In 1960, Mack the Knife was a relatively new song and people loved it. So on a whim, Ella added it to a performance she was doing in Berlin. The trouble was that she didn’t know the words very well and about halfway through had a lyrics train wreck. If this were any other singer in the world, this would be ugly. However, when Ella forgets lyrics, songs actually get better. Don’t believe me. Check this out.
App Camp for Girls and Macworld/iWorld are joining forces this year to offer a special App Camp for Girls on March 29 right in Moscone Center during Macworld. They are looking for girls 12 and up to come and learn about app development. If you were already thinking about going to Macworld, why not bring your daughter along so she can join in the geek-fest. That’s what I’m doing. Girls planning on attending the App Camp can get a free pass with this link.
This week’s home screen features TJ Luoma (website) (Twitter), Presbyterian minister by day, geek by night. TJ writes for The Unofficial Apple Weblog and frequently posts on automation. If that isn’t enough, TJ was our guest this week on the Mac Power Users. So TJ, show us your home screen.
My favorite iPhone app is Spotify, but for one very specific reason. Every morning I drive my son to school and hand him my iPhone 5s so he can control Spotify, which plays via Bluetooth to my car stereo. He’s almost 12, and getting to that age where music is likely to become really important to him, so I like that we have this setup in place. The nice thing about Spotify is that you can ‘star’ songs and have them cached to your iPhone. He has a playlist on my Spotify account and adds songs to it whenever he finds something new that he likes. He likes that he can hear the specific song that he wants to listen to, and not just songs related to some other songs that he said he likes.
In terms of “Wow, having this app on my pocket-computer makes life so much better” I’d say it’s a toss-up between OmniFocus and Safari. Before the iPhone I had a Trēo (actually, several: the 300, the 600, and the 650), and the web browser on it was atrocious. I almost never used it. I can still remember using Safari on my original iPhone and being amazed at how much better it was.
My favorite iPad app is Instapaper. When I was growing up, my Dad read two newspapers a day, and he especially enjoyed the Sunday paper. I don’t think I’ve ever read a newspaper, because I have something better. During the week I send things I want to read to Instapaper, and then I try to read through my Instapaper backlog on the weekend. It’s sort of my version of “the Sunday paper” except that every article is something that I already know I want to read. My Dad would have loved a newspaper like that.
I don’t use any notifications on Mac OS X, mostly because I use 3–4 different Macs depending on where I am/what I’m doing,1 and I can’t be bothered to set customize everything properly on all of them, so I just leave them off entirely. It used to be that if a message came in via iMessage, I might hear it on 2–3 Macs and 2 iOS devices. Since there are some messages (namely, non-iMessage text messages) which can only go to my iPhone, I decided to centralize all notifications to my iPhone and only my iPhone. So now I only have one digital “Inbox.” Consequently, my iPad has been in “Do No Disturb” since iOS 7 came out, which is great because I primarily use my iPad for reading, and derive great enjoyment out of being able to use it without being interrupted or distracted. (Well, not by the iPad, at least.) Some of my favorite apps are ones that allow me to centralize my messages to my iPhone, which starts by being brutally harsh when any app says that it wants to send me notifications. I almost always say no, because they are always easier to turn on than off but on is potentially worse than off so my default answer isHow About No? I don’t even allow Mail.app to show an unread badge, although, since I use SaneBox I usually have a fairly clean Inbox anyway.
AwayFind isn’t on my home page, because the only time I need to work with it is when it sends me a notification. There are so many awesome things about AwayFind, but the biggest three are these: 1) it allows me to respond to Certain Important People right away, 2) when I launch AwayFind, I only see the messages from my important people, which means that I don’t get sucked into other email when I’m just trying to focus on Important Email Only, 3) it allows me to turn off automatic email fetching entirely. Everywhere.
Fantastical on the iPhone is what Apple should have made. The list view of upcoming events is the most logical way to use the iPhone’s screen size, and Apple’s calendar didn’t really offer anything like it until the recent 7.1 update. I still prefer Fantastical, not only for looking at my calendar, but especially for adding things to it. The ability to just write a sentence about what I need to add to my calendar is, well, fantastic. Badge icons tell me I have a specific event happening at a specific time later today, or a reminder of something I either have to orreally really should do today (i.e. call for an oil change). I use Reminders (usually via Siri “Remind me to…”) for simple things, and OmniFocus for anything more complicated.
Pushover ($5) replaced Prowl for sending notifications from my Macs to my iPhone. I wrote a basic shell script which uses Pushover’s REST API so I can easily send myself a message. For example, my Mac mini runs SuperDuperevery morning at 6:00 a.m. When SuperDuper finishes successfully, it triggers a shell script which tells me so. Lots of other examples like that, just little things, but they all go to my iPhone
“Which app is your guilty pleasure?”
I probably spent more hours playing the original Plants vs Zombies than I’d like to see tallied up and shown to me on my deathbed. More recently I find myself coming back to Dots whenever I feel like doing something mindless but fun. I could spend thousands of dollars in Comixology and I love reading comic books again on my iPad, which is one of the reasons that I’ll always be a “full size iPad” guy.
