The unlikely persistence of AppleScript

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“And in a very real sense, modern AppleScript has quietly achieved its original goal of enabling non-programmers to create their own software—not through AppleScript scripting but instead through Automator, which is built on the same underlying technology and is arguably more popular than its predecessor.”

— John Gruber

John Gruber wrote a typically thoughtful piece for Macworld on how AppleScript continues to beat the odds. Nevertheless, I have to wonder as OS X creeps toward iOS how long AppleScript will stick around. I’m crossing my fingers for a good long time. I love what AppleScript, Automator, and Services do for me, warts and all.

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MPU115: Geek Gift Guide

Having trouble decided what to get that geek in your life or perhaps telling others what you’d like? The Mac Power Users are here to the rescue with this week’s episode, where Katie and I talk about some of our best ideas for geek gifts.

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The OmniFocus Mail Drop

The last few days there has been something of a coming out party for early beta testers in Omni’s Mail Drop Service. So at this moment I can’t help but stand up and say, “My name is David, and I’m an Omni-holic.” The kind folks at the Omni Group let me start testing this quite awhile ago and it has been absolutely killing me that I couldn’t tell anyone about it. The way this service works is really simple.

1. You get a special, super-secret, email address and add it to your address book.

2. You forward any email worthy of an OmniFocus task to that address.

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3. You move on with your day. At some point you’ll find yourself back in OmniFocus and you’ll find an new inbox entry with the text of the mail in the note. It actually happens in just minutes.

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I’ve been using this for months and it works exactly how you’d expect it. The only downside is that it doesn’t give you a one-click link to jump to the mail message the way the Clip-O-Tron does on the Mac. Having used this for awhile though, I can say I miss that feature far less often than I thought I would.

Moreover, the ability to send emails to OmniFocus from my iPad and iPhone with nothing more than a forwarded email feels like nothing short of magic. You’ll need to be syncing your data through Omni’s servers to pull this off but, frankly, you should already be doing that anyway. At this point I recommend running here and getting in. It will change your game.

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The Transporter

There is a new Kickstarter project by the guys behind the original Drobo, called the Transporter. Unlike so many Kickstarter projects, this one is a lot further along than a pretty CAD drawing. These guys have already built this device and are in production verification. I know, because I have one of the testing units and can tell you it works. I really like the idea of sticking one on my home network and using it as a secure offsite storage from the office or putting one in a relative’s home to make my own private offsite backup for personal data. Also, the sharing is easy enough that I’m planning to try to use it as photo bank for family holiday pictures.

In full disclosure, it is likely the Transporter will be a Mac Power Users sponsor but that isn’t why I’m writing about this. We don’t let just anybody sponsor the show and this is a really clever product. Watch the Kickstarter video to learn more.

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Farewell Dave Brubeck

In 1980-something, I was a nerdy jazz enthusiast. I had an opportunity to attend the Playboy Jazz Festival and there got to meet the pre-eminent nerdy jazz man for the ages, Dave Brubeck. Dave was extremely kind and thoughtful to awkward teenage me and he has since always had a warm spot in my heart.

I’ve seen him play a few times since but never spoken with him again. Indeed, Dave seemed so immortal that it never occurred to me that he may one day leave us. Alas, today he did.

If you’re not familiar with Dave Brubeck, I recommend going and buying the Time Out album right now. This album is one of the definitive cool jazz albums. The whole album is done in odd time signatures. Blue Rondo a la Turk (my favorite) is in 9/8. That’s right. 1-2 1-2 1-2 1-2-3. Take Five is another classic and considered by some to be the best jazz song ever recorded. (That one is in 5/4. 1-2-3 1-2)

Dave will be missed but people will be unsuccessfully trying to tap their feet to his music long after anyone remembers any of us. Farewell Dave.

iOS Pages Now Tracks Changes

Yesterday’s iOS Pages update added the ability to track changes. Jeff Richardson wrote it up and does his usual thorough job of covering iOS features particularly relevant to attorneys. Tracking changes is a doozy.

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“I have long been a fan of Pages because it is a powerful, rock solid app. For example, Pages is my preferred app for creating Word documents on the iPad. With the new track changes feature, I strongly suspect that Pages will also become my favorite app for viewing and creating redline edits on the iPad.”

I’ve stated several times how I felt that change tracking was the holy grail of iOS wordprocessing for lawyers. I’ve been playing with it now for a few hours and I agree with mostly everything Jeff says. I do think the lack of comment support will be a dealbreaker for some and completely irrelevant to others. The good news is now there’s a variety of options on the iPad for change tracking. If Microsoft doesn’t hurry up and get Microsoft Office out for iOS, pretty soon nobody’s going to care.

