One thing that’s been lingering in my mind since last week was the number of times everyone kept describing the new Metal platform as providing “Console” quality graphics. That’s pretty great and I’m looking forward to seeing some powerful iPad and iPhone games but how would this impact on the rumored updated AppleTV. There are lots of rumors that Apple has teams working on the next AppleTV and it is going to get more than a face lift. What if game developers, using Metal and the next Apple chip could push enough pixels to actually be in the ballpark with existing game systems (or at least close behind) and Apple put it’s weight behind a game controller? These things seemed inconceivable until last week’s Keynote but now I’ve got to wonder. Maybe the push for Metal was more about the AppleTV than iOS.
PDFpen’s “Get a Little, Give a Lot” Promotion
Over the years, I’ve become friends with the team at Smile Software. Smile is a group of incredibly smart people trying to do do right for their customers and the world at large. This is why their latest promotion came as no surprise to me.
Right now, if you buy PDFpen from Smile’s website, you’ll get 20% off and Smile will donate a copy to your favorite non-profit of choice. They’re calling it “Get a Little, Give a Lot.” If you haven’t bought PDFpen yet, this is your chance to get a deal and help someone out.
Jazz Friday: Ruby, My Dear
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 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.
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.
I’ve evaluated other calendar apps and keep coming back to Fantastical. It strikes a near perfect balance between style and functionality.
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 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 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?
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.
Pages in iCloud
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.
This message showed up at 3:05.
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.
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.
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.
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.