A great text editor. I think I own more than 40 iOS text editors, because each time a new one comes out, I’ll try it, but none of them has combined the right set of features that I want with a UI that I love. It may be that I’m just impossible to please. I keep coming back to Byword, mostly because the UI is nice and the iCloud sync is pretty great.
I use my iPhone a lot. A lot a lot. Many. Again, partially because of how I have my notifications setup, my iPhone is pretty much always either in my pocket or on a stand on my desk. My iPad usually goes with me to lunch, and then I use it most of the evening as we’re watching TV or whatever, unless I need to write something, in which case I’ll get out my MacBook Air.
Sync. Being able to start something on one device and pick up another device and continue to work on it there? That’s pretty close to magic. I tend to prefer Dropbox over iCloud for document sync, because if anything goes wrong I can go to the website and see previous version, restore a version, identify conflicts, etc. When it works, iCloud sync is great, but the “black box” aspect of it worries me.
The first thing would have to be some sort of way for apps to share documents. It’s completely absurd that I have to add a different “silo” of text files for every text editor, and that pictures have to be imported and exported. It’s clumsy, it’s ugly, and it’s completely un-Apple-like, at least unlike the Apple that most of us loved for their attention to detail and “just works” aspect. I don’t know why it’s taking them so long, but it’s the biggest downside to using an iOS device.
The second thing is trial versions of apps and upgrades. The absence of both of those (along with the difficulty of getting a refund) is one of the major factors that has pushed prices towards $0, which has pushed the overall quality of apps much lower. There are some notable exceptions, obviously, but there are a lot of great apps which seem to have been left behind by developers who realized they just couldn’t afford to keep developing them. It’s also given rise to in-app purchases being abused in so many different ways. If Apple wanted a bazillion apps in the app store, well, now they’ve got them. Now we need to think about making the app stores – iOS and Mac – financially viable for developers to stick around long term, instead of what it is now, which is basically a lottery for a few apps that strike it rich.
This picture of my mom and my son is my lock-screen picture. In my job as an ordained minister, I have to work every year on Christmas Eve. As soon as that service is over, I get in the car and drive 12-hours to go home to see my mom in the house where I grew up. My wife and son usually drive up a few days earlier when school break starts. She posted this picture with the caption:
Next time someone asks me why I drive 12 straight hours from Ohio to Massachusetts, I’m going to show them this picture. Somebody really loves his Grammy!
We’ve been doing this since 2006, and it’s what makes Christmas for me.
(My home-screen wallpaper is a solid dark blue or purple. I like my backgrounds to be plain and non-distracting.)
My home screen on my iPhone changes all the time, but there are a couple of constants. Anything that sends me a push notification has to go on the main screen. I have a “Comm” folder for any apps where someone might be trying to get in touch with me (Phone, Twitter DMs, Kik, Facebook, Pushover, etc) and I play a few “Turn Based” games like Words With Friends and Cribbage HD (I’m always looking for new players, so hit me up on Game Center, I’m “TJLuoma”) so those go into a folder called “Games.”
Due is my “nag me until I do this” app, especially for medication that I need to take every day. It’s repeating alarms are great, and it is persistent enough to keep me from forgetting things, which I have a tendency to do otherwise.
I arrange my iPhone home screen to be all of the apps I use most often. The first app on the second page is the App Store app, and I try to keep the second page mostly empty, because that’s where new apps that I am trying out will go. If it’s not on one of those two pages (or on the dock), I’ll launch it by searching.
On my iPad I have arranged things very differently. The first page is all Apple apps, and the second page is the apps that I use most often. Most of them revolve around reading of some kind or another.
A unsung hero of my app collection is DropCopy which is like like AirDrop, except that it works between iOS and Mac (as we’ll as iOS to iOS, and Mac to Mac). It’s the main way I send files between devices if I need them right nowand don’t want to have to go through Dropbox.
Whew. And here I wasn’t sure what I’d have to say about my home screens! I should have known. I have a friend (who is also a pastor) who says that if you ask a preacher for the time, they’ll probably respond with “That reminds me of a story…”
Thanks TJ.
It’s not that I’m rich, it’s that I never get rid of my Macs. I have a “late 2012” Mac mini that’s my office computer, a MacBook Air which was new in 2010, a “hand-me-down” 2008 MacBook Pro, an iMac which was new in 2007, and a Black MacBook that’s old enough that I don’t even remember when it was new. ↩
Find My Friends has become a thing in the Sparks household. My wife, kids, and a few other relatives have been using it since it premiered and while I don’t find myself looking in there every day, I certainly do it often enough. It is great when my kids are out or if we are just trying to find each other in the middle of Disneyland. I also use it with friends on a temporary basis when we are getting together. For example, I’ll be part of a large Find My Friends circle when I’m at Macworld at the end of the month.
