. I like being able to create notebooks that include all types of files that I’d like to keep in the same spot when I’m working on a project. And since I love to cook, I’ve used Evernote as a cookbook where I’ll store iterations of recipes I’m developing, as well as any other reference material. And it’s the perfect place to keep my grocery list.

Duolingo

I really enjoy learning new languages. It allows you to meet new people, learn about different cultures, and exercise your brain in a fun and challenging way. While I think that talking with native speakers is the most important element, learning the nitty gritty of vocabulary and grammar will help supplement this. Duolingo is a highly-addictive system to learn languages that does the job as well (if not better) than other products out there that cost hundreds of dollars or more.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Facebook

Yeah, yeah. It’s boring and unoriginal. But Facebook is definitely my guilty pleasure app. I check it more often than I probably should, and spend more time reading other people’s posts than writing my own. But at this point I’ve got friends and family all over the world, and it’s nice to take the occasional 15-second break to see what’s up with them. Plus, the ability to remove the updates from your more, er, dramatic friends makes it fairly easy to eliminate some of the more obnoxious aspects of Facebook.

What is the app you are still missing?

I can’t think of any specific app that’s still missing for me. My biggest desire would be to make my main apps work together as well as possible.

I’ve been playing around a lot with Drafts recently, and this seems to fitting the bill quite nicely, but it would be great if Siri had improved functionality so I can make more happen with audio notes as well.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

Countless.

I use it to capture quick notes, observations, to-dos, and cash transactions in Evernote, Day One, Omnifocus, and Mint, respectively.

If I have a spare minute, I’ll check Twitter on Tweetbot, Facebook, and text messages. (And if I come across a good long read, I’ll throw it into Pocket for later.)

If I have a little more time to kill, I’ll brush up on my Portuguese in Duolingo.

And if I’m driving somewhere new, you can surely bet I’ll be using Waze for navigating there!

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I understand that things are getting creepier with technology allowing others to track us, but GPS (and location-awareness in general) was a godsend for me, and probably the best feature of the iPhone.

For one thing, I probably spent at least an hour each week lost in my car before I had my iPhone. I just have a terrible sense of direction.

But furthermore, I’ve realized the power of having location-awareness for things like Omnifocus (which is handy for location-based contexts), Mint (for logging cash transactions), and Yelp (for finding new places to grab lunch).

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Better photo management.

I’m a proud owner of a MacBook Air, but all my photos and videos have turned it into a bloated whale.

And since photos are one thing that everyone hates to delete, it’s been a struggle for me for a long time to get all these photos somewhere safe and get them off my hard drive.

I just purchased Bradley Chambers’s book “Learning to Love Photo Management” after his recent guest hosting gig on MPU, and look forward to implementing what I learn.

But what I really want is something akin to iTunes Match, where I can just pay an annual fee to upload all my photos to the cloud so I can get them off my hard drive with as little brainpower expended on my part as possible.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

I use one of the standard wallpapers. It’s simple, non-distracting, and reminds me of what the sky looks like when the sun’s rising. And since I’m a morning person, who knows? Maybe it will make me more productive!

Thanks Darrin.

Transporter and PDFpen like Chocolate and Peanut Butter

I’ve heard from a lot of lawyers that want to use iPads for reviewing PDFs but are freaked out by the idea of storing client documents “in the cloud”. Yesterday Smile and Transporter announced support in the PDFpen applications for Transporter storage. The result is that now you can store PDFs in your own private Transporter cloud and still access them on the go using PDFpen. Clever.

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