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Back to Work’s GTD Refresher

I could go on and on about my love of the Back to Work podcast (and frequently do). Merlin is on a tear starting at Episode 95 with an in-depth discussion of Getting Things Done. The first episode was very good and I’m really looking forward to the next few. (Episode 96 went live as I post this.) I’m even re-reading David Allen’s book as I listen along. I know this is starting to sound like a cult. It’s not and this is a great way to get started.

Watermarker

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Don Southard is a really clever guy. He comes up with some amazing little solutions for getting more done on your Mac and he’s also a really fine writer with his pieces over at MacStories. Don just recently released a new application for the Mac, Watermarker. I like it. It’s a simple application that consistently applies watermarks to images. My wife is using it every day right now as she writes her ongoing series about Christmas ornaments. If you want an easy way to watermark photographs and want to support a standup guy, check out Watermarker.

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MPU114: Dan Returns

Episode 114 of the Mac Power Users is live. In this show, Dan Benjamin returns to talk about his workflows running the 5by5 network. We also talk about recording hardware and our ongoing struggles with email.

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Home screens – Oliver Breidenbach

Every year at Macworld I enjoy reconnected with my international Mac friends. One of those people is Oliver Breidenbach (Twitter) from Boinx software who makes the trip from Germany every year. Boinx makes some of my favorite software applications including FotoMagico and iStopMotion (Mac and iPad). Moreover, Oliver has some great insight about the relationship between Apple and iOS developers. So Oliver, show us your home screen.

What are some of favorite apps?

I don’ t really have favorite apps. The thing that got my attention about iOS was at an education event the summer after the iPhone was introduced. A teacher brought a couple of students who presented the cool video stuff they were doing. I had an iPod touch and was playing around with it. I downloaded a VNC app and used it to remote control the Mac OS X servers used at the event. The kids saw me doing it and I had never seen demonstrative boredom turn into utter fascination so quickly. I knew then that this was the next big thing.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Is Email considered a guilty pleasure? 😉
(From David: Umm. No.)

What is the app you are still missing?

There really is an app for almost everything. The big gripe I have is that Apple does not allow them to collaborate with each other. Adding a soundtrack to my iStopMotion movie is a major pain. Why can’t I create a soundtrack in Garageband on the iPad and simply send it to iStopMotion? If I need to change anything, why can’t I send it back to Garageband? I am sure that people who get paid billions should be able to work that out.

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

I am not so much using my iPhone a discreet number of times but rather constantly. I don’t use the iPad nearly as often, some days not at all, mostly because it is missing the collaboration between apps which makes it unusable for my daily work.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

When I was at the education event I was talking about earlier, I got really excited about these new post-PC devices, more excited than about anything that happened in the 15 years before in IT. The immersiveness of a touch UI is still very fascinating. But that excitement has worn off a little as I am getting disappointed with the lack of progress the platform has made in terms of using that great power to improve our daily tasks. It certainly was a smart move to get people to use it for leisure activity first, but I think it’s about time that we get to use it for serious creative projects as well.

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

I would definitely drive the platform towards collaboration. Both apps and people want to collaborate. It is necessary for being creative. Imagine how useful the iPhone would be if you couldn’t dial the phone numbers in your Address Book but would have to note them down on a piece of paper and type them in again in the phone app. Yet this is exactly what you have to do with most other content. The dream was to have small apps that do one thing really well, but with the current environment, every app needs to do everything. For example, instead of focusing on the task of keeping my passwords safe, 1Password also has to be a web browser so that you can actually use the passwords you stored. An HTML code editor also needs to be an image editor, an FTP/SFTP client and a webserver. To be able to make a complete movie, iStopMotion would need a video editor and an audio editor built-in. This seriously hinders innovation as we developers have to spend too much time and resources reinventing the wheel.

Also I think the business environment needs to be improved. Apple likes to point out several times on their iPhone 5 website that apps are what makes the iPhone great, and yet most apps don’t seem to make enough money to even cover the development costs. Apple also likes to point out that “many of the apps are free”, causing consumers, who happily just spend $500 on their new iPad, to expect that they don’t have to pay for the apps. That is a big issue threatening the success of iOS in the long run. Developers need to make a living and eventually will have to look for other opportunities.

But closing on a more positive note: The iPhone and the iPad really are magical devices, making technology much more accessible and usable to a much broader range of people than the PC ever could and I really hope that we see this eventually replacing our desktop/laptop computers with their broken metaphors from the 1970s.

Thanks Oliver.