One feature a lot of people don’t realize exists with Find My Friends are its notifications. While in Find My Friends, with a friend selected, tap on the Notify Me button and you will get options to have a notification provided to you when your friend or family member leaves or arrives the selected location. My oldest daughter is now a teenager and drives. I set this up sometimes when she is out so I know what time she leaves and can expect her to get home. While I acknowledge that sounds creepy, you try having a teenage daughter and see how you feel about it. Also, I know she prefers that over me constantly bugging her with text messages about when she’s going to leave. What is good for the goose is also good for the gander. I can also, inside Find My Friends, give notifications to the rest of my family when I leave or arrive at a location. As an example, if my wife wants to talk to me as soon as I leave work, I’ll set up Find My Friends to notify her when I leave. If you have started using find my friends with your family, take a minute and explore the notification options. They really are useful.
Did you know my wife also blogs? Here’s Daisy’s explanation of an app I’d never heard of that gives your photos a watercolor effect. Clever.
I’ve talked about my simple (yet essential!) Siri task to help me not screw up tea on the Mac Power Users. (“Set a Timer for 4 minutes.”) Listener Bob White, wrote in to explain that he sets these timers as alarms. Specifically, you can set the alarm name with Siri syntax. “Set the Oolong Tea Alarm for 4 minutes.” The phone will create a new alarm in 4 minutes called “Oolong Tea”. The advantage of doing them as alarms over timers is that you can set multiple alarms at once but just one timer, as The Doctor explains. Indeed, going back and reading Dr. Drang’s post I realize he also explained how you can name the alarm with Siri. Hmmm.
As a complete aside, if you are interested in tea, I recommend the end of MPU 168 where I talked at some length about how I make tea and Katie Floyd was stone-cold silent. Never has a silence been so judgmental. It might be one of my favorite segments of the Mac Power Users.
Dr. Drang posted this week about the value of throwaway macros and snippets. He’s a fan. So am I. I’ve referred to this before on the Mac Power Users but never posted on it here. Whenever I find myself doing anything remotely repetitive, my nerd-senses kick in and I look for automation. With text, that’s usually done in TextExpander. For example, a few weeks ago I had to ask a series of repeated questions that involved a rotating set of variables.
My questions were actually a little different but I needed to ask them many times with various combinations of Xs and Ys.
In this case, the contract numbers were a 25 character string of gibberish and I already had a text file with all of the contract numbers in it. So I made the snippet with TextExpander’s clipboard function for the X. (Did you know TextExpander will insert the clipboard contents in a snippet? The syntax is %clipboard.) Before starting the snippet, I’d go to the text file and copy the contract number into my clipboard for my X.
For they Y variable I used a fill-in snippet. Don’t forget that you can have the same fill-in snippet repeat multiple times in a single TextExpander snippet. To do so, simply copy and paste the snippet syntax (e.g. %filltext:name=Sample Fill In%) in the snippet wherever you want it to appear. Then, when you trigger the fill-in snippet typing it once in the first instance fills it in at all of its other instances. Building the snippet took some time but once it was right, populating the questions (there ended up being hundreds of iterations) was fast and there were no mistakes. Overall, it took a fraction of the amount of time I’d have spent doing it manually and was much more accurate. Afterwards, the snippet was completely useless and went into the TextExpander dust heap but for a little while, it was my moon and my stars.
Speaking of TextExpander, did you know I have a whole page of downloadable snippets?
Super Retina, The New MegaPixel Have you seen the new super high-density screens some of the Android phones are getting? The The iPhone 5/5c/5s phones have a 1136×640 screen with a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. I immediately appreciated these retina screens and consider it one of the best advances in mobile technology in recent years. Some of the Android phone makers seem to be taking this even further. The HTC One sports a 1920×1080 with a pixel density of 468ppi. LG has a new display that sports 1440 x 2560 with a pixel density of 538ppi.
While in terms of screen density, more is better, there is a limit. Specifically, when the screen gets dense enough that the human eye can no longer see a difference, increasing beyond that point doesn’t make much sense. I know people that can’t tell the difference between pre-retina and retina screens, which I believe are very different. I suspect very few people will be able to tell a difference between a 326ppi screen and anything even sharper than that.
Moreover, increasing screen resolution has a cost. More pixels need more battery. The phone either has to get bigger or suffer poorer battery life. Also, driving more pixels means the processor has a lot more to think about and the rest of operations will suffer a processor hit. I’m not in favor of Apple trying to make the screen significantly sharper than it already is until doing so will not result in significant battery and processor hits.
Nevertheless, I fully expect 2014 to be the year that manufacturers start making extremely high screen density a marketing thing, like the camera people have been doing with the elusive megapixel.
My thanks go again to Rocket Matter for sponsoring MacSparky.com. Rocket Matter is the best online law practice management solution and it just keeps getting better. Rocket Matter’s new advanced search makes it even easier to find information from multiple categories. This week Rocket Matter is sharing a free ebook to MacSparky readers, Cloud Planet: The Mobile Lawyer. Go download your free copy and check out Rocket Matter.
The first MPU Live episode published this week. In it, we include some listener audio questions and cover tweaking automation workflows, organizing PDF files, going back to school with an iPad, and more. We are going to continue doing these the first Saturday of every month and I expect them to get only better with some short listener interviews and a live audience. Enjoy.
