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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Backblaze’s Refer a Friend Program

I’ve been turning some friends and family onto online backup lately. It just makes a lot of sense for me, who will have to deal with data loss as the resident nerd. Backblaze has a nice promotion running right now that gets you a free month if you refer a friend and they sign up.

Sponsor: Drafts




This week I’m welcoming a new sponsor to the site, Drafts. With the emergence of mobile computing, we are still figuring out exactly how to make these pocketable devices work for us. Drafts is one of those applications that just bangs you over the head with its obvious utility.



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At its most basic level Drafts is an app that presents you with a blank screen and a keyboard every time you open it. Think about that for moment. When you are meeting a person or something brilliant occurs to you, there will be no friction between your brain and writing it down. There is no fiddling with the new file buttons or file naming. Just you and the cursor. Tap the drafts icon and start writing (or dictating through Siri). Drafts sits on the far right of my iPhone and iPad dock. I pop in there multiple times a day to capture ideas. This alone would make Drafts worth the price of admission but there is more.

Developer Greg Pierce has made Drafts one of the leaders of inter-app communications on iOS. Drafts is loaded with tools for you to easily do things with those bits of text right from the app. I can send them to emails and text messages but even this function goes deeper than you’d expect. You can set up common recipients and route texts or emails without any further work. For example, I’ve got a group of friends that have a Drafts texting action. I can dictate a message into Drafts, push a button, and send the text to everyone in that group. That is a simple example though. I could also send text to OmniFocus, process it in Markdown, create a calendar entry, send to Day One (my diary app), send to Byword, or process in Tweetbot. The interactions with Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive are just crazy. Also, your data will sync between your iPhone and iPad so you can capture on one device and process on another. I use the badge trick to make sure I process all my drafts every day.

Drafts has become one of my most important apps. It helps me get through the day and I’m privileged to have it as a sponsor. If you haven’t tried Drafts yet, you owe it to yourself. Head over to their website and check it out.

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iWork Collaboration in the iCloud

This week, Apple released some pretty nice upgrades to the web-based iWork apps in iCloud. The improvements include more fonts, more chart options, and the ability to handle larger sized files. The experience really is quite remarkable. If you haven’t yet, log into your iCloud account and create a document in iCloudy-Pages. You’ll be surprised. You may even forget that you are doing this all in a browser. One of the other updates was the ability to have up to 100 collaborators. It was this bit that had me most interested.

Google Documents really is the standard for online document collaboration. I’ve used that tool for years and, while it isn’t all that pretty, it absolutely nails the ability to have multiple people typing on one document at the same time. While Apple is now moving this direction, it hasn’t got there yet. Yesterday I had a small writing project with a Mac-savvy client and I decided to do it collaboratively with him using iCloud Pages. I figured that if the application can support 100 collaborators, it should be pretty solid with just two. It still isn’t.

While the experiment ultimately worked and he could see what I was typing, it was hardly simultaneous. Basically, we discussed and I wrote and he waited for the changes to show up, which happened about 30 seconds after I typed. If he typed anything on his side (even just a space bar), I got a conflict message on my end and had to pick a version to become gospel. While I think Apple is nailing the “productivity app in a web browser” part, they still have work their work cut out for them on the collaboration part.

Home Screens – Todd Olthoff


This week’s home screen features my pal Todd Olthoff (Twitter)(Website)(YouTube). Todd is a pastor by day and OS X Server guru by night. Todd has a really great YouTube channel with many Mac tutorials, including an excellent series on Mac OS X Server. Most recently Todd agreed to guest on the Mac Power Users and tell us all about it. Okay Todd, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

Some of my favorite apps are replacements for the built in Apple Apps. For calendar I use the incredible Fantastical. Fantastical is one of those applications that simplifies my life not only on my iOS devices but across my Mac devices as well. Nothing like using natural language to set up appointments. Another app I use often is Cobook for my address book. The way Cobook pulls in all of my contacts from not only my address book but from social media as well and puts everything in one place is incredible. I also like the ability to see what my friends have been tweeting about lately just by looking at their contact in Cobook instead of having to go out into another application. It will be interesting to see what happens with Cobook now that it has merged with FullContact.

For social media and keeping up on tech news I use Tweetbot for twitter, Reeder for RSS feeds, Pocket for my read later content, and Downcast for all of my favorite podcasts (like Mac Power Users, of course). I also have a general social folder for all of the other social media sites I touch base with like Google Plus and Facebook.

Being a true Mac geek I love being as productive as possible on whatever device I am working on so I use tools like Drafts to quickly get text based items into my system for later action. I use Launch Center Pro as my starting point for my daily review and other tasks. Putting all of the items I normal check with various swipes and taps in one place has really helped me cut down some of the time it takes for me to get things done. I would also have to add 1Password into my attempt to stay productive and secure on my iOS devices. I just can’t put a value on being able to access all of my passwords in one place to quickly login to websites in a secure manner. 

As far as dealing with writing and information, I am a huge fan of Day One for my daily journaling and capturing life events or thoughts on the run. For more serious writing I use Daedelous Touch. It’s combination with Ulysses on my Mac make it a killer app for me now that I am writing in Markdown (thanks to you David!). For storage and archive I am a big fan of Devonthink Pro Office and I use their companion app to take files and documents with me on the go for easy access when I need them.

And of course, being a Pastor for my day job, I love being able to carry the whole Bible in one little app in my pocket. For this I use the YouVersion App (Which I think is still smaller than one MacSparky Field Guide Book).

 

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Being a guy who likes to play around with OS X Server, one of the apps I have found a guilty pleasure is Server Admin Remote. This app let’s me access my server’s vitals from my iPhone. I can check to see how my network is behaving, power usage, storage and what services are running. I can also start and stop services remotely and view log files from my server. Though it hasn’t been officially updated for the most current Server OS, I have found it still works for me under 10.9. A great app if you need to keep up with your OS X Server.

 

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

Honestly I use my iPhone more times than I would like to count. It serves as my time piece so I am always pulling it out to check to see what time it is. I also use it to stay in touch with co-workers & family. The iPad I am trying to work into my workflow and find I use it mostly for media consumption, taking notes in places where using a laptop is not convenient, or when I want to travel light. I still heavily rely on and love my 13 inch Retina Macbook Pro! So overall, I am constantly using my iPhone and occasionally use my iPad for tasks needing a bigger screen.

 

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

If I was in charge at Apple I would like to see more cross app collaboration so developers could tie into each other’s apps a little easier. We see with what Readdle has been trying to do with their suite of applications and how they communicate with one another, what can happen when you allow this kind of integration. I know it goes against the current rules, but it really would make the experience of an iOS device more seamless in my opinion.

 

What’s your wallpaper and whys?

My wallpaper usually changes over time depending on my mood. I have a wallpaper application called Wallpapers 2 that uploads some nice stuff. I usually browse through there from time to time when I get bored of the wallpaper I am currently using.

 

Anything Else You’d Like to Share?

Thanks so much for the opportunity to share my home screen David!

Thanks Todd.